SOURCE: Jones, Evora W. “The Pastoral and the Picaresque in Zora Neale Hurston's ‘The Gilded Six-Bits’.” College Language Association Journal 35, no. 3 (March 1992): 316-24.

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.”¹ 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.”² 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.”³

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.

(64)

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 (given to Missie May in exchange for her sexual favors) 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.”

(67)

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 (Bone 131). 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” (Bone 131). 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” (64). 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” (64).

A third characteristic of the pastoral is the implication that the city (world) has “illusory, shallow rewards” (Bone 131). 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.

(65)

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 naive 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” (Hurston 59); 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” (63). 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” (Bone 133). 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' 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” (Bone 118). 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.”⁴ 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” (63, 64). 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, hierarchial traditional society to a series of adventures on an open road” (Bone 118). 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” (58). The mobility of Slemmons indicates a series of adventures. Slemmons' 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” (61).

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.

(Bone 119)

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 slicer 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” (59) 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” (62). Joe says, “He asted me, ‘Who is dat broad wid de forty shake?’” (60).

Finally, the “picaresque journey is at the bottom a quest for experience” (Bone 119). 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.⁵

“Folklore,” Hemenway adds, “consists of unwritten traditions which cause people to perform in familiar ways,”⁶ thereby creating reality.

Codes for conduct are evident in the consequences experienced by Missie Mae 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.”⁷ 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.⁸

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 Mae'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 disgression 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 Mae'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 borne an understanding of human nature and its culture.

Notes

1. Robert Bone, Down Home (New York: Putnam's, 1975), p. 130. Hereafter cited in the text.

2. Robert E. Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1978), p. 188.

3. Zora Neale Hurston, “The Gilded Six-Bits,” in Spunk (Berkeley, Calif.: Turtle Island Foundation, 1985), p. 60. Hereafter cited in the text by page reference only.

4. Darwin T. Turner, “Zora Neale Hurston: The Wandering Minstrel,” in In a Minor Chord (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1971), p. 99.

5. Hemenway, p. 99.

6. Ibid, p. 85.

7. William D. Howells, Criticism and Fiction and Other Essays (New York: New York Univ. Press., 1965), p. 64.

8. Ibid, p. 64.