[185] Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston

“All gods dispense suffering without reason. Otherwise they would not be worshipped. Through indiscriminate suffering men know fear and fear is the most divine emotion. It is the stones for altars and the beginning of wisdom. Half gods are worshipped in wine and flowers. Real gods require blood.” [45]

Whether one agrees with Alice Walker that “there is no book more important to her than this one”, Their Eyes Were Watching God is one of the most significant works of twentieth-century American literature by a woman writer. While her peers renounced her use of black vernacular text, which rendered blacks ignorant, modern critics reclaim Zora Neale Hurston, who imbued Janie Crawford with some of the questing quality that characterized her own life. Not only does she ransack the English language as well as Eatonville Ebonics, to achieve a precision of expression that exudes aesthetics, she captures the Eatonville experience through the mouth and the mind of a woman.

“Ah don’t mean to bother wid tellin’ ’em nothin’, Pheoby. ‘Tain’t worth de trouble. You can tell ’em what Ah say if you wants to. Dat’s just de same as me ’cause mah tongue is in mah friend’s mouf.” [6]

In her early forties, but her experience bespeaks a lifetime, tells the story of her life and journey via an extended flashback to her best friend, Pheoby. Her life has three major periods corresponding to her marriages to three very different men. Although slavery has long since ended, but living with her grandmother constrains her to a restricted vision of a black woman’s life. Nanny pushes Janie into a loveless marriage to Logan Killicks because the old woman was born to slavery and had no choice over her destiny. She likes her granddaughter to have comfort and money even if such amenities only come at the expense of emotion.

“The familiar people and things had failed her so she hung over the gate and looked up the road towards way off. She knew now that marriage did not make love.” [25]

Janie certainly manifests a will of her own in spite of her grandmother’s efforts to prune her and her first two husbands’ to dominate her. Rebelling against Logan’s attempts to turn her into a workhorse. She runs off with Joe Starks, a “citified man” with big dreams who eventually builds up Eatonville and becomes its mayor. Cowed by Joe’s chauvinism, she becomes “a rut in the road. Plenty of life beneath the surface but it was kept beaten down by the wheels.” [76]

After Joe’s death, against public opinion that grows to be a “mass cruelty”, she takes off with Tea Cake whose association to her at first she is ashamed of. But Janie is constantly evolving to become Janie, not someone who is bound by social purview. Like all individual thinkers, Janie Crawford pays the price of exclusion for nonconformity, much like Hurston herself, who was accused of stereotyping the people she loved when she simply sought to reclaim and amplify their voices. The charting of her fulfillment as an autonomous imagination is a lyrical novel that correlates to the need of her first two husbands for ownership of larger physical space with the suppression of self-awareness in their wife.

Whereas her hidebound contemporaries viewed her use of dialect as solecism, Hurston found a voice, with language as an instrument of injury and salvation, that is apropos of Janie’s prodigal status as well as Hurston’s herself. But she is never critical of her neighbor’s carping reactions to her. She either ignores them entirely or pities them for never having left the safety of their town and never having lived and loved as deeply as she has.

“She was sorry for her friends back there and scornful of the others . . . Only here, she could listen and laugh and even talk some herself if she wanted to.” [134]

It’s too close to conclude that she is solely defined by the men in her life. The novel is about self-revelation. At the end of the book, a whole new life lies ahead, uncharted for a still relatively young Janie Crawford. Although she will never forget tea Cake, who has opened up her world and gives his life for her, it’s hinted that she will continue to live on her own uncompromising terms; because she has unearthed many hidden layers of herself.

“…jus’ lak Ah told yuh. So Ah’m back home agin and Ah’m satisfied tuh be heah. Ah done been tuh de horizon and back now Ah kin set heah in mah house and live by comparisons.” [191]

In addition to the dialectical language that Hurston refused to bowdlerize, a free indirect discourse forms the backbone of the narrative, which constantly shifts from third to a blend of first and third person. Hurston herself becomes Janie’s echo by picking up the narrative thread in intervals, places where in real life or in real time, that Janie can’t bear to talk. Her escape from the Everglade inundation is a prime example of this shift. Tea Cake’s southern black dialect gains rhetorical distance as it becomes a third person narrative. That Zora Neale Hurston has claimed her place in American literature, belonging to the same league as F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner, is fait accompli, whether she is a legacy of protofeminist, a subject matter that sits outside of my purview, I’ll leave that to the readers. 256 pp. [Read/Skim/Toss]