elicit just such a response, he pretends to resist, and telling her, ‘‘Move yo’ hand. Woman ain't got no business in man's clothes nohow.’’ Joe really wants her to search his pockets, not only so she will find the gifts he has bought for her, but also because it gives her an excuse to grope him and possibly tear his clothes. The scene combines a dynamic of economic exchange with a strongly sexual connotation. This is another instance of foreshadowing—Slemmons also lures her into having sexual contact with the promise of gifts. As the couple scuffles, Joe tells Missie May that, should she tear his clothes, ‘‘you de one dat pushes de needles round heah,’’ reminding her that it is her job as his wife to mend his clothes. In the context of marriage, sexual innuendo easily turns into teasing about household chores.

Thus, the mock battle and flirtatious banter of the opening scene not only provide evidence of Missie May and Joe's domestic happiness, they also subtly demonstrate the asymmetry of their economic power vis-á-vis their gender roles. In some sense, the gender roles in a traditional marriage of the 1930s—a marriage where the man has a job and the woman keeps house—echo the unseemly implications of throwing money at a woman. Marriage is a kind of exchange. A woman, with no economic power of her own, takes a man's money and gives him something in return—not only sex, as with prostitution, but also household labor, including childbearing and rearing. Sex and domestic work are what a man gets in exchange for passing his wages along to his wife. The couple's ritual plays on and revels in the rules of this arrangement.

From a contemporary perspective, Joe's commands to mend his clothes and cook for him may seem limiting or even demeaning, but Hurston portrays Missie May's self-respect as dependent on this very role. After the play fight, she has Joe's bath water ready, and when Joe tells her to have dinner on the table when he gets out of the tub, she reprimands him. ‘‘Don't you mess wid mah business, man .. . Ah'm a real wife, not no dress and breath. Ah might not look lak one,’’ she adds, referring perhaps to her part in their playful romp, ‘‘but if you burn me, you won't git a thing but wife ashes.’’ Though it comes in the form of waiting on her husband, Missie May asserts that the housework is her realm of control. Historians have noted that during the Depression, when the story takes place, most married couples tried to maintain their traditional gender roles, meaning that the husband worked and the wife kept house, even though men's status as family providers was threatened by the weak economy and high unemployment. Because work was scarce, women were less likely to work outside of the home. However, their role in maintaining the household became more important when money was scarce. The family budget depended on them to make up the difference for what their men might not be able to earn by cutting corners and making do, even though they had very little economic power of their own. This historical perspective may make it easier to understand why Missie May takes so much pride in her identity as a ‘‘real wife,’’ as defined through her mastery of housework.

Missie May doubtlessly loves Joe for his personal qualities, but, invested as the couple is in traditional gender roles, his value to her is tied to his earning power, as revealed by their playful ritual. Similarly, for Joe, part of Missie May's value to him can be attributed to her cooking and cleaning, and, as well, to her sexual attractiveness. He takes pleasure in showing her off to Slemmons, since in addition to flaunting his gold, Slemmons has cited his many women as evidence of his status. When Joe tells Missie May about having met Slemmons, he concludes that his wealth makes Slemmons attractive. He's got a ‘‘mouth full of gold teethes’’ and a fat belly that ‘‘make ‘m look lak a rich white man.’’ Missie May retorts that he is ugly, ‘‘got a puzzlegut on ‘im and he so chuckle-headed, he got a pone behind his neck,’’ going on to compliment Joe's physical appearance. But after she meets Slemmons herself, she begins to see things Joe's way, admitting, ‘‘He'll do in case of a rush. But he sho’ is got a heap uh gold on ‘im.… It lookted good on him sho’ nuff.’’ While women are attractive because of their physical beauty and caring attributes, men are attractive because of their economic power. Ironically, only when a man is already rich can he adorn himself with jewelry and accept gifts from the opposite sex without compromising his masculinity.

Missie May goes on to reassure Joe that the gold would ‘‘look a whole heap better on you,’’ and begins to fantasize about somehow getting hold of such gold jewelry for him. Joe readily acknowledges that a ‘‘po man lak me’’ will never have access to such riches. This is because, lacking Slemmons's economic power and charisma, he will never convince rich white women to shower him with gifts, and because, rather than accumulating money, he gives it to his wife to run the household. Missie May doesn't admit to Joe that she wants to take matters into her own hands, speculating only that maybe someday they will find some gold along the road. In her wifely role, this is the only sufficiently passive way she can imagine to get hold of some gold with which to adorn her husband.

