Going far beyond the boundaries of cultural expectation, Zora Neale Hurston accomplished in the early to mid-20th century what many authors must still envy --- as a noted novelist, folklorist, dramatist and ethnologist, despite her humble roots in the American south and the color of her skin. This collection contains many of her well-known works, along with eight stories that heretofore had been lost in forgotten annals.

To encapsulate the places, issues and psychological outcroppings of Hurston’s work is nearly impossible. She deftly, often hilariously, used and parodied Biblical structures and language, as in “Monkey Junk,” one of the recently recovered works. In it, she put a sardonic twist on a Harlem romance gone sour, the devastating effects shown clearly in divorce court, when the devious wife seeking alimony “did testify and cross the knees, even the silk-covered joints, and weep,” wooing the jury to her side and leaving her wretched ex to return “unto Alabama to pick cotton.” As well as writing in the jazzed-up city talk of her Harlemite characters, Hurston was known for capturing and preserving what she called “the idiom --- not the dialect --- of the Negro.”

"Those who have read Hurston’s stories before will find rereading them, along with some new gems, to be time well spent. And for newcomers to her work, HITTING A STRAIGHT LICK WITH A CROOKED STICK is a chance to learn, laugh and long for more."

Many of her plots and portraits are based in her Florida childhood home, with the story “The Eatonville Anthology” offering a wide sampling of its people and their mores. There’s the Pleading Woman, who manages to cadge food from her neighbors even though everyone knows she is well supported by a hard-working husband. A woman who has 11 children and no husbands is scorned by the other mothers of Eatonville, “afraid that it is catching.” Sewell, a man who lives alone and moves often, doesn’t mind being bald because “he wants as little as possible between him and God.”

In “The Country and the Woman,” a wife who’s grown tired of her husband’s philandering since they’ve moved to “New Yawk” takes revenge by using an axe --- on his citified trousers. When her husband finally resurfaces, he tells friends he “caint git de country out dat woman.” Hurston’s “Black Death” is an eerie example of “the biter bit,” which, though it happens in rural America, could just as easily have been set in Paris, Mumbai or Tokyo.

Seen in the light of the current era, Hurston’s work might seem to some a bit dated and possibly “incorrect,” yet it was her culture, home folks and city acquaintances --- and her brilliant writing bringing it all unashamedly to the minds of readers from a variety of different backgrounds. She obstinately refused to paint blacks as consistently pitiful or downtrodden, even as she recognized their deprivations. As editor Genevieve West points out in her Introduction, Hurston “resisted the pressure to conform and presented her characters in their full, complex, and contradictory humanity.” Hurston adapted to the flow of the Harlem Renaissance but was capable of going against the tide as and when it suited her literary purpose.

Those who have read Hurston’s stories before will find rereading them, along with some new gems, to be time well spent. And for newcomers to her work, HITTING A STRAIGHT LICK WITH A CROOKED STICK is a chance to learn, laugh and long for more.