Spunk: Quotes About the Setting

Dusk crept in from the woods. Ike Clarke lit the swinging oil lamp that was almost immediately surrounded by candle-flies. The men laughed boisterously behind Joe’s back as they watched him shamble woodward.

This description occurs in the first section of the story, as Joe leaves the loungers of the general store to go confront Spunk in the palmetto woods. The woods operate in the story as a zone beyond the laws of the village, where Spunk can take Lena and where he can later shoot Joe without repercussions. In the first line of this passage, Hurston describes dusk not as falling on the village at once but as creeping in from the woods, as though the ungovernable quality of the natural world slips into the village with the coming of night. The village is very small, with only one street defining it as separate from the woods. The light of Ike Clarke’s lantern pushes back against the dark, but it is immediately swarmed by insects, another indication of the chaotic natural world resisting the village’s attempts to maintain its borders. This passage sets the tone for coming events, including Spunk’s lawless murder of Joe and the arrival of the black bobcat, another creature testing the boundaries of the orderly world of men.

A clear case of self-defense, the trial was a short one, and Spunk walked out of the court house to freedom again. He could work again, ride the dangerous log-carriage that fed the singing, snarling, biting circle-saw; he could stroll the soft dark lanes with his guitar. He was free to roam the woods again; he was free to return to Lena. He did all these things.

This passage comes at the end of section two, after Spunk kills Joe. In this description, Hurston reveals the reality of village life in this place and time, where laws exist but are not always enforced. The loungers of the general store agree that Spunk murdered Joe, and they know that Joe’s death was not an act of self-defense, since the razor Joe carried was not big enough to substantially hurt Spunk. However, Spunk is physically powerful, and it would take more will than they can muster to lock him up or even counter his story in court. Even once the law is involved, there is no real investigation. No outside power rules over the village, which denies Joe justice but also gives the inhabitants a measure of freedom unusual for Black people in the South of that time. The lyrical description of Spunk’s life after the court house captures the beauty of that freedom, as well as the intoxicating danger of the sawmill.

The cooling board consisted of three sixteen-inch boards on saw horses, a dingy sheet was his shroud.

The women ate heartily of the funeral baked meats and wondered who would be Lena’s next. The men whispered coarse conjectures between guzzles of whiskey.

This description of Spunk’s wake comes at the very end of the story. The details Hurston includes show the social and economic reality of life in this village. Spunk, for all his power and sway in life, is laid out in death on plain boards and saw horses from the sawmill where he died. The men in the story all work there, and this image shows how the sawmill dominates life in the village. Spunk and Lena each had their own homes, yet the dingy sheet that becomes his shroud indicates how spare those homes likely were, in a small village in rural Florida. These are not rich people. The whole village has come out for the wake, and the men and women gathered there show the social reality of Lena’s life. Although they are in attendance, they are not there to support her but to observe the scene, take advantage of the opportunity to eat well and socialize, and gossip over her future.

Next section The Power of Collective Perception