The Eatonville anthology — Themes and Context

Marriage, Money, and Misfortune

Several sketches turn on the odd bargains of married life. In “Turpentine Love,” Jim Merchant remains in good humor with his wife even after she has lost all her teeth; their bond was sealed when a dose of turpentine, spilled accidentally into her eye during a fit, cured her permanently. The story is told flatly, without irony, as if such a cure were unremarkable. Elsewhere, Becky Moore has eleven children by various fathers and has never married, “but that is not her fault.” Hurston’s narratorial voice is dry, leaving the reader to gauge the gap between the town’s judgment and the facts. Money, too, is a thread: Tony Roberts is “the best provider on his list,” yet his wife begs; the pleading woman’s husband gives her “all he can rake and scrape,” but she still works her rounds. The sketches accumulate a picture of domestic economies that are both practical and theatrical.

Voice and Vernacular on the Porch

Hurston’s Eatonville is a place where talk is action. The store porch is a stage: men sit, watch, and bet on the outcome of a marital showdown. When Mitch Potts buys a box “very much like a shoe-box” and heads for the piney woods, his wife Cal’line follows with an axe, and the porch “set to giggling and betting.” The dialogue is rendered in a carefully transcribed vernacular that signals status and intent. The pleading woman’s “sing-song” keening, Mitch’s “fancy cussing,” and the animal fable’s formal courtship speeches all occupy different registers. The fable, “Once ’way back yonder before the stars fell,” shifts into a mock-heroic tone: Dog and Rabbit court Miss Nancy Coon with elaborate proposals (“which would you ruther be—a lark flyin’ or a dove a settin’?”). The variety of voices—from aggrieved wife to boastful husband to polite rabbit—gives the collection its texture.

The Fable as Final Word

The anthology closes with a talking-animal story, a genre Hurston would later develop more fully. Rabbit offers to “fix” Dog’s voice to make it sweeter, a promise that the reader suspects is a trick. The fable is told in a different key from the preceding sketches: its characters are types (the sweet-voiced Dog, the scheming Rabbit, the coy Miss Coon), and its language is formalized folk speech. Placing it at the end suggests that the town’s human dramas are continuous with older storytelling traditions. The fable’s outcome is not given in the excerpt, but its presence frames the whole collection as a blend of reportage and invention. Hurston does not explain the connection; she lets the juxtaposition stand.

Because the excerpts cover only a portion of the fourteen sketches, the reader encounters Eatonville in fragments—a pleading woman, a cured fit, a wife with an axe, a rabbit with a scheme. The anthology rewards attention to recurring patterns: the gap between what people say and what they do, the social function of complaint, and the way a town watches its own. Hurston’s ear for speech and her refusal to moralize make these sketches feel like field notes from a place that is both real and invented.