SOURCE: Hurd, Myles Raymond. “What Goes Around Comes Around: Characterization, Climax, and Closure in Hurston's ‘Sweat’.” Langston Hughes Review 12, no. 2 (fall 1993): 7-15.

Shortly after her 1925 arrival in New York City from Washington, D.C., and her native Eatonville, Florida, Zora Neale Hurston sought to make her literary presence known by entering a contest in creative writing sponsored by Charles S. Johnson, editor of Opportunity, and by having one of her prize-winning fictions reprinted in Alain Locke's The New Negro (1925). Inspired by the encouragement of these well-known Black editors, Hurston felt confident enough in 1926 to join forces with Wallace Thurman and Langston Hughes in coediting Fire!!, a journal designed to “epater le bourgeois into a realization of the existence of the younger Negro writers and artists” by “burn[ing] up a lot of the old, dead conventional Negro-white ideas of the past” (Hughes 135). When her two major collaborators found themselves in desperate need of material for the controversial literary magazine, she submitted “Sweat” (November 1926), along with the play Color Struck, to the ill-fated, one-issue volume of the avant-garde journal. A recollection of family members and neighbors in the all-Black community where she was raised, the fiction satisfied the objectives of Fire!! by absenting white characters and interracial conflict from its story line; instead, it foregrounds “characters who are linked to their milieu by specific traditions, beliefs, and verbal expressions which have their analogues in Southern rural folk culture” (Grimes 36). Thus its conflict is intraracial and focuses on marital discord between Delia Jones, a religious washerwoman, and Sykes, her husband, who threatens, assaults, and eventually tries to kill her.

Stated succinctly, the complicated and symbolically heavy-laden plot of “Sweat” centralizes a hopelessly mismatched marriage. From its exposition we learn that whereas Delia “had brought love to the union,” Sykes had brought a “longing after the flesh” (41). Only two months after their wedding he had started to beat her, and shortly thereafter he began spending all his wages on extramarital flings in nearby Orlando. So, too, during his fifteen-year matrimony he has made several unwelcome overtures to married Black women and has subsequently gained a reputation for being incorrigibly adulterous. When he becomes enamored of Bertha, a fat, riant, dark-skinned “eight rock,” he displays his sexual interest in this latest consort throughout the town, buys her treats at the general store, and promises to install her in the house that Delia has purchased from the sweat of a decade and a half of hard work.

His philandering, however, in no way surpasses his physical mistreatment of Delia, who bears his monstrous behavior with a Christian patience that she is unwilling to forego. Aware that she must sort white folks' clothes on Sunday evenings after church to complete her seven-day-a-week laundress duties, he unfairly castigates her as a hypocrite; seizing on her fear of slithery animals and objects, he first tries to intimidate her with a bullwhip and later refuses to remove a six-foot rattlesnake from her kitchen. When he discovers that the snake fails to frighten her into abandoning her cabin, he destroys the pen in which the rattler had been enclosed and moves the animal to a hamper in a deliberately planned murder attempt. Ironically, however, the reptile strikes Sykes instead as a consequence of her escaping injury by running outside with a lantern, thus leaving her house dark and Sykes unaware of the diamondback's exact location. Drunk after a tryst with Bertha, he leaps upon a bed, where he is bitten in an action that he himself has anticipated: “Fact is Ah ain't got tuh do notin' but die. Tain't no use uh you puttin' on airs makin' out lak you skeered uh dat snake—he's gointer stay right heah tell he die” (46-47).

Although relatively few, if any, cautious readers experience difficulty in finding a pattern of sin and condign punishment within the narrative or in identifying Sykes as a character resistant to spiritual reclamation and unfaithful—in the double sense of that term—scholarly commentary on “Sweat” reflects confusion over Delia's moral stature at the story's conclusion, especially in relation to her unwillingness to alert her husband to his impending disaster. David Levering Lewis, for example, argues that “in the denouement, Sykes returns home to be fatally bitten by the snake the avenging Delia allows to strike without warning” (195). Likewise, Robert Bone labels the fiction a “revenge fantasy” and asserts that not just at its conclusion but “throughout the tale, man and wife are locked in a mutual hatred so intense that it acquires the force of myth” (148). For Lillie P. Howard, Delia's inaction is vindictive yet consistent with the story's thematic focus on punished hubris bound up with Sykes's tyranny:

Delia could have warned him, saved him, but she understandably does not. She has been hardened by his constant abuse and has built up a “spiritual earthworks” against him. Poetic justice has been rendered. He had made Delia's life miserable; he had beaten her, cheated on her, and refused to provide for her. He had taken advantage of her by taking things for which she had worked and paid to Bertha's and by flaunting Bertha daringly around the community and around Delia. He had even paid Bertha's rent at Della Lewis'—“the only house in town that would have taken her in”—and promised her his wife's house. Sykes had done everything, in short, which would turn Delia, observers in the community and the reader against him.

