“Spunk” and “Sweat”
“Spunk” and “Sweat”
THE LITERARY WORK
Two short stories, set in Eatonville. Florida, in the early 1900s; “Spunk” was first published in 1925, “Sweat” in 1926.
SYNOPSIS
In “Spunk,” a smll-town strongman steals another man’s wife, kills her husband, and is ultimately avenged by what all perceive to be the dead man’s spirit. “Sweat” centers on a hard-working washerwoman who triumphs over her scheming, adulterous husband.
Events in History at the Time of the Short Story
Zora Neale Hurston was born January 7, 1891, or 1901, in Eatonville, Florida, the first incorporated exclusively African American town in the United States. (The year of Hurston’s birth, probably 1891, is in dispute). A voracious reader, Hurston learned to decipher words before kindergarten but obstacles in childhood, including the death of her mother when she was nine, prevented her from attending high school until her twenties. Hurston went on to attend Howard University, later earning a scholarship to Barnard College. At Barnard Hurston studied anthropology under the tutelage of famed social scientist Franz Boas before graduating in 1928. For several years she worked as an apprentice anthropologist, documenting the folklore of African Americans in the South, as well as Caribbean rituals and culture. Hurston had earlier won second prize in a magazine contest sponsored by the African American organization the Urban League (the so-called “Opportunity” contest). In 1935 she became the first African American to publish a detailed account of Southern folk traditions and the Southern black experience in Mules and Men. A decade earlier her first story, “Spunk,” had incorporated Southern folk tales and colloquialisms. “Sweat” followed, incorporating colloquialisms too, but this time in a tale that showed her talent for depicting a slice of domestic life in a black southern town. Both stories signified her entré into the black cultural movement of the 1920s that would become known as the Harlem Renaissance.
Events in History at the Time of the Short Story
Separate but not equal
Although slavery was abolished in the United States in 1865, its legacy lay in the rampant discrimination against African Americans that remained an overt fact of life, especially in the southern states. Jim Crow or racial segregation laws kept African Americans from competing for jobs or mixing with Caucasians in schools and other public places in the South. The Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) validated segregation, sanctioning a “separate-but-equal” doctrine that would for half a century uphold discrimination on all fronts—education, business, housing, and politics. As black leader W. E. B. Du Bois saw it, “never before [had] a great and civilized folk threatened to adopt so cowardly a creed in the treatment of its fellowcitizens. . . . The new American creed says: fear to let black men even try to rise lest they become equals of the white” (Du Bois in Tomkins, p. 314). Decried by social activists, the color bar reflected serious cultural misunderstanding. Misguided “theories of blacks’ innate intellectual inadequacy provided much of the rationale for slavery and for Jim Crow. They also accomplished something equally pernicious . . . they caused many blacks (if only subconsciously) to doubt their own abilities” (Cose in Von Dassanowsky, p. 33).
Eatonville’s answer
Rather than continue to face discrimination by living under Jim Crow laws, some African Americans opted to form their own communities after Reconstruction. In 1886 Eatonville, Florida, became the first of many exclusively African American towns that spanned the South (Hurston’s father, John, became its first mayor and wrote many of the town’s bylaws). At least 60 black communities were formed between 1865 and 1915 in the South and in expanding western frontier territories. These were independent communities with their own schools, hospitals, city governments, and commercial centers. Though many labored outside their townships, traveling to nearby “white” cities to work during the day, they returned to their own community at night, and bought and sold goods in their own stores. “The black-town ideology . . . sought to combine economic self-help and moral uplift with an intense pride in race, while at the same time encouraging an active role in county and state politics” (Crockett, p. xiii). By creating a nurturing, safe environment in which to live and raise a family—as well as forging a firm economic and political base—the exclusively black towns gave African Americans what they were denied in other, white-dominated cities: power, pride, and self-determination. The successful black communities, such as Eatonville, furthermore defied the rationale behind discriminatory laws that insisted on black intellectual inferiority, proving that African Americans were perfectly capable of governing their own lives, shattering the racist myth that had been used to justify first slavery, then Jim Crow.
