A search for love and happiness from Hurston’s Eyes

For my tastes, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God was a much better read than the last heralded book on my last. This is a short one, only about 200 pages, but has lots of depth to ponder for days after you finish it.

The book follows a black woman named Janie in the early 1900’s (the book was released in 1937), who is just 2 generations removed from slavery. Janie has lighter skin than many of her friends, the result of her grandmother Nanny being raped by her white owner to father Janie’s mother. Janie never knew her mother, who was in turn raped by her school teacher (which resulted in Janie) and ran off. Janie was raised by her grandmother Nanny. Nanny was old school and thought that marriage to a man, any man, is better than nothing, so she shoves Janie to an older man as soon as she is 15 or 16, promising Janie that she will grow to love him. When she doesn’t after a couple years, Janie leaves him, goes to the next town down, and marries another man, Joe.

Joe has big plans to build an all-black city in Georgia. He builds a store to supply the area, gets houses built, gets himself made Mayor, and builds a decent amount of wealth. He makes Janie work the store, but they have money and don’t have to struggle like many of the town’s residents. However, Janie eventually realizes that Joe doesn’t really love her, that he just uses her like others always have in her life. When Joe gets sick and dies, Janie doesn’t make much of an effort to go around in mourning, and it isn’t long before she heads out of town with a new beau named Tea Cake.

With Tea Cake, Janie is finally happy. She spent years with Joe and is no longer a young woman, but she still has her looks, and has a nice nest egg of cash to sit on. Tea Cake is a hard worker, and the two head to the Florida everglades for work harvesting beans. However, their love is short lived. A hurricane hits the area their second year there, and in the ensuing chaos, Tea Cake is bit by a rabid dog. As he descends into madness, he attacks Janie, and she defends herself by shooting and killing him. She is acquitted of his murder with a self-defense plea, and moves back to the city Joe built, to recount her life to her friend Pheoby, where the book both began and ends.

If it sounds like a fairly simple tale, it is. The meat of the story isn’t involved, but so many issues are raised and explored that you can get a great view of the life of a good majority of black people in the south in the early part of the 20th century, the kinds of things you just can’t learn in school. Janie is an intelligent women but she isn’t allowed to show it, and is just there to support the men in her life. As black people, Janie and her circle are forced to show deference to whites, but even within the black community itself, black isn’t always black, with lighter skinned people like Janie treated much differently than the dark black skinned people like Tea Cake. A very well thought-out book. Really my only criticism is the dialogue. Like a lot of novels from this era, Hurston writes the dialogue in the way that words were spoken by the uneducated people of her characters, so things like, “Ah gets tuh seein whose goings tuh be aht dere.” Going for authenticism, but for me, just makes it tougher to read. I usually read pretty quickly, but dialogue like this forces me to slow down and almost sound out the words so I can understand it properly. Hurston only does this on the dialogue to convey how her characters speak, and does not in the rest of her writing in the novel. In my opinion it doesn’t add to the realism of the book, but I understand the reasoning behind it, and that is really my only quibble. A very good book.