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"Sweat" is an intriguing story in terms of what it is "supposed" to be about, especially in its treatment of racial issues. The key piece of a magazine eager to defy the Harlem Renaissance artistic agenda, the story would have been expected to exercise its artistic freedom and break the taboos of leaders such as W. E. B. Du Bois. Hurston had certainly grown irritated with the pressure from Du Bois and Alain Locke, her former mentor, to write with politics in mind. As she later wrote in Dust Tracks on a Road, "from what I had read and heard, Negroes were supposed to write about the Race Problem. I was and am thoroughly sick of the subject." Given this sentiment, one might even expect her to have made a particular effort to spite Du Bois's politicized view of art and write something that would be offensive to the Harlem Renaissance leadership.

. . . a closer look at the thematic implications of 'Sweat' reveals, ironically, that it can be read as an allegory for the birth of the New Negro that is distinctly in line with the conception of Locke and Du Bois.
And there is evidence that "Sweat" does defy Du Bois's agenda, since it is the story of a conflict between an abusive black man and his wife, one that results in the wife's standing by while her husband dies. As far as the black literary elite in Harlem was concerned, authors were supposed to play down interracial problems and instead help to achieve a unity of purpose and direction for the ideal of the New Negro. In 1925, Locke wrote in the New Negro that Hurston and her peers "have no thought of their racy folk types as typical of anything but themselves or of their being taken or mistaken as racially representative." This comment actually comes out of an essay that considers this ignorance a positive sign for the newly developing black consciousness and their unprecedented freedom to write what they wish, but Locke remains condescending towards authors who choose to place the race in this light. One would expect him to find a story like "Sweat" inappropriate and counterproductive to the goals of his movement.

Du Bois, who, unlike Locke, never claimed to be exclusively interested in "art for art's sake," was even more condemnatory of stories with plots he considered unflattering to African Americans. Describing the obligations of black writers to the New Negro movement, Du Bois describes the important political influence of black artists in his article "The Creative Impulse," proclaiming, "Thus all art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists." Locke was irritated when literature displayed poor, uneducated blacks, which (he felt) reinforced stereotypes and impeded progress, but Du Bois was irate, especially if they reflected some of the common white stereotypes against blacks. Du Bois was also more specific about the stereotypes to avoid, writing that whites want to see "Uncle Toms, Topsies, good 'darkies' and clowns" and that black writers should refuse to give them anything that could be construed as such.

So it is difficult to see how these black leaders could fail to condemn "Sweat." Sykes in particular has many of the "folk" characteristics of which Locke disapproved, such as a preference for larger women and a problem with wasting money, which many whites placed on blacks as a race. And Du Bois might even have seen Delia as an "Uncle Tom," which refers to the servile title character in Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel and came to be used as a label for blacks who tried to emulate or gain favor with whites. Indeed, Delia says she does not mind dirtying her black skin with sweat and blood in order to clean the clothes of white people, and she actually tells Sykes "Ah'm goin' tuh de white folks bout you, mah young man, de very nex' time you lay yo' han's on me." One would expect Du Bois to be particularly angry that Delia, in a way, carries out this warning, leaving Sykes to his death so she can be left to earn her living as a diligent servant of whites.

In reality, however, Locke and Du Bois ignored the story. Locke made only two short and conflicting references to the entire Fire!! magazine, and Du Bois did not even mention it. There was some very negative criticism from Benjamin Brawley, a prominent academic and black leader, but the major players in Harlem Renaissance leadership did not appear to be offended enough to comment.

They could have been purposefully ignoring "Sweat" and the rest of the magazine because they were worried about attracting attention to it, but this does not explain why the Crisis, the NAACP journal edited by Du Bois, made a brief and positive announcement of the magazine's publication. It is more likely that Hurston's short story did not offend Du Bois or Locke because it had more in common with the spirit of the movement than she and her fellow editors of Fire!! would have liked to admit. Indeed, a closer look at the thematic implications of "Sweat" reveals, ironically, that it can be read as an allegory for the birth of the New Negro that is distinctly in line with the conception of Locke and Du Bois. To illustrate this point, it is necessary to examine Delia's moral journey, concentrating on the values she denies and gains, and revealing how she comes to be what the black leaders actually meant by a "New Negro."