(67)

And viewing the story from a Freudian perspective, Robert E. Hemenway finds that the snake, on at least one symbolic level, represents a bosom serpent within Delia that forces her to acknowledge her ability to hate Sykes as she desperately but unsuccessfully tries to hold on to her strong sense of moral values:

In the context of Delia's unremitting faith, the snake comes to represent the evil that lives inside despite her Christianity, a force she knows and is afraid of, but which Sykes's cruelty will not permit her to overcome. Sykes himself becomes a kind of devil, whose demonic desires eventually lead to a struggle for Delia's life and soul, even though he does not quite understand the dramatic part he plays.

(Literary Biography 72)

The above interpretive speculations share in common a reading of “Sweat” suggesting that Delia, at some imprecise point before the narrative's conclusion, relinquishes her tolerance of Sykes's diabolism to become a vengeful wife intent upon helping to bring about her wayward spouse's death. Overlooking her depiction as a “habitually meek” and long-suffering domestic, these evaluations erroneously view her as being as steeped in sin as is Sykes and posit that she is a dynamic, rather than static, “Christian woman learning how to hate in spite of herself” (Hemenway, Literary Biography 70). Yet unaccounted for in this approach to the short fiction is an explanation for Delia's having waited fifteen years to display her alleged scheme for retaliation when, much earlier in her rocky marriage, she could have alternatively demanded that Sykes leave her home, sued him for divorce, or notified white authorities in adjacent Maitland of his being a spousal abuser. Though she admits that she has withdrawn her love from the marriage—in an outsized speech frequently alluded to as evidence of her willingness to lower herself to his level of malice—she confronts him because of his refusal to remove the snake from her midst, his threat to keep on pummeling her, and, most important, his refusal to mend his ways:

Delia pushed back her plate and got up from the table. “Ah hates you, Sykes,” she said calmly. “Ah hates you tuh de same degree that Ah useter love yuh. Ah done took and took till mah belly is full up tuh mah neck. Dat's de reason Ah got mah letter fum de chuch an' moved mah membership tuh Woodbridge—so Ah don't haftuh take sacrament wid yuh. Ah don't wantuh see yuh round me atall. Lay 'round wid dat 'oman all yuh wants tuh, but gwan 'way fum me an' mah house. Ah hates you like a suck-egg dog.”

(48)

Despite this forceful speech, misidentified by many readers as the story's climax, Sykes neither immediately leaves the household nor ceases tormenting Delia, and to overemphasize her response to his bedeviling her at this early stage in the tale is to forget that she utters these words before later being restored to serenity through her attendance at Sunday-evening church services. At issue in our reappraisal of the story is whether she transforms herself into a usurper of God's preserve on vengeance when she acknowledges that her strong faith is futile in persuading him to reform.

In describing Delia's stormy relationship with Sykes, Hurston inadvertently obscures her intentions by ineffectively modulating her narrative perspective, incorporating convoluted contexts within the fiction, and accreting up an excess of plurisignatic symbols and images easily leading us in elucidative misdirections.¹ Yet there is no doubt that the protagonist was intended to be an exemplar of virtue from its first scenes to its closure. Unfortunately, these overlapping contexts encourage readers striving for interpretive accuracy to look outside the text to explain why, as its conclusion, Delia's passivity is both aesthetically and morally appropriate. To guide narratees in the right direction, Hurston draws upon autobiographical elements, New Testament allusions, and snatches of folk wisdom from Black background figures to highlight her central figure's Christian steadfastness.

