Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick: Race and Gender in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston (review)

Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick: Race and Gender in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston. By Susan Edwards Meisenhelder. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999. 264 pp. $34.95.

According to Susan Edwards Meisenhelder in her compelling study Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick: Race and Gender in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston, Hurston never pandered to white audiences nor did she grow more conservative in her later years, as various critics have suggested. Instead, Hurston consistently "hit a straight lick with a crooked stick," manipulating patrons and publishers through her ingratiating demeanor in order to get published and then "camouflaging" her racial affirmation and feminist resistance in conventional literary narratives and folk humor. For Meisenhelder, this subversion of literary convention and audience expectation was how Hurston "achieved her literary survival," "enter[ing] the 'big house' of The Saturday Evening Post and other mainstream publishing concerns" while staying true to her ideals of social equality (191). Hurston was therefore a feminist trickster who, unbeknownst to her hostile audience, added radical themes of female resistance to her more explicit racial affirmation. Meisenhelder thus provides a valuable and unique vision of Hurston as a master of her craft and audience.

Meisenhelder makes this case in chapters on each of Hurston's major works. In the first chapter Meisenhelder presents Hurston's self-deprecating letters to mentor Franz Boas, written to get his preface to Mules and Men (without which the book might not have been accepted). She also compares the subtle critiques in Hurston's fiction to the more explicit social commentary in her less famous non-fiction writings in black-owned newspapers. This use of little-known material is the book's most original contribution. From this material, Meisenhelder can argue that Hurston submerges her feminist critique in the traditionally masculine narrative conventions through which her novels are usually understood. For example, Meisenhelder's insightful chapters on Jonah's Gourd Vine and Seraph on the Suwanee argue that Hurston subtly associates the ostensibly secondary female protagonists in these novels with the withered gourd vine and wispy seraph of the titles to suggest that women are often victimized by their roles within conventional narratives of masculine self-assertion. Observing that Hurston was "no doubt aware that her mask would be mistaken by blacks and whites as the whole self" (192), Meisenhelder demonstrates that readers who focused on the conventional narratives would have missed such feminist themes and subversive tactics.

Seeking to enumerate these tactics, Meisenhelder concludes rightly that "even though hitting a straight lick with a crooked stick would surely not have been Hurston's preferred tactic, it produced a literary craft both subtly complex in its treatment of race and gender and in its deft handling of a heterogeneous readership, seasoned with more than a pinch of craftiness" (192). In her chapter on Mules and Men, Meisenhelder most successfully reveals this complexity, illuminating how Hurston produced a rich social commentary and an innovative anthropology. By juxtaposing various folktales within a fictional plot, Hurston emphasizes both the racial af-firmation and female liberation within that folklore. Meisenhelder characterizes most of Hurston's other techniques usefully but incompletely as "camouflages" for her radical themes. For example, she calls literary allusion in Moses, Man of the Mountain the placement of "cryptic details to associate Moses with this [more egalitarian] Osirian worldview" (124), as if the "cryptic" and potentially subversive nature of allusion were somehow unique to Hurston's writing. Even her insightful reading of Jonah's Gourd Vine hinges on the idea that "through her apparent focus on black cultural affirmation, Hurston allows a story of a black woman's retaliation to 'pass' as one of unproblematic ethnic affirmation" (58). Meisenhelder posits the tension between feminism and racial affirmation as if it were a literary strategy, but Hurston does not...