Also by Zora Neale Hurston

Jonah’s Gourd Vine

Mules and Men

Their Eyes Were Watching God

Tell My Horse

Moses, Man of the Mountain

Dust Tracks on a Road

Seraph on the Suwanee

Mule Bone

The Complete Stories

Every Tongue Got to Confess

Barracoon

Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick

Zora Neale Hurston

ONE PLACE. MANY STORIES

Copyright

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2020

Copyright © Zora Neale Hurston Trust 2020

Zora Neale Hurston Trust asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Ebook Edition © January 2020 ISBN: 9780008374723

Note to Readers

This ebook contains the following accessibility features which, if supported by your device, can be accessed via your ereader/accessibility settings:

 Change of font size and line height

 Change of background and font colours

 Change of font

 Change justification

 Text to speech

 Page numbers taken from the following print edition: ISBN 9780008374716

Contents

Cover

Booklist

Title Page

Copyright

Note to Readers

Editor’s Note

Foreword by Tayari Jones

Introduction by Genevieve West

John Redding Goes to Sea

The Conversion of Sam

A Bit of Our Harlem

Drenched in Light

Spunk

Magnolia Flower

Black Death

The Bone of Contention

Muttsy

Sweat

Under the Bridge

’Possum or Pig?

The Eatonville Anthology

Book of Harlem

The Book of Harlem

The Back Room

Monkey Junk

The Country in the Woman

The Gilded Six-Bits

She Rock

The Fire and the Cloud

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Credits

About the Author

About the Publisher

Editor’s Note

This volume constitutes an entirely new edition of Hurston’s short fiction. Each story here has been transcribed anew using, whenever possible, the first documented publication of the story as the copy text. When a first publication was not available, typescripts served as the foundation. I respectfully corrected errors that likely occurred during the typesetting process, such as missing end punctuation, missing opening or closing quotation marks, obvious spelling errors, and idiosyncratic capitalization. Hurston’s punctuation—particularly her use of commas, dashes and commas together, and punctuation of contractions and dialogue—evolved considerably over the course of the Harlem Renaissance. Consequently, rather than impose a single standard on the volume, I have looked to the stories themselves for guidance. Each story has been treated as a discrete text with its own conventions. For instance, when ain’t appears five times in a story with the apostrophe and once without it, I have replaced the missing apostrophe in that story only. In later stories, readers will then see words spelled and punctuated differently in the various stories as Hurston’s distinctive voice matured. I have preserved her punctuation and spelling to ensure fidelity to her vision at the time the story first appeared.

Concerning the discovery of the stories, in 2005 I documented four that were found in the Pittsburgh Courier in Zora Neale Hurston and American Literary Culture. I uncovered them in the landmark microfiche collection Black Literature 1827–1940 as I searched for reviews of Hurston’s books. Edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr., Black Literature 1827–1940 collects the poetry, fiction, and reviews that appeared in 110 significant—but rare—black magazines and newspapers from the period. Although the work of developing the microfiche collection began in the early 1980s, the Hurston stories contained therein waited—undocumented—until 2005.

In 2010, Glenda S. Carpio and Werner Sollors working collaboratively also chanced upon the Pittsburgh Courier stories while perusing microfilm of the newspaper. Through their efforts, the Courier stories became front-page news in the Chronicle Review.¹ A short time later, Carpio and Sollors gathered all five of the Courier stories as the centerpiece of a special issue of an academic journal, Amerikastudien/American Studies.

Foreword

Love Letter and Testimony

Zora Neale Hurston is in that rare category of writer who reached the type of notoriety that gives her one-name status. This isn’t terribly uncommon—think Faulkner, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald. However, there are precious few whose one name is their first name, and fewer still who are easily known by their given names and/or their family names. I can think of only three—Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, and the great Zora Neale Hurston, who predated them both.

Whenever I think of Zora, by this single name, I have the urge to go wild with punctuation: Zora!!! Part of this is motivated by the audacity of the name itself. There is something brazen about the letter Z, bringing up the rear of the alphabet with three bold slashes. And this is compounded by the fact that the name is perfectly suited to the woman herself. Who hasn’t admired the images of her that we see on postcards in bookshops? The most memorable are the portraits taken by Carl Van Vechten in which Zora poses with her felt hat tilted to shade one eye, or she wears a coat that frames her face with a dramatic fur collar. These are black-and-white photos, but my favorite features her against a red background in which she sports a beaded cap that matches her cream-colored dress. Her lips are curved into something between a smirk and a smile, like she knows something that we don’t.

Have you ever noticed that Zora Neale Hurston is seldom photographed looking squarely at the camera? I can never decide whether she is being coy, deliberately cultivating the mystery of her persona. Maybe she spares us the intensity of her straightforward gaze because one should never look directly into the sun. Regardless of her motivation, the images we have are captivating and enchanting. She may not meet our eyes, but she leaves us unable to turn away all these years later.

The page of her insightful prose is where Hurston chooses to reveal herself. Gone are the dramatic hats and headdresses, the sidelong glances, and the rouged lips. The stories in this fine collection are the tales of country folks—farmers, factory workers. And through their lives we experience the full range of human emotion. Hurston’s sense of humor is legendary. I dare you to read this book in public without releasing at least one leg-slapping guffaw. Although people often suggest that black folks “laugh to keep from crying,” these characters show that some laughter is simply the reward for a joke well told. But even the folks who sit on the porch telling lies and playing the dozens still get the blues. After all, they are parents, lovers, children, spouses, and friends; with these connections come vulnerability and even grief. Hurston illuminates the breadth, depth, diameter, and circumference of the lives of those she knows and loves best.

Like Faulkner, Hurston’s muse is her hometown, the landscape and culture that formed her. But while Faulkner sets his work in a fictional place, Yoknapatawpha County, Hurston calls Eatonville by its true name, giving credit where it is due. (She represents for Eatonville harder than Biggie did for Brooklyn and Tupac for LA.) Hurston’s writing is both love letter and testimony. For too many years, the American South has been evoked as a shorthand for African American misery and oppression. When Nina Simone said, “Mississippi Goddam,” she covered the entire region. But Hurston loved the land that she called home. Eatonville boasted a black mayor, and although Hurston roasts him mercilessly in this book, as well as in Their Eyes Were Watching God, there is an empowerment that comes from black self-governance. Although racism and “white folks” present real challenges to the characters that people this collection, oppression is not the center of their lives. This is one of the many intricacies of the southern experience that is on full display in this excellent collection.

Short stories offer us something that novels do not. With a novel, even a masterpiece like Their Eyes Were Watching God, our attention is aimed at one or two characters as we take a deep dive into their complicated psychology, actions, and circumstances. With each short story, we encounter the same degree of complexity, but the characters’ experiences are distilled into a few defining moments. To use a metaphor of which I hope Hurston would approve: A novel is like a whole watermelon, gorgeous striped rind, white pith, red flesh, and shiny black seeds. It is delicious; it is a work of God’s majesty. The short story is more like the watermelon heart. In the country, men stand by the side of the road and throw the watermelon down on the pavement, just so. Upon impact, the melon will break in such a way that the juicy center is separated from the rest. This is the best part of the fruit—ripe, firm, seedless, and sweet. If a man offers a woman the heart of the watermelon, well, things are serious.

Similarly, these stories get right to the heart of the matter.

Hurston, trickster that she is, has chosen comeuppance as her literary specialty. Hers is a world populated by people who are more powerful than they seem. A jilted husband, so timid that he can only gulp when his wife’s lover passes by. However, through his own death, he takes the Romeo to his grave. (The wife, on the other hand, lives her best life—free of them both.) The Baptists and the Methodists square off for an epic clash and nobody quite wins, but laughs abound. But in the realm of payback, there is more than fun and games. In tales that feel as ancient as “The Monkey’s Paw,” characters learn to be careful what they wish for. The delight of this collection is the way the stories feel rooted in a reality that is nearly a century old, yet still manage to achieve timelessness.

On Hurston’s tombstone are engraved the words “A Genius of the South.” The memorial stone was commissioned by a young Alice Walker who was so moved by Their Eyes Were Watching God that she took a pilgrimage to Florida to find out what became of Hurston and to pay her respects. Many people know this part of the story. Hurston died penniless and in obscurity. Walker searched an unkempt cemetery, battling mosquitos and sticker briars until she found the sunken, unmarked grave. At the time, this was a deterrent example and rallying call, admonishing us to take better care of our cultural workers as they age. Hurston became symbolic of the many black women writers who fell into obscurity due to the twin burdens of racism and sexism. Virginia Woolf mused about Shakespeare’s hypothetical sister, but Walker championed Zora Neale Huston, an actual person.

I wonder what Hurston would make of this. I do not doubt for a moment that she would have enjoyed the attention. She was the life of the party, after all. Thanks to the advocacy of Walker and other writers and scholars, Their Eyes Were Watching God is now regarded as an American classic and has been translated into dozens of languages. Zora Neale Hurston is perhaps the best known of all the Harlem Renaissance writers, surpassing even Langston Hughes. However, I think she would be dismayed at becoming a cautionary tale. In her famous essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” she declared, “I am not tragically colored.”

In that spirit, I offer a different interpretation of these same events. We can all agree that the end of Hurston’s life was difficult. We can all agree that she deserved her laurels while she still walked among us. Yet Zora, being Zora, did not let mere death end her life. Alice Walker found Hurston’s grave, but Hurston’s work found Alice Walker.

Some readers may not understand the title Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick. I will explicate it the best I can. Like Hurston, I understand that sometimes the most vibrant language doesn’t translate well into the more formal tone of well-meaning documents like this foreword. The expression, one I know from my own southern childhood, means to achieve a goal that seems to be in contradiction to the means by which it was accomplished. (It’s amazing, isn’t it, how the act of translation boils the life out of the phrase, leaving it as limp as overcooked vegetables? This is why Hurston captured the language of her community phonetically, so that none of the music and magic would be lost in the alchemy from breath to ink.)

