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Allusions
Key Examples in The Gilded Six Bits
Dialect
Explanation and Analysis—Black Southern Dialect:
In “The Gilded Six-Bits,” Hurston includes a lot of dialogue between her characters, employing the use of dialect in this process. She does this by changing her grammar and spelling in order to capture the particular vernacular of her characters—Black people living in the rural American South at the beginning of the 20th century. The following passage—in which Joe reflects on the differences between his speaking style and the Northern-born Otis Slemmons’s—demonstrates Hurston’s use of dialect:
Didn’t Ah say ole Otis was swell? Can’t he talk Chicago talk? Wuzn’t dat funny whut he said when great big fat ole Ida Armstrong come in? He asted me, ‘Who is dat broad wid de forte shake?’ Dat’s a new word. Us always thought forty wuz a set of figgers but he showed us where it means a whole heap of things. Sometimes he don’t say forty, he jes’ say thirty-eight and two and dat mean de same thing.
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