When Slemmons offers Missie May gold in exchange for sex, she steps outside of her cherished role as a ‘‘real wife,’’ not only in that she is unfaithful to her husband but in that she attempts to take over Joe's own cherished role as the family breadwinner. Slemmons is disruptive to the Banks's marriage not so much because he represents a competitive love interest or a real sexual threat, but because he encourages Missie May to attempt to provide economically for Joe by ‘‘earning’’ gold from him. When this is revealed, Missie May and Joe's traditional gender roles are upset, and the domestic ritual with which they reinforced them can no longer be celebrated.

Though the story promotes openness and forgiveness, it envisions this only by means of a return to the asymmetrical economic arrangement that is arguably what led to the problem in the first place: that Missie May is economically powerless without a man. The morning after her betrayal, she is somewhat comforted when Joe asks her to make him breakfast and, later, when he succumbs to sleeping with her. But harmony is fully restored in the house only when she gives Joe a son—the ultimate symbol of her wifely value. At this point, Joe, once again secure in his status as husband, takes the trinket he wrested from Slemmons wrist and buys a little gift, offering it, with his wages, as a sign of his true love.

Source: Sarah Madsen Hardy, in an essay for Short Stories for Students, Gale Group, 2000. Hardy has a doctorate in English literature and is a freelance writer and editor.

The history of a people, recorded through folklore, reveals unique, significant, complex, and even virtuous behavior patterns of a culture. This kind of history is one of the contributions of Zora Neale Hurston anthropologist and folklorist, and includes literature reflecting the pastoral and the picaresque. It also includes literature which maintains readability, relevance, and its rightful position among belles lettres. Characteristic of such history is Zora Neale Hurston's ‘‘The Gilded Six-Bits.’’

The term pastoral embodies many characteristics, the first of which is a ‘‘contrast between two worlds—one identified with rural peace and simplicity—the other with power and sophistication.’’ This contrast pervades the story. While details of the story will be used later to indicate other pastoral qualities, an initial discussion of this characteristic is appropriate here for its overshadowing effect.

According to Robert E. Hemenway, ‘‘The Gilded Six-Bits’’ is an ‘‘ironic account of infidelity and its human effects.’’ A young Southern, unsuspecting wife, anxious to earn a ‘‘gold coin,’’ is seduced by an aggressive, pretentious, smooth-talking, city entrepreneur from Chicago who flaunts his superficial possessions and his dalliance with women. Missie May, the wife and central figure in the work, represents the simple and peaceful.

Hurston's three principal characters, Missie May, Otis D. Slemmons, and Joe, approach life variously. Joe, the husband of Missie May, represents the simple and the peaceful. Otis D. Slemmons, the city entrepreneur, symbolizes the powerful and sophisticated. While Joe is seemingly momentarily concerned with the interest that Missie May seems to have in Slemmons, and while Missie May is hopeful that she and Joe ‘‘will find’’ some gold, Missie May engages in an affair with Slemmons and is discovered by her husband in the process. The fleeting appeal of the city life is in contrast to the already pleasant security of rural life. Missie May hopefully tells Joe, ‘‘Us might find some gold long de road some time. Us could.’’

The simple life is exalted by Hurston when she gives significance not to the gilded coins but to the simple, natural entities of the earth. As Missie May weeps in Joe's arms over her act of infidelity and her regrets about the act, Hurston writes:

The sun, the hero of everyday, the impersonal old man that beams as brightly on death as on birth, came up every morning and raced across the blue dome and dipped into the sea of fire every evening. Water ran down the hills and birds nested. Nature's way of soothing the soul is symbolized and exalted in the sun. Nature tempers disappointments and pain.

The sophisticated city life is depicted with a kind of deceptiveness and shallowness in the conversation between Joe and the store clerk in the candy store in Orlando. When Joe throws the gilded half dollar on the counter, the clerk asks him where he got it, and Joe replies:

Offen a stray nigger dat come through Eatonville. He had it on his watch chain for a charm—goin’ round making out iss gold money. Ha ha! He had a quarter on his tie pin and it wuz all golded up too. Tryin’ to fool people. Makin’ out he so rich and everything. Ha! Ha! Trying to tole off folkses wives from home.