I would not do justice to this latest addition to Hurston’s oeuvre if I didn’t praise the splendor of its language. No writer before, or since, has regarded the language of the African American South with such affection and seriousness. Unfettered by respectability politics, Hurston lets the people speak for themselves. And speak, they do.

I recommend reading this work aloud, enjoying the feel of the words in your mouth, and the sound of English tightened and strummed like the strings of a banjo. Lose yourself in these stories. Laugh when it’s funny. Wipe your eyes when the spirit moves you. Remember Hurston in this way—complicated and brilliant. These pages, like their author, contain multitudes.

Tayari Jones

August 19, 2019

Introduction

Outstanding novelist, skilled folklorist, journalist, and critic, Zora Hurston was for thirty years the most prolific black woman writer in America.¹

—Mary Helen Washington

For Zora Neale Hurston the Harlem Renaissance began in 1921, when she published her first short story, and it ended in 1937 with the publication of her masterpiece, Their Eyes Were Watching God. In the period between, she wrote twenty-one stories, all of which appear here together in a single volume for the first time. Included in Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick are several “lost” Harlem Renaissance tales, eight of which challenge readers to rethink their assumptions about Hurston’s literary interests. An author long associated with the rural, with Eatonville, Florida, she wrote eight stories about northern cities and the Great Migration. She also wrote about Harlem’s middle class. Thus, this new Harlem Renaissance volume provides a much-needed correction to Hurston’s legacy and better reflects the true breadth of her subject matter.

Presented in the order of their composition, the stories collected here allow readers to track the evolution and maturation of Hurston’s skills and interests as a fiction writer, from what her biographer Robert Hemenway describes as her “apprentice” work to her mature, masterful critiques of the politics of race, class, and gender—what we today call the politics of identity.² Hurston typically submerged her explorations of such serious topics within plots revolving around romantic relationships between men and women. Literary critics Claudia Tate and Susan Meisenhelder adopted Hurston’s own phrase, “hitting a straight lick with a crooked stick,” to describe the ways in which she subversively critiques the politics of race and gender, and, I add, the politics of class as well. Zora herself described what it means to “hit a straight lick with a crooked stick” in slightly different ways. In her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), she uses the phrase to describe her hometown because “[i]t is a by-product of something else.” In the essay “High John de Conquer,” she describes it as “making a way out of no-way” or “[w]inning the jack pot with no other stake but a laugh.”³ Hurston’s “making a way” to express herself in a racist and masculine publishing industry required subversive strategies for exploring topics, critiquing behaviors and norms, and expressing perspectives that editors and readers might have rather avoided. Across the body of her Harlem Renaissance fiction, again and again Hurston “hit[s] a straight lick with a crooked stick” to address the politics of identity.

The recovered stories that appear here are set in urban environments that reflect the tumult of the Great Migration. More than two million African Americans left the largely rural South between 1910 and 1940 for the industrialized cities of the North.⁴ On their journeys to build new lives, migrants faced collective and individual challenges in urban communities as they encountered new expectations for dress, deportment, speech, education, religious practice, and entertainment. So profound were the changes wrought by the Great Migration that it spawned an entire body of what scholar Farah Jasmine Griffin describes as migration narratives—songs, stories, novels, and paintings—that depict the upheaval of migration, the resulting loss of community, confrontations with the new environment, attempts to reestablish community, and even reverse migration, which some undertook when the North failed to fulfill its promise of a better life.⁵

Until the recovery of Hurston’s lost stories, it had appeared as though she had opted to limit her treatment of the Great Migration to a single story, “Muttsy,” and to the subtle references that appear elsewhere in her fiction, such as in her first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934). Cultural and literary critic Hazel V. Carby had even gone so far as to suggest that Hurston “attempt[ed] to stabilize and displace the social contradictions and disruption of her contemporary moment” by focusing on “a utopian reconstruction of a historical moment of her childhood” in Eatonville.⁶ Today—with the recovery of these urban stories—we know that Carby was mistaken. She simply did not have access to Hurston’s entire corpus. When Hurston explores urban settings and characters, the Great Migration may be central to the plot, or it might loom in the background. Both strategies, however, expand her treatments of the politics of gender, class, and race to include another layer of complexity produced by regional differences. Migrants were forced to reconcile conflicting norms on matters both secular and sacred—many of which intersected with gender-based norms related to race and class. The choices Hurston’s characters face, mundane and momentous alike, illustrate the tumult of the times. Hurston’s short stories rarely fail to engage identity politics, and in this way her urban tales are no different from her better-known Eatonville stories and her novels. At the same time, the urban settings do change the nature of the politics her characters must negotiate.

HURSTON “REALLY DID GET BORN”

Zora Neale Hurston claimed, at various times, to have been born in 1901, 1902, and 1903 in Eatonville, Florida, the first “incorporated” black town in the United States.⁷ It is probably more accurate to say that Eatonville was home, the place that not only inspired her but also shaped her identity. In addition, Zora was also a decade older than she publicly acknowledged, having been born (according to US Census records) in 1891 in Notasulga, Alabama.⁸ Her family relocated to Eatonville in 1894. When Zora’s mother died and her father remarried to a woman she despised, it initiated a period of wandering. Unable to finish high school because she needed to support herself, she worked in white homes as a maid, bounced among relatives and friends, and then took a position as a lady’s maid in a Gilbert and Sullivan troupe traveling the country. When the woman she worked for left the company to marry, Hurston settled in Baltimore, Maryland, where her sister Sarah was, to complete her education.⁹

State law in Maryland guaranteed a free high school education to anyone under the age of twenty. Hurston seized the opportunity that she had longed for and promptly took a decade off her life to begin passing as a teenager rather than the twenty-six-year-old woman she was. Thus Hurston began the masquerade of being born in 1901 rather than 1891. In 1917 Hurston enrolled at Morgan Academy, then the high school division of Morgan College, which we know today as Morgan State University. The following year, she moved to Washington, DC, with the hope of attending Howard University, which she would later call “the capstone of Negro education in the world.” Admitted first through the college preparatory program, Hurston spent close to four years at Howard, in and out of class as her finances and health allowed. There she discovered that she was not only “Howard material,” as a friend put it, but also Zeta Phi Beta material.¹⁰

When Hurston’s first story appeared in print in 1921 in the Howard University literary magazine, The Stylus, she was still a student trying to make rent and pay tuition by working as a manicurist. Fortunately for Hurston, the literary renaissance was already taking place in Washington, as well as in other cities around the country. A lifelong lover of books, the would-be writer found in the city a lively black literary community, focused on a group known as the Saturday Nighters. Elizabeth McHenry’s research has demonstrated that such groups “provid[ed] a network of support for African American intellectuals” and helped shape American literature and modern culture.¹¹ Weekly gatherings of the Saturday Nighters—at which participants discussed books, plays, and poetry—often took place at the home of Georgia Douglas Johnson, who was already an established poet. For this group of writers, many of whom found the city’s racism and narrowness isolating, Johnson’s home proved “an assembly of likeable and civilized people.” One contemporary recalls that Hurston actually lived at Johnson’s home for a period.¹² There, Zora, as an evening’s guest or in residence, would have encountered not only faculty members and mentors from Howard University, like Montgomery Gregory and Alain Locke, but also a range of other luminaries from the period, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles S. Johnson, Marita Bonner, and Jessie Fauset, as well as native Washingtonian Jean Toomer, whose Cane (1923) instantly made him a literary celebrity. It was during these years that Hurston began publishing her fiction and her lesser-known poetry, suggesting that the lively discussions may have helped foster her desire to put pen to paper.

Hurston wrote her first four extant stories during this period. By the fall of 1924 her work had been accepted in one of the period’s leading magazines, Opportunity. It was her breakthrough. “Drenched in Light” would become her first major publication. The success encouraged her to consider writing as a career. Unable to raise the funds to finish her degree at Howard, Zora packed her bags and migrated to New York, the center of American publishing. She tells us in her autobiography that she arrived in Harlem with only $1.50 in her pocket. Short of funds but full of dreams, she carried “a small suitcase of … short stories and plays.”¹³

The connections that Hurston established through Opportunity proved essential once she arrived in New York. The monthly magazine of the National Urban League served as a major publication venue for New Negro writers. Charles S. Johnson, a young sociologist who acted as the magazine’s editor, fostered Zora’s career by publishing three of her early stories. The magazine also sponsored a series of literary contests and award dinners in the 1920s to help introduce emerging writers to judges and editors who could open doors to periodical and book publications. At the May 1925 Opportunity awards, where the fledgling writer won four prizes for her short stories and plays, she wisely made the most of her meetings with the (white) writers Fannie Hurst and Annie Nathan Meyer.¹⁴ Their assistance allowed her to return to college in the fall. Hurst offered the recent transplant a secretarial position while Meyer facilitated admission to Barnard College, then the women’s division of Columbia University, where she matriculated that fall and from which she would graduate in 1928. A 1925 letter from Hurston to Meyer reflects the goals the young writer had set for herself: “My typewriter is clicking away till all hours of the night. I am striving desperately for a toe-hold on the world.”¹⁵ Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick demonstrates just how successful she was in attaining her goal.

Zora’s short fiction opened doors that allowed her to network with the period’s most powerful figures and would help her find a publisher for her books in the 1930s. It was her 1933 short story “The Gilded Six-Bits,” included here, that attracted the J. B. Lippincott Company to Hurston and led to her first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine, published in 1934. Four other books followed with Lippincott. In her lifetime only her last novel, Seraph on the Suwanee (1948), would be published by another. Without Zora’s early success as a Harlem Renaissance writer of short fiction, it seems unlikely that her beloved novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) would ever have found an audience.