Besides challenging stereotypes, African American towns such as Eatonville benefited society in another major way: their exclusively black populations, outside what would later be called the “melting pot” of America, allowed them to preserve cultural traditions. Instead of being the “black backside of a white city,” Eatonville was a kind of “Eden” where African Americans could feel completely at ease and cultural life could flourish (Hurston in Hemenway, p. 11). The center of social life in Eatonville was the corner store, and each night it was filled with music and storytelling. Drums, spirituals, and the blues accompanied elaborate “lying sessions” (Hurston in Hemenway, p. 12). Generations-old folk tales about the might of John Henry or B’rer Rabbit enraptured, educated, and entertained listeners. Children such as Hurston, growing up in this kind of nourishing environment, couldn’t help but be charmed by their “folk” and emerge “drenched in light,” with a stronger sense of self and of pride in their heritage (Hemenway, p. 11).
As shown in both “Spunk” and “Sweat,” African American women were not entirely emancipated in the black towns. While the environment offered safety from the sexual aggression associated with both slavery and working in white households, many black women still held a precarious position at home. From slavery on, African American women had been forced into an impossible position. Their situation left them with formidable, often uncontrollable tasks—to keep their families together, to maintain their own sanity despite being treated like chattel, and to support their men who were denied key ingredients of their masculinity: command over their own lives and over what slave owners did with their wives and daughters. Hence, the role of women in relation to men in the black family was a byproduct of slavery and its aftermath. Once slavery ended, jobs that employed black men paid them so little that black women had to work to augment their spouses’ meager income. In fact, it was not uncommon for black women, such as Delia Jones in “Sweat,” to assume the bulk of responsibility for maintaining their households and to overlook many transgressions on the part of their husbands. At least 25 percent of married black women worked outside the home in 1900—eight times that of white women. Economically, as well as politically and socially, black women could not at this point afford to press for gender equality. It had to take a backseat to the more basic struggle for racial equality, or, more exactly, for the survival of all blacks. The women were too busy working to keep their families fed, clothed, and sheltered in the face of the major demon they were facing—racist society. Hurston, whose own mother had put up with a philandering husband, had something to say about the less basic but still pervasive issue of gender inequality, though. Her story “Sweat” portrays a community that does not sanction the husband’s womanizing, and a wife who finally fights back at being exploited by him.
Race relations: North v. South
In 1900 two-thirds of the African American population lived in the rural South, working for scant wages as farm laborers, sharecroppers, tenant farmers, or domestics in the service of whites. Most lived in segregated towns, where they were relegated to the poorer sections and denied the right to vote or hold public office because of tactics such as literacy tests, poll taxes, or physical intimidation (lynchings, etc.). Those who dared to challenge the status quo, by claiming their constitutional rights or simply mixing with whites socially, risked being lynched by local mobs who took the law into their own hands. Lynchings, brutal murders generally committed in a public fashion, often entailed the hanging of the victim and sometimes dismemberment of the victim’s body parts. Mostly a Southern practice committed against blacks, the practice claimed nearly 2,000 lives from 1880 to 1900, and continued somewhat less vigorously thereafter. There were 233 recorded lynchings in the 1920s, the decade in which Hurston’s stories appeared.
By this time, terror, discrimination, and poverty had driven many African Americans north, where fewer Jim Crow laws and greater opportunity existed. Farmworkers in New York State earned double the salary of those in South Carolina ($26.13 compared to $10.79 per month [Tomkins, p. 314]), and factory jobs—created first by rapid industrialization, then by a labor shortage as a result of World War I—could be found. At first, the North seemed like the Promised Land. However, discrimination in both housing and employment existed there, too. Only in the North it was a de facto condition, one that existed in fact or practice rather than one prescribed by law. “Migration to northern cities resulted not in an end to Jim Crow segregation but rather in the establishment of new forms of de facto urban segregation in schools, swimming pools, restaurants, and theatres” (Tomkins, p. 271).
