What Happens?

When discussing Zora Neale Hurston’s “Turpentine Love,” a question arose about Jim Merchant, and we were asked to consider what makes him such a peculiar man. My answer comes from the first sentence where Hurston writes, “Jim Merchant is always in good humor—even with his wife” (245). Culture today plays heavily on the idea of the worsening marriage, teaching that the longer two people are married, the more likely they are to become resentful to each other. Jim Merchant is peculiar in that this cultural thought has yet to intrude on his marriage, and after many years of matrimony, he still manages to have good humor with his wife. Of course, her being unable to speak [“She has had all her teeth pulled out” (245).] might be the ultimate reason for Mr. Merchant’s long-lasting humor.

The most complicated vignette of Hurston’s we read has to be “Pants and Cal’line.” The open ending leaves a reader with many possible scenarios to finish the story with, and no matter how you want to end it, there are all sorts of implications to draw out. Does she only scare her cheating husband, or does she finally put a definitive end to his cheating? Does she go for the mistress instead, opting to leave the husband alone? We learn early on that she was prone to do “things to the women, surely. But most any townsman would have said that she did them because she liked the novel situation and the queer things she could bring out of it” (246). Is taking an axe to her husband’s mistress merely a novel situation for her?

When I first read the story, all I thought was the simple, “something bad is going to happen,” and did not give it much more consideration than that. However, thinking more about it now, I am starting to reconsider my original notion. Early in the semester, the various pieces of theory warned against humor which involves violence that is too realistic, since when we know someone becomes seriously hurt, much of the comedic effect is lost. Considering how taking an axe to another person is an extremely grizzly form of murder, does the piece lose something if you believe that is how it ends?

The townspeople are what save it for me, because when seeing her pass with the axe, they are set to “giggling and betting” (247). Their flippant attitude of betting on Cal’line’s actions makes me believe what she ultimately does is not too horrible. How can you sit on a porch and place money on whether or not a wife is going to brutally slay her husband and his girlfriend? Being privileged to previous episodes of the Potts’ problems, it is as if they know something the audience cannot possibly consider in their surmising of what happens. Still, this whole incident is presumably the first time Mitchell Potts tried to assert his “manly” authority in the household, so even though the townspeople laugh as if the axe is just another harmless fit of Cal’line’s, they might be wrong. There is a first time for everything, and this might become the first time Mitchell will not be able to cheat again.

Hurston, Zora Neale. “Pants and Cal'line.” Redressing the Balance: American Women's Literary Humor from Colonial Times to the 1980s. Ed. Nancy Walker and Zita Dresner. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1988. 246-247.

---. “Turpentine Love.” Redressing the Balance: American Women's Literary Humor from Colonial Times to the 1980s. Ed. Nancy Walker and Zita Dresner. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1988. 245.