THE POLITICS OF ART IN THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE

When Hurston arrived in New York, the Harlem Renaissance was in full bloom, but the debates about black art were thorny. At the heart of the matter was the battle over images of African Americans. Alain Locke, in his landmark 1925 essay “The New Negro,” describes the race as a butterfly undergoing the transformative process of emerging from “a chrysalis.” But who was the “New Negro”—or the “old Negro,” for that matter?¹⁶ How was he or she to be depicted? It was hardly a theoretical question. The New Negro movement advocated for art as a means of changing American culture and challenging its racism. To advance the cause of racial equality, writers and other artists battled racist stereotypes of African Americans that had existed since the transatlantic slave trade. Dehumanizing images of Africans had helped make the institution of slavery possible. Those same stereotypes had been deployed in the years following Reconstruction to repress African Americans’ political and economic progress. Many of them manifested on the stage and in popular culture through the minstrel tradition. The New Negro movement in the 1920s sought to correct those images and to celebrate “authentic” black culture.¹⁷ One strategy for advancing the race was to establish that there were class differences within the group—that there were educated, refined, intelligent, and properly chaste middle-class black people.¹⁸ Consequently, depictions of middle-class characters were a popular means of challenging stereotypes. Hurston, however, allied herself with the younger writers who were willing to challenge the establishment, including Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman, and Rudolph Fisher, to explore the lives of the common people. She introduced folk characters who speak in their own voices and typically fail to conform to middle-class New Negro standards.

Perhaps inspired by James Weldon Johnson’s 1922 call for African American writers to do “something” for black dialect like John Millington Synge “did for the Irish,” Hurston and some of the other, typically younger, writers of the period challenged long-held assumptions about art, language, and politics.¹⁹ Her decision to write in idiom—often described as dialect—was a risky enterprise in the 1920s, particularly when that writing was funny. The history of minstrelsy meant that dialect and idiomatic expression, particularly when coupled with humor, evoked the very stereotypes New Negroes hoped to vanquish. Zora’s essays make it clear that she understood the inter- and intraracial politics of her artistic choices, but she persisted in her efforts to break the chains of the past.

Hurston’s earliest statement on aesthetics appears in the neglected essay “Race Cannot Become Great Until It Recognizes Its Talent.”²⁰ There she compares African Americans to the English after William the Conqueror’s conquest in the year 1066. She credits Chaucer with recognizing the beauty of writing in English (rather than the French or Latin that had been used for centuries) and Shakespeare with incorporating folklore into his plays. Implicitly, we see Hurston following the lead of these canonical figures by devoting herself to writing about the beauty of the folk. She saw African Americans as “physically but not spiritually free, unable as yet to turn our eyes from the distorted looking glass that goes with the iron collar [of slavery].” Imitation of white traditions, she cautions, will do nothing to advance the race, as “pupils never stand on equal footing with the master.”²¹ In search of something original, she refused to shrink from aspects of black life such as folk traditions and patterns of speech that others found undesirable or shameful. Hurston was proud of the way she depicted the speech of her African American characters on the page. She described this as her use of “the idiom—not the dialect—of the Negro.” She wanted to capture the “poetical flow of language,” the “thinking in images and figures.” She says it provides “verisimilitude to the narrative by stewing the subject in its own juice.”²² Committed to representing those Langston Hughes called “the low-down folks,” Hurston resisted the pressure to conform and presented her characters in their full, complex, and contradictory humanity. In a 1938 essay written for the Florida Federal Writers project, the now-established novelist would describe this as her “objectivity.” Of course today we recognize that there was nothing neutral or apolitical in her passionate work in a violent Jim Crow culture to reclaim black folk speech and traditions and to establish the full humanity of its creators. She depicted the full range of the human experience in her characters, even when doing so did not suit a New Negro agenda.²³

Hurston’s stories from the Harlem Renaissance typically revolve around courtship and marriage, a trope that scholar Ann duCille describes as “the coupling convention.” The convention allowed generations of black women writers a way to critique the inequities and injustices they saw.²⁴ Zora deployed the convention regularly. Instead of critiquing directly, she used her “crooked stick” to work in subversive, often subtle, ways that challenge the status quo. Through her use of language, characters, and plots, she interrogates and disputes the very stereotypes New Negroes objected to and treats subjects that continue to trouble American culture today. One of the reasons that Their Eyes Were Watching God has a current popular readership is that the issues her characters wrestle with continue to be relevant more than eighty years after the book’s initial publication. Implicitly, the novel asks, What is the purpose and function of marriage? What does it mean to be a woman, particularly a married woman? How should a man behave? What are his responsibilities? How do couples navigate or share power? What is the community’s role in negotiating difficult or abusive relationships? These questions are all posed implicitly by Their Eyes Were Watching God, but Hurston was exploring such topics long before writing her masterpiece. Her Harlem Renaissance short fiction also reveals the intersections of race, class, and gender that scholars talk about as intersectionality.²⁵ In short, the term means that we should not talk about one aspect of identity without talking about others. Hurston was not only a woman; she was a black woman from the rural South. This intersectionality makes it difficult—and shortsighted, if not foolish—to try to separate race, class, and gender in Hurston’s life and in her work. Rather, they intersect and intertwine to create complex subjectivities and systems of oppression. She worked within those systems and wrote about them.

Hurston’s earliest stories reveal that she was wrestling with the politics of identity from the very beginning of her career, regardless of whether she was focused on rural or urban communities. Her early narrative “A Bit of Our Harlem” implicitly asks what it is that connects people. This recovered story first republished by Tony Curtis appeared in the weekly newspaper Negro World in 1922 while Hurston was still pursuing her studies at Howard University. A publication of Marcus Garvey’s black nationalist Universal Negro Improvement Association, the paper boasted a weekly circulation of nearly 200,000 and would, undoubtedly, have introduced Hurston’s fiction to a large reading audience.²⁶ Here, in her second published story, class divisions dissolve over the course of a conversation between the unnamed middle-class narrator, who is likely a stand-in for the author, and a child with a disability selling candy. Despite their many differences, the educated narrator finds in the boy “the world of sympathy, understanding, and fellowship” that “seldom had she found” in “her own class.” And although these two characters overcome their class differences, in the majority of Hurston’s stories class differences serve as a wedge that divides people.

INTERROGATING THE POLITICS OF GENDER AND CLASS

In some of Hurston’s earliest stories, she focuses on the ways in which class intersects with masculinity to determine just what it means to be “a man.” While Hurston has become known for her depictions of female characters, she began her career exploring masculine identities in both the North and the South.

“The Conversion of Sam” (ca. 1922), a recovered story, is one of Hurston’s earliest, written before her migration to Harlem. The original story exists only in typescript form at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Scrawled across the top margin in Hurston’s craggy handwriting are her name, the Washington, DC, address of the barber shop in which she worked as a manicurist, and the phrase “submitted at the usual rate.” The library has no record of the story’s provenance, so we can only speculate about its history. In the same collection at the Schomburg are letters Hurston wrote to Lawrence Jordan, a 1931 graduate of Columbia University who worked as an assistant to the curator of the Schomburg Collection from 1930 to 1932.²⁷ Since Jordan clearly knew Hurston and they corresponded in the 1920s, perhaps he is responsible for the story finding its way to the collection. It appears that Adele S. Newson in Zora Neale Hurston: A Reference Guide was the first scholar to document the story’s existence, while John Lowe in Jump at the Sun: Zora Neale Hurston’s Cosmic Comedy was the first scholar to comment on it.²⁸ A published version has not been located, but the phrase “submitted at the usual rate” tantalizingly suggests it may have appeared in a newspaper or magazine. The stilted, nineteenth-century dialect suggests she wrote the story between 1921 and 1923—before her use of African American idiom and vernacular was fully developed.

“The Conversion of Sam” appears in print for contemporary readers for the very first time in this collection. The narrative introduces readers to Sam, who falls for Stella, a recent urban migrant. He has a reputation as a gambler who refuses to work, but his desire to marry Stella prompts Sam to change his lifestyle and become “dickty,” or middle class. When a former gambling buddy realizes just how prosperous Sam has become, the man jealously works to undermine the couple’s happiness. Faced with different lifestyles, Sam must decide whether he will “be a sensible, steady man” by providing for his wife. This tension between the gambler and the middle-class employed worker is Hurston’s first examination of the ways class intersects with and complicates life in the black community. In the story, to be a “steady man” requires that Sam earn a steady living, provide a home for his wife, and “keep her clean,” likely meaning that she will not have to work outside the home. Implicitly, then, Stella is a domestic figure, a woman to be cared for and protected, but her character is secondary to Hurston’s focus on Sam’s journey into manhood.

Sam’s story has much in common with the previously anthologized “Muttsy.” In this urban migration tale, Hurston’s migrant is also a woman. Pinkie has journeyed to Harlem from Eatonville, Florida. Pinkie, like Hurston in 1925, wishes to continue her education and has “no home to which she could return.” In an unfamiliar city, Pinkie’s traditional middle-class notions of femininity and her beauty make her vulnerable to exploitation. Muttsy, a well-respected and successful gambler, pursues Pinkie and even takes “nice,” or respectable, work in order to make himself more attractive as a potential husband. In an ironic twist, however, the final lines of the story leave readers to wonder whether Pinkie will find her marriage to Muttsy the refuge from exploitation and the source of respectability she seeks.

Hurston wrote two additional stories that focus on male migrants, only one of which appeared in print in her lifetime. Despite the commonalities of these two recovered stories, “Book of Harlem” and “The Book of Harlem” are distinctly different, with different protagonists and different conclusions. Both, however, work against the grain of her contemporaries’ treatments of the Great Migration. While many other Harlem Renaissance stories of migrants end tragically, Zora finds humor in the experience.²⁹ “The Book of Harlem” (1927) appeared in the Pittsburgh Courier, while “Book of Harlem” (ca. 1925) appeared posthumously in Zora Neale Hurston: Novels and Stories (1995).³⁰ Unlike the protagonists from other migration stories from the Harlem Renaissance, Hurston’s are not escaping lynching or seeking relief from the economic exploitation of sharecropping. Instead, her male protagonists are pleasure seekers. Loaded with their fathers’ “shekels,” the young men leave their rural towns for Harlem in pursuit of “Shebas of high voltage.” These details challenge the stereotypes of poor southerners and of the migrant escaping persecution. Hurston’s humorous versions of the greenhorn story employ mock biblical language to marry the high and the low, the sacred and the secular, with terrific results. The narratives allow readers to see the characters transform themselves from men in “mail-order britches” to Harlem sophisticates. In their southern clothing that marks them as outsiders, they are dismissed by urban women. The characters’ transformations require financial resources. Only after the migrants adopt urban clothing and straighten their hair will women interact with them. Here, even in funny stories, the author presents serious issues.