In observing that “in a sense, everything Zora Neale Hurston wrote about came out of her experience in Eatonville” and that “everything she experienced in Eatonville she eventually put into her books” (176), Alice Walker, who praises Hurston as a racial, spiritual, and literary “foremother,” provides us with an important insight into similarities between Delia and Lucy Potts Hurston, the older writer's mother, who predeceased her husband, thus enabling him to court and then hastily marry an insensitive, corpulent, second wife. In her autobiographical Dust Tracks on a Road, Hurston recalls not only her frustration in being held back from carrying out her mother's deathbed requests but her suspicion of the guilt her father felt while shedding tears over his dying wife; the prescient, nine-year-old future author knew that John Hurston, a 200-pound “stud-looking buck,” could be easily beaten in a verbal duel with his wife, who weighted “somewhere in the nineties,” and that a quick glance or aptly timed riposte from Lucy could curtail his boasting on Joe Clarke's porch about past, present, or future sexual conquests:

Of weaknesses, he had his share, and I know that my mother was very unhappy at times, but neither of them ever made any move to call the thing off. … He was used to being a hero on the store porch … and I can see how he must have felt to be always outdone around home. I know now that that is a gripping thing to a man—not to be able to whip his woman mentally. … My mother took her over-the-creek man and bare-knuckled him from brogans to broadcloth, and I am certain that he was proud of the change, in public. But in the house, he might have always felt over-the-creek, and because that was not the statue he made for himself to look at, he resented it.

(10, 67)²

The significance of the female parent's ability to bring about her husband's comeuppance in arguments becomes clear when we note the recurrence of oral jousting among married couples in a number of Hurston's longer fictions and shorter prose compositions. As Hemenway points out, “her most dramatic episodes arise from men and women squaring off for a verbal duel, a situation best understood as part of the process whereby a Black woman negotiates for respect, seizing the opportunity to affirm herself as a woman” (“Flying Lark” 146). With specific reference to Delia's conflagrations with Sykes in “Sweat,” we see that the “Black woman affirms herself in Hurston's fiction because she has the courage and the verbal techniques to establish herself in something other than a dependent relationship with a man” (Hemenway, “Flying Lark” 145).

Notably, Delia's expertise in momentarily reducing Sykes to silence, like Lucy's oral victories over her husband, manifests itself in an arena where words easily triumph over retaliatory deeds. Just as many of Shakespeare's characters disjoin thought and action, so does Delia restrain herself from taking any physically assertive, compensatory steps to end her unhappiness. Rather, like several other saintly, mother-inspired fictional wives boxed in by unhappy marriages in Hurston's fiction, she emerges as a sharp-tongued yet patient spouse reluctant to venture beyond shrewd verbal maneuvers to come to terms with her unsatisfactory conjugal life.

On the other hand, John Hurston, though never directly condemned by his daughter in her autobiography, is represented by surrogates upended by their own masculine overaggressiveness and sexual infidelities. As Howard reminds us, these stand-ins for the male parent are subjected to retribution when they come in contact with phallic symbols, such as circle saws, water moccasins, shotguns, and trains (84-88). In “Sweat” perceptive readers recognize such a pattern of moral recompense, condemn Sykes for oppressing his helpmeet, and exonerate Delia for not standing between him and the catastrophe he brings on himself.

In addition to shaping her tale to emphasize Delia's struggle to display a “triumphant indifference to all that [Sykes] was or did” (42), Hurston includes Biblical allusions to liken Delia's suffering with that of Christ. In a passage too often overlooked (or ignored), Hurston places her misery—shortly before her declaration of hating her husband—in a specific Christian context:

Delia's work-worn knees crawled over the earth in Gethsemane and up the rocks of Calvary many, many times during these months. She avoided the villagers and meeting places in her efforts to be blind and deaf. But Bertha nullified this to a degree, by coming to Delia's house to call Sykes out to her at the gate. … Two or three times Delia attempted a timid friendliness, but she was repulsed each time. It was plain that the breaches must remain agape.

(46)

Besides the explicit parallels between Delia and Jesus, what stands out in the passage are multiple evocations of agape. As an adjective, it heightens our awareness of the seemingly unbridgeable connubial disharmony between the incompatible couple. On another level it signals a shift from sexual to nonphysical terms of correspondence in their marriage, and from a third angle of vision, it refers to love feasts³ mentioned in both Jude 12 and the story itself. The import of these multiple meanings becomes clear when we link Delia's moving her church membership to avoid taking sacrament in Sykes's presence with the Biblical injunction to be wary of inveterate sinners participating in joyful religious celebrations: “These are spots in your feats of charity, when they feast with you, feeding themselves without fear.”

