Zora Neale Hurston (1926) — a washerwoman in Florida, fifteen years of a cruel marriage, and a rattlesnake in a box.
Need an easier version? Read this story at A2/B1 level →
Before we read, let's unlock the words you'll need. Think first — the Reveal only confirms.
Read each sentence aloud and say what the bold word means from the rest of the sentence. Then reveal.
You know one form of the word. Say the form the sentence needs, then reveal.
Say a, b or c, or the missing word — then reveal.
This story is still in copyright in most of the world, so here it is retold in three parts; the phrases in quotation marks are Hurston's own. In the original, all the dialogue is written in the spoken English of Black Florida in the 1920s — 'Ah' for 'I', 'gointer' for 'going to' — which Hurston, who grew up there, reproduced as carefully as music. Read each part; after it, try the quick check from memory, then talk about the question.
Eleven o'clock on a spring Sunday night in a small Florida town. Delia Jones should have been asleep two hours ago, but she is a washerwoman: she collects the white people's dirty clothes on Saturday, sorts them after church on Sunday, and puts the whites to soak, because it saves her half a day on Monday. She is kneeling on the kitchen floor beside the pile, humming a mournful hymn, wondering where her husband Sykes has gone with her horse and cart.
Something long, black and limp drops onto her shoulders and slides to the floor. For a full minute she cannot move or cry out. It is the bull whip Sykes likes to carry when he drives — and he is in the doorway, bent double with laughter at her terror. She screams at him: he knows it looks like a snake, and he knows how frightened she is of snakes. Of course he knows, he says; that is why he did it.
Then he starts on the clothes. He has told her a hundred times to keep white folks' washing out of his house; she is a hypocrite, singing and shouting in church and then working on the Sabbath. He kicks the whitest pile across the room. And something in Delia gives way. Her habitual meekness slips off her 'like a blown scarf'. She is on her feet — a thin, work-hardened little woman defying a huge man. Fifteen years, she tells him: fifteen years of marriage and fifteen years of taking in washing. "Sweat, sweat, sweat!" Her tub of suds has filled his belly more often than his own hands have. Her sweat paid for this house, and she means to go on sweating in it.
She snatches up the iron skillet from the stove. It surprises him so much that, for once, he does not hit her. He mutters that she had better stop making him angry, that he is sick of her, that he hates skinny women — and, a little awed by this new Delia, he sidles out and slams the gate. She knows where he has gone, and that he will not be back before dawn.
In the big feather bed she lies awake and looks back down fifteen years: the first beating, two months after the wedding; the wages spent in Orlando; the love she brought and the appetite he brought. Too late now to hope for love — if it were not this woman, Bertha, it would be another. Too late for everything except her little house, with the trees and flowers she planted one by one for her old age. Before she sleeps she says aloud that whatever goes over the Devil's back must come under his belly: sooner or later Sykes, like everyone else, will reap what he has sown. After that, she finds, his shells can no longer reach her.
1. What does Sykes do with the whip, and why does it work so well?
2. What is different about this Sunday night's quarrel?
1. He drops it on her shoulders from behind so that it slides to the floor like a snake — because he knows she is terrified of snakes. That is exactly why he does it.
2. For the first time in fifteen years Delia fights back: she stands up, tells him her sweat paid for the house, and picks up the iron skillet. He is so surprised that he doesn't hit her, and leaves 'a little awed'.
A hot Saturday at the end of July. The men on the porch of Joe Clarke's store are too limp with heat even to throw their sugar-cane knots. Delia's shaggy pony comes round the bend with the cart piled with baskets of clean laundry, and the porch becomes a chorus. Rain or shine, week in, week out, Delia carries and fetches. She has to, if she wants to eat: Sykes Jones isn't worth the powder it would take to shoot him. She was a pretty little thing when he got her, one of them says — he'd have married her himself. Too much beating will ruin any woman, says another; he has beaten her enough to kill three.
They talk about the other woman, Bertha, big and loud, whom Sykes has brought in from another town and is keeping at the only house that will take her. Joe Clarke, who has said nothing, says the thing the story is built on: there is no law on earth that can make a man decent if it isn't in him. Some men take a wife the way they take a piece of sugar-cane — sweet and juicy at first — and squeeze and grind until every drop is gone, and then throw her away like a chewed stalk, and hate her for being a chewed stalk in their way. The porch agrees they ought to take Sykes down to the swamp and whip him. Then the heat melts their civic virtue and they buy a watermelon instead.