The gilded power and sophistication are elusive; the serenity and security of the simple life are desirable and attainable. The simple life is meaningful to the inhabitant, not to the observer, for as the clerk erroneously sums up Joe's life by saying that ‘‘[n]othin worries 'em,’’ he fails to locate the true pulse of simplicity, serenity, and peace of mind inherent in the rural life of Joe and Missie May. The real pulse of simplicity is feeling—experience—sublimity.

A second characteristic of the pastoral is the presentation of situations of choice. From the time that Missie May meets the city businessman until she succumbs to his advances, she torments herself with thoughts of what life would be like with the glitter and prestige of owning gold coins. Because the reader is allowed to see immediately the temporary shallowness of the gold coins and the boastful talk, ‘‘the simple world is more intrinsically desirable.’’ Missie May's need and desire to return to the simple life afforded by her husband, Joe, is found in the narrator's explanation of Missie May's behavior after her husband told her, ‘‘Missie May, you cry too much. Don't look back lak Lot's wife and turn to salt.’’ The narrator continues, ‘‘Missie knew why she didn't leave Joe. She couldn't. She loved him too much, but she could not understand why Joe didn't leave her.’’

A third characteristic of the pastoral is the implication that the city (world) has ‘‘illusory, shallow rewards.’’ Slemmons, symbolizing the city with its illusory rewards, is realistically depicted when the narrator describes the response of Missie May when she finds the piece of money under her pillow. The narrator explains:

Alone to herself, she looked at the thing with loathing, but look she must: She took it into her hands with trembling and saw first thing that it was no gold piece. It was a gilded half dollar. Then she knew why Slemmons had forbidden anyone to touch his gold. He trusted village eyes at a distance not to recognize his stick-pin as a gilded quarter, and his watch charm as a four-bit piece.

Next, a manifestation of the pastoral in a literary work is in a peasant's need to be protected from corruption and temptation. Although Missie May is quickly aware of the likelihood of much exaggeration in the statements made by Slemmons, she is naïve and believing when alone with him. At one point, she tells Joe that ‘‘Dat stray nigger jes tell y'all anything and y'all b'lieve it;’’ yet, at another point, after she tells Joe, ‘‘Oh Joe, honey, he said he wuz gointer give me dat gold money and he jus’ kept on after me.’’ Missie May is aware, but she needs the protection of her husband.

The last pastoral quality in Hurston's short story is the revelation of ‘‘fundamental values.’’ This story, while embodying many ideas, embodies best perhaps the idea that infidelity can be a cheap affair which tarnishes a marriage with the same deceptive shallowness found in the tarnish of Otis D. Slemmons's coin.

One of the pedagogical functions of folklore is to remind members of society of wise codes of conduct; Hurston's story serves this function. The deterioration of Missie May, caused primarily by worry and respect, evidences the need for society to adopt wise, accountable codes of behavior.

While extended definitions of the picaresque as a literary form abound, four characteristics of the picaresque lend themselves to Hurston's ‘‘The Gilded Six-Bits.’’

Initially, ‘‘picaresque,’’ according to Robert Bone, ‘‘consists of a journey, which is not so much a spatial geographical excursion as a pilgrimage towards possibility, toward experience, toward spiritual freedom.’’ Careful analysis of ‘‘The Gilded Six-Bits’’ reveals two of the characters, Missie May and Slemmons, on a ‘‘pilgrimage toward experience.’’ For Missie May, the journey begins with the onset of supposing what life would be like for her and her husband if they owned the kind of ‘‘gold’’ that the city man flaunted; the journey ends with the realization that fleeting, gilded tokens are cheap, useless, and even damaging when one's life is traded for illusion. Darwin Turner surely had ‘‘The Gilded Six-Bits’’ in mind when he said that ‘‘most of Zora Neale Hurston's stories … seem to be quiet quests for self-realization.’’ For Missie May learns to differentiate between the valued and the valueless. This, for Missie May, is a maturation process, a journey. For Slemmons, the journey begins with his stop in Eatonville, Florida, for the purpose of getting as much from the residents of this city as they will allow and by any means; the journey ends as ‘‘Slemmons was knocked a somersault into the kitchen and fled through the open door.’’ This, for Slemmons, is a dying process, for the type of man symbolized by Slemmons is one who is ultimately defeated. The manipulative schemes, the flamboyant attire and accessories, bespeak an experience leading to defeat.

