Sweat

The notable irony in “Sweat” is Sykes’s demise. He brings the snake home specifically to terrorize Delia, and in the story’s final scenes, she finds it inside a laundry basket, presumably because Sykes put it there—perhaps scheming to drive her away from the house or to kill her. Though the narrative doesn’t clarify Sykes’s intentions, it can be assumed that he would be comfortable with either outcome. Delia does flee when the snake gets loose in her bedroom, but only to the barn. She does not purposely plant the snake in the bedroom to attack Sykes, but she leaves the house unattended and gives no warning when he returns at dawn. Thus, Sykes meets his ironic end when the snake strikes him rather than Delia.

Hurston is well known for her use of African American vernacular and regional speech, both in her nonfiction and her fiction writing. She used her fiction as a space in which to share these traits as matters of identity. She used idioms from the Black communities of Florida that her characters are based upon and amended the spelling on the page to capture the sound and