Sykes and Bertha arrive, and the melon is put away. Sykes orders grandly for Bertha — strawberry soda, peanuts, chewing gum — making sure Delia sees as she drives past. This is his town, he tells Bertha, and she can have it; she can have the little house too, as soon as he gets 'that woman' out of it. He cannot abide a skinny woman.
Through the weeks that follow Delia's knees, the story says, crawl over Gethsemane and up Calvary many times. She keeps away from the village and tries to be blind and deaf; Bertha undoes that by coming to the gate of Delia's own house to call Sykes out. Husband and wife fight without pause now, and eat and sleep in silence. Twice or three times Delia tries a timid friendliness. Each time it is thrown back at her.
1. What does the porch know about Delia and Sykes?
2. What is Joe Clarke's sugar-cane speech about?
1. That she works without fail and has to, because Sykes is worthless; that she was pretty once and he has beaten her 'enough to kill three women'; and that he is keeping another woman, Bertha, in town.
2. Men who take a wife like a stick of cane: squeeze all the sweetness out, then throw her away and hate her for being used up — and no law can make such a man decent if it isn't in him.
August; the dog days, when snakes go blind in shedding and men and dogs go mad. Delia comes home to find Sykes in the kitchen doorway with his arm across it, and a soap box beside the steps. He has brought her something, he says, laughing, and pushes her towards it. Inside is a six-foot rattlesnake. She begs him to take it away — she is afraid even of earthworms — and he refuses, delighted: it wouldn't waste its fangs on her skinny legs. He tells the village he is a snake-charmer. The village thinks a heavy stick is the best way to charm a rattlesnake, but the box stays by the door, and after a few days the snake digests its frogs, comes to life, and rattles at every movement in the yard.
One day Delia sees its white fangs hooked in the wire mesh, and for once she does not run. She stands in the doorway in a red fury. That night at supper she tells Sykes to take the snake away: he has starved her and she stood it, beaten her and she took it, but this has killed everything inside her. He drinks his coffee slowly and says the snake is going nowhere, and that she has not taken nearly all the beating she will take if she stays around him. She pushes back her plate. She hates him, she says calmly — as much as she once loved him. She has moved her church membership to another town so that she need never take the sacrament beside him. He can have his woman; he can leave her and her house alone. And the next time he lays hands on her, she will go to the white folks. He answers with a torrent of insults about her body, and leaves, and does not come back that night.
Sunday. She drives to her new church, and comes home singing a hymn about crossing the Jordan 'in a calm time'. The snake's box is silent. Perhaps he has taken it away; perhaps her threat frightened him; after fifteen years she will hope anything. There is only one match left in the tin — he has been in the house with Bertha, she knows, before she strikes it. She carries the lamp into the bedroom to sort the washing from the hamper beside the bed, almost gaily, still singing. She throws back the lid. The snake is in the basket.
She runs — the lamp blown out, the door slammed — and climbs into the hay barn, where she lies for an hour, a gibbering wreck; then quiet; then thought; then a cold, bloody rage that lasts for hours; then an awful calm. She has done the best she could, she tells herself: if things aren't right, God knows it isn't her fault.
At grey dawn there is a hollow sound below: Sykes at the woodpile, smashing the empty box. He goes into the house. Delia climbs down and crouches under the bedroom window. Inside, in the dark, Sykes knocks a pot lid off the stove reaching for the matches — he has none; he emptied his pockets at Bertha's — and the rattle begins. A rattlesnake is a ventriloquist: the sound is everywhere but where it is. He leaps for the bed. The cry that comes through the thin wall is not a human sound.
Then he is calling her name, over and over, in the voice of a man who expects no answer. Her legs will not move. The sun climbs. When at last she goes to the door he is on his hands and knees, his neck horribly swollen, one open eye shining with hope — an eye that must, cannot fail to, see the washtubs and the lamp, and know that she has been home all night. A pity too strong to bear carries her away from that eye. Orlando, with its doctors, is too far. She gets as far as the chinaberry tree and waits there in the growing heat, while inside, she knows, the cold river is creeping up to put out that eye — which by now must know that she knew.
