Summary
As Delia arrives at the kitchen door, she notices that the snake is not making its usual sounds. She goes into the house full of hope that Sykes has taken her defiance to heart and taken the snake away, and imagines even that he might be sorry. After fifteen years, Delia is in a place where "she would hope anything that looked towards a way over or through her wall of inhibitions" (1028). She feels around in the dark kitchen for a match and finds only one in the safe. She grumbles to herself that Sykes does not contribute to the house at all, but he is certainly happy to burn through all of her supplies. She can also sense, even in the total darkness, that Sykes has had Bertha over to her house. It makes her furious.
She brings in the tubs to soak the laundry. She decides that today she will sort the laundry in the bedroom instead of bringing it to the kitchen. She sings again to herself, a song about crossing the river Jordan, and this comforts her. She opens the lid of the hamper at the foot of the bed almost with good cheer. However, she springs suddenly to the door, because she realizes that the snake is inside the hamper. It moves slowly at first, but begins to move more and more vigorously. She watches the snake slither out onto the bed, and she runs as fast as she can to the kitchen. The wind blows out her lamp and she becomes even more frightened in the dark.
She runs to the yard, shutting the door behind her. She is so frightened that she does not even wish to remain on the ground, instead climbing to the hay barn. For an hour she lays awake, crying and possessed by fear. Eventually she turns quiet, and begins to think. From this point on, a violent anger grows inside of her. For hours, she thinks, and from this comes "an awful calm" (1029). She concludes, "Well, Ah done de bes' Ah could. If things aint right, Gawd knows taint mah fault" (1029).
She falls into a fitful sleep and wakes up to a gray sky. She hears noise outside, and sees that Sykes is at the wood pile destroying the wire-covered box that used to hold the snake. He rushes to the kitchen door, but then stands outside for some minutes before entering, then for some minutes inside before he closes the door behind him. The gray sky spreads outwards and Delia climbs down from the barn unafraid.
Delia crouches outside the bedroom window. The curtains are keeping the light out but the walls are thin, so Delia hears everything. She hears the snake wake up and begin to make its rattling sound. She observes that the rattlesnake is particularly tricky because it is "a ventriloquist" (1029). It is able to make noise seem like it is coming from somewhere other than where it is, and even so may strike without making noise at all.
Sykes, meanwhile, hears nothing until he knocks over a pot lid while fumbling for a match. He has spent all of his money at Bertha's. Sykes jumps suddenly into the bedroom, now aware of the snake. Although he is drunk, the presence of the snake shocks him into alertness. He cries out, "ef Ah could on'y strack uh light" (1029). He is immobilized with fear, and the snake does not seem to move either. Sykes mutters to himself that he thought the snake would be too sick from eating to move. He leaps onto the bed when he hears a rattling beneath his foot.
Outside, Delia hears a pure, horrible, animalistic cry of pain and terror. There is nothing, she feels, that sounds human about it. The screaming continues, and so does the rattling of the snake. Sykes has pulled down the curtain shade and beats the floor with the window stick. Delia sees and hears everything and feels ill. She stretches out on the ground to collect herself. She hears Sykes calling for her in the voice of a man who does not expect anyone to come. Delia herself feels unable to move. He continues to call and shriek with pain and the sun continues to rise. When she hears him stumbling around she rises from the ground, the sun getting warm. He calls out hopefully to her as she approaches the door, and she sees him on his hands and knees. He reaches to her but is able to move only a couple inches. His neck is swollen and only one of his eyes is open. Delia is filled with unbearable pity and turns away from "that eye that must, could not, fail to see the tubs" (1030). She observes that Orlando and medical attention are too far. She goes to wait by the Chinaberry tree in the day's increasing heat for Sykes to die.
Analysis
This last section of the story is a crucial one for elaborating the character of Delia and charting her evolution over the course of the story. First of all, we see most explicitly the comfort and respite that she derives from her Christian faith. Delia willingly drives to the next town to worship without having to face Sykes, and on this day she stays until the evening "love feast," "which was very warm and full of spirit." The effect that the service has on her is described in the terms of a very physical, tangible metaphor, language that matches much of the very physical, tangible language that is used in the story, even when describing abstract things.
"In the emotional winds," the story says, describing emotions as a phenomenon of the weather, "her domestic trials were borne far and wide so that she sang as she drove homeward" (1028). The service is so powerful that it is able to carry away her burdens. In many ways it seems that church is her haven. Beyond this comfort, Christianity is also deeply important to the story in terms of its symbolism. For example, the song that Delia sings is not simply coincidental: the river Jordan, "black an' col'," is a Biblical allusion to deliverance. This foreshadows the deliverance that Sykes himself will soon receive by his own hand.
Even in Delia's new defiant state, which gradually emerges over the course of the story, she maintains hope. This is shown when she returns home and no longer hears the rattlesnake. She then goes into the house "with a new hope in its birth struggles"—more physical, visceral language to describe an abstract phenomenon. "Perhaps her threat to go to the white folks had frightened Sykes! Perhaps he was sorry! Fifteen years of misery and suppression had brought Delia to a place where she would hope anything" (1028). This is of course extremely optimistic: it turns out that far from removing the snake, Sykes has planted it in the laundry hamper in Delia's bedroom, hoping that it will kill her, presumably so that he can move in with Bertha.
However, the fact that Delia remains eternally hopeful does not mean that she has not changed. She may still wish for the best, and that people will change for the better, but she increasingly stands up for herself when Sykes treats her badly. Indeed, when Delia is nearly scared to death by the discovery of the snake in her bedroom, she undergoes her final transformation. She cries for over an hour as she lies in the hay barn, but then she becomes "quiet," and very uncharacteristically, is filled with "a cold, bloody rage. Hours of this. A period of introspection, a space of retrospection, then a mixture of both. Out of this an awful calm" (1029). The language of this passage is both purposefully ambiguous—we are not told exactly what Delia is thinking—and menacing in tone: the passage uses words that usually connote danger, like "stalked," "cold, bloody rage," and "awful calm." She concludes that she has done the best that she can, and that "if things aint right, Gawd knows taint mah fault" (1029). It is at this moment that Delia seems to decide to disengage entirely from her relationship with Sykes. She will not purposefully harm him—that would still be very unlike her, despite everything—but she will not avoid harm from coming to him if he has created that harm himself. She decides that she will not do anything to prevent Sykes from feeling the full consequence of his actions.
This sets the scene for the story's mysterious, ambivalent conclusion. The sun rises on a sky that is not blue or yellow or pink, but gray. Delia sees Sykes enter the house cautiously, but she does not stop him, even though she knows that the rattlesnake is inside. As he is dying, Delia reflects, without saying so explicitly, that Sykes must know that she knew. In an example of synecdoche, she is possessed by the image of his one remaining open eye, which represents Sykes himself. It is an eye that "must, could not, fail to see the tubs. He would see the lamp" (1030): that is to say, he would see that she had returned home before him, but did not stop him from entering the house with the lethal snake. This troubles Delia, presumably because it is not generally good Christian behavior to allow someone to go to their death. But the story leaves Delia's stance unresolved, and encourages us to reach our own conclusion on Delia's choice.
