Title: Their Eyes Were Watching God
Rating: 5 Stars
This is one of those novels that isn’t just an amazing read but is also amazing in their historical context.
This is the story of Janie Crawford. Her grandmother was a former enslaved person. She gave birth to a daughter after being raped by her white enslaver. Her daughter was later raped by a school teacher. Janie’s mom eventually ran away and it was left to her grandmother to raise her.
Janie dreams of falling in love. One day, her grandmother sees Janie kissing a boy. Terrified that she’s going to end up like her mom, she immediately marries her off to the much older farmer Logan Killicks. Not an evil man, Logan is looking for a help mate, not a soul mate. He wants her to stay on his farm and work all day with him. It’s a life of drudgery with no joy for Janie. Such a life would have been adequate for someone like her grandmother, but Janie wants more.
One day she meets Joe Starks. He’s full of energy and possibilities. He wants to make something of himself. Convinced that life with Joe will be much richer, Janie runs off with him. Indeed, Joe does become prosperous and successful. He even becomes the mayor of the little town they settle in. However, Joe is not at all interested in what Janie wants. He figures that as long as he keeps her in nice clothes and a nice house, she should be satisfied. All of her dreams of love and living life seem to disappear. She feels herself becoming a husk of herself. After some twenty years of marriage, Joe sickens and dies.
Now close to forty, Janie is at loose ends. Other men come around to woo her. She doesn’t see any of them offering her anything new. One day she meets a much younger man named Tea Cake. Tea Cake doesn’t seem to want anything from her except her love. The two of them run off and get married. Although their relationship is occasionally tempestuous, at last Janie discovers love. Not only love, but Tea Cake encourages her to experience and live life as his partner, not just as his possession. Although she’s living a much simpler life than she did with Joe, she’s much happier.
All good things must come to an end. A hurricane comes through and devastates their land. During the hurricane, Tea Cake risks his life to save her from a rabid dog. In doing so, he is bit himself. Driven mad by rabies, Janie must shoot and kill Tea Cake before he kills her. She’s acquitted at trial and heads back to her original home. There she will live and luxuriate in the memories of the love that she had with Tea Cake.
It’s a wonderful story. Published in 1937, it’s considered a classic of the Harlem Renaissance.
The fact that it was written and published seems kind of amazing to me. Zora Neale Hurston was born in 1891. All four of her grandparents were born in slavery. She was born the fifth of eight children. Despite experiencing poverty, she graduated from Howard University. She studied anthropology at Barnard and at Columbia. She studied under Franz Boas, the founder of American anthropology. She wrote this novel in a seven week period while staying in Haiti.
Not even two generations removed from slavery and living in a world where white people dominated all Black people and Black men dominated Black women, Hurston managed to write this amazing novel describing a Black woman’s journey from living a life of subjugation to realizing her full self as a Black woman. You can draw a pretty straight line from this novel to later works by such authors as Toni Morrison and Alice Walker.
I found it interesting that fellow Harlem Renaissance authors did not all positively review her novel. Authors such as Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison criticized it. They thought it presented a caricature of Black life. They also did not like the colloquial dialect in which it was written.
From her anthropological work, she studied African American folklore and cultural traditions in Georgia and Florida. It would seem that this extensive research influenced the novel and informed the creation of her characters’ dialect.
Although racism isn’t explicitly called out in the novel, the fact that there are very few white characters in the novel and they are all much removed speaks to the segregationist world in which the Black characters live. It does discuss the discrimination that takes place within the Black race in the form of Mrs Turner. With Janie’s lighter skin and European features, Mrs Turner idolizes her and despises her other Black neighbors. Even when Janie insults her, Mrs Turner takes it as her due because of Janie’s supposed superiority.
This important novel is a forerunner to Black feminist writing. Even better, it is also is a vibrant, funny, moving novel that sparkles with life.
dorkenstein 