Their Eyes Were Watching God (original 1937; edition 2006)

I bought this novel recently and then discovered that the classic club had chosen it as their sync read, well I was delighted to have an excuse to read it so soon. It is a deeply touching novel, lyrical and evocative and I suspect will prove to be very memorable.
“Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the same horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men. Now, women forget all those things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.”
Written in the late 1930’s in those still very difficult years for African American people between slavery and the civil rights movement, Their Eyes were watching God is a novel about a young woman’s search for the freedom to be herself. Janie Crawford has been raised by her grandmother, a woman born into slavery, whose idea of freedom and security compels her to arrange a marriage between sixteen year old Janie and a middle aged man with sixty acres. Janie is a light skinned black woman, with long straight hair to her waist – her colour and appearance something for which Janie is judged for, and drooled over by both men and women throughout the novel. Janie is destined to be dictated to, decisions taken out of her hands first by her grandmother and then by the men in her life. It is Janie’s search for her own voice and independence that is at the heart of this wonderful novel. Janie finds her first marriage to be a disappointment – falling short of the ideas of love she had hoped for.
“Oh to be a pear tree – any tree in bloom! With kissing bees singing of the beginning of the world!”
When Joe Starks come walking down the road –with a story of a new town called Eatonville in Florida, a town just for black people, he turns Janie’s head and she goes off with him to start a new life.
he did not represent sun-up and pollen and blooming trees, but he spoke for far horizon. He spoke for change and chance."
Only Janie doesn’t find the freedom she thinks she will, tied to a man who likes the sound of his own voice and telling people what to do, Janie finds herself suffocated, working in the store and being criticised for what she does. It is only after this second marriage that Janie finally finds her true love, a man who seems far from perfect, going by the name of Tea-cake, he is twelve years younger than Janie, has no money and gambles, all he has to offer her is a packet of seeds. However when it comes to Tea-Cake Janie makes her own decision, ignoring the disapproval of the people of Eatonville Janie decides to take a chance on what she has always been looking for.
As the novel opens Janie – now around forty years old, returns to Eatonville after an absence of nearly two years. The last the town saw of Janie she had been leaving with Tea-cake – now she has returned alone. Did Tea-cake take all her money and run off with a younger woman? That is what the local gossips think, upon her return Janie tells her story to her friend Pheoby Watson, the story of her great love for Tea-Cake and how she has come to return on her own.
With its rich poetic language and vibrant authentic speech of depression era African-American people, “Their Eyes Were Watching God’ is a deeply poignant novel about a woman’s struggle to find herself. ( )

A nice story about a woman named Janie as she goes through life, love and marriage. The dialogue in this story really helps the reader connect to the characters along with helping the reader her the words s they would be said. ( )

I think that "Their Eyes Were Watching God' was a very interesting and entertaining book. The writing was excellent, and the use of dialect throughout the entire book gave personality and life to the characters, even if it was a little hard to understand certain words at times. Watching Janie grow and change from the beginning to the end was wonderful. Certain passages were incredibly beautiful, and caused me to go back and reread them. My favorite passage was probably on the first page, when it says "Now, women forget all those things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget. Then they act and do things accordingly." I would definitely recommend reading this book. ( )

Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. New York: Perennial Classics (HarperPerennial), 1990 (originally published in 1937).

Characters: Janie; Nanny (Janie’s grandmother); Logan Killicks (Janie’s first husband); Jody Starks (Janie’s second husband); Tea Cake (Janie’s third husband); Pheoby Watson (Janie’s best friend)

Setting: Rural Florida around the 1930s

Theme: Language as a mechanism of control; power and conquest as a means to fulfillment; love and relationships versus independence; spiritual fulfillment; materialism

Genre: Classic African-American literature; women’s literature; fiction

Golden Quote: “The day of the gun, and the bloody body, and the courthouse came and commenced to sing a sobbing sigh out of every corner of the room; out of each and every chair and thing. Commenced to sing, commenced to sob and sigh, singing and sobbing.”

Summary: Their Eyes Were Watching God follows the life of Janie Crawford, a girl of mixed black and white heritage around the turn of the century. As an adolescent, Janie sees a bee pollinating a flower in her backyard pear tree and becomes obsessed with finding true love. From there, the novel documents her emotional growth and maturity through three marriages.

