Setting

Hurston begins the story with description of its setting that uses the same adjective repetitively: "It was a Negro yard around a Negro house in a Negro settlement." Such deliberate emphasis underscores the 'blackness' of the community (which is later named as Eatonville, Hurston's real-life hometown), defining how it is seen from the outside. Once the story gets underway, the characters' race is not mentioned, though it remains implicitly significant. "The Gilded Six-Bits" takes place in a community that is all black, thus racial difference is not much of an issue—quite an exceptional situation in the United States, especially during the race-conscious 1930s when Hurston wrote. Instead, Hurston addresses the issue of race through celebrating the integrity and cultural richness of the all-black community. Because she often chose such happily segregated settings, Hurston's black literary peers sometimes criticized her for failing to address racism. The issue...