Hurston’s focus on masculinity also drives two of her early well-known Eatonville stories, “John Redding Goes to Sea” (1921) and “Spunk” (1925). “John Redding Goes to Sea” has long been accepted as Hurston’s first published short story. The “apprentice” effort follows the efforts of John to see the world, a desire his father attributes to his being a man. The women in John’s life, however, want him to stay home, leading to inevitable conflict. While these characters split along the lines of gender in their thinking about masculinity, “Spunk” presents conflicting views held by the men within the Eatonville community. In the first of Hurston’s stories to introduce the Eatonville store porch and the men who talk there, readers meet a cuckolded husband who has lost his wife to Spunk, the title character. When the wronged husband seeks revenge—despite being fearful and outmatched—he loses his life. From beyond the grave, however, the husband continues to seek vengeance. Submerged within this ghostly love triangle, almost out of view, lies Hurston’s exploration of masculinity. The men on the porch debate whether the betrayed husband is braver—that is, manlier—for having conquered his fears and attacking his rival. Or is Spunk manlier for “go[ing] after anything he want[s]”? Even within the same community and among men of the same class, there is no clear consensus. The story exposes conflicting constructions of masculinity within this community, but the narrator avoids drawing a conclusion to allow the reader to decide.

Hurston’s recovered story “Under the Bridge” (1926) was first printed in The X-Ray: The Official Organ of the Zeta Phi Beta Sorority along with a play and an essay by Hurston. She joined the sorority while still a student at Howard University, but her writing was published in the X-Ray after she moved to New York. Wyatt Houston Day, a collector of African American sorority and fraternity memorabilia, bought several items at auction, and among his purchases he uncovered the story, which he reprinted in American Visions in 1997.³¹

“Under the Bridge,” the story of a May–December love triangle, follows Luke, a widower, who marries Vangie, a woman less than half his age.³² As fate would have it, Luke has a handsome son the same age as his new wife. While it takes little to imagine the painful outcome, there is nothing tawdry in the tale. Rather, the two young people grow closer emotionally. As Henry Louis Gates Jr. puts it, “The air is thick with temptation in this story, but it is also thick with the young people’s love of the old man.”³³ Luke feels his age in a growing sense of competition with his beloved son. In an effort to keep his wife, the husband and father resorts to “a hand” from the local conjure man. Hurston’s decision to introduce conjure plays a crucial role in the plot, but it also has class implications. Middle-class black readers who saw such practices as ignorant or backward often wanted to distance the race from practices that had so often been yoked to stereotypes. It was a part of African American life in the South that they wanted to leave behind. The story has elicited speculation that it, like much of Hurston’s fiction, may be autobiographical. If it were, an early marriage to a much older man might account for the lost decade of Hurston’s life—those years between school and the Gilbert and Sullivan troupe—that biographers have been unable to reconstruct.³⁴

Hurston’s exploration of manhood also introduces extreme behaviors that demonstrate what I call tyrannical masculinity.³⁵ “Magnolia Flower” and “Sweat” both explore violent tyrants who seek to control the women in their lives. The first introduces colorism or shadeism, while the latter raises questions about the responsibilities of men in the community to deal with abusive husbands. “Magnolia Flower” (1926) opens in the years following emancipation. Bentley’s daughter, Magnolia Flower, falls in love with a light-complected African American teacher. Rather than see his daughter marry a man who reminds him of his white oppressors, the father vows to hang the lover. To punish most cruelly, Bentley vows to make the lover watch Magnolia Flower marry one of his lackeys before the hanging. Bentley emerges as a tyrant who exploits, abuses, and exercises complete control of his family and neighbors. In this way and in others, “Magnolia Flower” anticipates themes that would reach their fullest representation twelve years later in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Bentley’s character prefigures the better-developed one of Joe Starks, Janie’s second husband, in the novel. Although Joe Starks is not a would-be murderer, both men build big houses, control the men around them, and verbally and physically abuse their wives. Joe Clarke, a similar figure, also dominates Eatonville in Hurston’s 1925 story “The Bone of Contention,” in which readers witness Joe’s power to banish others from the town he founded.

In “Sweat” (1926), Sykes has been cheating on and beating Delia for fifteen years. Despite his abuse, Delia has built a home for them washing the clothes of white families in a neighboring town. The men on the store porch know that Sykes has subjected Delia to “brutal beating[s].” In fact, they agree that Sykes has beaten Delia “’nough tuh kill three women.” At the same time, the larger community becomes a target for criticism when the men continue to turn a blind eye to the violence. They discuss whipping and killing Sykes, but “the heat … melt[s] their civic virtue.” They opt to cut a watermelon rather than address his abuse. Hurston raises a number of unanswered questions. If Sykes has beaten Delia too much, as the men suggest, readers are left to wonder, How much violence toward a wife is acceptable? At what point should other men in the community intervene in domestic violence? If they do so, what form should that intervention take? If the men in the community fail to intervene, have they failed to act as “men”?

As Hurston was exploring masculinity in her fiction, she also began to develop the female characters for which she has become so well known. Although “Drenched in Light” (1924), her third published story, often prompts discussions of race, the author also explores constructions of gender. Isis, the story’s eleven-year-old heroine, strains against and even flouts the gender norms her grandmother would impose on her. Perched on the fence post, Isis loves to watch the parade of people and cars on the shell road outside her home. Doing so, however, puts her at odds with traditional femininity, which would describe such behavior as unladylike. The child also likes to whistle, slouch in her chair, and sit with her knees apart, which her grandmother describes as “settin’ brazen.”³⁶ Isis clearly does not care and would much rather be on horseback herding cattle and cracking the whip (a masculine, phallic symbol) than washing dishes for her family, a chore that falls to her as the only female child. Hurston cleverly turns this traditional construction of ladylike womanhood on the grandmother when Isis and her brother try to shave the woman’s chin whiskers as she snores loudly through her afternoon nap. While Hurston doesn’t tackle constructions of femininity directly, she reveals a girl resisting traditional gender roles and the grandmother’s hypocrisy in imposing them.

“The Back Room” (1927) is one of the four stories I discovered in the Pittsburgh Courier, a weekly black newspaper. It is unique among Hurston’s fiction, as it focuses on an educated and evidently prosperous migrant. It is Hurston’s only work of fiction to plumb New Negro life in the Harlem Renaissance. The thirty-eight-year-old Lilya Barkman is living, in the words of Glenda R. Carpio and Werner Sollors, the “upper-crust party life” of Harlem’s elite.³⁷ She is approaching the age of forty but has by choice remained unmarried. She has remained “on the battlefield” and “had her fun” in the belief that marriage “ages a woman so—worrying with a house and husband at the same time.” Lilya’s home includes a large portrait of her painted years earlier, when her beauty and her marriage prospects were at their peak. Unwittingly, she has constructed herself as an object of the male gaze, both in art and in life, but in order to land on her feet at the end of the story, she must reclaim her agency.

The narrative names Porter David as the artist who created the painting that captures Lilya at her best. His name, as Carpio and Sollors astutely point out, evokes the painter James A. Porter, a 1927 Howard graduate.³⁸ While Carpio and Sollors suggest “the world in a jug” reference in the story constitutes an “uncanny anticipation” of Porter’s award-winning painting Woman Holding a Jug, it seems more likely that both Hurston and Porter allude to the blues song “Down Hearted Blues,” which made Bessie Smith famous in 1923.³⁹ Like so many blues songs, this one chronicles a broken relationship. Smith, however, puts her own stamp on the song by reorganizing the lyrics to emphasize the blues singer’s resilience. Although Smith’s man has left her, she still believes that she has “got the world in a jug—the stopper’s in my hand.”⁴⁰ In Hurston’s story, the line “the world in a jug” appears in the opening paragraphs, foreshadowing the ending, in which the male characters leave Lilya behind.

“Monkey Junk” (1927), another recovered story, also evokes an element of Harlem life that is unlike anything else in Hurston’s work. Although funny, it is perhaps the author’s most cynical look at relationships between men and women. The narrative juxtaposes the high and low in mock biblical chapters, much like “Book of Harlem” and “The Book of Harlem.” “[M]ixed up proverbial wisdoms” like ‘He that laughest last is worth two in the bush,’ Carpio and Sollors note, provide much of the humor.⁴¹ Beneath this humor, however, Hurston takes her “crooked stick” to both genders. The plot unfolds as an unnamed man journeys out of the South to Harlem. He believes he “knoweth all about women,” and by story’s end that overconfidence has cost him dearly. He is trapped by a woman infatuated with his checkbook. As a consequence of underestimating the power of feminine wiles and overestimating his own skills, the exploited and outmatched husband finds himself responsible for a hefty alimony payment. It is easy to laugh as the unnamed woman takes advantage of his arrogance. At the same time, however, Hurston also interrogates the way the woman exercises her agency. In divorce court the judge and jury view her as a woman in need of rescue when nothing could be further from the truth. As readers watch the woman lie and manipulate, her performance becomes central. Admittedly, as Carpio and Sollors point out, she is hardly a feminist role model. And yet, she uses what she has—her appearance—to achieve her ends in a patriarchal culture. Through the introduction of the woman’s lawyer, Hurston “hit[s] a straight lick.” He is the only man who sees through the woman’s performance. Through his character, Hurston cautions readers to avoid being like the “doty juryman” and instead to see beneath the surface of gendered performances.