The Great Migration
The North may not have been the Promised Land, but it did offer more hope—and employment—than the South. From 1916 to 1919 about 500,000 African Americans migrated northward; many of the men filled jobs vacated by soldiers and enlisted in the military themselves. Encouraged by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, hundreds of thousands of African American men joined the U. S. Army and shipped out overseas to fight in World War I. More exactly, some 367,000 were called into service in segregated units. Exposure to artistic movements in Paris, London, and Berlin, where jazz was the rage, along with the Great Migration north, catalyzed what would become the New Negro movement. “For the black infantrymen who fought overseas, the war provided an opportunity to experience
“NEGRITUDE”
Rooted in the rejection of western, primarily Anglo Saxon domination of the social, cultural, and political world, Negritude was a movement that began in the Caribbean region in the late nineteenth century. It was essentially “a revalorization of Africa on the part of New World blacks, affirming an overwhelming pride in black heritage and culture, and asserting, in Marcus Garvey’s words, that blacks are ‘descendants of the greatest and proudest race who ever peopled the earth’” (Nesbitt, p. 1). The movement gained strength in Europe—primarily in London and Paris, where African and Caribbean arts and artists flourished. After being brought to the attention of African Americans in World War I, negritude became a predominant theme and catalyst of the Harlem Renaissance.
firsthand the rising importance of African cultures and to learn about the burgeoning popularity of negritude, a philosophy created by African and Caribbean poets that promoted the unity and beauty of peoples of African descent” (Campbell, p. 15). A sort of “spiritual emancipation” occurred when African American servicemen were exposed to this enlightened mentality. Once back in the States, they contributed to the birth of the “New Negro” (Locke in Campbell, p. 15).
The New Negro
The “New Negro” of the 1920s was an African American vehemently opposed to the status quo, politically active, and determined to change racist American policies through education, activism, and art. Unwilling to accept second-class citizenship, the New Negroes demanded that their votes be counted and their criticism be heard (Hemenway, p. 37). Recently created organizations, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (established 1909–10), the Urban League (1910), and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (1914), championed various—and often opposing—causes of New Negroes. But primarily it was the artistic expression of African Americans, as exemplified in Alain Locke’s The New Negro anthology, that gave the movement its direction.
Charles S. Johnson, editor of the Urban League’s Opportunity magazine, believed that he could “redeem, through art, the standing of his people” (Johnson in Lewis, p. 90). His idea and Locke’s anthology of African American prose, published in 1925, became the philosophy and
A WRITER AHEAD OF HER TIME
Zora Neale Hurston was a proud woman with enlightened beliefs for her era. Having grown up in a black town with a strong, nurturing mother, she had a fierce sense of self that she carried with her all her life—even in the face of racism and criticism by African Americans for pandering to whites.
I have no race prejudice of any kind. My kinfolks, and my “skin-folks” are dearly loved. . . . But I see their same virtues and vices everywhere I look. So I give you all my right hand of fellowship and love, and hope for the same from you. In my eyesight, you lose nothing by not looking just like me. I will remember you all in my good thoughts, and I ask you kindly to do the same for me.
(Hurston in Wall, p. 769)
manifesto of the movement, respectively. “The New Negro represented a ‘spiritual coming of age,’ a ‘new soul’ for black America, and its ‘heralding sign’ was the ‘unusual burst of creative expression’ in the works of younger artists like Zora Neale Hurston” (Hemenway, p. 39). Trail-blazers, such as Locke and Johnson, believed that gifted African American artists could establish the cultural parity—or superiority—of African American society and thereby instill racial pride in African Americans and win cultural respect from other groups. This, they thought, would shatter racist stereotypes and lead to equality in other aspects of society.
Not everyone shared the same vision of how the artists should go about this, however. There was some controversy concerning the role that artists should play and the type of art they should produce. Many felt that given the racist climate in the United States, African Americans had a duty to promote only positive images of African American culture (there were nearly 5 million Ku Klux Klan members by 1925, who led a violent backlash against the growing diversity of American society). Fearful that depicting superstitious behavior or colloquial speech would reinforce negative stereotypes, Locke prefaced Hurston’s short story “Spunk” (which he included in The New Negro) with a disclaimer, stating that all African Americans didn’t speak and behave the way Hurston’s characters did. Such disclaimers hint at restrictions, self- or otherwise-imposed, placed on the African American writer’s freedom to create in Hurston’s era. She herself resented such restrictions; in her mind, African American groups should be as free as any other group to create whatever inspired them. As the “race problem” heated up over the following decades, Hurston’s liberated attitude would prove to be not only controversial but also destructive to her career.
