"Sweat"

Can I be honest? I have a difficult time writing these blogs. Were I simply writing a private response to the professor, I'd have no problem putting my thoughts down. But knowing that all of you are reading (or at least could read, if you cared) what I say makes me just a little more self conscious than I already am. So every time I sit down to write, feeling like I have so much to say, I get a few sentences down, then delete it and go check my facebook. Having said that, hopefully I can now move on, and discuss what I enjoyed about this short story.
Hurston uses the story of Eden, and adds a wicked twist to create her short story. What I find most interesting about this story is the obvious role reversals. First, there is the title of the story: Sweat. In the Biblical story, God tells Adam that he will earn his keep by the sweat of his brow. Yet, here we see Delia doing the earning and the sweating. Also, we have the serpent. There is still enmity between the woman and the snake, as in the story in Genesis. But again, where Adam was the protector of Eve, Sykes is the antagonizer of Delia, torturing her through her fear of snakes. The most important scene in the entire story, is that final scene, as Sykes drags himself on his belly across the lawn towards Delia who stands under the tree, watching. He has become the serpent, and here she stands at the foot of the tree, again reckoning back to the story of Eden, watching as he comes to the same knowledge as she.
After reading this story, while I liked it, I wondered 'so what does this have to do with the Harlem Renaissance?' And I started to dig a little deeper. According to Barbara Johnson "Hurston's work is often called non-political simply because readers of Afro-American literature tend to look for confrontational racial politics, not sexual politics"(itech.fdcu.edu). Baum concludes that a tension exists between the black characters' attempts to assert meaning in their lives and the white world's oppression of those lives. "Hurston's assertion . . . is of a promising world outside the dominant culture, a world created by human beings as a stay against confusion, as a potent denial of sacrifice and suffering"(ibed). A lot of interesting stuff at work in this story, as well as the rest of her works. Many critics have often taken Hurston out of the political frame work simply because her works are not inherently race related.