1. How does the snake get from the box into the house, and what does Delia do when she finds it?
2. What happens to Sykes, and what does Delia do — and not do?
1. Sykes puts it in the laundry hamper beside the bed while she is at church. She flees to the hay barn, lies there for hours — terror, then rage, then 'an awful calm' — and decides she has done all she could.
2. In the dark, without matches, he is bitten and cries out. She hears him calling her name for hours and cannot move; when she sees him, dying, she is overcome by pity and goes to the chinaberry tree to wait. She does not fetch help — Orlando is too far — and does not go to him.
Hurston's people speak with tremendous emphasis — 'It's mah sweat that paid for this house.' English has a special set of structures for pointing at the one thing that matters in a sentence. They are called cleft sentences ('cleft' = split), and advanced speakers use them constantly.
One each, from: What · It was… who · All · reason · What. Some sentences have two gaps.
1. she did not do was call for help.
2. Sykes, not Delia, brought the snake into the house.
3. she had left was her house and her flower-beds.
4. he hated most was that she could pay for the house and he couldn't.
5. The she moved her church membership was that she would not take the sacrament beside him.
1. What
2. It was … who
3. All
4. What
5. reason
Rewrite with the frame in brackets. Say it, then reveal.
1. Delia's sweat paid for the house. (It was… that)
2. She feared the snake more than anything. (What… was)
3. Sykes wanted the house for Bertha. (It was… that)
4. She needed one quiet Sunday. (All… was)
5. He never came back because he had no matches. (The reason… was that) — careful: what is the real reason he stayed inside?
1. It was Delia's sweat that paid for the house.
2. What she feared more than anything was the snake.
3. It was the house that Sykes wanted for Bertha. (or: It was Bertha that Sykes wanted the house for.)
4. All she needed was one quiet Sunday.
5. The reason he could not find the snake was that he had no matches. (He did come back — the sentence needed correcting as well as splitting.)
Fill each gap with the cleft frame the hint asks for. Read it aloud — hear where the stress falls.
1. (what) Delia heard first the rattle, not the scream. (it… who) Sykes had emptied his pockets at Bertha's, so (all) he had in the dark his hands. (the reason) she never moved that her legs had gone; (what) carried her to the chinaberry tree pity, too strong to bear.
1. What … was · It was … who · all … was · The reason … was · what … was
Five clefts in five sentences is too many for ordinary prose — but say them aloud and notice how each one points.
In the Speak tab, use clefts to argue: It was Sykes who…, What Delia did was…, All she had to do was…
Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960) grew up in Eatonville, Florida, one of the first towns in America founded and governed entirely by Black citizens; Joe Clarke's store porch was a real porch, and she sat under it as a child listening. She trained as an anthropologist, collected folklore across the South, and wrote 'Sweat' in 1926 for Fire!!, a magazine that lasted one issue and helped start the Harlem Renaissance. She died poor and almost forgotten; her novels were rediscovered in the 1970s, and she is now read everywhere.
The story is a folk-tale with a Bible inside it. Delia sows and reaps; her knees climb Calvary; she crosses the Jordan 'in a calm time'; the snake is 'ol' Satan'; and the man who plants the serpent in the garden of the house she built is bitten by it. But Hurston will not let it be simple. Delia does not kill Sykes — and she does not save him. She waits under a tree while he dies knowing that she knew. The porch, which saw everything for fifteen years and bought a watermelon, is the community; Delia's silence at the end is the same silence, turned back on the man who counted on it.
This is the heart of the lesson — do all three out loud. The timer is there to keep you going: fill the time with detail rather than escaping it.
Tell 'Sweat' to someone who has never read it. Move through the arc: Sunday night and the whip → the skillet and fifteen years → the porch and Bertha → the box by the door → the hamper → the barn → the dawn, the rattle, the chinaberry tree.
Use at least three cleft sentences to put the emphasis where it belongs, and at least five key words (meekness, truculent, torment, sluggish, defiant, hypocrisy, awed, ventriloquist, rage, reap what you sow).
Prosecute her: she heard him calling for hours, she knew a doctor was in Orlando, she went to a tree and waited. Then defend her: he planted a rattlesnake in her bed; the law, the church and the porch had all seen and done nothing for fifteen years. Which case is stronger — and which does Hurston make?
Tell a story — real, famous or invented — in which someone reaps exactly what they sowed, and say whether the people around them helped it happen or simply watched. Use cleft sentences to point at who did what.
Stuck for an idea? Pick one of these and run with it: