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Poker!: High-Stakes Gambles and Social Struggles: A Journey Through African American Life in 'Poker!'
Poker! By Zora Neale Hurston is about Nunkie, Black Baby, and Tush Hawg and their mischievous parlor games. Nunkie engages them all in a rousing game of poker. "BLACK BABY Aw, you can be had! Come on and get in the game! My britches is cryin' for your money! Come on, don't give the healer no trouble!*[ last sentence crossed out in pencil] NUNKIE Soon as I play the deck I'm comin' and take you all money! Don't rush me. Ace means the first time that I met you Duece means there was nobody there but us two Trey means the third party—Charlie was his name…"
13 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1931
37 people are currently reading
266 people want to read
About the author
Zora Neale Hurston
185 books5,447 followersNovels, including
Their Eyes Were Watching God
(1937), and nonfiction writings of American folklorist Zora Neale Hurston give detailed accounts of African American life in the South.
In 1925, Hurston, one of the leaders of the literary renaissance, happening in Harlem, produced the short-lived literary magazine Fire!! alongside Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman shortly before she entered Barnard College. This literary movement developed into the Harlem renaissance.
Hurston applied her Barnard ethnographic training to document African American folklore in her critically acclaimed book Mules and Men alongside fiction Their Eyes Were Watching God . She also assembled a folk-based performance dance group that recreated her Southern tableau with one performance on Broadway.
People awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to Hurston to travel to Haiti and conduct research on conjure in 1937. Her significant work ably broke into the secret societies and exposed their use of drugs to create the Vodun trance, also a subject of study for fellow dancer-anthropologist Katherine Dunham, then at the University of Chicago.
In 1954, the Pittsburgh Courier assigned Hurston, unable to sell her fiction, to cover the small-town murder trial of Ruby McCollum, the prosperous black wife of the local lottery racketeer, who had killed a racist white doctor. Hurston also contributed to Woman in the Suwanee County Jail , a book by journalist and civil rights advocate William Bradford Huie.
In 1925, Hurston, one of the leaders of the literary renaissance, happening in Harlem, produced the short-lived literary magazine Fire!! alongside Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman shortly before she entered Barnard College. This literary movement developed into the Harlem renaissance.
Hurston applied her Barnard ethnographic training to document African American folklore in her critically acclaimed book Mules and Men alongside fiction Their Eyes Were Watching God . She also assembled a folk-based performance dance group that recreated her Southern tableau with one performance on Broadway.
People awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to Hurston to travel to Haiti and conduct research on conjure in 1937. Her significant work ably broke into the secret societies and exposed their use of drugs to create the Vodun trance, also a subject of study for fellow dancer-anthropologist Katherine Dunham, then at the University of Chicago.
In 1954, the Pittsburgh Courier assigned Hurston, unable to sell her fiction, to cover the small-town murder trial of Ruby McCollum, the prosperous black wife of the local lottery racketeer, who had killed a racist white doctor. Hurston also contributed to Woman in the Suwanee County Jail , a book by journalist and civil rights advocate William Bradford Huie.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
September 7, 2018
What just happened?!
Then again, I wonder how long it actually took to write it, so thank you, Ms. Hurston, for helpfully including the bracketed notes such as "[Handwritten: last sentence crossed out in pencil]". Also uses "X'es" for "crosses" (as in "the room...") and--at least in my Kindle version, there's...what, an anti-typo that calls a character "Beckerwood"...
And what a great line: "Somebody is goin' to west Hell before midnight!"
Then again, I wonder how long it actually took to write it, so thank you, Ms. Hurston, for helpfully including the bracketed notes such as "[Handwritten: last sentence crossed out in pencil]". Also uses "X'es" for "crosses" (as in "the room...") and--at least in my Kindle version, there's...what, an anti-typo that calls a character "Beckerwood"...
And what a great line: "Somebody is goin' to west Hell before midnight!"
August 6, 2011
Poker!
Written by: Zora Neale Hurston, Copyrighted in 1931
Published By: Public Domain (Amazon) Kindle Edition
The play was transcribed from the original handwritten manuscript, complete with penciled notations.
Poker!
Characters:
Nunkie
Too-Sweet
Peckerwood
Black Baby
Sack Daddy
Tush Hawg
Aunt Dilsey
Poker! is a very short play that takes place in a dingy front room of a shotgun house in New York. The play centers on a host of characters playing poker and talking a bunch of “smack.”
Aunt Dilsey comes in and tells them they are all going to go to hell for “gamblin’ and carryin’ on.” While she is talking the poker players are pulling aces out of their sleeves, vest pockets, and shoes.
More then one player ends up with four (4) aces and they argue. Guns come out and the shooting starts.
In the end, Aunt Dilsey returns and observes the bloodshed. She says, “They wouldn’t lissen -- It sure is goin’ to be a whole lot tougher in hell now!”
Zora Neale Hurston was an African-American woman, born in 1891. During the time the play was written she lived in Westfield, New Jersey, a short distance from New York City. My assumption is that the play’s setting is Harlem, in 1931 at the tail-end of the Depression and the Harlem Renaissance.
This was a dispirit time and the poker players were probably disheartened men. They apparently thought nothing about cheating to get money. Everyone can not have four (4) aces. In the end it was everyone’s loss.
Hurston a trained anthropologist uses the colloquial language of the day, in the play. She is writing about a class of people who are different from her background. I am not convinced that she really understands the people she is writing about. Further, I question whether gender had any influence in her portrayal of men playing poker.
Written by: Zora Neale Hurston, Copyrighted in 1931
Published By: Public Domain (Amazon) Kindle Edition
The play was transcribed from the original handwritten manuscript, complete with penciled notations.
Poker!
Characters:
Nunkie
Too-Sweet
Peckerwood
Black Baby
Sack Daddy
Tush Hawg
Aunt Dilsey
Poker! is a very short play that takes place in a dingy front room of a shotgun house in New York. The play centers on a host of characters playing poker and talking a bunch of “smack.”
Aunt Dilsey comes in and tells them they are all going to go to hell for “gamblin’ and carryin’ on.” While she is talking the poker players are pulling aces out of their sleeves, vest pockets, and shoes.
More then one player ends up with four (4) aces and they argue. Guns come out and the shooting starts.
In the end, Aunt Dilsey returns and observes the bloodshed. She says, “They wouldn’t lissen -- It sure is goin’ to be a whole lot tougher in hell now!”
Zora Neale Hurston was an African-American woman, born in 1891. During the time the play was written she lived in Westfield, New Jersey, a short distance from New York City. My assumption is that the play’s setting is Harlem, in 1931 at the tail-end of the Depression and the Harlem Renaissance.
This was a dispirit time and the poker players were probably disheartened men. They apparently thought nothing about cheating to get money. Everyone can not have four (4) aces. In the end it was everyone’s loss.
Hurston a trained anthropologist uses the colloquial language of the day, in the play. She is writing about a class of people who are different from her background. I am not convinced that she really understands the people she is writing about. Further, I question whether gender had any influence in her portrayal of men playing poker.
June 30, 2013
I gave this play 2.5 stars
The play had the makings to be a really good piece, but it wasn't long enough to really get what was going on. This was literally a quick read. You could literally read it in 5 minutes or less if you wanted to.
The play had the makings to be a really good piece, but it wasn't long enough to really get what was going on. This was literally a quick read. You could literally read it in 5 minutes or less if you wanted to.
July 26, 2017
First Time For Everything
This was a very nice and entertaining short play to read. It was actually the first time I'd actually read one outside of Shakespeare and a few others that I read as school assignments. I really enjoyed this and I look forward to reading more.
This was a very nice and entertaining short play to read. It was actually the first time I'd actually read one outside of Shakespeare and a few others that I read as school assignments. I really enjoyed this and I look forward to reading more.
December 22, 2017
I wasn’t able to write a review on this until now but better late than never! I have to say that I love Zora’s work its vibrant and fresh. This is a short read that can be finished it in a matter of minutes.(6 pages) It leaves you to wonder what this story could have fleshed out to be. It gives drama, action and puts you into the scene. As a writer and a lover of the 1920s this is what I enjoyed the most about reading this piece.
December 19, 2014
A short scene but it put me right there!
February 23, 2021
It's not as tidied up and tight as some of her other works. For the modern reader, it feels like the same rise in action and moments as Poof!. It's a one act play that highlights the limits to which one will go when desperate for money --even with one's friends. While it is not a 4 star in the story, I think it deserves that extra star because it lets us peak under the lid of Hurston's working mind.
It's not as rich as some of her Eatonville works, especially compared to the "gambling" scenes in them (checkers and cards). That said, those scenes are often far more wholesome as they take place in the country setting and have much lower stakes. Take de Turkey and de Law's card playing scene, there is showboating and even a gun at the table, but the setting and tension are completely different --the gun is for hunting, the Great Depression has seemingly not touched Eatonville as it has Harlem (the location for this story), and the people at the table rib each other but they know and like each other. Due to the setting and it's limited depth, we also don't know the characters as well as we do those in her more established Eatonville stories. So, we can only take them at their limited words in this one instance; indeed, the other characters don't seem as well acquainted with each other either --there is no winking, nudging, etc from the stage directions. These are neighbors by proximity rather than feeling and the card game is seriously for the money --money that each will not feel bad getting from another man in an equally cash strapped scenario.
