Point of View

Throughout the 21 short stories presented in Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick, the narrator takes on various perspectives. Throughout the majority of stories, the narrator uses the third-person perspective and the past tense. This allows the narrator to engage in whatever form of the third-person is more effective for each story, like limited or omniscient. The narrator thus need not be directly involved in the events of the short stories, rather an observer that allows the reader to draw their own conclusions.

This is complicated by the narrator’s use of the first-person perspective and present tense that pulls the reader into the immediacy of the events. In this way, the narrator equates herself with the community of Eatonville on various occasions. For example, In “Black Death,” the narrator states, “We Negroes in Eatonville know a number of things that the hustling, bustling...