The Harlem Renaissance
Despite the emergence of the New Negro, America remained, by and large, segregated and discriminatory. Blacks—especially women—continued to be relegated to menial jobs and while whites could come to black neighborhoods to socialize, blacks were barred entry to white establishments where they worked or entertained. In response, African Americans created their own city of refuge: Harlem. Alain Locke wrote enthusiastically, “In Harlem, Negro life is seizing upon its first chances for group expression and self-determination.… It is—or promises to be—a race capital” (Locke in Baker, p. 74). Indeed, by 1923 approximately 300, 000 African Americans lived in New York City—the vast majority in Harlem (Lewis, p. 26). It became the “Negro capital of the world,” rich in enterprise and excitement—“a buzzing cultural capital of Afro-America” (Lewis, p. 27; Hemenway, p. 30). With the artists and activists of the New Negro movement converging on this burgeoning urban center, it won renown as the birthplace of the Harlem Renaissance—the creative outpouring of African Americans that energized the 1920s. Indeed the artists generated works portraying the black experience in ways that gave rise to growing self-confidence and racial pride.
Jazz resounded in the speakeasies as artists, writers, celebrities, and socialites of all races filled the streets, drawn to the rhythm and celebration of African American culture. Harlem was in vogue and going uptown was the thing to do on a Saturday night during the roaring 1920s. “In Harlem, it was like a foretaste of paradise,” Arna Bontemps recalled. “A blue haze descended at night and with it strings of fairy lights on broad avenues” (Bontemps in Lewis, p. 103). African American artists of all genres thrived, leading to the publication of more of the country’s African American writers from 1919 to 1930 than in any other decade prior to 1960. With Charles Johnson’s support, Harlem produced its own counterparts to America’s so-called “Lost Generation” writers (Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos). The acclaimed African American literati included Jean Toomer, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Sterling A. Brown, Arna Bontemps, Marita Bonner, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Wallace Thurman, and Zora Neale Hurston, who playfully proclaimed herself “Queen of the Niggerati” (Hurston in Hemenway, p. 44).
Supporting the New Negro suddenly became the cause célebre of liberal whites. White patrons, whom Hurston dubbed “Negrotarians” and who included genuine humanitarians as well as less noble curiosity-seekers, began not only frequenting Harlem but funding African American artists, schools, and associations (Lewis, p. 98). Hurston was personally supported by Mrs. Os-good Mason, a wealthy white philanthropist, in a mutual relationship that enabled Hurston to work as an anthropologist but also severely stifled her creative output. Other Harlem Renaissance artists and organizations were funded by white philanthropic entities (i. e., The Harmon and The Stokes Foundations). Mindful of this funding, many later criticized the results, accusing the artists of selling out or pandering to a white audience. The reality is that, regardless of the source of funding, African American artists “emerged for the first time in great numbers . . . driven by intense ethnic pride, political activism.
THE RISE OF CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
Though anthropology became a distinct science in the mid-1800s, it was not until 1899 that Franz Boas founded the first major department for its teaching at Columbia University in New York City. Boas promoted eyewitness studies of individual cultures and encouraged his students, such as Hurston, to go into the field. Under his guidance, Hurston compiled African American folklore of the South and Caribbean, which she published as Mules and Men and incorporated into her fiction. As Hurston’s work helped illustrate, this type of research was groundbreaking in that it operated on the basis of parity between societies rather than on the previously held notion that some cultures were superior to others. Field research demonstrated that “the difference between the mentality of. . . peoples was one of degree and not of kind,” a revolutionary finding that could be used to demolish racist arguments for the subjugation of any peoples (Radin, p. 9).
and a sense of unique cultural lineage which cut across geographic regionalism, inspiring Black artists to produce as they had never before dared” (Campbell, pp. 39, 14).
The Short Story in Focus
The plot
While “Spunk” serves as a homespun folktale, “Sweat” explores deep social and political issues. Both stories incorporate colloquialisms and vivid slice-of-life details of Eatonville in the early twentieth century, both celebrate African American culture, and both deal with the age-old subject of good versus evil.
“Spunk.”
“Lookah theah, folkses!” cried Elijah Mosley, slapping his leg gleefully. “Theah they go, big as life an’ brassy as tacks” (Hurston, “Spunk,” p. 1).
