The Gilded Six-Bits

Zora Neale Hurston

Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1986

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Background

Authorial Context: Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) was born in Alabama but grew up in Eatonville, Florida, the setting of “The Gilded Six-Bits.” Hurston attended Barnard College and Columbia University, where she studied with noted anthropologist Franz Boas. Over the course of her life, she worked extensively as an anthropologist in the American South and the Caribbean. Mules and Men, a collection of African American folklore from Florida and New Orleans, was published in 1935. In the late 1930s, Hurston worked for the Federal Writers’ Project in Florida, part of Roosevelt’s New Deal, collecting folklore to add to the collection. A posthumous anthology of this work was published nearly 40 years after Hurston’s death as Go Gator and Muddy the Water (W. W. Norton & Company, 1999).

Scholars have suggested that “The Gilded Six-Bits” provides “a solution to the problem of reconciling her [Hurston’s] rural Florida childhood with her liberal-arts education” (Chinn, Nancy and Elizabeth E. Dunn. “‘The Ring of Singing Metal on Wood’: Zora Neale Hurston’s Artistry in ‘The Gilded Six-Bits.’” The Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 49.4, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996, pp. 775-90). Viewing Hurston as both an author and an anthropologist helps illuminate “The Gilded Six-Bits,” particularly as the story combines elements of a folk tale with specific geographical and historical contexts. For example, Eatonville was not only Hurston’s hometown but a community in which African Americans enjoyed a degree of independence, as the opening lines of the story emphasize: “It was a Negro yard around a Negro house in a Negro settlement” (86).

Historical Context: The Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance, which lasted from approximately 1910 to the beginning of the Great Depression in the 1930s, was a period in which African American arts, culture, and politics experienced a “rebirth.” The Renaissance had its origins in the Great Migration of the former century, when African Americans moved to Northern and Midwestern cities like Chicago and New York in record numbers, seeking greater economic opportunities and racial equality. Art of all kinds—poetry and prose, painting and sculpture, dance and jazz music—flourished. While Harlem was the “epicenter” of the Renaissance, African American culture thrived in cities all over America (“A New African American Identity: The Harlem Renaissance.” National Museum of African American History and Culture, The Smithsonian. 13 Mar. 2022). Alain Locke, one the leaders of the Renaissance, hailed it as “a spiritual coming of age” for African Americans (“A New African American Identity”). Other notable figures included Josephine Baker, Duke Ellington, W. E. B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey, Langston Hughes—and Zora Neale Hurston.

Living in Harlem and studying at nearby Columbia, Hurston was at the geographical and intellectual heart of the Renaissance. She was friends with Hughes and fellow writer Countee Cullen, and together they published a literary magazine called FIRE!!. It is in this atmosphere that Hurston wrote “The Gilded Six-Bits,” and the story exemplifies one of the hallmarks of the Harlem Renaissance: the “mainstreaming” of African American culture and art. Prior to this era, African American art tended to fall into one of two categories: folk tradition or work that emulated Western forms and styles. Many figures associated with the Renaissance instead sought to carve a place for traditional African American art forms in “highbrow” culture (e.g., Hughes’s incorporation of jazz elements in his poetry). “The Gilded Six-Bits” shares this instinct in, for example, Hurston’s reproduction of African American vernacular.