Their Eyes Were Watching God

by Zora Neale Hurston

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In a word: springtime In a sentence: Upon her return home, Janie tells her triptych life story to her friend Phoebe.

Synopsis: Janie grows from a spoiled little girl in her grandmother’s house to a town icon, then, after a second escape, into an impassioned, self-aware, African-American woman. Her tragic story is one filled with self-realization, heartbreak, and commentary on African-American culture.

Reactions: To read this novel is to drop oneself into Spring. It lapses days of uncontrollable virility, days of lethargic heat, days of incalculable perfection, and days of devastating hurricane. Janie’s life is marked in husbands, each with his own ideal of what the African-American woman should look like and desire. Only Tea Cake sets Janie free to wonder what she should look like and desire for herself.

I first read this book about three years ago in a Harlem Renaissance literature class taught by one of my favorite professors in the OU English Department. We delved into the various commentaries on Black freedom Hurston touches upon throughout Their Eyes Were Watching God. Though many of these nuances live in a section of my brain packed in deep beneath years of legal jargon, it was a relief to be able to ruminate once more on the many larger social implications Janie’s life embodies. Each of Janie’s marriages depict a different interpretation of African-American freedom. Logan and his farm embody the slave’s vision of freedom; Jody built Eatonville and freedom by the white man’s definition of the word; then Tea Cake came along and brought Janie to the Everglades where their people live freedom on their own terms.

One of the particularly potent aspects of this book for me during this second reading was the use of nature as a backdrop to mindset. I was drawn to the similar use of nature in this book as in One Hundred Years of Solitude to similarly captivating effect. As Janie matures, she imagines herself a pear tree. First in lusty pubescent daydreams she is flowering in wait for the entrance of a bold bumblebee, then her soul flows like pollen on the wind in search for more fertile lands. Later in the novel, nature seems to use moisture to quench her emotional needs. As Janie hides herself and her hair beneath her headcloths in Eatonville she is choked dry by the colorless dust of the town. Only once she runs away with Tea Cake into the muck where the rain meshes with the sea does her soul gush out to fall in love. In Florida, the only consistent is the heat.

Read if: you wish for the waters of freedom and love to sweep you away.