A Checklist of Zora Neale Hurston's Short Stories

By Jade Harrison

The following list presents 25 of Zora Neale Hurston’s short stories by year of publication, including stories published during her lifetime and those that appeared posthumously.

1921: “John Redding Goes to Sea”
1924: “Drenched in Light”
1925: “Magnolia Flower”
1925: “Spunk”
1926: 'Possum or Pig?”
1926: “Muttsy”
1926: “Sweat”
1926: “The Eatonville Anthology”
1933: “The Gilded Six (Bits)”
1934: “Mother Catherine”
1934: “The Fire and the Cloud”
1934: “Uncle Monday”
1941: “Cock Robin Beale Street”
1942: “Story in Harlem Slang”
1943: “High John De Conquer”
1946: “Hurricane”
1950: “Escape from Pharaoh”
1950: “The Conscience of the Court”
1951: “The Tablets of the Law”
1995: “Black Death” (published posthumously)
1995: “Book of Harlem” (published posthumously)
1995: “Now You Cookin' with Gas” (published posthumously)
1995: “The Bone of Contention” (published posthumously)
1995: “The Seventh Veil” (published posthumously)
1995: “The Woman in Gaul” (published posthumously)

Related: 

• Black Short Story Findings

What is it about Poetry?

By Albert Smith

First-year collegiate Black women and men we surveyed identified poetry as being the type of reading that they anticipated being the most difficult in their college careers.

Of eight options, 29% of the young men and 28% of the young women chose poetry as their anticipated reading challenge. Poems served as the most anticipated reading challenge for both groups, even more than short essays and excerpts from slave narratives.

This finding was particularly worth noting as it warrants an investigation into how students view poetry and the experiences that they have with the artform. Poetry has exclusive elements that the other choices do not have which may offer glimpses into what these students do and do not view as valuable.

What is it about poetry that makes students view it as difficult?

Related: 

• Black Readers Findings

Edward P. Jones by the Numbers

By Kenton Rambsy

His shortest story, “A Butterfly on F Street,” has about 1,600 words, and his longest, “Root Worker,” has about 14,600, more than nine times as many.

The word counts of Edward P. Jones’s two short story collections show his stories growing much longer from the first book to the second.

Across Lost in the City (1992) and All Aunt Hagar’s Children (2006), Jones has published 28 stories, 14 in each collection, totaling about 233,700 words. The average Jones story runs about 8,300 words.

The 14 stories in Lost in the City total about 87,400 words and average about 6,200 words each, with “A Butterfly on F Street,” as the shortest at about 1,600 words, to the longest story, “The Store,” at about 11,300. Five stories run under 5,000 words: “A Butterfly on F Street,” “The First Day” (1,900), “An Orange Line Train to Ballston” (3,500), “Lost in the City” (3,600) and “A Dark Night” (4,400).

The 14 stories in All Aunt Hagar’s Children are considerably longer than his first collection with a total about 146,300 words and average about 10,400 words each story. They range from “Resurrecting Methuselah,” at about 7,600 words, to the longest “Root Worker,” at about 14,600. “Resurrecting Methuselah” is longer than 9 of the 14 stories in the first collection, including “Gospel” (6,900) and “The Night Rhonda Ferguson Was Killed” (7,500).

Jones also links the two books in order, so each story in All Aunt Hagar’s Children connects to the story in the same position in Lost in the City. Miles, the barber who gives Betsy Ann her pigeons in “The Girl Who Raised Pigeons,” the first story of the first book, appears as a baby in “In the Blink of God’s Eye,” the first story of the second, and Penelope “Penny” Jenkins of “The Store” returns in “All Aunt Hagar’s Children,” the fifth story in each. Lost in the City moves from its youngest characters to its oldest, while several stories from All Aunt Hagar’s Children feature the geographic South to depict what ties several DC residents to the migration that brought their families to the District.

Read together, the word counts and the links between the books show Jones building one connected set of DC stories, compact in two short story collections.

 

Related: 

• Black Short Story Findings

Walking to School in Edward P. Jones’s “The First Day”

In Edward P. Jones’s “The First Day,” the walk to church passes Seaton Elementary every Sunday. On the first day of school, mother and daughter walk the same streets to Seaton, are turned away and walk on to Walker-Jones. Every stop sat in a 1960 census area at least 88 percent Black.

