In “Spunk,” Hurston employs the use of dialect, meaning that she tries to capture the particular vernacular of her characters—Black people living in the rural American South near the beginning of the 20th century. The following passage—in which Elijah shares Spunk’s dying words—demonstrates Hurston’s use of dialect:
“The fust thing he said wuz: ‘He pushed me, ’Lige—the dirty hound pushed me in the back!’—He was spittin’ blood at ev’ry breath. We laid him on the sawdust pile with his face to the East so’s he could die easy. He helt mah han’ till the last, Walter, and said: ‘It was Joe, ’Lige—the dirty sneak shoved me . . .”
Hurston changes much of the spelling and grammar here in order to capture Elijah’s speech patterns. “The first thing he said was” becomes “The fust thing he said wuz” and “He held my hand” becomes “He helt mah han’.” These changes help readers to hear the way that these characters’ actual regional dialect would sound.
While some scholars today take issue with the use of dialect like this—as it can come across as demeaning—at the time Hurston was writing, capturing Black regional dialects in writing was a way of honoring the sounds and speech styles of (often lower-class) Black people. Hurston, in particular, grew up in a rural community in the South and, as such, is seeking to realistically depict the community from which she came. Rather than tone her characters’ dialects down to make her stories more palatable for white or middle-class Black readers, she includes them in her stories to accurately represent her community. Hurston is also honoring the rich tradition of Black oral storytelling by having characters like Elijah narrate important moments like this, rather than the disinterested and formal voice of the narrator.