Hanging around the local store with the townsmen, Mosley peers out the window and passes the time prattling on and telling tales like they all do every evening after work. Today, at his instigation, they are talking about Spunk Banks, who has just walked by with Lena Kanty—another man’s wife. Just as they comment on Spunk’s imposing figure and renowned fearlessness, the “other man,” Joe Kanty, walks into the store. Joe orders a soda and the townsmen all hush up. But not for long. Mosley can’t stop himself and asks poor Joe, “How’s yo’ wife?” (“Spunk,” p. 2).
Visibly disturbed and embarrassed, Joe begins to tremble and stare at the floor. The other townsmen chime in, going on about how Joe’s wife passed the store clearly in the company of Spunk Banks. Realizing that the men all know his wife is keeping company with another man, Joe suffers from wounded pride. After some deliberation, he announces his intention to finally go after Spunk and draws a razor out of his pocket. The men all applaud him for “talkin’ like a man” as he leaves the store and wanders into the woods (“Spunk,” p. 2).
In truth, however, no one believes Joe will confront Spunk. First, Spunk’s reputation as a tough guy is well known; secondly, Joe’s “timid ‘bout fightin’,” and finally, they all know that Spunk packs a pistol (“Spunk,” p. 3). The men agree that Lena has no respect for her husband and that Joe will just come back dejected, hanging his head because he has been unable to get back his wife.
The men are wrong, though; Joe never comes back. Instead, a pistol fires in the distance and a short while later Spunk saunters into the store. “Well,” Spunk announces calmly, “Joe come out there wid a meat axe an’ made me kill him” (“Spunk,” p. 4).
The men all run to see Joe’s dead body and then glare at Elijah Mosley for prodding the cuckolded husband to act so suicidally.
After a brief trial in which he claims self-defense, Spunk is acquitted. Life goes on in the town. Spunk and Lena move in together, planning to marry. Spunk continues riding the circle saw in the lumber mill that slices the enormous tree trunks, the most dangerous and rigorous job on the site. He has long done this job, for Spunk is a man who lives his life with no fear. Only now, out of the blue, a black bobcat appears and starts stalking him. One night, the bobcat is howling outside his house and he grabs his gun to shoot it but gets “so nervoused up he couldn’t shoot” (“Spunk,” p. 6).
The men gather at the store, chattering about how Spunk ought to be nervous after what he’s done to Joe. According to them, Spunk thinks the bobcat is Joe, back from Hell for revenge! Laughing, they muse about how Joe was perhaps braver than Spunk and speculate about old Joe’s coming back to get him.
The next evening the men gather again but this time there is no laughter. Spunk has been killed, cut to death falling into the circle saw. It was Joe, said a dying Spunk; he shoved me into it.
Spunk’s body is laid out and the town gathers at his house for the wake. Life goes on, as the women eat and the men drink whiskey and wonder who will be Lena’s next.
“Sweat.”
The story centers on Delia Jones, a hard-working washerwoman who has bought her own home and fed her husband by taking in the laundry of white folks. Once a “right pretty li’l trick,” Delia is now worn and dried out like sugar cane that’s been juiced (Hurston, “Sweat,” p. 43). She is married to a philandering bully of a man who refuses to work.
As much as the townsfolk admire her—“Heah come Delia Jones . . . . Hot or col’, rain or shine, jes’ez reg’lar ez de weeks roll roun”’—they look on her husband, Sykes, with disdain (“Sweat,” p. 42). “He useter be so skeered uh losin’ huh, she could make him do some parts of a husband’s duty” one of the townsmen tells Lindsay (“Sweat,” p. 43). “There oughter be a law about him,” says Lindsay. “He ain’t fit tuh carry guts tuh a bear” (“Sweat,” p. 43).
For the better part of 15 years, Sykes has been carrying on, intimidating his wife with a bull whip and parading his mistresses in plain view. Now he has taken up with a fat woman, Bertha, whom he fattens further with sweets purchased with Delia’s money. He and his sweetheart plan to get rid of Delia and take her house. But Delia, though scared of Sykes, has been pushed far enough.
