hand-turned hems This refers to sewing that is done "by hand" and not in a factory on a machine. Ruth has purchased some curtains for the new house, proof of her exuberance over the possibility of their moving away from the ghetto, for Ruth did not even measure the windows before rushing out and buying curtains. When she is asked if she considered whether these curtains will even fit the windows of the new house, Ruth says, "Oh well, they bound to fit something." The curtains, she brags, have "hand-turned hems," which would, of course, make them more valuable than machine-made curtains.
Thirty pieces and not a coin less Thirty pieces of silver was the standard price of a slave (Exodus 21:32). Judas Iscariot betrayed Jesus Christ for the same amount of money (30 pieces of silver) normally paid for a slave. Beneatha taunts Lindner with this allusion when he makes his generous offer to keep the Younger family out of the neighborhood.
Mrs. Miniver An Oscar-winning film (1942) which starred Greer Garson as Mrs. Miniver, an English middle-class housewife who appears in many scenes tending her roses. In the movie, despite the blitz bombs of Nazi Germany, Mrs. Miniver stands stalwart, the symbol of England's hope and strength. Because Mama's housewarming gift is a set of gardening tools, the card reads, "To our own Mrs. Miniver Mama's strength and her survival in a nation divided by racial struggle makes her an appropriate parallel to Mrs. Miniver.
Scarlett O'Hara When Travis gives Mama his gift, of which he is enormously proud, everyone laughs because it is an oversized gardening hat worn, as he says, by [rich] ladies "who always have it on when they work in their gardens." However, instead of looking like a rich "lady" in her garden, in this hat, Mama looks more like a slave who is about to pick cotton, which makes everyone laugh. Mama doesn't want to hurt Travis' feelings, so she tells him how much she likes it even though she probably knows better than the others how ridiculous she looks in the hat. Beneatha laughs and says that their intention in giving the gardening tools was to make Mama look like Mrs. Miniver, while Travis' gift makes Mama look more like Scarlett O'Hara (from Mitchell's Gone With the Wind, a novel that laments the fall of the South after the Civil War).
spread some money 'round Walter Lee had previously explained to Bobo that the only way to make "big" money was through the payment of required graft, which Walter Lee refers to as having to "spread some money 'round." Bobo is apparently too intellectually dense to understand that this is a term that one does not use openly. Bobo uses the expression casually, as though it were conversationally correct.
