Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick

January 13, 2020
This arresting collection from Hurston (Barracoon) includes eight previously unpublished works, mostly set in or featuring characters from her hometown of Eatonville, Fla. Many of the stories draw on folklore and mythology to dramatize conflicts around gender, class, and migration. In “John Redding Goes to Sea,” a young boy named John dreams of leaving his small Florida town and continues to dream of leaving after he’s grown up. Delayed at first by his mother, who neither understands nor approves of her son’s wanderlust, and then his wife, John finally gets an opportunity, undaunted by a portentous, impending storm. In “Magnolia Flower,” a young couple’s stealing of time together away from the woman’s overbearing, abusive father is framed as a bedtime story shared by an anthropomorphic river to a splashing brook after it disrupts the river’s slumber (“ ‘Oh, well,’ the river muttered, ‘I am wide awake now, and I suppose brooks must be humored’”). Hurston ingeniously uses the cadence of her characters’ speech to denote regionalism and class—there’s a marked difference between how her Eatonville characters speak and how her Harlem characters speak. Arranged chronologically, the collection offers an illuminating and delightful study of a canonical writer finding her rhythm.

Starred review from December 15, 2019
Best known for Their Eyes Were Watching God and her exuberant appreciation of African American culture in the rural south, Hurston also penned keen observations about Harlemites, many of them transplanted southerners. In another reclaimed volume, following Barracoon (2018), 21 of Hurston's short stories are gathered together for the first time, including nine recovered works, most focused on life in Harlem during its renaissance period, beginning in 1921 when Hurston struggled to launch herself as a writer. Presented in the order in which Hurston wrote them, the stories trace her literary development and the adjustments she shared with others of the Great Migration. The collection includes tales of a young man who longs to live life beyond his small Florida town, a faithful wife tempted by her husband's admiration for a gold-leafed city slicker, and a man who rejects the notion of marrying a biscuit cooker in favor of the prospect of Shebas of high voltage. Throughout, Hurston draws insightful and humorous contrasts between southern and northern cultures, small-town and big-city life, and the ties and disconnects between country and urban folk. With biting wit, Hurston gets to the heart of the human condition, including racism, sexism, and classism, through the circuitous path of her characters, that is, the straight lick with a crooked stick.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Kicked off with a foreword by Tayari Jones, Hurston's rediscovered stories will electrify book media and draw in readers.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)