Summary Of The Gilded Six Bits

“The Gilded Six Bits” is Zora Neale Hurston’s response to the Gold-Standard Debate in America in the year 1933. The short story was coincidentally published the year the United States went off the gold standard and Franklin D. Roosevelt asked loyal Americans to exchange their gold for silver and paper money. This exchange of money had significance in the story as it embodies the character, Otis D. Slemmons as having gold money and symbolizes him being known as a counterfeit. In the short story, Zora Hurston does more than compare issues that involve race to those that involve money; she illustrates that race and money are the same issue. She paints the gold standard as a symbol of a universal white supremacy which can only be obtained by the

and G. Fertilizer Works for its support” (GSB, 86). Hildegard Hoeller points out the repetition of the word “Negro” and how it highlights “the racial character of the economy” and its dependence from “the black laborers on the white capitalists” (767). Hurston seems to imply that the “Negro settlement” is a dependent community artificially fertilized by the white capital. The short story continues to respond to the oppression as Hurston describes the weekly ritual that the main characters, Joe and Missie May, have as a couple when Joe, the husband, arrives home from selling his labors to the white fertilizer factory for the common man’s money (silver) in return. Hildegard Hoeller notes that “while the story celebrates the joyful, erotic rituals of husband and wife, the functions of these rituals is simultaneously to deny, rewrite, and assert economic relations between them” (768). Initiating the ritual is Joe tossing silver coins as the house’s door calling his wife out of the bedroom to bid to his time, signifying that time equates silver money. Furthermore, the money-oriented ritual draws parallels between Missie May’s diligent domestic work at the home and Joe’s labor in the factory and converts their efforts into a time-measured currency displayed by the stacked coins

Furthermore, Hurston uses the silver coins, the black coin of the Eatonville economy, earned by Joe to symbolize the double meaning of payment and gift in Joe and Missie May’s relationship; the ritual is Joe turning over the coins to his wife as an exchange for her domestic tasks and the cooked food for Joe to eat. This dual meaning for the silver money strongly contrasts to the role of gold money in the story as the gold money embodies a new standard of value: the gold standard. When Otis Slemmons, the new owner of the ice-cream parlor in town, enters the picture with “his mouth full of gold teethes”... “a five-dollar gold piece for a stick-pin” and “a ten-dollar gold piece on his watch chain,” he becomes the inevitably unreachable symbol of white, wealthy America and Joe is nothing in comparison (GSB 89, 90). Feeling insecure, Joe begins to flaunt “his wife in Slemmons’ ice cream parlor” knowing that “[he] ain’t got nothin’ but [her]” (GSB 90). The couple knows that Gold money to them is as comparable to a myth and Otis emphasizes their lacking by forbidding them to touch the supposed gold clinging to him. The story suggests that African Americans cannot acquire gold through business or hard work, but only by a stroke of good luck or by selling themselves to white people, as exemplified by Joe selling himself to