SPUNK

"Spunk" tells the story of the relationship between the protagonist Spunk and the antagonist Joe Kanty, seen through the eyes of the townspeople. Set in a rural southern town, Spunk, an intimidator by virtue of his size and overconfidence, flaunts his relationship with Lena Kanty, Joe's wife, and silently dares anyone including Joe to do anything about the situation. He does what he wants, when he wants and how he wants. Encouraged by the embarrassment of people in the community talking openly about his situation , and a little <">Sass'prilla, Joe makes the decision to fight for Lena. He attacks his enemy with a razor knowing that Spunk carried an<">Army 45. Spunk kills Joe, claims he did so in self defense and challenges anyone to think otherwise. Spunk makes preparations to marry Lena but the sudden appearance of a big black bob-cat that howls outside his house at night disturbs hiim. He declares that the bob-cat is no one but Joe Kanty back from hell. Spunk becomes a nervous wreck, unsure of himself and loses the confidence and cockiness he had before Joe's death. Well known for his skill in using a saw at the town mill, Spunk one day makes a tragic mistake which fatally injures him. On his deathbed of a sawdust pile, Spunk blames Joe for the accident and claims that they will meet in hell to settle the fight once and for all.

Zora Neale Hurston was an important pioneer of Black American Literature. As a member of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920's and 1930's she brought a fresh perspective to black writing, the true experience of the rural South. Intolerant of observing and writing about the Black experience within the acceptable conservative confines of literary expression at that time, and feeling the need to remind black people of their rich culture, Ms. Hurston wrote on her own terms. However rebellious the idea, her literary works were aimed at a specific audience, the black reader. Yes, anyone could read her literature and everyone was welcome to, but in order to dispel the culture created by assimilation and to reconnect black people with their roots, Ms. Hurston wrote about black people and for black people by using familiar settings and writing in familiar dialog. <">Spunk, one of her many short stories, fits the Hurston format.

In many southern rural cities in the United States, the village general store is the center of community activity. If you wanted to know what was happening with other townspeople, you went to the village store where you could make your necessary purchases and get a little gossip as well. We learn from he autobiography that growing up in Eatonville Florida, Joe Clark's store was Ms. Hurston's community center. As a youngster she heard everything there, who had babies, who died, who was dating who and all these topics were discussed without pretense and without holding back any emotion. In <">Spunk, the village store is where the story begins, where Joe gets his courage, where Spunk announces he killed Joe and where the townspeople discuss the whole affair. In her travels throughout the south to gather information for her writing, she realized that the village store senario was typical of most black southern towns, a tool to link the black reader to her work.

In addition to a link with the setting, use of the black dialect draws another connection to familiarity of the black reader with Ms. Hurston's work. With the emancipation of the slaves in the South and their exodus northward, the colorful black dialect of the south was lost. Assimilation into the northern culture caused a repression of the very colorful language, and what Ms. Hurston's works did was to jog the reader's memory, remind them of how beautiful the language was and how important it was in effectively restarting an interest in the marvelously rich cultural stories and idioms they had forgotten or even grown ashamed. The conversations in "Spunk" are all written in black dialect, very phonetic and initially a little difficult to read but with time easier to understand. The use of black dialect adds color and familiarity, more connections to her target audience, the black reader.

The black cultural experience was of great importance to Zora Neale Hurston and she spent her lifetime trying to show that importance to everyone, but especially other black people. As a Black American writer, the Black American culture was her focus but I found that the connections she used on her target audience, Black Americans, stretched to West Indians as well. I have always enjoyed Ms. Hurston's writing because I feel some connection to my Jamaican heritage. The village store being the community center of the southern black town is very typical of rural towns in Jamaica. Born and raised in the city that was not my experience but from conversations with my parents, the general store in town was where people met and talked about everything. Jamaicans have a dialect called patois which is very similar to the southern black dialect and Ms. Hurston's literary works are a pleasure for me to read because I find familiarity in her plots and settings, identifiable similiarities which remind me of my childhood in Jamaica. Ms. Hurston's writing transcends geographical boundaries and in her goal to exalt Black American culture she first grabs the reader's attention with recognizable cues and then explores the human relationship common to the characters and the reader. A sutiable motto?