Hardin 1

David Hardin

Maggie Walton

English 2610

4 April 2024

The Living Room Nemesis of “Sweat” and “Poof!”

This essay sets out to compare these two works of literature (“Sweat”: Zora

Neale Hurston and “Poof!”: Lynn Nottage) through their shared basis in justi ed killing.

Both are stories of home, community, and revenge. By examining the nature of mortal

threat when it occurs in the home, when community is less than helpful, maybe

‘revenge’ will take a nobler connotation. Here, revenge is accepted naturally as a

necessary component of self-determination—that is, a right to live well, and use “any

means necessary” to enforce that right (X).

Story Summaries

In “Sweat,” Delia the pious washerwoman must reckon with her shiftless,

unfaithful husband Sykes. She is the breadwinner, she maintains the home, but for

fteen years he has only maligned and beaten her. The story, and their mutual hatred,

comes to a head when he begins to keep a pet rattlesnake (Delia’s special fear) in their

home. When he contrives to murder Delia at night by stealing the lamp-matches and

loosing the snake into their dark house, it bites and kills him instead—after Delia does

not take an opportunity to warn him.

fi
fi
 Hardin 2

In “Poof!,” Loureen’s husband Samuel is similar to Delia’s Sykes. He is

untrustworthy, smelly, and has beaten Loureen—sometimes quite viciously—for years.

The play begins as a frantic conversation between Loureen and her trusted neighbor

after Loureen has killed Samuel in self-defense. At this story’s beginning, a reader must

choose: do they accept the magical element, accept that Loureen has used god or

voodoo or pure hatred to speak her husband out of existence, or do they subtract it

and imagine what really might have happened? Subtracted of magic, there remains,

ominously, only the very rst sentence of the story: “Nearly half the women on death

row in the United States were convicted of killing abusive husbands” (Nottage 1063). Is

it more likely that Loureen used a kitchen knife as the instrument of self-determination?

In either case, she has killed him.

Home

Both stories are take place and receive mood in the small things of home:

spectacles, corduroys, kitchen sinks and washtubs and neverending necessary

laundry. Dinner at dinner tables, lamps and the golden light of domesticity—a home

means safety, it is the place one retreats to. But these stories’ homes so corrupted by

violence have become traps instead. Their heroines’ predicaments partake in the

universality of threat to dwelling-place and the terror of blocked retreat. The authors

corner these women in their homes and harass them until only one option remains.

The relationship of protagonist to home is di erent in each story:

In “Sweat,” the home is Delia’s. It is her sweat that paid for it (Hurston 841). In

her life, it was “Too late for everything except her little home. She had built it for her old

days, and planted one by one the trees and owers there. It was lovely to her, lovely”
fi
fl
ff
 Hardin 3

(842). It is her refuge but also her pride, and with pride she says, forebodingly, “You

ain’t paid for nothin’ on this place, and Ah’m gointer stay right heah until Ah’m toted

out foot foremost” (841).

In “Poof!,” Loureen has no power over the home. She has no job, she is

consigned there to the home and her one spot: “My place, the silent spot on the couch

with a wine cooler in my hand…” while Samuel goes where he pleases (Nottage 1068).

She must wait in the perverse unhome, cooking and cleaning and awaiting the caprice

of his violence (1063). As she does, she fantasizes about “being rid” of him (1065).

Community

The women are surrounded by neighbors. Their tortures are witnessed and

discussed by their community. But what help do these neighbors give? Can the two

protagonists rely on anyone other than themselves? These stories are two points ve

decades apart on a timeline overlapping the period of Black social revolution beginning

the mid-20th century, when great leaders began to speak of the need for self-

maintenance of community as the most urgent for overcoming the horrors faced by an

entire people (King; X). The crime of the abuser is magni ed, because by failing their

partner they have also failed a people at a crucial time.

In “Sweat,” consider a passage that begins with Delia’s neighbors proclaiming a

blunt and businesslike judgement of death for a man such as Sykes, but ends with a

snack in the afternoon heat. After listing Syke’s crimes as husband and community

member both, it is decided. “—‘an we oughter kill him.” “A grunt of approval went

around the porch. But the heat was melting their civic virtue…” (Hurston 843) Delia is
fi
fi
 Hardin 4

left to fend for herself. Her community comes to the edge of aiding her, then ‘melts

away’ almost literally.

In “Poof!”, Loureen has a good, supportive friend in upstairs neighbor Florence.

