Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick

Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick (2020) is a collection of short fiction by American author Zora Neale Hurston. Edited by scholar Genevieve West, the book collects 21 short stories written by Hurston, a seminal figure in the Harlem Renaissance literary movement and the author of Their Eyes Were Watching God, a classic of both women's literature and African American literature. The stories, listed chronologically, are selected from across her literary career, which stretches roughly from 1921 to 1950.

John Redding, of the title "John Redding Goes to Sea," wants to leave his small hometown in Florida to explore the world, but his mother is so afraid of losing him that she feigns illness and begs him to stay. Furthermore, John's wife, Stella, refusing to leave their town, conspires with his mother to make him stay. When John is presented with an opportunity to join the US Navy, his mother throws such a tantrum that he is compelled to decline the offer. One day, John drowns when a violent storm strikes his work crew on the St. John's River. Rather than retrieve his body from the river, John's father lets it float out into the ocean so John can finally explore the world.

"The Conversion of Sam" explores how racism can afflict well-meaning white individuals. A generous white man gives a young black man a place to stay, offering him all his furniture. Nevertheless, when Sam fails to live up to the white man's expectations, the benefactor turns sour, telling him, "I treated you white, but you didn't appreciate it."



"A Bit of Our Harlem" concerns a hunchbacked orphan boy in his teens who sells cheap candy in the neighborhood. He strikes up a conversation with a pious young woman whose parents are also dead. The woman is touched by a feeling of fellowship and sympathy toward the boy.

A white girl so hungers for interactions with a black girl in "Drenched in Light" that she pays the black girl's grandmother to let the girl come to entertain her. The white girl says, "I want a little of her sunshine to soak into my soul. I need it."

The eponymous Spunk of the story "Spunk" walks down the street arm in arm with Lena, a beautiful woman who is also someone else's wife. Spunk is described as giant and fearless. By comparison, Lena's husband, Joe, is timid and meek. He knows Spunk and Lena are romantically involved but is too cowardly to do anything about it. Certain that Joe is too afraid to confront either of them, the shopkeeper Elijah encourages Joe to go through with plans to attack Spunk with a razor blade. When he does so, Spunk gets the upper hand and kills Joe in self-defense. Later, strange happenings begin to occur to Spunk who feels he is being haunted by the ghost of Joe. Despite Spunk's normally expert handling of the equipment at the sawmill, Spunk falls on the saw, suffering fatal injuries. He uses his last words to claim that Joe pushed him into the saw.



Set in a village outside Orlando, "Black Death" concerns a practitioner of hoodoo sorcery known as Old Man Morgan. It is said that Old Man Morgan can kill a man miles away without even leaving his chair. Meanwhile, Beau Diddely, a waiter from the North at a resort hotel, begins a sexual relationship with one of the chambermaids, Docia Boger. When Beau makes plans to leave town to return North during the off-season, Docia's mother demands that he stay and marry Docia to protect her honor. Both Docia and her mother are devastated when Beau cruelly rejects their pleas for marriage. Seeking revenge, Docia's mother pays Old Man Morgan a visit. Taking out a mirror and a gun, he tells the mother to shoot at the mirror when she sees Beau's image in it. She does so. At the same moment, Beau, having sex with another chambermaid, grabs his chest in agony and dies. Though the death is ruled a heart attack, an autopsy finds gunpowder residue in his heart. All the black residents in town know how Beau came to his end, but “the white folks never knew and would have laughed had anyone told them—so why mention it?"

"Magnolia Flower" depicts a conversation between the calm St. John's River and a babbling brook whose noisy water won't let the river sleep. The brook asks the river to tell it a story about lovers. The river relates a tale about an escaped slave who marries a Cherokee woman. They have a daughter named Magnolia Flower. When she grows up, her father insists that she marry a black man. But when she professes her love for John, a mixed-race man, the father ties John up and locks him in a shed. While the father sleeps, Magnolia Flower steals the key to the shed along with a pistol. They escape and live out their lives happily before returning to the river to hear it tell their story to the brook.

Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick is a brilliant collection of stories from one of the most important authors of the 20th century.