Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick by Zora Neale Hurston (2020)

A new collection of 21 Zora Neale Hurston stories, including eight previously uncollected.

Book Review: Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick is an unnecessarily long title (and it's not about golf), but may bring some attention to the eight recently recovered stories within, and the possibility that more undiscovered stories are out there. Zora Neale Hurston seems to be having a second revival (the first began with her rediscovery by Alice Walker in 1975) with the publication of Barracoon in 2018 and now this new edition of her stories. The previous collection of Hurston's short stories from HarperCollins, The Complete Stories (1995) edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., contained 26 works. This new selection has 21 stories, of which eight were previously uncollected, and so contains only half the stories from the 1995 edition. Hitting a Straight Lick contains a variety of stories showing Hurston's wide-ranging talent and versatility: "folklore" stories (she was an anthropologist and folklorist) including a visit from Brer Rabbit and Brer Dog; slice of rural life stories (usually instructional or moral); stories told in a Biblical tone; stories told in bullet points; and her indisputably classic short fiction such as "Sweat" and "The Gilded Six-Bits." Some of the stories seem to be drafts of other stories, some of the same phrases or incidents are repeated in several, and the final story in Hitting a Straight Lick, "The Fire and the Cloud," reads as an excerpt from her penultimate novel, Moses, Man of the Mountain. Most of Hurston's stories were about rural blacks, including her hometown, the all black community of Eatonville, Florida. Little of her work rails against white oppression or concedes that whites were an onerous factor in black life. Hurston's view was that white people were simply a fact of life like bad weather or bad luck. She believed that black culture need not follow white ways, that black people were not deprived or lesser, and that African Americans would be better off going their own way without depending on or grumbling about white people. The villains in her stories are usually other black people, often men. Her career was cut short by her uncompromising independence. One notable element here is how often Hurston writes dialogue in "the idiom -- not the dialect -- of" black people (as she put it). Although it can take a little time to get used to, she felt it provided realism and I believe it followed her training as a folklorist. She let the people speak for themselves. Use of the idiom also provides a stark contrast when the dialogue turns to Hurston's own narration, beautifully and powerfully written. Although I'd prefer a revised "complete" edition of her stories incorporating the new works included in Hitting a Straight Lick, until that day arrives I'm happy to find any recovered fiction by Hurston because we have so little, just four novels, 34 stories.  [3½★]