The conflict in "Sweat" is between Delia and her abusive, adulterous husband, Sykes. The conflict starts when Delia decides to stand up for herself for the first time.
The action begins when Sykes lays a bullwhip across Delia's shoulders to scare her. This turns out to be the final straw for Delia, who picks up a heavy frying pan and threatens Sykes with it. She refuses to move out of their home so that Bertha, his new mistress, can move in. Sykes then slinks out to return to his latest mistress.
Sykes's surreptitious insults grow increasingly severe, and he goes as far as to buy Bertha expensive gifts in sight of Delia, who works her fingers to the bone as a washerwoman to make a living. His next strategy to get Delia out is to bring a rattlesnake into their home. While doing housework, Delia finds the snake...
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in a laundry basket and hotfoots it out of the house.
When she wakes up, it is to find Sykes being attacked by the snake, which is ironic because he meant the reptile to cause her harm, and he wound up being the one who was harmed. In fact, Sykes dies as a result of his rattlesnake bite, and the conflict ends with Delia gaining the freedom that she so richly deserves.
An additional conflict in "Sweat" is that between the respective views that Delia and Sykes have concerning the role of women.
Sykes is very much an old-school Alpha male, a man with a traditional, sexist understanding of a woman's role in society. As far as he's concerned, women exist purely and solely to serve him and his needs. The idea of their having needs of their own simply doesn't enter his head for a moment. He expects the women in his life to be there at his beck and call, giving him their undivided attention. That's one of the reasons why he's so abusive toward Delia. Her work outside the home and her involvement in the church, in his mind, deprive him of the attention he believes is rightfully his.
As for Delia, she has a completely different understanding of a woman's place. Though by no means a feminist, she nonetheless bristles at the prospect of being nothing more than a domestic slave. She gets the confidence to stand up to her bullying, philandering husband and assert herself at long last. Delia may not be a feminist just yet, but in standing up for herself, she's recovered some of the dignity that she'd lost over the course of fifteen years in an abusive marriage. So, in that sense, one could say that she's taken the first step toward an understanding of her situation's being linked to that of women as a whole.
The conflict is mainly between the protagonist, Delia, and her husband, Sykes, who is horribly mean and cruel to her. He is cheating on her and has before and treats her as if she is a servant. He also beats her.
She has taken all that she can handle, but is limited by her race and gender as to what she can do about it. This is why when the snake bites Sykes, she simply watches him die...she can't make herself save him. Anyone could understand why she would have done what she did, really.
At the end,
Sykes, whose head is clearing from gin, hears nothing until he reaches behind the stove to look for a match. But they are all gone, and Sykes hears the rattling right beneath him, so he leaps up on the bed. Delia can hear a horrible scream as Sykes is being attacked, and she becomes ill. While lying down to recover, she hears Sykes moan her name and gets up to walk towards the door. He crawls towards her and realizes that she had been there the whole time.
Because of this, Sykes dies, realizing, though, that Delia had seen him get bitten and that she did nothing about it. Perhaps then Sykes might have realized the many errors of his ways.