Zora Neale Hurston’s short story “The Gilded Six-Bits” begins on a note of innocent childlike happiness. Happiness is depicted as a characteristic of the place—“there was something happy about the place”(1011). The happiness of the house is actually a reflection of the innocent joy of the two childlike adults living in what was then their paradise. The pleasure they both take in their ritual transactions of “joyful mischief”(1011) is quite obvious. A tempter from the city stifles the joy of the couple and it seems as if their Paradise has been irrevocably lost. However, at the end of the story, the husband and the wife seem to at least anticipate a paradise regained—although they are somewhat older, sadder, and wiser than at the beginning.
In the innocent beginning, just the sound of the nine dollars thrown on the wooden door by her yet unseen husband makes Missie May “grin…with delight”(1011) anticipating the picking up of the money, the mock fight leading to the emptying of her husband’s pockets to reveal the trinkets and the candy kisses he had bought for her and the subsequent visit to an ice cream parlor or a restaurant, and the other pleasures of the night to come. The couple takes a particular delight in pretending they did not actually love each other to distraction: There was, the author says, “very little talk during the meal but that little consisted of banter that pretended to deny affection but in reality flaunted it”(1013). Their love for each other was so true and so great that they could play such innocent games with impunity—for they both knew they understood each other perfectly.
Into this paradise enters the serpent in the form of the apparently prosperous Otis Slemmons with his many adornments of gilded dollars that seem as if they were really made of solid gold. Missie May’s husband Joe makes no secret of the fact that he envies Slemmons’s gold ornaments, his wealth and panache, and even his potbelly, but Missie May reassures him by saying that Rockefeller and Ford were both spare-built, and affirming that she loved Joe just the way he was.
Joe continues in paradise for a week or two—till one day he arrives home unexpectedly early and catches Slemmons in bed with Missie May. He does not beat his wife or berate her and when she says that Slemmons had tempted her with gold, he only says that he has a gold piece for her. There was no retribution—but it was the end of paradise. The next morning, Missie May wakes up to hear a voice “from beyond the no-man’s land between them…. A strange voice that yesterday had been Joe’s”(1017). It was Joe asking for his breakfast—and after the meal when Missie May burst into tears, Joe comforted her a trifle coldly perhaps, advising her not to look back at the past, “lak Lot’s wife and turn to salt”(1017).
Three months later Missie May is asked to rub Joe’s back and they end up making love. Joe slips under his wife’s pillow the gilded half-dollar Slemmons had left behind in his haste, and Missie May realizes that all that glitters is not gold. She has learned her lesson and does not need the coin anymore. Every ten days or so now, Joe’s back needs rubbing and the rubbing leads to lovemaking. The pretense is no game, however, and the innocent joy of the couple’s mischief seems forever lost.
Joe and Missie regain a paradise of sorts when Missie May delivers a baby boy who is her husband’s “spitting image” (1018). Joe buys candy kisses after a long time—fifty cents worth, using Slemmons’ gilded coin. That night Missie May hears the sound of “singing metal on wood”(1019) after many months and all her joy is evident in her words that also conclude the story: “Joe Banks, Ah hear you chunkin’ money in mah do’way. You wait till Ah got mah strength back and Ah’m gointer fix you for dat” (1019). Hopefully, the man, the woman, and their child will not let Paradise slip away from them again.
Works Cited
Hurston, Zora Neale. “The Gilded Six-Bits.” The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. Ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay. New York: Norton, 1997.