It is clear that "Sweat" is about some kind of birth. The story is heavily allusive to the Garden of Eden in the Bible, complete with the snake of temptation, and Delia is, in a sense, reborn at the end of the story with a radically different life view. This birth is not a straightforward representation of the Bible, however; it is complicated by other biblical references to the life of Jesus ("over the earth in Gethsemane and up the rocks of Calvary") and to the journey of the nation of Israel under Joshua ("Ah wantah cross Jurden in uh calm time"), by which Hurston begins to develop an allegory of the birth and emancipation of a people that mixes and matches biblical stories suitable for her goals.

In fact, in the role of the prophet or deliverer, Delia undergoes a process of reinterpreting biblical authority, just as she reinterprets the religious custom of not working on the Sabbath, in order to provide herself a realistic and original solution to her difficult life. For example, she reinterprets the "awful calm" she finds after nearly being killed by the snake into the "calm time" for crossing the Jordan, and she reassigns the meaning of her sweaty hard work for white people, in a way, in order to baptize her followers, because a prophet always has followers, in the "salty stream that had been pressed from her heart," the baptismal font of her sweat. But perhaps the clearest example is her reversal of the story of the Garden of Eden by refusing to act in the passive role of Eve and turning the symbol of abusive male power, the snake, against itself.

The allegorical lesson of "Sweat," then, must consist of the value system that Delia gains from this process of reinterpretation and rebirth. And, this is where the story's biblical imagery and allegory connect specifically to the prevailing concept of the New Negro.

The principle value system Delia denies and from which she leads her people away is that of Sykes and his abusive, phallic sexuality associated with the snake. By the end of the story, Delia has not simply retained her "triumphant indifference to all that he was or did"; she has actively and violently allowed what "goes over the Devil's back" to "come under his belly." And her vehement rejection is not just of Sykes's abuse; it is of all "he was or did"--his laziness, his preference for large women, his money-wasting, and his prankster pleasure-seeking--all of which are symbols of the discriminatory white stereotypes of blacks and the "folk type" that so irritated Locke. Under this allegorical interpretation, the whole point of "Sweat" is to reject the value system of the "old" Negro and start anew. Perhaps this accounts for Locke's indifference to Fire!! Its feature piece seems superficially offensive but actually reinforces basic New Negro ideology, such as the importance of entering a new cosmopolitan moral system and denying the folk values that Harlem Renaissance leadership considered detrimental to the image of the race.

It is important to note, however, that "Sweat" also considers the negative consequences of this New Negro rebirth. From the story's treatment of white oppression, for example, it is clear that Hurston is worried about the predominance of Du Bois and Locke's artistic agenda. In rejecting Sykes, Delia is also rejecting a philosophy that, albeit violent and abusive, refuses white oppression as her own does not. When Sykes says, "Ah done tole you time and again to keep them white folks' clothes outa dis house," he is demonstrating independence from white capitalist (and exploitative) values, unlike his wife, and Hurston is sympathetic to this. The critic John Lowe even suggests in his book Jump at the Sun that the story laments and condemns Sykes's indirect murder. By this logic, Hurston's allegory of the rise of New Negro philosophy is somewhat ironic or at least ambivalent.

Nevertheless, Hurston's ambivalence about the process she is allegorizing does not prevent her, like Delia, from allowing Sykes's ideology to destroy itself. The reader, and the author, ultimately side with Delia, and the allegory of "Sweat" overturns sympathy with the "old" Negro. Hurston's political statement is subtle about what it affirms, but it does ultimately reinforce the New Negro politics of Locke and Du Bois.