The second picaresque quality is the movement of the ‘‘picaresque hero from a static, hierarchical traditional society to a series of adventures on an open road.’’ While Slemmons should not be labeled a hero, he can be seen as one who moves from traditional society to adventure. After all, when he settles in Eatonville, he is already being called ‘‘Mr. Otis D. Slemmons of spots and places—Memphis, Chicago, Jacksonville, Philadelphia and so on.’’ The mobility of Slemmons indicates a series of adventures. Slemmons's haste in opening the ice cream parlor speaks of the ease with which he quickly settles in one place after the other. The adventuresome spirit is in direct contrast with Joe's life, since for Joe ‘‘[t]hat was the best part of life—going home to Missie May.’’

Another characteristic of the picaresque in literature is given by Robert Bone when he says:

This bastard is cut off from the past and from tradition; there is no ancestral fortune to sustain him; he is entirely on his own, and must survive as best he can.

Hurston brings Otis D. Slemmons into the story by showing him as a stranger to this quiet, rural town. The introduction of Slemmons is at once a contrast to the tone and quality of life into which Joe and Missie May have securely and so happily nestled.

Hurston does not give the readers any indication that this city-slicker is from the background of the Harlem Renaissance; she does, however, in her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, say that people are products of their cultures. Since Eatonville, Florida, is clearly depicted as a specific cultural location by carefully recorded dialect, behavior, and descriptions, Otis D. Slemmons is cutoff from this tradition by the author's description of his previous residences and his behavior. Missie May even calls Slemmons ‘‘[d]at stray nigger’’ when she is warning Joe that this newcomer is bragging about many of his so-called dalliances with women and that this bragging may not contain all truth. The only words Hurston gives to Slemmons are those which are uttered through Joe as he tells what Slemmons asked and the pleas that Slemmons made for his life when he pleaded, ‘‘Please, suh, don't kill me. Sixty-two dollars at de sto’. Gold money.’’ Joe says, ‘‘He asted me, ‘Who is dat broad wid de forty shake?’’’

Finally, the ‘‘picaresque journey is at the bottom a quest for experience.’’ The experience is for all of Hurston's characters, but perhaps most meaningful for Missie May. The story is, at its core, one of a woman saved from destruction and tarnish with the birth of a son who looks like her husband, Joe, and by the forgiving heart of this husband.

‘‘The Gilded Six-Bits’’ holds its rightful place among belle lettres in its realistic portrayal of life in the South. In his biography of Hurston, Hemenway says,

Zora Hurston had known firsthand a culturally different esthetic tradition. While she and her classmates revered Beethoven, she also remembered the box playing of Eatonville's Bubber Mimms. She enjoyed Keats, but recognized the poetry in her father's sermons; she read Plato but told stories of Joe Clark's wisdom.… Her racially different folk culture was tolerated … as a primitive mode of apprehending experience; yet she knew that … folk traditions enabled black people to survive with strength and dignity.

‘‘Folklore,’’ Hemenway adds, ‘‘consists of unwritten traditions which cause people to perform in familiar ways,’’ thereby creating reality.

Codes for conduct are evident in the consequences experienced by Missie May and Joe. Hurston's genius in presenting this is obvious. Her style unveils the short story within an even broader context than the literary qualities, pastoral and picaresque.

William Dean Howells praises the short story writer's use of ‘‘native sources’’ and ‘‘local color flavor of diction.’’ On these two elements of the short story, he writes,

I should, upon the whole, be disposed to rank American short stories only below those of such Russian writers as I have read, and I should praise rather than blame their free use of our different parlances, or ‘‘dialects,’’ as people call them. I like this because I hope that our inherited English may be constantly freshened and revived from that native source which our literary decentralization will help to keep open, and I will own that as I turn over novels coming from Philadelphia, from New Mexico from Boston, from Tennessee, from rural New England, from New York, every local color flavor or diction gives me courage and pleasure.

Hurston's mastery of the short story is evident. Her attention to the preservation of a culture is a universal technique which has been incorporated in numerous works.

Zora Neal Hurston's fiction provides a history of a people. It inculcates major elements in American fiction, and it does what one literary critic, William Dean Howells, suggests an American short story should do—revive a local dialect. Hurston's ‘‘The Gilded Six-Bits’’ is not only folklore; it is also great literature—the story of any people who would be momentarily disoriented by the glare and fleeting appeal of a false Utopia.