“The Country in the Woman” and “She Rock” also explore the impact migration has on identity and marriage, as well as the tensions between rural and urban life. The plot of both stories revolves around Caroline, a married woman who uses her ax to end the affairs of her philandering husband. This pattern appears four times across the body of Hurston’s work. Rural versions of the tales set in Hurston’s hometown of Eatonville, Florida, appear in “The Eatonville Anthology” (collected here) and in her autobiography. In “The Country in the Woman” and in “She Rock,” Hurston relocates the plot to Harlem to critique urban constructions of female identity.

“The Country in the Woman” (1927) focuses narrowly on Caroline and her wayward husband in Harlem. In exchanges between Caroline and her husband, Mitchell, readers see Caroline perform for her audiences. The story opens on a Harlem street as Caroline confronts Mitchell and his “side gal.” Rural African American vernacular permeates Caroline’s speech, as she threatens the other woman: “I’ll kick her clothes up round her neck like a horse collar. She’ll think lightnin’ struck her all right, now.” A “dark brown lump of country contrariness,” this wife has publicly and humorously vanquished previous rivals when the couple lived in the South, but Mitchell mistakenly believes that in urban Harlem he can carry on an affair without her knowledge. Mitchell has adopted “Seventh Avenue corners and a man about town air” and a new, store-bought wardrobe. Caroline, however, continues to sleep in “yellow homespun.” Because homespun cloth and the clothing it became were made in the home, that nightgown symbolizes the independence necessary for the survival of rural women like Caroline. Her idioms and her “‘way-down-in-Dixie’ look” also foreshadow the rural weapon Caroline will use to end Mitchell’s liaison. Readers laugh at the humorous conflict between husband and wife and between rural and urban norms as Caroline emerges the victor by rejecting conventional, urban, middle-class norms of femininity.⁴²

The final and latest of the recovered stories is “She Rock.” In 2004, Hugh Davis noted his discovery in The Zora Neale Hurston Forum.⁴³ He serendipitously found it while browsing the Courier for the writings of another Harlem Renaissance scribe, George Schuyler.⁴⁴ Written in 1933, “She Rock” explores the same central plot as “The Country in the Woman,” but in this version traditional narration gives way to the numbered mock biblical chapters and verses that Hurston had employed in “The Book of Harlem” and “Monkey Junk.” In “She Rock” Hurston allows readers to migrate with Caroline and her husband when Oscar’s brother recruits him to work for the “Kings and Princes in Great Babylon” to earn “many sheckels.” Once in the city, Oscar is advised to “shake that thing,” and he does, as Hurston riffs on the Ethel Waters hit by the same name: “Yea, shook the fat with the lean, the rich with the poor; the aged with the young, verily was there not a shaking like unto this before nor after it.” More explicitly than in “The Country in the Woman,” Hurston critiques the relationship between Oscar and his girlfriend. The portraits are funny but unflattering. He is arrogant, and she is a gold-digging manipulator. The result of Hurston’s revisions is a less playful tale, one more critical of New Negro gender constructions that would keep Caroline passively at home while her husband roams the streets with another woman.⁴⁵

EXPLORING THE POLITICS OF RACE AND CLASS

Hurston’s fiction interrogating race receives less attention than it should, particularly given that her more direct treatments of race and power appear in stories in which she blends folklore and fiction. African American folklore, particularly in song and story, serves important functions within the black community. It also has a long history as a weapon in the fight against slavery and racism. While Zora’s treatment of race differs considerably from the angry, confrontational work of her contemporary Richard Wright, her fiction nevertheless explores what it means to be black in America. Her decision to write about black communities with white characters appearing only on the fringes—if at all—is a political choice, one that marginalizes whites and puts African Americans at the center and affirms that black folk are worthy of stories. As we have seen, using her “crooked stick” Hurston strikes at the intraracial politics of complexion, called colorism or shadeism, which exists in dialogue with whiteness and the belief that lighter is somehow better. Likewise, her fiction resists New Negro attempts to rehabilitate the image of blacks in the eyes of the whites by shunning folk culture as backward, ignorant, or undesirable. These are intentional treatments of race that Wright and his contemporaries overlooked.⁴⁶ But Hurston also wrote stories that address race more directly. She turned to folklore to do so.

The neglected story “Black Death” apparently never appeared in print in Hurston’s lifetime. She submitted it to the 1925 Opportunity literary contest, where it won honorable mention.⁴⁷ All evidence suggests the story waited until the appearance of The Collected Stories (1995) to finally find an audience, perhaps because it explores conjure’s role in a southern black community. Like “Spunk,” the story illustrates the ways in which the weak take their vengeance on the strong. Fiction and folklore blend in “Black Death,” blurring the lines between genres. The frame for the plot of “Black Death” reads like an essay and emphasizes different ways of knowing, illustrating that blacks know and understand things about the world that whites do not. At the heart of the story is a lothario who comes to town, seduces a girl he works with, and abandons her when she becomes pregnant. The girl’s mother, distraught and helpless in this world, turns to Old Man Morgan, the local conjure man, for justice. Hemenway tells us that both the lothario’s name, Beau Diddely, and the plot itself are “traditional,” and they exist elsewhere in Hurston’s anthropological publications.⁴⁸ Clearly, then, the story is not entirely fiction, but Hurston transforms the folktale, frames it, and, like Charles W. Chesnutt did before her in his conjure tales, reveals the ways in which power works—in the material world and beyond. While some middle-class readers might have been put off by or embarrassed by a conjure story, Hurston’s pride in her culture prevented any such discomfort for her. Further, the frame of the story suggests that whites are inferior because they live only in a material world and thus fail to understand the additional dimensions of the spirit world.

In “’Possum or Pig” (1926) Hurston takes a similar approach by blending genres. Julius Lester, the African American storyteller, explains that folklore is like water in that as it passes from one pitcher to another “its essential properties are not harmed or changed … . A folktale assumes the shape of its teller.” ⁴⁹ Hurston’s oral performances at parties were legendary, and here she may well have transferred to paper part of her repertoire for the magazine Forum, where editors included commentary praising the value of African American folklore and supporting the New Negro movement. Set in the days before emancipation, the story features a plot that hinges on John, the classic African American trickster figure, who has stolen and butchered one of Master’s pigs. When Master comes to John’s cabin, the pig is steaming in a pot above the fire. Unable to deter Master from entering his humble cabin without enduring a whipping, John claims to be cooking a “dirty lil’ possum”: “Ah put dis heah critter in heah a possum,—if it comes out a pig, ’tain’t mah fault.” The open-ended tale emphasizes John’s willingness to match wits with his master, and readers pull for the less powerful character. Lurking beneath the surface, however, are also the larger dynamics of American slavery. John steals pigs to feed himself because he is not provided enough to eat. His cabin is not his own. The man defined by law as his “owner” can do what he wills to John without fear of retribution. John must use his wits to survive. The seriousness of this history embedded within a funny, traditional tale reveals Hurston “hitting a straight lick with a crooked stick” to address the politics of race, which had evolved painfully little in the years between emancipation and the Harlem Renaissance, especially for those sharecropping in the South.

Near the end of the period, Hurston published one of her finest stories, “The Gilded Six-Bits” (1933), which offers one of her most direct critiques of the politics of race. Her critique is embedded in an interesting reversal of other migration stories (in that one of the characters migrates south) and provides a subtle interrogation of masculinity. In its conclusion, however, Hurston turns the reader’s attention to the politics of race. When “The Gilded Six-Bits” appeared in Story magazine, it caught the attention of editors at J. B. Lippincott and ultimately led to the publication of Hurston’s first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine. Again, the complexities of marriage take center stage in a love triangle, but this time a northerner participates in reverse migration when he moves from Chicago to Eatonville to open an ice cream parlor. There he meets Joe and Missie May, a young married couple. Joe puts the urbanite on a pedestal, talking repeatedly about this urban interloper with “de finest clothes … ever seen on a colored man’s back” and a five-dollar gold coin for a lapel pin. Missie, on the other hand, seems decidedly unimpressed. Readers then are almost as shocked as Joe is to find Missie and the northerner in bed together. When Joe discovers the affair, he also finds that the gold pin he had admired is nothing more than a gilded coin. It and the urbanite are both fakes. Things are not always as they seem. In the final lines, Hurston turns this story about love and marriage to illuminate yet another way in which appearance and reality collide, this time in the politics of race. She confronts readers with racism in the one scene in which a white character appears. When Joe finally spends the northerner’s gilded coin in a local shop, the white store clerk articulates the stereotype he has imposed on Joe: “Wisht I could be like those darkies. Laughin’ all the time. Nothin’ worries ’em.” The ironic claim rings hollow for readers who know just how painful the acquisition of that gilded coin was for Joe. The clerk’s use of the term “darky” reveals that he sees Joe as a minstrel figure untroubled by the woes of the modern world. Through dramatic irony, Hurston points out that Joe’s life is far more complicated than the racist clerk can imagine. The line contrasts what readers, white and black, know about Joe’s life with what the clerk thinks he knows. In this way, Hurston undermines the stereotype, revealing its distortion of a man’s complex humanity.

