Question

This passage opens the short story "Sweat,” by Zora Neale Hurston, an African American novelist of the Harlem Renaissance.

It was eleven o’clock of a Spring night in Florida. It was Sunday. Any other night, Delia Jones would have been in bed for two hours by this time. But she was a wash-woman, and Monday morning meant a great deal to her. So she collected the soiled clothes on Saturday when she returned the clean things. Sunday night after church, she sorted them and put the white things to soak. It saved her almost a half day’s start. A great hamper in the bedroom held the clothes that she brought home. It was so much neater than a number of bundles lying around.

–”Sweat,”
Zora Neale Hurston

Read the passage carefully. Choose a connection a reader could make between the text and society.

In history class, we studied the lives of African Americans in the Deep South.
Last year, I read a novel about a group of domestic workers.
My Saturday chores include collecting and washing the laundry.
My family traveled to Florida last summer on vacation.

Answer 1

"In history class, we studied the lives of African Americans in the Deep South."

This passage about Delia Jones (a Black wash-woman in Florida) invites a connection to the historical and social conditions faced by African Americans in the Deep South — wage labor, domestic work as common employment, rigid gender and economic roles, and the daily struggle to make a living under segregation and limited opportunities.