Sykes gets hold of a rattlesnake, a creature he knows frightens Delia to death, and he lets it loose in the house. Delia returns home, finds the snake in her wash basket, and runs in alarm to the barn before it can bite her. She stays out there well into the night—long enough for Sykes to return home. Drunk, he stumbles through the house and fumbles for the light. The snake wakens and, before Sykes can locate the rattle, bites him. From outside, Delia hears his cries but knows that she cannot do anything to save him (since the nearest big hospital is in Orlando). Instead, she sidles over to the chinaberry tree in her yard, “where she waited in the growing heat while inside she knew the cold river [death] was creeping up and up to extinguish that eye which must know by now that she knew” (“Sweat,” p. 53).
Folk art reclaimed
After Joe Kant confronts Spunk Banks and gets shot, one of the townsmen calls Joe the braver man:
Look it what he done; took a razor an’ went out to fight a man he knowed toted a gun an’ wuz a crack shot, too; ‘nother thing Joe was skeered of Spunk, skeered plumb stiff! But he went jes’ the same. It took him a long time to get his nerve up. Tain’t nothin’ for Spunk to fight when he ain’t skeered of nothin’. Now, Joe’s done come back to have it out wid the man that’s got all he ever had.
(“Spunk,” p. 6)
Through this dialogue Hurston conveys the colloquial speech, the cadence, the “musicality” as Alice Walker terms it, of the way people really talked in 1920s Eatonville. Measured against standard English, the grammar is imperfect but Hurston cared little for such measurement. Her interest was in capturing the reality of the moment, the speech as spoken. For example, in “Sweat” Delia exclaims, “Dat niggah wouldn’t fetch nothin’ heah tuh save his rotten neck, but he kin run thew whut Ah brings quick enough,” meaning he can use up her earnings in short order (“Sweat,” p. 50). Delia’s own words heighten the impact of her lament and add to the realism. By hearing her speech pattern, we get a more vivid picture of the strong, Southern woman Delia Jones is than would otherwise be the case.
Hurston’s stories—and later, her anthropological work—illustrate what Locke liked to call the “voice of the proletariat” (Locke in Hemenway, p. 40). Not only the variety of English spoken, but also, in Hurston’s mind, the folktales, spirituals, the blues, and other oral traditions were triumphant creations of a culture that was forced by circumstance to turn inward. Hurston had her opponents, many of whom took vehement issue with her position. Because these arts were born of repression, such an opponent reviled the practice of them. In 1925, for example, there was a strike at Howard University; its students refused to sing spirituals. Charles Johnson articulated the attitude of these students in The New Negro, saying that folk art could serve for some as too painful a reminder of slavery or as an embarrassment due to the “incorrect” English and uncultured expression it incorporated.
But Hurston saw folklore as a celebration of African American culture and regarded this folklore as “art.” Like Locke, Du Bois, and the proponents of Negritude, she viewed African American folklore as affirming the considerable creative powers of the black community. Against the grain of her time, she sought to reclaim this folklore in the voice of the African American to illustrate the beauty, dignity, and validity of her cultural traditions.
The thoughts conveyed in “Spunk” reveal the deep reflection that could occur during nightly “lying sessions” of a group of worldly wise black men. The seemingly superstitious plot twist of Joe’s coming back as a black bobcat to avenge himself is an allegory of good conquering evil. This is no backward pagan community of which Hurston writes but a thinking, god-fearing people who know right from wrong.
At the same time, the story shows African Americans to be a people with universally shared traits, in keeping with her focus on people in general, rather than light- or dark-skinned peoples. Hurston saw human beings as individuals, not members of racial groups. Her story illustrates the same penchants for gossip, egging someone on, empathy, jealousy, and regret in her small town of Eatonville as one might find in any small town of the day.
Hurston’s reclaiming of the folktale was years ahead of its time and often misunderstood. Others, including James Weldon Johnson (1871—1938), who published a compilation entitled The Book of American Negro Spirituals and Paul Robeson (1898—1976), who became famous for performing traditional African American musicals, also sought to record African American cultural history. Hurston set out on a different mission than these other artists, though; her interest was in capturing the storytelling nuances in ways that showed the African American experience to be as valid and culturally important as any in the world. “There is the sense of a long, ghostly procession behind Hurston: what might have existed if only more of the words and stories had been written down decades earlier, if only Phillis Wheatley (the first black American woman to publish an account of her experiences as a slave) had not tried to write like [the Englishman] Alexander Pope, if only literate slaves and their generations of children had not felt pressed to prove their claim to the sworn civilities” (Pier-pont, pp. 152–53).