The New Testament chapter preceding Revelation is also relevant to Hurston's plot in that it issues a warning to individuals so given over to lust that they stand in jeopardy of incessant torment. Indeed, it speaks directly to Sykes's physical and spiritual condition at the story's ending in having its authorship attributed to a saint identified with lost causes.

The Book of Jude's central theme stresses inevitable punishments for sexual transgressions, and the chapter condemns licentious sinners who, like Sykes, have strayed from God's path of righteousness. Whereas modernized Biblical translations describe such sinners as “animalistic,” verse 16 in its traditional rendering characterizes them as “murmurers, complainers, walking after their own lusts; and their mouths speaking great swelling words.” Moreover, Sykes, in his visits to Bertha and in his being denied light to locate the diamondback, is reminiscent of those angels “which kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation, [whom God] hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day” (Jude 6).

Just as important, Hurston applies other passages from the Book of Jude to Delia's situation to exculpate her main character for not being more aggressive in trying to help Sykes in his dying hours. Verse 9, for example, offers a dictate against intervening between God and those individuals who merit His wrath: “Yet Michael the archangel, when contending with the devil he disputed about the body of Moses, durst not bring against him a railing accusation, but said, ‘The Lord rebuke thee.’” And verses 22-23, translated in The Living Bible, give advice to believers at odds with contentious malefactors:

Try to help those who argue against you. Be merciful to those who doubt. Save some by snatching them as from the very flames of hell itself. And as for others, help them to find the Lord by being kind to them, but be careful that you yourselves aren't pulled along into their sins. Hate every trace of their sin while being merciful to them as sinners.

These passages seem especially apropos when we remember that Sykes, returning from a liaison with Bertha, pushes Delia against the inside rail of the latter's bed; but instead of accusing him of cheating on her or engaging him in an argument, she reticently drifts back to sleep.

For Hurston, who would include Biblical allusions in many of her subsequently composed fictional and nonfictional works, the overall effect of drawing upon the New Testament chapter was to underscore its interlinked references to sexual sin, animalistic behavior, and Christian endurance so that her intended audience could detect parallels between the spiritual commentary and important plot elements in her own creative artistry. Thus, the story's emphasis on Delia's “spiritual earthworks” points to her extended tolerance of Sykes's malevolence within a New Testament context, and not to her “Old Testament vengeance.”

Hurston further signals her foregrounded character's admirability in “Sweat” through the noteworthy comments of the male villagers who gather in front of Joe Clarke's store. Though these unlettered Black townspeople could have easily taunted Delia for being sexually abandoned because of Sykes's numerous affairs, they instead sympathize with her as they reflect on the regularity with which she collects and returns laundry. Functioning like choric members in ancient Greek tragedies, these folk characters not only provide useful information on the background of her marriage but analyze Sykes's faults in vituperative moral terms. When, for instance, they notice her withered skin and narrow shoulders, they remember that she has invested her income in a house while Sykes has squandered his earnings on weekend flings from which he returns to beat her.⁴ And when Clarke observes that Delia, who “wuz ez pretty ez a speckled pup” (43), now looks aged beyond her years, he explains how Sykes has exploited her and sapped her vitality:

Tain't no law on earth dat kin make a man be decent if it ain't in 'im. There's plenty men dat takes a wife lak dey do a joint uh sugar-cane. It's round, juicy an' sweet when dey gits it. But dey squeeze an' grind, squeeze an' grind an' wring tell dey wring every drop uh pleasure dat's in 'em out. When dey's satisfied dat dey is wrung dry, dey treats 'em jes' lak dey do a cane-chew. Dey throws 'em away. Dey know whut dey is doin' while dey is at it, an' hates theirselves fuh it, but they keeps on hangin' after huh tell she's empty. Den dey hates huh fuh bein' a cane-chew an' in de way.

(43-44)

Moreover, Old Man Anderson, after listening to Clark's analogy, suggests that Sykes and Bertha submit to a joint punishment akin to the tarring and feathering of the titular character in Hawthorne's “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” and to the skimmity ride in Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge:

We oughter take Sykes an' dat stray 'oman uh his'n down in Lake Howell swamp an' lay on de rawhide tell they cain't say Lawd a, mussy. He allus wuz uh ovahbearin niggah, but since dat white 'oman from up north done teached 'im how to run a automobile, he done got too beggety to live—an' we oughter kill 'im.

