"The Gilded Six-Bits" by Zora Neale Hurston Short Analysis

                                                               Southern Forgiveness
        I chose to read The Gilded Six-Bits by Zora Neale Hurston which is set in the south during the Great Depression. In this story, it is evident through dialect the class setting of Missie May and Joe, a middle-low class husband and wife, who were married within the past year and saving up to start a family. This story was not overly laden with descriptive details about their surroundings but the ones that it did provide were strong within the story. It starts off short, sweet, and to the point in its clear cut description that stated “It was a Negro yard around Negro house in a Negro settlement…” (421) the story then quickly established that Missie May kept a clean house that was “scrubbed white” from a “weekly scouring”. We learn quickly that Missie May’s ability to keep such a clean tight ship is all made possible by the job Joe keeps with “G and G Fertilizer”. These elements gave Hurston’s settings that “something happy” feeling that drove the climb to the climax. It was within this “something happy” that Joe was contented by the wife he adored, that “So long as Ah be yo’husband, ah don’t keer’bout nothin’ else.” (424) This “something happy” was a setting that represented strength, stability, and security for Joe and through his eyes, he assumed it represented the same to his wife. However, Missie May did not here contentment within her husband's words when the walked home from Otis’s ice-cream parlor. Instead, she heard her husband wrapped up in Otis’s money and the way he flaunted it proudly. She didn’t understand his admiration from afar. So it was within that “something happy” that Missie May accepted Otis’s sexual advances in exchange for some of his illusionary gold. As in her mind having this illusionary gold was what seemed to appeal highly to her husband’s happiness. As ironies of life go, Missie was caught and ashamed on a night when Joe got off work early. Joe, upon seeing this unexplainable indiscretion was lost and confused as to why Missie May was unhappy. It took time and patience to heal the wounds of the “something happy” and the assurance that their new baby brought that solidified the “something happy about the place” again.



                                                                      Works Cited:

• Hurston, Zora Neale. “The Gilded Six-Bits.”The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction", Bedford/Saint Martin's, 2015, pp. 421-429.