Sources and literary context
In setting “Spunk” in a carefully evoked southern context of the early 1900s, Hurston portrays a people through their own vernacular, documenting more than a folk story, recording history. Growing up in Eatonville, the first incorporated completely African American town, Hurston became immersed in the rich storytelling tradition of her people. The store in “Spunk” is clearly Joe Clarke’s store of Eatonville, and the banter and superstitious beliefs are clearly those she heard so often as a child. Both Hurston and her groundbreaking story were adopted by leaders of the Harlem Renaissance, including Alain Locke and Charles S. Johnson, who recognized it and her as a “voice of the proletariat.” Convinced that “writers like Zora Neale Hurston would help to prove the cultural parity of the races,” they entered the story in the Urban League’s Opportunity magazine contest and it won second prize (Johnson in Hemenway, p. 9).
Apart from reflecting a new emphasis on African American folklore as a genuine art form, “Spunk” represents a larger shift to the realist style in American literature of the 1920s. “Sweat” is even more fully representative of this style. Also rooted in her early childhood experience, “Sweat” foreshadowed the next major genre of African American writing: the protest novel. Though the story tackles gender, not racial politics, and Hurston was not seen as a political writer, contemporary re-evaluation of her writing insists that “Sweat” is, in fact, protest literature” (Glassman, p. 33).
Reception
“Spunk” received wide praise when published. Alain Locke selected it for inclusion in his definitive anthology, The New Negro, thereby establishing Hurston as a primary voice of the Harlem Renaissance. In the 1950s and 1960s African American writers and critics, including Sterling Brown and Richard Wright, accused Hurston of ignoring racial oppression and exploitation in the South and of pandering to racist stereotypes of blacks. In the decades of the civil rights movement Hurston’s work, including “Spunk,” did not get published because it did not deal with the race problem. Unable to get publishing contracts, she took menial jobs and died anonymously in a welfare-sponsored retirement home in Florida. Despite his criticism of her work, Brown agreed that “Spunk” “showed a command of folklore and idiom excelled by no earlier Negro novelist” (Brown in Jones, p. 211). But not until a decade after her death in 1960 did Hurston’s story and work really receive their due. Robert Hemenway, who wrote her definitive biography in 1977, credited Hurston with having “liberated rural black folk from the prison of racial stereotypes and granted them dignity as cultural creators” (Hemenway in Jones, p. 222).
Alice Walker, who “discovered” Hurston in the 1970s and erected her tombstone posthumously, concludes with the quality she feels is most characteristic of Zora’s work: racial health—a sense of black people as complete, complex, undiminished human beings, a sense that is lacking in so much black writing and literature” (Walker in Hemenway, p. xii). “Sweat” was praised for its complexity and later for its power in asserting female rights. David Headon writes of the story’s political as well as literary impact:
In “Sweat” Zora Neale Hurston forcefully establishes an integral part of the political agenda of black literature of this century. She places at the foreground feminist questions concerning the exploitation, intimidation, and oppression inherent in so many relationships. It is not the civil rights of Du Bois and Crisis, but it is civil rights nonetheless.
(Headon in Glassman, pp. 32—33)
—Diane Renée
For More Information
Baker, Houston A., Jr. Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
Crockett, Norman L. The Black Towns. Lawrence, Kans.: The Regents Press of Kansas, 1979.
Campbell, Mary Schmidt, ed. Harlem Renaissance: Art of Black America. Harlem: Harry Abrams, 1987.
Glassman, Steve, and Katherine Lee Siedel, eds. Zora in Florida. Orlando: University of Central Florida Press, 1991.
Hemenway, Robert E. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1977.
Hurston, Zora Neale. “Spunk.” In Spunk: The Selected Short Stories of Zora Neale Hurston. New York: Marlowe, 1985.
_____. “Sweat.” In Spunk: The Selected Short Stories of Zora Neale Hurston. New York: Marlowe, 1985.
Jones, Daniel, ed. Contemporary Authors New Revision Series. Vol. 61. Detroit: Gale, 1998.
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