(44)

In addition to reminding us that rawhide is the base material for the bullwhip that Sykes wields to scare Delia at the story's beginning, these bits of folk wisdom harmonize with her accurate prediction of the suffering to be visited on him later in the tale: “Oh well, whatever goes over the Devil's back, is got to come under his belly. Sometime or other, Sykes, like everybody else, is gointer reap his sowing” (41-42).

And the actions of these background figures are just as important as are their speeches. When, for example, they see Sykes squiring Bertha around town and purchasing sweets for her, they leave Clarke's store, returning only after the couple departs. Additionally, as arbiters and enforcers of the village's ethos, these porch sitters unsuccessfully encourage Skyes to kill the rattlesnake as they listen incredulously to his boasting about being a seasoned charmer. The cumulative effect of their speeches and actions is to dissuade us from attributing blameworthiness to Delia and to help us chart her movement from eros to agape to an ultimate realization that he is spiritually—and later medically—unsalvageable. Their collective role is to remind us that the story's moral structure demands that Skyes, without the assistance of any other character, must inevitably die an unrepentant sinner.

“Sweat,” to be sure, exhibits structural flaws, but these awkwardness, even tallied cumulatively, hardly convince us of its impenetrability to cogent analysis. In fact, near the story's conclusion Hurston provides us with several uncomplicated explanations for Delia's not ministering to Sykes's needs. For one thing, had the protagonist yelled to her spouse about the snake's escape from the clothing container, she would have revealed her presence to Sykes, who, only a few hours earlier, had tried to snuff out her existence. Moreover, given his boasting about charming snakes, it is doubtful that he would have heeded her warnings, especially since he shows the aftereffects of liquor on coming home from Bertha's bed. And we need not forget that Delia is paralyzed with fear and that this response to a direct confrontation with evil causes her, at first, to hide in a hayloft, where she grudgingly acknowledges his unwillingness to change.

Besides these explanations, Hurston further frees Delia from blame by introducing a schema of contrasting light and darkness to set Delia's strong faith over against Sykes's sinister intent. Within this pattern of attributions, Delia is associated with light and safety, but Sykes is identified with darkness and subsequent death. Discovering the diamondback from the lantern's illumination, she rushes outside her house, where she distances herself from harm. Later, when Sykes staggers home from Bertha's furnished room, he stumbles into darkness because he had previously taken all the matches from Delia's cabin to his paramour's residence and had lost them while “emptying his pockets.” Thus swallowed up in a darkness for which he himself is responsible, he instinctively leaps onto his bed and is fatally bitten. Without a guiding light Delia has to wait until dawn to approach a window to look for him and Old Scratch, but even then a shade blocks her view. Therefore, she is rendered powerless to rescue Sykes lest she jeopardize herself. And the narrator does not let us forget that Delia's unlit house has become a den of iniquity as a result of his having earlier brought Bertha inside while the heroine was away at church.

The play on light and darkness functions as a controlling device underlining the differences in moral temperaments between Delia and Sykes. Similarly, the coiling of the snake in a striking position is part of a pattern of circularity pervading the narrative and “testifies to the prevalence of sin a world we shape with our own deeds” (Bontemps 204). We recall that “Sweat” both begins and ends in the temporal interval between late Sunday evenings and early Monday mornings and that Sykes, who “useter eat some mighty big chunks of humble pie tuh git dat li'l 'oman he got” (43), is once again humbled in being brought to his knees by the serpent's sting. Yet Delia stands outside the circle of evil that Sykes both creates and perpetuates—i.e., the circle revealing the purview of the depths of his depravity.

