Notes

Symbolism in Zora Neale Hurston "Sweat" is prevalent throughout the story, Showing up in the form of religion, snakes, and even sugarcane.
The story starts off with Hurston characterizing Delia as hardworking, relatively intelligent, and SKINNY. Skinny being one of the traits that sykes absolutely despises.
Towards the end sykes takes all the matches and leaves them at Berthas home
throughout the story he repeatedly attempts to provoke jealousy from Delia and uses her as a scapegoat for everything wrong in his life
Delia
is ugly in sykes eyes and we can see that as the story progresses, leading sykes to dislike her even more than he did when she was just skinny. now she's ugly too!
The townsfolk all discuss sykes wrongdoings and even talk about killing him but once he comes over to them they cease all talking about him and move onto another subject Religous symbolism helps see the bigger picture set by the Theme of the story and how it essentially locks Delia into a fruitless marriage with sykes while he goes out and cheats on her every weekend with bertha. Sykes sucks the theoretical sugar out of Delia with the repeated beatings, similar to sugarcane and how once it has been sucked dry it is thrown to the side Delia is beaten, verbally abused, and threatened the whole marriage up until the end where he calls out to her not even expecting a response knowing that he is most likely already dead
As the story advances we see that Sykes feels superior to the town because of his ability to drive a car, something not very common for a black man in 1920 and his relatively well paying job