Zora Neale Hurston is unabashedly a writer of fine literature. A critical analysis of ‘‘The Gilded Six-Bits’’ affirms the genius of this writer in her skillful treatment of not only the pastoral and the picaresque but also fiction, narration, and folklore. Fiction is the shaping of a civilization through a certain construction of language. Hurston makes the rural South live through Missie May's enjoyment of it until new ideas and modes of behavior are introduced, altering the value system of the town and the people. The South represents that time and place in the lives of people, bound by cultural conditions. This time and this place are perfect complements for Joe and Missie May. People are their culture. A digression from the culture of a people is a digression from the reality of the people. Hurston's symbolic reference to illusion versus reality through the feigned significance of the gold coin is a direct reference to illusion versus reality in the altered behavior of people who have digressed from the moral tenor of their culture as a result of the temptations of the turpitude of other cultures.

The use of narration by Hurston is unsurpassed. Hurston's fiction is punctuated with philosophical truths throughout. Choices for analysis, treatment, and application are numerous. Through Missie May's character the need for attention to the spirit of the person and to the culture is evident. Through Joe's character the need for attention to the frailties of human nature, encouraged by strong forces of the modern world, is made clear. Through Otis's character the ever-present appeal of illusory qualities of a strange culture draws attention to the need to understand a given culture, not to embellish it. Through the use of her hometown, Eatonville, Florida, Hurston's narration projects unparalleled significance and strength, for she captures the nuances, scenery, language, tone, and a Southern code of behavior in what has been called her finest short story, ‘‘The Gilded Six-Bits.’’

Finally, Hurston's place in literature as a folklorist remains among the masters of creativity. Any variation on the theme of rural Southern life may be traced to Zora Neale Hurston's perception of it. Her story intensifies the history and the truth of Eatonville, Florida, a truth so complex that it could be of any time and any place. The author's mastery of myth, tale, and legend transcends Eatonville; it goes around the world without leaving the story's setting, for out of that setting is born an understanding of human nature and its culture.

Source: Evora Jones, ‘‘The Pastoral and the Picaresque in Zora Neale Hurston's ‘The Gilded Six-Bits,’’’ in The CLA Journal, Vol. XXXV, No. 3, March, 1992, pp. 316-24.

Hurston's ‘‘The Gilded Six-Bits’’ (1933) takes us out of the conventional restrictions observed in Dunbar. This transformation is partly due to the shift in perspective: we are inside rather than outside the black community and there is not the same double-conscious concern with an exclusive white audience. Because there are not the same motives of the anti-lynching story or of the tradition of protest literature in general, Hurston can be concerned with the relationship between a man and woman in ‘‘a Negro settlement.’’ She can expand the range beyond ‘‘humor and pathos’’ to a crisis-of-love story; there can be development and recognition, dilemma and resolution, delineated personality.

Critic George Kent has called this a ‘‘simple story.’’ In an interview with Bell he says ‘‘that one [the story] suggests that really simple people could suddenly resolve all problems by suddenly forgiving each other very easily (…) I (…) recall that incident being very tediously resolved. I don't recall a really imposing short story by her (…).’’

Though the story is about ‘‘simple people’’ whose relationship seems to be apparently simply resolved, in view of the problems manifest in Dunbar, it might be reviewed in a more complex light. Its shift in perspective (what Ellison would term ‘‘restoring of perspective’’), its lack of preoccupation with audience, its sense that Southern rural black speech as dialect may contain any emotion in literature adds degrees of complexity not easily acknowledged or perceived in a cursory reading. Although there certainly is humor in places (as in all her work), it is the spontaneous good humor of fully realized characters in interaction and not that of dimensional minstrel humor. We laugh along with the characters in their happy moments; we go down into the depths with them during the ‘‘crisis of love’’; we come out with them. We are brought beyond humor and pathos.

The focus is on relationships, interpersonal conflict and conflict of values. There are some elements of sophistication in the story (particularly in its many reversals) but the problem with Hurston (and this perhaps also accounts for Kent's reaction) is how does one write of ordinary people without making the story seem trivial, without making the writer's concerns seem likewise? The subject of Dunbar's story is perhaps a more ‘‘significant event’’ in socio-historical reality but, nevertheless, his Afro-American characters remain in the background in both their physical presence and psychological reality. On the other hand, Hurston's characters are pulled to the foreground in both these respects. Like most literary transitions, this does not appear to be of great note these days with contemporary Afro-American writers who automatically do the same, notwithstanding certain persistent (or recalcitrant) white critics who may still be asking the former whether they write about ‘‘black people or human beings?’’ and consider the Afro-American character' s perspective ‘‘the broader perspective’’ and the significant one. However, it was an important transition and should be seen as an initial link between a literary technique (viewpoint) and its broader humanistic implications in the depiction of black humanity in literature.

