The Gilded Six-Bits

“The Gilded Six-Bits” combines elements of a folk tale with specific geographical and historical contexts to explore how Joe and Missie May’s marriage can overcome hardship. Themes of The Function and Morality of Money, Sex, Physical Desire, and Marriage, and Appearance Versus Reality further illuminate this short story.

Unlike folk tales, which are often generic in their locations, the specific location of “The Gilded Six-Bits” is established in the first paragraph as Eatonville, Florida: both Hurston’s hometown and a historically Black community. The “Black justice”—a folk element related to Black Americans’ historical struggles to secure justice via the legal system—that Joe carries out by sending Slemmons packing is perhaps more possible in Eatonville than other Southern communities. However, as in many folk tales, the plot of the story is relatively simple. Most folk tales have a moral, and the consequences of Missie May’s infidelity are deeply felt during the weeks and months in which she and Joe live as virtual strangers. Furthermore, while Joe and Missie May are rounder characters than many folk heroes, Otis D. Slemmons is fairly flat, serving mainly as a foil to Joe.

Hurston’s story is set during the Great Depression, so money would have been scarce—and more appealing than ever—during this time. The details that establish this include the shelves lined with newspaper in Joe and Missie May’s house, the fact that Missie May uses a meal sack to dry herself off after her bath, and—above all—the appearance of money throughout “The Gilded Six-Bits” and the couple’s fascination with Otis D. Slemmons. References to titans of industry Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller in Joe and Missie May’s discussion of Slemmons further establish the period’s preoccupation with wealth.

In this atmosphere, Slemmons’s arrival tests the strength of Joe and Missie May’s marriage. Hailing from “spots and places—Memphis, Chicago, Jacksonville, Philadelphia and so on” (89)—Slemmons is Joe’s opposite in all ways. Wealthy and worldly, Slemmons’s appearance telegraphs his wealth: He has a potbelly and flaunts his wealth in the form of gold (gilded) money on his stickpin and watch chain.

When Missie May sees Slemmons’s wealth, she is intrigued and eventually agrees to sleep with him on the condition that he give her one of his gold coins. However, “The Gilded Six-Bits” is also about Appearance Versus Reality, especially when it comes to outsiders, and Slemmons’s wealth turns out to be false: The gold coin that would have paid Missie May is in reality a gilded half-dollar (or four-bit, a bit being worth 12.5 cents). The title of the story even takes its name from the true amount of money Slemmons wears on his person: The gilded half-dollar Slemmons wears on his watch chain is worth four bits, or 50 cents, and the coin he wears on his stickpin is worth two bits, or 25 cents. The gilded coin thus represents his falseness, while Joe is strong and true, like “a pine tree” (90). The money, fake as it is, becomes a symbol of Missie’s infidelity to Joe; he carries it around to remind her of her infidelity.

The silver dollars that Joe gives Missie May every Saturday have a clear connection to the gold coin Slemmons promises Missie, thus linking marriage with infidelity and even sex work. Though the silver dollars are freely given and not necessarily exchanged for a specific act—unlike with Slemmons—there is nonetheless a transactional element. At the end of the story, when Missie May hears Joe throwing the silver dollars in a final act of reconciliation, she thinks, “[W]ait till Ah got mah strength back and Ah’m gointer fix you for dat” (98), implying some quid pro quo. Similarly, after Missie May and Joe have slept together for the first time since her affair with Slemmons, Joe places the gilded coin under her pillow, causing her to feel like a sex worker: “He had come home to buy from her as if she were any woman in the long house” (96).

Hurston also explores the difference between rural versus urban settings in “The Gilded Six-Bits,” clearly championing rural values: Joe and Missie May triumph while Otis D. Slemmons, who arrives in Eatonville from various urban locales, is painted as the antagonist to Joe’s rural folk hero. This depiction overlaps significantly with the theme of Appearance Versus Reality, as Hurston associates Slemmons’s cosmopolitanism with dishonesty and showmanship and the details of Joe and Missie May’s day-to-day life—e.g., her Southern cooking—with wholesome authenticity.