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

Abstract

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.