We first meet Missie May and Joe in a ritual scene that occurs every Saturday morning when he throws nine silver dollars in the door ‘‘for her to pick up and pile beside her plate at dinner.’’ He also brings her candy kisses. The beginning is full of happiness, ‘‘joyful mischief,’’ ‘‘mock anger’’ and the ‘‘play fight.’’

Otis Slemmons, introduced shortly after this playful scene, becomes the center of a conflict of values and the latter, as the subject of much of Hurston's fiction, should be considered a worthy subject or what E. M. Forster would call a ‘‘noble’’ one. Nevertheless, Otis is from Chicago and ‘‘spots and places.’’ In the initial dialogue between husband and wife we see the things that interest the couple about him: he has been places, he has gold teeth, he wears ‘‘up to date’’ clothes, his ‘‘puzzlegutted’’ build makes him ‘‘look like a rich white man,’’ he has the attention of many women (including white ones up North) and he has gold pieces. These are the things that Joe notices and talks about. Initially, May's concerns seem not to be material but her love for Joe is uppermost; she loves him as he is. Joe, however, feels he ‘‘can't hold no light to Otis D. Slemmons’’ because he ‘‘ain't never been nowhere’’ and ‘‘ain't got nothing but you.’’

At first, May is not taken in by Otis or what he represents. Then there is a reversal. The next time we hear the couple talking together (after they have returned from seeing Otis at the local ice-cream parlor), Joe is expressing her earlier values and she is expressing his. We see then all the things she wants for him ‘‘because she loves him.’’ Nevertheless, she wants them:

Joe laughed and hugged her, ‘Don't be so wishful ‘bout me. Ah'm satified de way Ah is. So long Ah be yo’ husband, Ah don't keer ‘bout nothin’ else’.

However, to get the gilded six-bits which the gold coins turn out to be, May betrays Joe with Otis. Joe comes home early from work and finds them together. There is a fine handling of emotional reactions here. He sees them and ‘‘open his mouth and laughs.’’ Because this is not the expected response—the reaction and emotion seem contradictory—it deepens our sense of the emotion as ‘‘a howling wind [which] raced through his heart’’ and he ‘‘kept on feeling so much.’’ He fights Slemmons, drives him away and the crisis of love begins. There is no more laughter or banter.

Kent calls the resolution easy. I think that it appears easy because Hurston handles all the emotional reversals and complications in narrative summary rather than in active dramatic scenes. One reads them quickly and so it seems that they are done quickly but these are real, subtle and difficult changes. Joe makes love to May then leaves a piece of Slemmons's ‘‘gold’’ with the bit of chain attached under her pillow. She then discovers that ‘‘it was a gilded half dollar.’’ After the love making she thinks that ‘‘they were man and wife again. Then another thought came clawing at her. He had come home to buy from her as if she were any woman in the long house. Fifty cents for her love.’’ She dresses and leaves the house, but she encounters her husband's mother and, so as not to ‘‘admit defeat to that woman,’’ she returns home. Joe discovers she is pregnant, and when she has the child, he knows it is his (his mother even confirms that it looks like him so it must be his!) and they reconcile.

The story is perhaps resolved too simply at this point, the ‘‘baby chile’’ being a kind of deus ex machina. Nevertheless, Hurston's handling of their complications and reversals of emotion up to now has been superb and certainly adds more shadings of emotion than revealed in earlier dialect stories. Dialect itself is more complex and shows more literary sophistication. The links with the interior of the characters, the processes of emotional transformation, as well as the foreground presentation make it no ‘‘simple story’’ though it deals with ‘‘ordinary folks,’’ yet it poses a challenge because it contains everything that was considered not the stuff of important fiction: it is regional, it focuses on the relationship between a black man and a black woman, and it does not make interracial conflict its reason for being.

The problem of the ‘‘stuff of important fiction’’ of course transcends racial lines. A contemporary American white writer, Mary Gordon, has written an article entitled ''The Parable of the Cave or In Praise of Water Colors’’ in which she speaks of Theodore Roethke saying that woman poets were ‘‘stamping a tiny foot against God’’ and that she has been told by male (but not female) critics that her work is ‘‘exquisite,’’ ‘‘like a water color’’: ‘‘Water colors are cheap and plentiful; oils are costly; their base must be bought. And the idea is that oil paintings will endure.’’