By Kenton Rambsy

Edward P. Jones shows how a route walked every Sunday made one school a fixture in a family’s life.

In “The First Day,” a mother and her daughter walk every Sunday from their home at 1227 New Jersey Avenue to Mt. Carmel Baptist Church. Seaton Elementary sits across I Street from the church, so they pass it on every trip. For as many Sundays as the daughter can remember, her mother has pointed to Seaton and said, “You gonna go there and learn about the whole world.”

Because mother and daughter walk to school on the first day, Jones can show the neighborhood block by block as the daughter names each street they cross on New Jersey Avenue, from New York Avenue to K Street. At Seaton, a woman says they live “beyond the area that Seaton serves,” and the mother’s “I want her to go here.” The mother chose Seaton from years of walking past it, but the school system goes by address, so she walks her daughter to Walker-Jones, a school that is not across the street from her church.

Every stop on the walk was in Black DC. In 1960 the census areas around the family’s home, Mt. Carmel, Seaton and Walker-Jones were all at least 88 percent Black, when DC as a whole was 54 percent Black. The zone line runs through the family’s own neighborhood, between the school on their Sunday route and the one their address assigns them.

Jones sets a family’s weekly walk against the school system’s map, and on the first day of school the map decides where the daughter goes.

Related: 

• Black Short Story Findings

Trying to Get Lost in Edward P. Jones’s “Lost in the City”

 In Edward P. Jones’s “Lost in the City,” Lydia Walsh asks a cab driver to get her lost the morning her mother dies. The cab heads north from her town house in Southwest into Shaw, past the addresses of her childhood with her mother.

By Kenton Rambsy

Edward P. Jones builds “Lost in the City” around a cab ride from Lydia Walsh’s town house in Southwest to the Shaw neighborhood where her mother raised her in a majority Black neighborhood in DC.

The morning her mother dies, Lydia asks the driver to get her lost, and he heads north from her gated compound up 5th Street. At the old K Street market she wonders whether she ever wrote down her mother’s beef stew recipe, and at 1122 5th Street, where her father died, she remembers her mother telling him she loved him. The cab passes 457 Ridge Street and her mother’s house on O Street, then turns down Rhode Island Avenue past Frazier’s Funeral Home.

The driver thinks the side streets of Shaw will be unrecognizable to Lydia. Instead, the farther north he goes, the more she recognizes. Jones uses the driver’s mistake to fit her family’s history into one short ride.

As the cab pulls out of Southwest, Lydia remembers wanting to buy her mother a town house nearby and her mother doubting she could live among so many white people, saying, “I’m not used to their ways and such like you are, Lydia.” Her mother also knew people who lived in Southwest “before they threw the colored out and made it for the wealthy.” In 1980 Lydia’s Southwest census area was about 48 percent Black, while the Shaw blocks were 94 to 98 percent Black and DC as a whole was 70 percent.

By sending the cab up real DC streets, Jones turns Lydia’s attempt to get lost into a ride back through her younger life in Black DC.

Related: 

• Black Short Story Findings

Searching Black DC in Edward P. Jones’s “A New Man”

Be Kenton Rambsy

In Edward P. Jones’s “A New Man,” Woodrow Cunningham searches DC for his missing daughter, from R Street and U Street in Northwest to 21st Street off Benning Road in Northeast. In 1980 those census areas were 95 to 99 percent Black, in a city that was 70 percent Black.

In Edward P. Jones’s “A New Man,” Woodrow Cunningham’s search for his missing daughter takes him into homes across DC, and over time it also keeps him out of his own.

Woodrow comes home early and finds his fifteen-year-old daughter, Elaine, skipping school with two boys and smoking in the apartment, and he slaps her. Soon after, she runs away from their apartment on R Street in Northwest. For months he and his wife, Rita, search together, starting at the police station at 16th and V Streets, and Rita’s map of the search reaches Petworth, Lincoln Park and Anacostia before she takes it down in late April.

Woodrow keeps going and carries Elaine’s picture into a young mother’s home on U Street a few blocks from R Street, an old woman’s home on Harvard Street about a mile north and a man’s place on 21st Street off Benning Road, nearly three miles east. The search keeps him away from Rita, and he begins to tell a different version of events every time she asks, “What happened? Whatcha say to her?” In Jones’s words, “the more places he visited the more places he wanted to see.”

