Consider the importance of the region, the South, and particularly, an African-American community quite similar to the one in which Hurston was raised in rural Florida, to the characters lives’ and the meaning of the story.

I think that Hurston chose her setting for her story because it shows how much hardship Missie May and Joe had to overcome to be happy. They are living in the South, a region fraught with racial tensions. In fact, this sentence very aptly sets the scene by figuratively hitting the reader over the head with how typically despondent the situation for African Americans is in the South, and how much the subjects of the story have to contend with in their everyday lives. They even live close to a fertilizer works, which I imagine is introduced in the sentence to illustrate how much the place might smell. Nevertheless, as the opening states, they are happy in their situation despite it seeming bad from the outside. Almost certainly, that is because they found each other. Love, Hurston asserts, can help people overcome even the worst of circumstances. Even when their marriage is tested, the pair is able to rise above their problems because they are truly in love.