To Hell with Dying

Alice Walker published her first short story, “To Hell with Dying,” in 1968 and republished it as a children’s book with illustrations by Catherine Deeter in 1988. While suitable for children, its depth, themes, and writing style resonate with readers of all ages with an interest in African American literature.

Alice Walker is a prominent author of novels, essays, and poems and was the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1982 for her acclaimed novel, The Color Purple. Walker often explores themes of love, mortality, gender, empowerment, and community in her work.

The guide refers to the first publication of the story in 1968 and is cited by paragraph.

“To Hell with Dying” is a first-person narrative of the close relationship between a young girl and her elderly friend, Mr. Sweet. Told in hindsight by the young girl as an adult, the story details the close bond that Mr. Sweet, the narrator, and her family share. In the narrator’s memory, the love between the narrator’s family and Mr. Sweet gives them “powers” to bring Mr. Sweet back to life in the frequent moments he is resigned to his death bed by showing him emotional and physical affection. These occasions are called “revivals.” Walker focuses primarily on the dynamic between Mr. Sweet and the narrator instead of other characters like the mother, father, and brother, which upends the archetypes of relationships experienced by children in relation to age and gender roles. 

The story opens amid one of these revivals: “‘To hell with dying,’ my father would say. ‘These children want Mr. Sweet!’” (Paragraph 1). The narrator dives into a description of Mr. Sweet, who is a “diabetic and an alcoholic and a guitar player” who lives on a “neglected cotton farm” (Paragraph 1). He is a troubled but positive character that the community as a whole appears to worry for. The narrator writes that Mr. Sweet often interacts with her and her brother while drunk, but he is the “ideal playmate” as he could dance and be weak enough to wrestle in play, “all the while keeping a fairly coherent conversation going” with the adults (Paragraph 4).

The narrator feels a special bond with Mr. Sweet; she describes this through her admiration of his physical attributes, such as his hair and wrinkles. Likewise, Mr. Sweet calls her nicknames like “princess.” The narrator remembers when Mr. Sweet would play the guitar and tell stories of his life through made-up songs with the guitar. She mentions that her older siblings used to perform his revivals when he was dying—which are revealed to be depressive episodes, or metaphorical deaths—but due to their bond, she became Mr. Sweet’s primary caretaker.

Mr. Sweet uses song and blues music to communicate his sorrows: when he “had” to marry Mrs. Sweet, when his love moved to “Chi- cag-go, or De-story Michigan” (Paragraph 6), and his doubts about the paternity of Mrs. Mary’s son, Joe Lee. The narrator recounts how Mr. Sweet crying signals “an indication that he was about to die again” (Paragraph 6). The narrator comforts him when he cries and says how she wishes she had been alive all of his life to care for him.

One day, the neighbors knock on the narrator’s family door to say that Mr. Sweet was once again on his death bed and to come quick. The children arrive, and the narrator’s father initiates the “revival” with the cue, “To hell with dying, man, the children want Mr. Sweet!” (Paragraph 10). The narrator recalls jumping on the bed and kissing and tickling him, a common show of affection. The revival works; Mr. Sweet recovers. There was only one occasion when Mr. Sweet did not open his eyes instantly following the revival because he had suffered a stroke, which scared her.

On Mr. Sweet’s 90th birthday, the narrator, now 24, is called home from her doctorate studies in Massachusetts to see the ailing Mr. Sweet. She returns to his house to find her own parents also looking “old and frail” and standing by Mr. Sweet (Paragraph 19). When Mr. Sweet recognizes her, she puts her head down next to his, and he strokes her hairline as he used to. When she opens her eyes, he has died.

As the narrator comes to terms with the finality of his death, her father passes her Mr. Sweet’s guitar as his final wish. Upon plucking the strings of the guitar and humming “Sweet Georgia Brown,” a song she noted him singing in childhood, she feels Mr. Sweets magic and realizes he was her “first love.”