26 pages • 52 minutes read
The Gilded Six-Bits
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Character Analysis
Missie May
Missie May is one of two main characters in “The Gilded Six-Bits.” She is an attractive young woman who is happily married to her husband, Joe, at the beginning of the short story, and she takes pride in keeping her humble home clean and neat, especially in anticipation of her husband’s homecoming on “payday” Saturdays. She is also an excellent cook, and she shows her love for Joe through her cooking. Her meals include “[h]ot fried mullet, crackling bread, [and] ham hock atop a mound of string beans and new potatoes” (88), placing her cooking firmly within the realm of Southern cuisine.
Missie May evokes youth and sexual appeal in her appearance and attitude: “Her dark brown skin glistened under the soapsuds that skittered down from her washrag. Her stiff young breasts thrust forward aggressively, like broad-based cones with tips lacquered in black” (86). Her interest in money and subsequent decision to sleep with Otis D. Slemmons creates the story’s central conflict and develops the theme of Sex, Physical Desire, and Marriage. Though she loves Joe, her desire for wealth—possibly for Joe’s sake—momentarily overcomes her. She spends the rest of the story suffering the consequences of that decision, though she decides not to leave Joe. Revealing Missie May’s inner thoughts, the narrator explains that Missie May won’t leave Joe both because she cares for him and because she stubbornly refuses to give her mother-in-law the satisfaction of knowing that she wasn’t a good choice for Joe. These complex motivations, alternately admirable and imperfect, make Missie May a more complicated protagonist than the folk heroes that inspired Hurston.
Joe
Joe is the second of two main characters in Hurston’s short story. Married to Missie May, he is a hard worker who is firm in both build and character: “God took pattern after a pine tree and built you noble” (90). The metaphor contrasts with the soft build of rich men like Otis D. Slemmons, who serves as Joe’s foil.
Early in the short story, Joe appears a jocular, easygoing man, eager to please his wife and playfully engaging in his weekly ritual of “chunkin’” silver dollars on their front door for her to proudly stack by her plate at dinner. While Slemmons measures wealth primarily in cold, hard cash—and fakes it if he can’t get it—Joe’s riches are immeasurable: He values his family, specifically Missie May, above all. Nevertheless, he is not immune to the allure of wealth and status: He desires to take Missie May to the new ice cream parlor in Eatonville so that he can show her off to its rich owner, Otis D. Slemmons. When Missie May is unfaithful to him with Slemmons, she has to earn Joe’s trust back. Her penance is symbolized by Joe carrying around Slemmons’s fake gold coin, which represents not only the rich man’s deceit but also the immoral desire for ostentatious wealth. Using this coin to pay for candy kisses at the end of the story symbolizes Joe’s forgiveness of Missie May and underscores the story’s depiction of The Function and Morality of Money: Money per se is not harmful, but the desire to flaunt it is prideful and corrupting.
Otis D. Slemmons
Otis D. Slemmons is the out-of-towner in who arrives in Eatonville and becomes the catalyst for conflict in “The Gilded Six-Bits.” His appearance is described in more detail than either Joe’s or Missie May’s, and he is a subject of fascination for the married couple, representing worldliness and urban wealth. In addition to being well dressed, Slemmons has gold teeth and what appear to be a $5 gold coin attached to his stickpin and a $10 gold coin attached to his watch chain.
Slemmons’s build is robust, even rotund, which Joe thinks further signifies wealth, though Missie May is skeptical: “Ah seen de pitchers of Henry Ford and he’s a spare built-man” (89). Slemmons boasts that his wealth both attracts and is given to him by wealth white women—a claim that comes into question when Missie May and Joe learn that his gold is actually gilded two- and four-bits. Nevertheless, it illustrates the relationship between sex and money that persists throughout the story, sometimes benignly and sometimes troublesomely.
Slemmons begs for life when Joe finds him and Missie May in bed together, offering to pay Joe for his life. He crumples like a doll, summersaulting out the door when Joe swings at him, in contrast to Joe’s physical and moral strength. When it emerges that his claims to wealth were false, Slemmons’s character is further undermined, and he becomes emblematic of Appearance Versus Reality.
Joe’s Mother
Joe’s mother has a small, if crucial, role in “The Gilded Six-Bits,” aiding Joe and Missie May’s reconciliation. Readers learn little about her except that, from Missie May’s point of view, she doesn’t approve of her daughter-in-law. When Missie May discovers that Joe has left Slemmons’s gilded half-dollar under her pillow and decides to leave him, meeting Joe’s mother changes her mind. Because Joe’s mother never approved of Missie May, she will not give her the satisfaction of proving his mother right: “Never would she admit defeat to that woman who prayed for it nightly” (96). At the end of the story, Joe’s mother makes sure he knows the baby looks like him, which seems to ease any concerns Joe has that Slemmons is the father of the newborn.
Joe’s mother confirms Missie May’s impression of her when she tells her son, “Ah never thought well of you marryin’ Missie May cause her ma used tuh fan her foot round right smart and Ah been mighty skeered dat Missie May wuz gointer git misput on her road” (97). Because Missie May’s mother strayed, Joe’s mother worried Missie May would stray too, but the baby’s appearance seems to offer all the proof she needs that Missie May is on the right path; she tells Joe that Missie May is “strong as a ox” and will have many more children (97).
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By Zora Neale Hurston
