The Literary Gilt of The Gilded Six-Bits
While no attempt to define a pattern in nature, human or otherwise, has ever been fully successful at escaping the inherent nuance and exceptions in the natural world (call that the persistence of nature in naturalism), Zora Neale Hurston certainly abides by her list of uniquely Black traits in art, in her essay “Characteristics of Negro Expression”. There are many works written during the Harlem Renaissance that contrast with Hurston’s claims that, for example, that Black literature is always “absent of the concept of privacy”, when we have read several poems describing the pain of hiding one’s suffering due to their Black identity. However, the entirety of The Gilded Six-Bits and the writing that paints the story are highly decorated in the exact styles that Hurston had highlighted; namely Adornment or “the Will to Adorn”, “Drama”, the “Absence of the Concept of Privacy”; upon further examination, you can find much more hidden throughout. In fact, I was hard pressed to f...