Because Gordon's remarks are important in cross-sexual and cross-cultural criticism, I will quote her in full:

There are people in the world who derive no small pleasure from the game of ‘‘major’’ and ‘‘minor.’’ They think that no major work can be painted in water colors. They think, too, that Hemingway writing about boys in the woods is major; Mansfield writing about girls in the house is minor. Exquisite, they will hasten to insist, but minor. These people join up with other bad specters and I have to work to banish them. Let us pretend these specters are two men, two famous poets, saying,‘‘your experience is an embarrassment; your experience is insignificant.’’

I wanted to be a good girl, so I tried to find out whose experience was not embarrassing. The prototype for a writer who was not embarrassing was Henry James. ‘‘And you see,’’ the two specters said, proffering hope, ‘‘he wrote about social relationships but his distance gave them grandeur.’’

Distance, then, was what I was to strive for. Distance from the body, from the heart, but most of all, distance from the self as writer (…)

If Henry James had the refined experience, Conrad had the significant one. The important moral issues were his: men pitted against nature in moments of extremity. There are no important women in Conrad's novels, except for Victory, which, the critics tell us, is a romance and an exception. Despite the example of Conrad, it was all right for the young men I knew, according to my specters, to write about the hymens they had broken, the diner waitresses they had seduced. Those experiences were significant. But we were not to write about our broken hearts, about the married men we loved disastrously, about our mothers or our children. Men could write about their fears of dying by exposure in the forest; we could not write about our fears of being suffocated in the kitchen. Our desire to write about these experiences only revealed our shallowness; it was suggested we would, in time, get over it. And write about what? Perhaps we would stop writing.

‘‘And so,’’ the specters whispered to me, ‘‘if you want to write well, if you want us to take you seriously, you must be distant, you must be extreme.’’

I suppose the specters were not entirely wrong. Some of the literature that has been written since the inception of the women's movement is lacking in style and moral proportion. But so is the work of Mailer, Miller, Burroughs, Ginsberg. Their lack of style and proportion may be called offensive, but not embarrassing. They may be referred to as off the mark, but they will not be called trivial.

And above all I did not wish to be trivial; I did not wish to be embarrassing.

Most female writers (black and white) have experienced this from male critics. Black writers (male and female) have experienced it from (white) male critics and, ironically, given Gordon's remarks, from white female critics. The problem of writers dominated by literary standards of ‘‘significant events’’ (national, sexual, racial) is not only finding one's voice but of trusting it when one does find it; then finding the voice or voices that one most values and avoiding destruction of the creative spirit and discovering how one can most (as Kent would term it) ‘‘assert one's existence’’ and the existences of all the characters.

Kent himself feels that black women writers fail to explore real depth: ‘‘Often, the problem is that you don't get a deep enough definition of the things that the woman encounters which are her responses to power (…) I would say that black women writers that I've read don't seem to get much into subtle possibilities (…) I don't see much possibility and I'm not sure that there is always depth (…).’’ Yet, unlike most critics, he acknowledges that ‘‘it might be that male thing you were talking about.’’

This could be the ‘‘elliptical details’’ in the work for which a male critic would need more ‘‘analytical commentary.’’

But regardless of the ‘‘subtle possibilities’’ (of society, history, gender?) that critics confuse with aesthetics, in the case of Hurston, dialect, as regional vernacular, can and does contain subject, experience, emotion and revelation. Two reasons for this new attitude and sense of possibility in character and dialect might be that she was born in the first incorporated all-black town of Eatonville, Florida, and that she was a folklorist possessing an exact as well as a creative ear. In her Foreword to Their Eyes Were Watching God, Williams speaks of her ‘‘command’’:

She had at her command a large store of stories, songs, incidents, idiomatic phrases, and metaphors; her ear for speech rhythms must have been remarkable. Most importantly, she had the literary intelligence and developed the literary skill to convey the power and beauty of this heard speech and lived experience on the printed page.

