The Gilded Six-Bits

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) was born in Alabama but grew up in Eatonville, Florida, the setting of “The Gilded Six-Bits.” Hurston attended Barnard College and Columbia University, where she studied with noted anthropologist Franz Boas. Over the course of her life, she worked extensively as an anthropologist in the American South and the Caribbean. Mules and Men, a collection of African American folklore from Florida and New Orleans, was published in 1935. In the late 1930s, Hurston worked for the Federal Writers’ Project in Florida, part of Roosevelt’s New Deal, collecting folklore to add to the collection. A posthumous anthology of this work was published nearly 40 years after Hurston’s death as Go Gator and Muddy the Water (W. W. Norton & Company, 1999).

Scholars have suggested that “The Gilded Six-Bits” provides “a solution to the problem of reconciling her [Hurston’s] rural Florida childhood with her liberal-arts education” (Chinn, Nancy and Elizabeth E. Dunn. “‘The Ring of Singing Metal on Wood’: Zora Neale Hurston’s Artistry in ‘The Gilded Six-Bits.’” The Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 49.4, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996, pp. 775-90). Viewing Hurston as both an author and an anthropologist helps illuminate “The Gilded Six-Bits,” particularly as the story combines elements of a folk tale with specific geographical and historical contexts.