THE END OF THE ERA

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Hurston took a break from writing short fiction as she traveled the South collecting African American folklore. During this period she drafted the material that would eventually become three distinct books: Mules and Men (1935), Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro Folk-tales from the Gulf States (2001), and Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” (2018). She and Langston Hughes fell out over their failed collaboration on Mule Bone in 1929, which did not appear in print until 1991. And she worked to bring authentic folk performances to the stage to great critical acclaim but with little financial success.⁵⁰ Zora’s fiction was changing, too. The last story from Hurston’s Harlem Renaissance years, “The Fire and the Cloud” (1934), marks a significant departure from her earlier stories in terms of themes, characters, and settings. There is no love triangle, no Eatonville or Harlem settings, no vernacular speech. Instead, “The Fire and the Cloud” focuses on the Old Testament figure of Moses. Hurston’s attention has shifted from identity politics to the complexities of leadership. “The Fire and the Cloud” appeared five years before her novel Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), in which she develops Moses as a magical figure—a masterful hoodoo practitioner, one not only dependent on God but powerful in his own right. Building on a long tradition of the Exodus story serving as an inspiration in African American culture, Hurston shifts the focus from the plight of the people being led out of bondage to the struggles of the leader. In the short story, readers see Hurston exploring for the first time the isolation and burdens of leadership. Set in the days after Moses has led the people to the Promised Land, the story opens on a mountain where the great liberator sits overlooking his people. Although seemingly without companionship, Moses strikes up a series of conversations with a lizard, in which he reveals he is alone after forty years of leadership. He is unconvinced that the people he served will remember or appreciate his sacrifices. After all, he points out, “The heart of man is an ever empty abyss into which the whole world shall fall and be swallowed up.” At the end of thirty days on the mountain, Moses symbolically inters his role as leader and walks away, leaving his powerful staff leaning on the pile of stone. He passes the role of leader to Joshua, who will find the staff and assume that Moses has passed away. The story’s conclusion literally and symbolically severs the role of leader from the human being who assumes the mantle, suggesting it is a performative role. While followers might naively put their leaders on a pedestal and idealize them, leaders take on the role their followers need them to assume, sometimes at great personal cost.

In the years between “The Fire and the Cloud” and Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Hurston traveled to Haiti and Jamaica on two prestigious Guggenheim fellowships. She wrote the novel on her first trip as she tried to “smother [her] feelings” after leaving her longtime love affair behind in the United States. “The plot was far from the circumstances, but I tried to embalm all the tenderness of my passion for him in ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God,’” she writes in her autobiography.⁵¹ While Hurston’s black contemporaries were critical of the book when it appeared because it did not explicitly confront class issues, it has been largely responsible for her ascending to the canons of American literature.⁵² When the author returned to the United States after her fellowships in 1938, she would focus on producing books and essays. The peak of her productivity as a short story writer was behind her.

Almost a century later, Hurston’s contributions to American literary culture continue to inform the ways we talk about the Harlem Renaissance, Modernism, women’s literature, folk literature and folklore, ethnography, migration fiction, and Southern literature. Her groundbreaking stories and bodacious personality have made her one of the most-storied and most-studied Harlem Renaissance writers. Hurston’s finest stories have made her a hypercanonical figure, a giant of the twentieth century, an icon. This collection of Hurston’s Harlem Renaissance short fiction, particularly the addition of once-lost stories to her canon, requires readers to rethink her legacy. In these recovered stories, we see her explore the urban experience and the educated New Negro, two elements of Harlem Renaissance culture that seemed to have been lacking in her oeuvre. We see her use her “crooked stick” to critique the politics of gender, class, and race. Situated within the better-known body of Hurston’s work, as they are in this volume, these recovered stories reveal the broader scope of her writings, both in terms of theme and form. Hurston’s keen ear for vernacular speech, her devotion to depicting proudly and completely the folk she knew, and her persistent attention to the intersections of race, class, and gender have left us a beautiful, complicated, and unsurpassed legacy of Harlem Renaissance short stories.

Genevieve West

October 22, 2019

John Redding Goes to Sea

The Villagers said that John Redding was a queer child. His mother thought he was too. She would shake her head sadly, and observe to John’s father, “Alf, it’s too bad our boy’s got a spell on him.” The father always met this lament with indifference, if not impatience.

“Aw, woman, stop dat talk ’bout conjure. ’Tain’t so nohow. Ah doan want Jawn tuh git dat foolishness in him.”

“Case you allus tries tuh know mo’ than me, but Ah aint so ign’rant. Ah knows a heap mahself. Many and manys the people been drove outa their senses by conjuration, or rid tuh deat’ by witches.”

“Ah, keep on telling yur, woman, ’taint so. B’lieve it all you wants tuh, but dontcher tell mah son none of it.”

Perhaps ten-year-old John was puzzling to the simple folk there in the Florida woods, for he was an imaginative child and fond of daydreams. The St. John River flowed a scarce three hundred feet from his back door. On its banks at this point grew numerous palms, luxuriant magnolias and bay trees with a dense undergrowth of ferns, cat-tails and rope-grass. On the bosom of the stream float millions of delicately colored hyacinths. The little brown boy loved to wander down to the water’s edge and cast in dry twigs, and watch them sail away down stream to Jacksonville, the sea, and the wide world and John Redding wanted to follow them.

Sometimes in his dreams he was a prince, riding away in a gorgeous carriage. Often he was a knight bestride a fiery charger prancing down the white shellroad that led to distant lands. At other times he was a steamboat Captain piloting his craft down the St. John River to where the sky seemed to touch the water. No matter what he dreamed or whom he fancied himself to be, he always ended by riding away to the horizon, for in his childish ignorance he thought this to be the farthest land.

But these twigs, which John called his ships, did not always sail away. Sometimes they would be swept in among the weeds growing in the shallow water, and be held there. One day his father came upon him scolding the weeds for stopping his seagoing vessels.

“Let go mah ships! you old mean weeds, you!” John screamed and stamped impotently, “They wants tuh go ’way, you let ’em go on.”

Alfred laid his hand on his son’s head lovingly. “What’s mattah, son?”

“Mah ships, Pa,” the child answered weeping. “Ah throwed ’em in to go way off an them ole weeds won’t let ’em.”

“Well, well, doan cry. Ah thought youse uh grown up man. Men doan cry lak babies. You mustnt take it too hard bout yo ships. You gotter git uster things gitten tied up. They’s lotsa folks that ’ud go ’on off too ef somethin didn’ ketch ’em and hol’ ’em!”

Alfred Redding’s brown face grew wistful for a moment, and the child noticing it asked quickly, “Do weeds tangle up folks too, Pa?”

“Now, now chile, doan be takin’ too much stock of what ah say. Ah talks in parables sometimes. Come on, le’s go on tuh supper.”

Alf took his son’s hand, and started slowly toward the house. Soon John broke the silence.

“Pa, when ah gets as big as you ah’m goin’ farther than them ships. Ah’m going to where the sky touches the ground.”

“Well, son, when ah waz a boy, ah said ah waz going too, but heah ah am. Ah hopes you have better luck than I had.”

“Pa, ah betcher ah seen somethin in th’ wood that you ain’t seen.”

“What?”

“See dat tallest pine tree ovah dere how it looks like a skull wid a crown on!”

“Yes, indeed,” said the father looking toward the tree designated, “it do look lak a skull since you call mah ’tention to it. You ’magine lotser things nobody evah did, son.”

“Sometimes, Pa, dat ole tree waves to me just after th’ sun goes down, an’ makes me sad an’ skeered too.”

“Ah specks youse skeered of de dahk, thas all, sonny. When you gits biggah you wont think of sich.”

Hand in hand these two trudged across the plowed land and up to the house—the child dreaming of the days when he should wander to far countries, and the man of the days when he might have—and thus they entered the kitchen.

Matty Redding, John’s mother, was setting the table for supper. She was a small wiry woman with large eyes that might have been beautiful when she was young, but too much weeping had left them watery and weak.

“Matty,” Alf began as he took his place at the table, “dontcher know our boy is different from any othah chile roun’ heah. He ’lows he’s goin to sea when he gits grown, an’ ah reckon ah’ll let ’im.”

The woman turned from the stove, skillet in hand. “Alf, you aint gone crazy is you? John kaint help wantin tuh stray off, cause he’s got a spell on ’im, but you oughter be shamed to be encouragin’ ’im.”

“Aint ah done tol you forty times not tuh tawk dat low-life mess in front of mah boy?”

“Well, if taint no conjure in de world, how come Mitch Potts been layin’ on his back six mont’s an’ de doctah kaint do ’im no good? Answer me dat. The very night John wuz bawn, Granny seed ole witch Judy Davis creepin outer dis yahd. You knows she had swore tuh fix me fuh marryin’ you ’way from her darter Edna. She put travel dust down fuh mah chile, dats what she done, to make him walk ’way fum me. An’ evah sence he’s been able tuh crawl, he’s been tryin tuh go.”

“Matty, a man doan need no travel dust tuh make ’im wanter hit de road. It jes comes natcheral fuh er man tuh travel. Dey all wants tuh go at some time or other but they kaint all git away. Ah wants mah John tuh go an’ see, cause ah wanted to go mahself. When he comes back ah kin see them furrin places wid his eyes. He kaint help wantin tuh go cause he’s a man chile.”

Mrs. Redding promptly went off into a fit of weeping but the man and boy ate supper unmoved. Twelve years of married life had taught Alfred that, far from being miserable when she wept, his wife was enjoying a bit of self-pity.

Thus John Redding grew to manhood, playing, studying and dreaming. He attended the village school as did most of the youth about him, but he also went to high school at the county seat where none of the villagers went. His father shared his dreams and ambitions, but his mother could not understand why he should wish to go to strange places where neither she nor his father had been. No one of their community had been farther away than Jacksonville. Few, indeed, had ever been there. Their own gardens, general store, and occasional trips to the County seat—seven miles away—sufficed for all their needs. Life was simple indeed with these folk.

John was the subject of much discussion among the country folk. Why didn’t he teach school instead of thinking about strange places and people? Did he think himself better than any of the belles thereabout that he would not go a courting any of them? He must be “fixed” as his mother claimed, else where did his queer notions come from? Well, he was always queer, and one could not expect the man to be different from the child. They never failed to stop work at the approach of Alfred in order to be at the fence to inquire after John’s health and ask when he expected to leave.

“Oh,” Alfred would answer, “yes, as soon as his ma gets reconciled to th’ notion. He’s a mighty dutiful boy mah John is. He doan wanna hurt her feelings.”

