Delia

…Ah been takin’ in washin’ fur fifteen years. Sweat, sweat, sweat! Work and sweat, cry and sweat, pray and sweat! [...] Mah tub of suds is filled yo’ belly with vittles more times than yo’ hands is filled it. Mah sweat is done paid for this house and Ah reckon Ah kin keep on sweatin’ in it.’

This passage appears in the opening scene of the story, when Delia fights with Sykes after he kicks over and grinds dirt into the laundry she is sorting. This moment represents the first time in their marriage that Delia has stood up to Sykes, which she does by pointing out that her labor is what they have been living on, demonstrating Hurston’s overall theme of the value of hard work. Delia’s repetition of the word “sweat” gives the story its title, emphasizing the physical nature of Delia’s work, which has enabled her to build a safe and lovely home through sheer determination and effort.

Anything like flowers had long ago been drowned in the salty stream that had been pressed from her heart. Her tears, her sweat, her blood.

This line appears during a period of contemplation as Delia considers her failed marriage following the fight with Sykes in the story’s opening. Expanding on the metaphor of marriage as a trail, Hurston uses the image of a salty stream to illustrate how the effects of Sykes’s abuse and neglect have made it impossible for their marriage to contain any beauty. The salt of the metaphorical stream comes from Delia’s literal salty tears, sweat, and blood, symbolizing her sorrow at Sykes’s cruelty, the hard labor she undertakes to provide for them in the face of his laziness, and the physical injuries she suffers from his brutal beatings. Flowers symbolize the safe and beautiful life Delia longs for, as indicated by the pride and comfort she takes in the garden she has planted by the house, which ultimately shelters her in the final scene of the story.

Sykes

’Course Ah knowed it! That’s how come Ah done it.” He slapped his leg with his hand and almost rolled on the ground in his mirth. “If you such a big fool dat you got to have a fit over a earth worm or a string, Ah don’t keer how bad Ah skeer you.’

This passage appears in the opening scene of the story, in which Sykes has sneaked up on Delia and thrown the whip across her shoulders, causing her to become terrified at the prospect of the whip being a snake. Sykes responds to her fear with laughter, demonstrating from his very first appearance the intentional cruelty with which he treats his wife. Throughout the story, Sykes escalates his attempts to use Delia’s fear of snakes against her, for his own pleasure at her distress and later to attempt to force her to leave and give the house to him. The image of him bent over laughing at Delia frozen in terror foreshadows the end of the story, when Delia returns to the house to see Sykes, helpless and dying of snake bites.

’Syke Jones aint wuth de shot an’ powder hit would tek tuh kill ’em. Not to huh he aint.’

This quotation comes from the scene of the men of town on Joe Clarke’s porch discussing Delia and Sykes (here spelled “Syke”). In this line, Hurston uses vivid, colloquial, and hyperbolic language to describe Sykes’s worthlessness as a man and a husband, establishing that even other men in town think little of him. In contrast to industrious Delia, whose work creates value in the community, Sykes is worth nothing—not even the bullet necessary to kill him.