“It was a Negro yard around a Negro house in a Negro settlement…But there was something happy about the place.” The beginning of “The Gilded Six-Bits” sets the reader up to believe that, although the main characters in this story may not be rich, they are happy together. The playfulness and joy of their relationship is introduced when Joe, the husband, comes home from work on his payday and tosses silver dollars through the front door, for his wife, Missie May, to pick up and place next to her plate during dinner. Then, like a child, Missie May rifles through all of Joe’s pockets to extract all the candy and other gifts that he has brought home for her. This is a weekly ritual for the both of them, and Missie May could not be happier.
Otis T. Slemmons
It is not until Joe begins to speak about a new man in town, Otis D. Slemmons, that Missie May begins to think for the first time that perhaps money would make her and Joe’s life richer. At first, Missie May is unimpressed by Joe’s descriptions of Slemmons, a presumably very wealthy man, and cannot imagine that there could be a better man in the world than her Joe. Yet Joe is so enthralled by Slemmons and his success that he will not let Missie May deny his greatness, and they go to the ice cream shop that Slemmons owns to meet him. Missie May is still not terribly impressed, but the reader comes to recognize that a seed of avidity has been planted in her mind.
Betrayal
A short while after this and several other visits to Slemmons’ ice cream shop, Joe comes home early from work to find Missie May in bed with Slemmons. She cries hysterically and apologizes profusely, claiming that her motive was only to get more money for she and Joe, for Slemmons had promised her some of the money from his shop if only she would sleep with him. At first, Joe is angry and attacks Slemmons, but after the man is gone, Joe shows no visible signs of anger. He does not leave Missie May, though she cannot understand why, and he does not tell anyone else of what happened. However, neither does he come home on payday with money for her, or with pockets full of gifts. He rarely speaks, and he carries around the golden coin that Slemmons left behind: A symbol of the affair that Joe, in a way, brought on himself.
Realizations
The couple drifts by each other, day in and day out, both shadows of their former selves, until one night Joe comes home tired and achy. Missie May gladly gives him a massage, and they end up sleeping together for the first time in a long while. When Joe gets up in the morning, he leaves behind Slemmons’ coin, as if to pay her for her services. Full of loathing for Slemmons as well as for herself, Missie May looks closely at the coin for the first time, and sees that it is not a gold piece at all, but a gilded (foil-covered) half dollar. He was not a rich man after all, but a liar and a cheater. She had thrown away her happiness for nothing.
A few weeks after this realization, Missie May realizes something else: she is pregnant. Throughout the entire pregnancy, Joe is unsure whether the baby is truly his or if Slemmons is the father. At the end of the story, the baby is born and Joe’s mother convinces him that the baby is indeed his own, and Joe then takes the gilded coin to the candy shop and buys sweets for his wife. That night when he gets home, he tosses in silver half dollars, and Missie May, though still sore and tired from giving birth, comes to meet him at the door, and for the first time in nearly a year, they are happy.
“The Gilded Six-Bits” was written by Zora Neale Hurston, and printed in Story magazine in 1933, and reprinted in Norton’s Anthology of American Literature: Shorter Seventh Edition, Volume B, on pages 985-993. Published by W.W. Norton and Company in 2008. ISBN: 978-0-393-93055-9.
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