To charge Delia with malice aforethought for not assisting her blackguard husband in his moribund condition is to misread “Sweat” in terms of Hurston's depiction of the washerwoman's unwavering saintliness. In one sense, this impugning of Delia's character reflects a dissatisfaction with the fiction's polarized elements of dramatized evil and passive resistance. Because Hurston exerts quite a bit of creative energy in outlining Sykes's outrageous behavior and in subsequently punishing him for his misdeeds, Delia's virtue is too often easily overshadowed by his villainy. Moreover, Hurston seems to have forgotten that the typical modern reader, familiar with and attracted to blackened portraitures in the works of such writers as Edgar Allan Poe, favors vice over victimization, especially when the superior moral referent evidences a boring doormat morality. Though most readers can vividly recall the various instances of Sykes's cruelty, Delia remains memorable only in relation to that cruelty. Had Hurston failed to enliven her protagonist with one or two good speeches, Delia, like many of Chaucer's heroines, would have been relegated to the status of a literary character a bit too perfect to be believable. Consequently, the attempt to identify an emerging evil coexisting with Christian faith in Delia's characterization results from the discomfort of many readers in her being upstaged by Sykes, a more dramatically compelling antagonist. And such readers overeagerly expect Delia to counter his evil, rather than allow herself to be repeatedly buffeted by it.

As a product of Hurston's literary apprenticeship, “Sweat” betrays its author's shaky architectonics. Still, by analyzing this folk parable in light of its treatment of sexuality in a religious context and the Eatonville code of morality that serves as its superstructure, we see that despite its structural flaws, characterizational weaknesses, and other infelicities, it not only holds our interest but ultimately withstands close critical scrutiny.

Notes

1. One can easily argue that thematic ambiguity arises in Hurston's story because its Christian and Freudian contexts seem more often fused than polarized. The passage comparing Christ's suffering with Delia's “Gethsemane” stands out as a case in point. After offering the analogy and informing us that her protagonist attempts to remain “blind and deaf” to her fellow townspeople's awareness of her situation and indifferent to her husband's philandering, Hurston confuses matters by noting that “Delia and Sykes fought all the time now with no peaceful interludes” (43). Because of the story's sexual contours and the passage's placement early in Section III, which begins with an account of Sykes's first encounter with Bertha upon her arrival in the community, readers may initially be lured into conjecturing that Delia's attempts at a “timid friendliness” with Sykes suggest her desire for his physicality and then her being “repulsed” eventuates at the fiction's conclusion in an adverse reaction to sexual rejection. As the text makes clear, however, Delia is never described as being overlibidinous, and she is happiest when she sings spirituals while traveling to or from fellowship with other churchgoers. Thus she offers no jealousy-inspired hatred to counterbalance Sykes's animosity, nor does his death satisfy a “wish-fulfillment” for the end of his bullying.

   We can also account for this ambiguity by positing along with Robert B. Heilman that Hurston, like many another prose writer, “has unstable responses to a character or situation, or, at a deeper level, has emotional contradictions that express themselves in fictional elements of not wholly congruous impact” (306). Alternatively, we can follow Dorothea Krook's lead in differentiating between authorial, text-inherent, and unconscious intentions by exemplifying “Sweat” as a narrative in which these various levels of intentions conjoin (353-72).

2. Although in Dust Tracks Hurston recalls her mother's being the major property owner in the household, her own habit of climbing chinaberry trees to “jump at de sun,” talking snakes in Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Books, swapped “lies” on Clarke's porch, and her mother-in-law's expropriation of Lucy's featherbed—all of which recollections are alluded to in “Sweat”—she emphasizes her mother's death as the most stultifying event in her childhood and never completely forgives her father for the anguish he caused Lucy.

3. The love feasts (agape) mentioned in Jude 12 refer to the joyous church celebrations of early Christians. In Dust Tracks Hurston explains that the “‘Love Feast’ or ‘Experience Meeting’ is a meeting held either Friday night or the Sunday morning before Communion. Since no one is supposed to take Communion unless he or she is in harmony with all other members, there are great protestations of love and friendship. It is an opportunity to reaffirm faith plus anything the imagination might dictate” (193-94).

4. I am in disagreement here with a number of other readers who have speculated that Sykes is unemployed. A minor character's comment about Sykes's being puffed up as a result of a white woman's having taught him to drive suggests that Sykes is a chauffeur and that this form of employment supplies him with a modest income. We know, of course, that he must have money to purchase sweetmeats for Bertha and to pay her rent; because Delia knows about his dalliances, it seems unlikely that she would give him money to engage openly in adultery. Additionally, it should be recalled that shortly before composing “Sweat,” Hurston herself was employed as a companion and chauffeur by Fannie Hurst, a popular white novelist who had previously discharged the Black writer for clerical deficiencies.

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