Hurston's evocations of the lifestyles of rural Blacks have not been equaled but to stress the ruralness of Hurston's settings or to characterize her diction solely in terms of exotic ‘‘dialect’’ spellings is to miss her deftness with language. In the speech of her characters, black voices—whether rural or urban, northern or southern—come alive. Her fidelity to diction, metaphor and syntax—whether in direct quotations or in paraphrases of characters’ thoughts—rings, even across forty years, with an arching familiarity that is a testament to Hurston's skill and to the durability of black speech.

In ‘‘The Gilded Six-Bits’’ one sees the folklorist in the metaphors, images and descriptions in the dialogue: ‘‘He ain't puzzlegutted, honey’’; "God took pattern after a pine tree and built you noble’’; ‘‘You can make ‘miration at it, but don't tetch it’’; ‘‘Ah reckon dey done made him vast-rich.’’ Certainly there is a difference between the metaphors used here and those in Melville's descriptive evaluation of Jube or Creelman's of Washington because we have individuality, range and elegance.

Oral tradition enters, complements and complicates character in the use ‘‘storytelling’’ or reported scenes to reinforce the dramatic ones. When May and Joe go to the ice-cream parlor and see Otis, they return and Joe retells the encounter:

On the way home that night Joe was exultant. ‘‘Didn't Ah say ole Otis was swell? Cain't he talk Chicago talk? Wuzn't dat funny whut he said when great big fat ole da Armstrong come in? He asted me,‘‘Who is dat broad wid de forte shake?’’ Dat's a new word. Us always thought forty was a set of figgers but he showed us where it means a whole heap of things. Sometimes he don't say forty, he jes’ say thirty-eight and two, and dat mean de same thing. Know whut be told me when Ah wuz payin’ for our ice cream? He say, ‘‘Ah have to hand it to you, Joe. Dat wife, of yours is jes’ thirty-eight and two. Yessuh, she's forty!’’ Ain't he killin’?

This description of the scene is important. Hurston does not take us to the ice-cream parlor directly and dramatically; she skips the scene and lets Joe's storytelling serve as a flashback and the story advances through the character's reactions to the moment. Therefore, the psychology of relationships is explored: there are complicating reversals and confusions of value, then the renewed and stronger affection.

Besides the use of storytelling dialogue, Hurston also moves ‘‘folk expressions’’ into the narrative while in most early fiction, and certainly the turn-of-the-century fiction of both Dunbar and Charles Waddell Chesnutt, it was confined to dialogue: ‘‘way after while,’’ ‘‘make his market,’’ ‘‘mess of honey flowers.’’

Here, the syntax, lexicon and expressive techniques of oral tradition break though to the narrative and alter it; this enlarges the scope of dialect to the modes of exposition. It is also possible for this extensible language to tell a story and Hurston offers a beginning here as well. Wideman speaks of this important ‘‘evolution’’:

From the point of view of American literature then, the fact of black speech (and the oral roots of a distinct literary tradition—ultimately the tradition itself) existed only when it was properly ‘‘framed’’ within works which had status in the dominant literary system. For black speech, the frame was the means of entering the literate culture and the frame also defined the purposes or ends for which black speech could be employed. The frame confers reality on black speech; the literary frame was a mediator, a legitimizer. What was outside the frame—chaotic, marginal, not worthy of the reader's attention—becomes, once inside, conventionalized into respectability.

The frame implies a linguistic hierarchy, the dominance of one language variety over all others. This linguistic subordination extends naturally to the dominance of one version of reality over others.

Hurston, in her use of dialect, was one of the first to initiate this breaking out of the frame—an important initiation for those writers committed to such linguistic explorations in fiction.

In ‘‘The Gilded Six-Bits,’’ not only does the dialect have more functions but it is used in a story of greater complexity of character, greater thematic range and literary sophistication. Though the people themselves are ‘‘simple’’ in the sense of being ‘‘ordinary folks,’’ their range is more than sentimental or comic emotion. Because the dialect here is given a fuller value and use, we move a step further toward a fuller exploration of black personalities in fiction but it will not be until Their Eyes Were Watching God that language, thought, experience, emotion and imagination will break through and add to the text like an apical bud, increasing the length of the stem or, to use Hurston's own image, ‘‘a peartree bud coming to flower.’’ She fulfills the possibility of what dialect might do when moved beyond the literary conventions and allowed more of the magic and flexibility of authentic folk creation.

Source: Gayl Jones, ‘‘Breaking Out of the Conventions of Dialect: Dunbar and Hurston,’’ in Presence Africaine, No. 144, Fall, 1987, pp. 39-46.