The boy had on several occasions attempted to reconcile his mother to the notion, but found it a difficult task. Matty always took refuge in self-pity and tears. Her son’s desires were incomprehensible to her, that was all. She did not want to hurt him. It was love, mother love, that made her cling so desperately to John.

“Lawd knows,” she would sigh, “Ah nevah wuz happy an’ I nevah specks tuh be.”

“An from yo actions,” put in Alfred hotly, “you’s determined not to be.”

“Thas right, Alfred, go on an’ ’buse me. You allus does. Ah know Ah’m ig’nrant an’ all dat, but dis is mah son. Ah bred an’ born ’im. He kaint help from wantin’ to go rovin’ cuz travel dust been put down fuh him. But mabbe we kin cure ’im by discouragin’ the idea.”

“Well ah wants mah son tuh go, an’ he wants tuh go too. He’s a man now, Matty, an’ we mus let John hoe his own row. If it’s travellin’, ’twont be for long. He’ll come back tuh us bettah than when he went off. Anyhow he’ll learn dat folks is human all ovah de world. Dats worth a lot to know, an’ it’s worth going a long way tuh fin out. What do you say, son?”

“Mama,” John began slowly, “it hurts me to see you so troubled over me going away, but I feel that I must go. I’m stagnating here. This indolent atmosphere will stifle every bit of ambition that’s in me. Let me go, Mama, please. What is there here for me? Give me two or three years to look around and I’ll be back here with you and Papa, and I’ll never leave you again. Mama, please let me go.”

“Now, John, it’s bettah for you to stay heah and take over the school. Why won’t you marry and settle down?”

“I’m sorry Mama that you won’t consent. I am going, nevertheless.”

“John, John, mah baby! You wouldn’t kill yo’ po’ ole mama, would you? Come kiss me, Son.”

The boy flung his arms about his mother and held her closely while she sobbed on his breast. To all of her pleas, however, he answered that he must go.

“I’ll stay at home this year, Mama, then I’ll go for a while, but it won’t be long. I’ll come back and make you and Papa oh so very happy. Do you agree, Mama dear?”

“Ah reckon t’ain’t nothin’ ’tall fuh me to do else.”

Things went on very well around the Reddings home for some time. During the day John helped his father about the farm and read a great deal at night.

Then the unexpected happened. John married Stella Kanty, a neighbor’s daughter. The courtship was brief but ardent—on John’s part at least. He danced with Stella at a candy-pulling, walked with her home and in three weeks declared himself. Mrs. Redding declared she was happier than she had ever been in her life. She therefore indulged in a whole afternoon of weeping. John’s change was occasioned possibly by the fact that Stella was really beautiful, he was young and red-blooded, and the time was spring.

Spring time in Florida is not a matter of peeping violets or bursting buds merely. It is a riot of color, in nature—glistening green leaves, pink, blue, purple, yellow blossoms that fairly stagger the visitor from the north. The miles of hyacinths are like an undulating carpet on the surface of the river and divide reluctantly when the slow-moving alligators push their way log-like across. The nights are white nights as the moon shines with dazzling splendor, or in the absence of that goddess, the soft darkness creeps down laden with innumerable scents. The heavy fragrance of magnolias mingled with the delicate sweetness of jasmine and wild roses.

If time and propinquity conquered John, what then? These forces have overcome older men.

The raptures of the first few weeks over, John began to saunter out to the gate to gaze wistfully down the white dusty road, or to wander again to the river as he had done in childhood. To be sure he did not send forth twig-ships any longer, but his thoughts would in spite of himself, stray down river to Jacksonville, the sea, the wide world—and poor home-tied John Redding wanted to follow them.

He grew silent and pensive. Matty accounted for this by her ever-ready explanation of conjuration. Alfred said nothing, but smoked and puttered about the barn more than ever. Stella accused her husband of indifference and pouting. At last John decided to bring matters to a head and broached the subject to his wife.

“Stella, dear, I want to go roving about the world for a spell, would you stop here with Papa and Mama and wait for me to come back?”

“John, is you crazy sho ’nuff? If you don’t want me, say so, an’ I kin go home to mah folks.”

“Stella, darling, I do want you, but I want to go away too. I can have both if you’ll let me. We’ll be so happy when I return.”

“Now, John, you cain’t push me off one side like that. You didn’t hafta marry me. There’s a plenty others that would hev been glad enhuff tuh get me. You know ah want educated befo han’.”

“Don’t make me too conscious of my weakness, Stella. I know I should have never married you with my inclinations, but its done now. No use to talk about what is past. I love you and I want to keep you, but I can’t stifle that longing for the open road, rolling seas, for peoples and countries I have never seen. I’m suffering too, Stella, I’m paying for my rashness in marrying before I was ready. I’m not trying to shirk my duty—you’ll be well taken care of in the meanwhile.”

“John, folks allus said you was queer and tol me not to marry yuh, but ah jes loved yuh so ah couldn’t help it, an now to think you wants tuh sneak off an’ leave me.”

“But I’m coming back, darling. Listen, Stella—” But the girl would not. Matty came in and Stella fell into her arms weeping. John’s mother immediately took up arms against him. The two women carried on such an effective war against him for the next few days that finally Alfred was forced to take his son’s part.

“Matty, let dat boy alone ah tell yuh! Ef he wuz uh home-boddy he’d be drove ’way by you-all’s racket.”

“Well, Alf, dats all we po’ wommen kin do. We wants our husbands an’ our sons. John’s got a wife now, an’ he ain’t got no business to be talkin’ bout goin’ nowhere. I ’lowed dat marryin’ Stella would settle him.”

“Yas, das all you wimmen study ’bout—settlin’ some man. You takes all de get-up, out of ’em. Jes let uh fellah mak a motion lak gettin’ somewhere an’ some ’oman’ll begin tuh hollah ‘Stop theah! wheres you goin’? don’t fuhgit you b’long tuh me!’”

“My Gawd! Alf! What you reckon Stella’s gwine do? Let John walk off an leave huh?”

“Naw. Git outer huh foolishness an’ go ’long wid him. He’d take huh.”

“Stella ain’t got no call tuh go crazy ’cause John is. She ain’t no woman tuh be floppin’ roun’ from place tuh place lak some uh dese reps follerin’ uh section gang.”

The man turned abruptly from his wife and stood in the kitchen door. A blue haze hung over the river and Alfred’s attention seemed fixed upon this. In reality his thoughts were turned inward. He was thinking of the numerous occasions upon which he and his son had sat on the fallen log at the edge of the water and talked of John’s proposed travels. He had encouraged his son, given him every advantage his poor circumstances would permit. And now John was home-tied.

The young man suddenly turned the corner of the house and approached his father.

“Hello, Papa.”

“’Lo, Son.”

“Where’s Mama and Stella?”

The older man merely jerked his thumb toward the interior of the house and once more gazed pensively toward the river. John entered the kitchen and kissed his mother fondly.

“Great news, Mama.”

“What now.”

“Got a chance to join the Navy, Mama, and go all around the world. Ain’t that grand!”

“John, you shorely ain’t gointer leave me and Stella, is yuh?”

“Yes, I think I am, I know how both of you feel, but I know how I feel also. You preach to me the gospel of self-sacrifice for the happiness of others, but you are unwilling to practice any of it youself. Stella can stay here—I am going to support her and spend all the time I can with her. I am going; that’s settled, but I want to go with your blessing. I want to do something worthy of a strong man. I have done nothing so far but look to you and Papa for everything. Let me learn to strive and think—in short, be a man.”

“Naw, John, Ah’ll nevah give mah consent. I know you’s hard headed jus lak you Paw, but if you leave dis place ovah mah head, ah nevah wants you tuh come back heah no mo. Ef I wuz laid on de coolin’ board, ah doan’ want yun standin’ ovah me, young man. Doan never come neah mah grave, you ongrateful wretch!”

Mrs. Redding arose and flung out of the room. For once, she was too incensed to cry. John stood in his tracks, his eyes dilated with terror at his mother’s pronouncement. Alfred, too, was moved. Mrs. Redding banged the bed-room door violently and startled John slightly. Alfred took his son’s arm saying softly, “Come, son, let’s go down to the river.”

At the water’s edge they halted for a short space before seating themselves on the log. The sun was setting in a purple cloud. Hundreds of mosquito hawks darted here and there, catching gnats and being themselves caught by the lightening-swift bull-bats. John abstractedly snapped in two the stalk of a slender young bamboo. Taking no note of what he was doing, he broke it into short lengths and tossed them singly into the stream. The old man watched him silently for a while, but finally he said, “Oh, yes, my boy, some ships get tangled in the weeds.”

“Yes, Papa, they certainly do; I guess I’m beaten—might as well surrender.”

“Nevah say die. Yuh nevah kin tell what will happen.”

“What can happen? I have courage enough to make things happen, but what can I do against Mama! What man wants to go on a long journey with his mother’s curses ringing in his ears? She doesn’t understand. I’ll wait another year, but I am going because I must.”

Alfred threw an arm about his son’s neck and drew him nearer but he quickly removed it. Both men instantly drew apart, ashamed for having been so demonstrative. The father looked off to the wood-lot and asked with a reminiscent smile, “Son, do you remember showing me the tree dat looked lak a skeleton head?”

“Yes I do. It’s still there. I look at it sometimes when things have become too painful for me at the house, and I run down here to cool off and think.”

“You wuz always imaginin’ things, John, things that nobody else evah thought on.”

“Oh, yes, I’m a dreamer. I have such wonderfully complete dreams, Papa. They never come true. But even as my dreams fade, I have others.”

The men arose without more conversation. Possibly they feared to trust themselves to speech. As they walked leisurely toward the house Alfred remarked the freshness of the breeze.

“It’s about time the rains set in,” added his son. “The year is wearin’ on.”

After a gloomy supper, John strolled out into the spacious front yard and seated himself beneath a China-berry tree. The breeze had grown a trifle stronger since sunset and continued down from the southwest. Matty and Stella sat on the deep front porch, but Alfred joined John under the tree. The family was divided into two armed camps and the hostilities had reached that stage where no quarter could be asked or given.