Of course, there are still really amusing highlights. I particularly like when Aunt Dilsey comes out and tells them all:
"If you don't stop this card playin', all of you all goin' to die and go to Hell."
With that amusing foreshadow, of course she was right.
It's also pretty amusing to see on stage someone literally bring a knife to a gun fight. There is this escalation in anger and disbelief that their fellow man would cheat at cards (never mind that they also cheated). Hurston takes the time to mock how ridiculous these men are for both gambling when they can't afford to and for all cheating with the same high card (aces) in such a blatant way.
It's Hurston, so of course, the living colloquial language is present and rich. The LOC preserved her notes to herself and you can see that even with some over the top expressions, there are sections where ZNH pulls back and retracts sections. She slims it down or expands to express a specific feeling. Nunkie gets that long card speech to showboat, but just before that longer speech this section is edited:
"I plays the piano and Gawd knows I plays the devil.
I'm Uncle Bob with a wooden leg!"
Nunkie is a showboat, a showman on the piano because he enjoys the attention. Even so, ZNH thinks that wooden leg joke is just a toe too far over the line with his silliness, especially that close to a loud, boisterous speech about cards.
It's not as rich as some of her Eatonville works, especially compared to the "gambling" scenes in them (checkers and cards). That said, those scenes are often far more wholesome as they take place in the country setting and have much lower stakes. Take de Turkey and de Law's card playing scene, there is showboating and even a gun at the table, but the setting and tension are completely different --the gun is for hunting, the Great Depression has seemingly not touched Eatonville as it has Harlem (the location for this story), and the people at the table rib each other but they know and like each other. Due to the setting and it's limited depth, we also don't know the characters as well as we do those in her more established Eatonville stories. So, we can only take them at their limited words in this one instance; indeed, the other characters don't seem as well acquainted with each other either --there is no winking, nudging, etc from the stage directions. These are neighbors by proximity rather than feeling and the card game is seriously for the money --money that each will not feel bad getting from another man in an equally cash strapped scenario.
Of course, there are still really amusing highlights. I particularly like when Aunt Dilsey comes out and tells them all:
"If you don't stop this card playin', all of you all goin' to die and go to Hell."
With that amusing foreshadow, of course she was right.
It's also pretty amusing to see on stage someone literally bring a knife to a gun fight. There is this escalation in anger and disbelief that their fellow man would cheat at cards (never mind that they also cheated). Hurston takes the time to mock how ridiculous these men are for both gambling when they can't afford to and for all cheating with the same high card (aces) in such a blatant way.
It's Hurston, so of course, the living colloquial language is present and rich. The LOC preserved her notes to herself and you can see that even with some over the top expressions, there are sections where ZNH pulls back and retracts sections. She slims it down or expands to express a specific feeling. Nunkie gets that long card speech to showboat, but just before that longer speech this section is edited:
"I plays the piano and Gawd knows I plays the devil.
Nunkie is a showboat, a showman on the piano because he enjoys the attention. Even so, ZNH thinks that wooden leg joke is just a toe too far over the line with his silliness, especially that close to a loud, boisterous speech about cards.
April 2, 2020
Enjoyed it
Very simple, short play that offers interesting dialogue fitting of the time period. Zora scaled back the dialect here which is a little disappointing but the play still reads in an lively manner.
Very simple, short play that offers interesting dialogue fitting of the time period. Zora scaled back the dialect here which is a little disappointing but the play still reads in an lively manner.
January 10, 2019
It seems literally like a morality play, but as always Hurston’s attention to dialogue makes the characters come alive and seem sympathetic, even when judgement does inevitably come.
May 28, 2019
Too short
Interesting premise. Love the author. However this is just the beginning of a play where characters were not developed. Less than five minutes to read
Interesting premise. Love the author. However this is just the beginning of a play where characters were not developed. Less than five minutes to read
April 14, 2024
short, entretainig, blood and an easy presentation for class
July 10, 2017
Moral of the story -- don't cheat at poker unless you want a cap buss in yo' a**!
November 15, 2018
This is a very short play, with notes added to show where the Zora Neale Huston added or subtracted lines. I like this for the wonderful character accents and hysterically funny lines.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews