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While Richard Wright presents almost every encounter between blacks and whites on southern soil as potentially life threatening and definitely dangerous, Hurston elides any such hostility in her text. Encounters between blacks and whites are harmonious and, at times, downright helpful, beginning with Hurston’s own delivery. Most black folks of Hurston’s generation in the South were delivered by midwives, but Hurston paints her delivery as specially ordained when the midwife is out of place and her mother’s birth pains begin. No matter. A local white man just happens to arrive at the house to share some freshly killed hog meat, and he comes to the rescue. Hurston writes of this Good Samaritan who comes upon her shortly after she “rushes out” of her mother’s womb:

He followed the noise and then he saw how things were, and, being the kind of a man he was, he took out his Barlow Knife and cut the navel cord, then he did the best he could about other things. When the mid-wife, locally known as a granny, arrived about an hour later, there was a fire in the stove and plenty of hot water on. I had been sponged off in some sort of a way, and Mama was holding me in her arms. (Dust Tracks 21)