Two groundbreaking stories by Zora Neale Hurston

Two stories by Zora Neale Hurston from the 1920s, Spunk and Sweat, make a good air and any reader can see that they were groundbreaking in their time and still unusual a near-century later - among the first to effectively use Southern black dialect in a literary and not a comical or condescending way - she was really trying to get at the heart of life in black communities in the rural and obviously strictly segregated South. The first of the two, Spunk, is about a tough black guy hated and feared by pretty much everyone in the small town, who brazenly steals another man's wife - the other man is a quiet and unassuming man who now feels pressure to defend what's his - a mission he knows will be suicidal. He takes it on anyway - and his spirit then haunts Spunk in the form of, I think, a black wildcat. Story give life to a community that up till then had not appeared much if at all in serious literature - Toomer's Cane a possible exception, though I think that was later. My only quibble with this very short story is the descent into the supernatural - would have been stronger had a man and not a ghost given Spunk his due - and ZNH's strange decision to not show us the most dramatic scene, the attack - from the back - on Spunk and Spunk's vengeance. Sweat is a stronger and more developed story, about a woman working hard all her life to house and support a no-good husband who's cheating on her - and beating her into submission - and her act of vengeance, an attack involving a concealed rattlesnake. This story is the stronger because it's a great depiction of a woman's spirit rising and because we see her take a direct action - as a person, not as a spirit. It's also a much more ambitious story - a portrait of a horrible yet probably all too typical marriage - and with village folks on the fringe of the story, sad for the poor abused and beaten wife but unwilling or unable to do anything about it. Too many people are unwilling to "interfere," and as a result too many wives and children live in terror and sorrow. .This story shows one woman's rebellion against oppression - not just her husband's but the oppression by indifference of her entire community.