But, in the same way that Loureen has no power over her own home, Florence is

unable to o er anything but sympathy and talk because her husband is also

overbearing and abusive and would not allow it. One woman is as trapped as the other;

the police never help and family is blind (1069). The best they have is an unful lled pact

to ee together when “things got real bad for both of us” (Nottage 1067). As though

they were not bad already. Simply, the two women are alone and all but helpless in

their apartment building.

Revenge

Instead of nding a safer, softer word for these acts of self-determinaton, why

not call it like it is? It is revenge justi ed, glorious, and complete. A reader might feel

obligated to use a word more high-minded or tactful, but doesn’t a erce word t erce

action? The authors’ descriptions of culminated revenge revel in victory, they do not

apologize for it:

In “Poof!”, by the end of the story, they’re both smiling and laughing. Self-doubt

has subsided, and Loureen is feeling neither regret nor fear of the police. “Chicken’s in

the oven, you’re welcome to stay,” she says to her friend. The two do not seem like

women moved to a more hesitant moral re ection of justi ed killing. But they do make

plans to play cards. They do contemptuously eulogize Samuel’s stench with laughing

litany of goodbyes. And Loureen does sit down to eat her dinner in her kitchen (1069).
fl
ff
fi
fi
fl
fi
fi
fi
fi
fi
 Hardin 5

In “Sweat”, an odd form of pity keeps Delia from watching Sykes die. “Ah hates

you, Sykes … Ah hates you tuh do de same degree dat Ah useter love yuh … gwan

away fum me an’ mah house, ” she’d said to him days before. She hears him crawling.

She knows Sykes, his eyes swollen with poison, “must, could not, fail to see the tubs.

He would see the lamp.” Delia knows that in his last moment Sykes will know who

killed him, and that the last thing he sees will be the symbol of her labor: those tubs of

her sweat that paid for her home (Hurston 848).

Loureen is in her kitchen, “a symbol of imprisonment at the beginning of the

play, a symbol of liberation at the end,” as one scholar puts it (Narbona-Carrión).

Another elevates Delia’s mastery of her land to the mythical, or an “Adam and Eve in

reverse, a very unblissful bower which is made peaceful” (Lupton). In any case,

Loureen and Delia have reclaimed their homes by any means necessary. It is no stretch

t the language of Malcolm X to the plight of these women, as it is no stretch to

imagine that the authors—Nottage an activist playwright and Hurston a pioneering

Black academic—wanted these stories to change the reader, regardless of their race.

(Dominus; Zora). There is a burden in knowing what’s in these stories. Should we

soften our language for this place. ‘Revenge’ speaks the seriousness of this real world,

where men suddenly turn to ash and whole communities can burn to the ground.
fi
 Hardin 6

Works Cited

Dominus, Susan. “Lynn Nottage.” The New York Times Magazine. https://www.nytimes.com/

interactive/2021/10/14/t-magazine/lynn-nottage-theater-greats.html. Accessed 9 April

2024.

King, Martin Luther. “The Beloved Community” The King Center. https://thekingcenter.org/

about-tkc/the-king-philosophy. Accessed 6 April 2024.

Hurston, Zora Neale. “Sweat.” Literature: The Human Experience edited by Abcarian, et al.

Bedford/St Martin’s, 2013. pp 840-849.

Lupton, Mary Jane. “Zora Neale Hurston and the Survival of the Female.” The Southern Literary

Journal, vol. 15, no. 1, 1982, pp. 45-54. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20077687.

Accessed 18 Apr. 2024.

Narbona-Carrión, María Dolores. "The Role of Female bonding on the Stage of

Violence." Performing Gender Violence: Plays by Contemporary American Women

Dramatists. New York: Palgrave Macmillan US, 2012. 61-78.

Nottage, Lynn. “Poof!” Literature: The Human Experience edited by Abcarian, et al.

Bedford/St Martin’s, 2013. pp 1063-1069.

“Wheel of Intimate Partner Power and Control in the African American/Black Community.”

Domestic Abuse Intervention Programs. https://bwjp.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/

African-American-Power-and-Control-Wheel-Final_May-2022-1.pdf. Accessed 6 April

2024.

X, Malcolm. “Speech At The Founding Rally…” Black Past. https://www.blackpast.org/african-

american-history/speeches-african-american-history/1964-malcolm-x-s- speech-

founding-rally-organization-afro-american-unity. Accessed 6 April 2024.

“Zora Neale Hurston.” YouTube, uploaded by CrashCourse, 8 January 2022, https://

www.youtube.com/watch?v=72ABMa_PuHU&t=1s. Accessed 9 April 2024.