About nine o’clock an automobile came flying down the dusty white road and halted at the gate. A white man slammed the gate and hurried up the walk towards the house, but stopped abruptly before the men under the China-berry tree. It was Mr. Hill, the builder of the new bridge that spanned the river.

“Howdy John, howdy Alf, I’m mighty glad I found you; I am in trouble.”

“Well, now, Mist. Hill,” answered Alfred slowly but pleasantly, “we’se glad you foun’ us too. What trouble could you be having now?”

“It’s the bridge. The weather bureau says that the rains will be upon us in forty-eight hours. If it catches the bridge as it is now, I’m afraid all my work of the past five months will be swept away, to say nothing of half a million of dollars’ worth of labor and material. I’ve got all my men at work now and I thought to get as many extra hands as I could to help out tonight and tomorrow. We can make her weather tight in that time if I can get about twenty more.”

“I’ll go Mister Hill,” said John with a great deal of energy. “I don’t want Papa out on that bridge—too dangerous.”

“Good for you, John!” cried the white man. “Now if I had a few more men of your brawn, I could build an entirely new bridge in forty-eight hours. Come on and jump into the car. I am taking the men down as I find them.”

“Wait a minute. I must put on my blue jeans. I won’t be long.” John arose and strode to the house. He knew his mother and wife had overheard everything, but he paused for a moment to speak to them.

“Mama, I am going to work all night on the bridge.”

There was no answer. He turned to his wife.

“Stella, don’t be lonesome, I’ll be home at daybreak.”

His wife was as silent as his mother. John stood for a moment on the steps, then resolutely strode past the women and into the house. A few minutes later he emerged clad in his blue jeans and brogans. This time he said nothing to the silent figures rocking back and forth on the porch. But when he was a few feet from the steps he called back, “Bye Mama, bye Stella,” and hurried down the walk to where his father sat.

“So long, Papa. I’ll be home around seven.”

Alfred roused himself and stood. Placing both hands upon his son’s broad shoulders he said softly, “Be keerful, son don’t fall or nothin’.”

“I will, Papa. Don’t you get into a quarrel on my account.”

John hurried on to the waiting car and was whirled away.

Alfred sat for a long time beneath the tree where his son had left him and smoked on. The women soon went in doors. On the night breeze were borne the mingled scents of jasmine, of roses, of damp earth, of the river, of the pine forest near by. A solitary whip-poor-will sent forth his plaintive call from the nearby shrubbery. A giant owl hooted and screeched from the wood lot. The calf confined in the barn bleated and was answered by his mother’s sympathetic “Moo” from his pen.

Around ten o’clock the breeze freshened, growing stiffer until midnight when it became a gale. Alfred fastened the doors and bolted the wooden shutters at the windows. The three persons sat about a round table in the kitchen upon which stood a bulky kerosene lamp, flickering and sputtering in the wind that came through the numerous cracks in the walls. The wind rushed down the chimney blowing puffs of ashes about the room. It banged the cooking utensils on the walls. The drinking gourd hanging outside the door played a weird tattoo, hallow and unearthly, against the thin wooden wall.

The man and the women sat silently. Even if there had been no storm they would not have talked. They could not go to bed because the women were afraid to retire during a storm and the man wished to stay awake and think of his son. Thus they sat: the women hot with resentment toward the man and terrified by the storm, the man hardly mindful of the tempest, but eating his heart out in pity for his boy. Time wore heavily on.

And now a new element of terror was added. A screech-owl alighted on the roof and shivered forth his doleful cry. Possibly he had been blown out of his nest by the wind. Matty started up at the sound but fell back in her chair pale as death. “My Gawd!” She gasped, “dats a sho’ sign of death.”

Stella hurriedly thrust her hand in the salt jar and threw some into the chimney of the lamp. The color of the flame changed from yellow to blue-green, but this burning of the salt did not have the desired effect—to drive away the bird from the roof. Matty slipped out of her blue calico wrapper and turned it wrong side out before replacing it. Even Alfred turned one sock.

“Alf,” said Matty, “what do you reckon’s gonna happen from this?”

“How do ah know, Matty?”

“Ah wisht John hadner went way from heah tuh night.”

“Huh.”

Outside the tempest raged. The palms rattled dryly, and the giant pines groaned and sighed in the grip of the wind. Flying leaves and pine-mast filled the air. Now and then a brilliant flash of lightning disclosed a bird being blown here and there with the wind. The prodigious roar of the thunder seemed to rock the earth. Black clouds hung so low that the tops of the pines among them moaned slowly before the wind and made the darkness awful. The screech-owl continued his tremulous cry.

The wind ceased and the rain commenced. Huge drops clattered down upon the shingle roof like buckshot and ran from the eaves in torrents. It entered the house through the cracks in the walls and under the doors. It was a deluge in volume and force, but subsided before morning. The sun came up brightly on the havoc of the wind and rain, calling forth millions of feathered creatures. The white sand everywhere was full of tiny cups dug out by the force of the falling rain drops. The rims of the little depressions crunched noisily underfoot.

At daybreak Mr. Redding set out for the bridge. He was uneasy. On arriving he found that the river had risen twelve feet during the cloudburst and was still rising. The slow St. John was swollen far beyond its banks and rushing on to the sea like a mountain stream, sweeping away houses, great blocks of earth, cattle, trees, in short, anything that came within its grasp. Even the steel framework of the new bridge was gone.

The siren of the fibre factory was tied down for half an hour, announcing the disaster to the country side. When Alfred arrived therefore he found nearly all the men of the district there.

The river, red and swollen, was full of floating debris. Huge trees were swept along as relentlessly as chicken coops and fence rails. Some steel piles were all that was left of the bridge.

Alfred went down to a group of men who were fishing members of the ill-fated construction gang out of the water. Many were able to swim ashore unassisted. Wagons backed up and were hurriedly driven away loaded with wet, shivering men. Two men had been killed outright; others seriously wounded. Three men had been drowned. At last all had been accounted for except John Redding. His father ran here and there, asking for him or calling him. No one knew where he was. No one remembered seeing him since daybreak.

Dozens of women had arrived at the scene of the disaster by this time. Matty and Stella, wrapped in woolen shawls, were among them. They rushed to Alfred in alarm and asking where was John.

“Ah doan’ know,” answered Afred impatiently, “that’s what ah’m tryin’ to fin’ out now.”

“Do you reckon he’s run away?” asked Stella thoughtlessly.

Matty bristled instantly.

“Naw,” she answered sternly, “he ain’t no sneak.”

The father turned to Fred Mimms, one of the survivors, and asked him where John was and how had the bridge been destroyed.

“You see,” said Mimms, “when dat terrible win’ come up we wuz out ’bout de middle of the river. Some of us wuz on de bridge, some on de derrick. De win’ blowed so hahd we could skeercely stan’; and Mist. Hill tol’ us tuh set down fuh a speel. He’s afraid some of us mought go overboard. Den all of a sudden de lights went out—guess de wires wuz blowed down. We wuz all skeered tuh move for slippin’ overboard. Den dat rain commenced—and ah nevah seed such a downpour since the flood. We set dere an’ someone begins tuh pray. Lawd, how we did pray tuh be spared! Den somebody raised a song and we sung, you hear me. We sung from the bottom of our hearts till daybreak. When the first light come we couldn’t see nothin’ but fog everywhere. You couldn’t tell which wuz water an’ which wuz lan’. But when de sun come up de fog began to lift, and we could see da water. Dat fog was so thick an’ so heavy dat it was huggin’ dat river lak a windin’ sheet. And when it rose we saw dat de river had rose way up durin’ the rain. My Gawd, Alf, it was running high—so high it nearly teched de bridge an red as blood, so much clay, you know, from lan’ she done overflowed. Coming down stream, as fast as ’press train, was three big pine trees. De fust one wasn’t forty feet from us and there wasn’t no chance to do nothin’ but pray. De fust one struck us and shock de whole works, an’ befo it could stop shakin’ the other two hit us an’ down we went. Ah thought ah’d never see home again.”

“But Mimms, where’s John?”

“Ah ain’t seen him, Alf, since de logs struck us. Mebee he’s swum ashore, mebbe dey picked him up. What’s dat floatin’ way out dere in de water?”

Alfred shaded his eyes with his guarded brown hand, and gazed out into the stream. Sure enough there was a man floating on a piece of timber. He lay prone upon his back. His arms were outstretched and the water washed over his brogans, but his feet were lifted out of the water whenever the timber was buoyed up by the stream. His blue overalls were nearly torn from his body. A heavy piece of steel or timber had struck him in falling, for his left side was laid open by the thrust. A great jagged hole, wherein the double fists of a man might be thrust, could plainly be seen from the shore. The man was John Redding.

Everyone seemed to see him at once. Stella fell to the wet earth in a faint. Matty clung to her husband’s arm weeping hysterically. Alfred stood very erect with his wife clinging tearfully to him, but he said nothing. A single tear hung on his lashes for a time, then trickled slowly down his wrinkled brown cheek.

“Alf! Alf!” screamed Matty, “dere’s our son. Ah knowed when ah heard dat owl las’ night.”

“Ah see ’im Matty,” returned her husband softly.

“Why is yuh standin’ heah? Go git mah boy.”

The men were manning a boat to rescue the remains of John Redding when Alfred spoke again.

“Mah po boy, his dreams never come true.”

“Alf,” complained Matty, “why doan’t-cher hurry an’ git mah boy. Doan’t-cher see he’s floatin’ on off?”

Her husband paid her no attention, but addressed himself to the rescue party.

“You all stop. Leave my boy go on. Doan stop ’im. He wants tuh go. Ah’m happy ’cause dis mawnin’ mah boy is going tuh sea, he’s goin’ tuh sea.”

Out on the bosom of the river, bobbing up and down as if waving good-bye, John Redding floated away to Jacksonville, the sea, the wide world—at last.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.