Geotagging the homes Woodrow enters shows the search spreading from a few blocks to nearly three miles from R Street, through census areas that were 95 to 99 percent Black in 1980, when DC was 70 percent Black. The map keeps growing after the couple moves to Independence Avenue in Southeast, where Woodrow leaves Rita at home on a freezing night and wonders whether to walk down 15th Street to a house he has not visited. Mapped together, these places show Jones using one father’s search to take readers inside Black homes across the city.

Jones uses Woodrow’s widening route through DC to show a grieving father becoming the new man of the title.

Related: 

• Black Short Story Findings

Changing Routes in “An Orange Line Train to Ballston”

By Kenton Rambsy

In Edward P. Jones’s “An Orange Line Train to Ballston,” a man with dreadlocks starts talking with Marvella Watkins’s children on the Metro, and Marvella changes the route her family rides across DC every weekday in hopes of seeing him again.

Since her divorce, Marvella has lived in Southeast with her sister, but her family’s weekdays happen in Northwest. Each morning, she rides from Stadium-Armory to McPherson Square and drops her sons at Thompson School, two blocks from her mother’s apartment at Horizon House, where Avis spends the day. Then she walks to work at C&P Telephone.

The man sits beside Marvella on the train and touches her hand, and she starts carrying her phone numbers in case he asks. Guessing he rides only the orange line, she lets blue trains pass, though both stop at McPherson Square. Her oldest son, Marvin, still learning the Metro, asks why they wait when the blue train is like the orange. Embarrassed and frustrated that the man rarely appears, Marvella lashes out at him, hating a scene “particularly around white people.”

Her search covers a lot of DC. The weekday ride runs about four miles, from Southeast blocks that were about 82 percent Black in 1980 to blocks around the school and her office at 37 and 34 percent. On Saturday she circles back through Southeast looking for him, driving her nephew’s car between 19th Street and Potomac, Kentucky and North Carolina Avenues, where she thinks he must live if he boards at Stadium-Armory. The man turns her weekday commute into a search of the neighborhood where she grew up.

Jones shows a mother who crosses DC every weekday to hold her family together, then changes that route, in hopes of seeing one man again.

In Edward P. Jones’s “An Orange Line Train to Ballston,” orange and blue trains share the track from Marvella’s station at Stadium-Armory to McPherson Square, and either one gets her family to school and work. Once she meets the man with dreadlocks, she lets blue trains go by and waits for an orange one.

Related: 

• Black Short Story Findings

Car Rides in Edward P. Jones’s “The Gospel”

By Kenton Rambsy

In Edward P. Jones’s fiction, the way a character gets around DC decides where the most personal talk happens.

In “Gospel,” Vivian Slater drives her gospel group to two churches on one Sunday, from her home east of the Anacostia River to Diane’s house in Southeast, Claridge Towers downtown, a burned storefront in Shaw and a large church off 14th Street. Only a car lets the group cover that much of DC in one day, and Vivian decides the route.

To bring out conflicts inside the group, Jones keeps four women in one car. On 11th Street, Maude complains that her building has “turned bad” and talks of moving back South. On the way home, Diane asks Vivian to stop at 14th and Fairmont so she can meet a man who is not her husband. Vivian snaps, “I ain’t your gotdamn chauffeur!” When Diane gets out at Claridge Towers instead of riding home, Vivian drives off alone and turns the wrong way at Thomas Circle.

The day covers more than ten miles of driving, through neighborhoods that ranged from 30 to 95 percent Black in 1990, when DC was 66 percent. Vivian’s side of the river was 95 percent, Diane’s blocks near Lincoln Park 30 and Claridge Towers 61, while both churches sat in areas above 85. The car carries women from very different parts of the city into the same mostly Black churches.

Jones uses a Sunday drive across DC to gather women from three neighborhoods into one car, and the miles between stops give their tensions begin to surface.

In Edward P. Jones’s “Gospel,” set around 1990, Vivian Slater drives from her side of the Anacostia River (95 percent Black) to Diane’s blocks near Lincoln Park (30), Claridge Towers (61), a burned storefront in Shaw (89) and 14th Street (86). DC was 66 percent. Her car brings together women from very different parts of the city.

Related: 

• Black Short Story Findings