Audience: 9th grade and up

Curriculum ties: Discussion Questions: 1.What kind of God is the eyes of Hurston's characters watching? What is the nature of that God and of their watching? Do any of them question God?
2. What is the importance of the concept of horizon? How do Janie and each of her men widen her horizons? What is the significance of the novel's final sentences in this regard?
3. How does Janie's journey--from West Florida, to Eatonville, to the Everglades--represent her, and the novel's increasing immersion in black culture and traditions? What elements of individual action and communal life characterize that immersion?
4. To what extent does Janie acquire her own voice and the ability to shape her own life? How are the two related? Does Janie's telling her story to Pheoby in flashback undermine her ability to tell her story directly in her own voice?
5. What are the differences between the language of the men and that of Janie and the other women? How do the differences in language reflect the two groups' approaches to life, power, relationships, and self-realization? How do the novel's first two paragraphs point to these differences?
6. In what ways does Janie conform to or diverge from the assumptions that underlie the men's attitudes toward women? How would you explain Hurston's depiction of violence toward women? Does the novel substantiate Janie's statement that "Sometimes God gits familiar wid us womenfolks too and talks His inside business"?
7. What is the importance in the novel of the "signifyin'" and "playin' de dozens" on the front porch of Joe's store and elsewhere? What purpose do these stories, traded insults, exaggerations, and boasts have in the lives of these people? How does Janie counter them with her conjuring?
8. Why is adherence to received tradition so important to nearly all the people in Janie's world? How does the community deal with those who are "different"?
9. After Joe Starks's funeral, Janie realizes that "She had been getting ready for her great journey to the horizons in search of people; it was important to all the world that she should find them and they find her." Why is this important "to all the world"? In what ways does Janie's self-awareness depend on her increased awareness of others?
10. How important is Hurston's use of vernacular dialect to our understanding of Janie and the other characters and their way of life? What do speech patterns reveal about the quality of these lives and the nature of these communities? In what ways are "their tongues cocked and loaded, the only real weapon" of these people?
Lesson Idea Deepening Our Understanding of Power and Control through Literature
1) Examining the Cycle of Abuse: Have students divide the book into four sections: Janie’s life with Nanny, with Logan, with Joe Starks, and with Tea Cake. Have students work in groups using a plot diagram. Then, in a class discussion, have students share plot cycles and examine the abuse cycles in the text.
2) Examining Relationships through Imagery: Like the media, Hurston paints images throughout her novel. As a romantic writer, she uses a great deal of nature.
• How does Hurston use nature to reflect the state of relationships throughout the novel? Have students choose a section of the text and create a dual-entry journal to examine the evidence (quote and type of imagery: auditory, gustatory, olfactory, tactile, thermal, visual) and its effect (what it shows about relationships).
3) Wrap-up: Have students’ jigsaw what they have learned in a class discussion and then create a Venn diagram to show where they see overlaps in attitudes/behavior of characters.

Awards: None, but it is considered one of the most important and influential novels in contemporary African American literature

Personal response: At first, I was completely thrown off by the southern black vernacular used throughout the novel. With this statement, I have to say that once I got used to it, it greatly added to my enjoyment of the story. Hurston’s use of dialect creates a realistic portrayal of life in the rural south during a time of much uncertainty for black Americans (after the end of slavery and before the Civil Rights Movement). She also beautifully crafts the character of Janie Crawford, a strong black woman struggling against the societal norms of the time, but all the while, constrained by them as well. Despite her circumstances, she perseveres through three marriages (two unhappy and the other, the love of her life), owning a business, a hurricane, and even a murder trial. I especially loved Hurston’s poetic metaphors used throughout the story. They brought a sense of wonderment and magic to Janie’s life story. ( )

Janie Crawford is only 16 years old when her grandmother decides to marry her off to a man who is well-respected in the community. Nanny has had to work hard all her life and she wants Janie to have an easier life. She marries her off as soon as she notices boys noticing Janie. It comes from a place of love, but Janie wants to live life, not just settle for comfort. So she sets out to live the kind of life she wants to live.

You just have to admire Janie. My gosh, does she just take a big bite out of life and chew it with gusto! She does not have an easy time of it by any means. But she weathers the hard times and she wrings every drop of sweetness out of the good times. She learns early on that she shouldn't be too concerned about what others think of her choices. She's the one who has to live with her decisions, so she's the only person she needs to please. And besides, you can't make everybody happy, so why even try?

I already knew a little about the town of Eatonville from reading Zora and Me by Victoria Bond and T.R. Simon. That was getting a little out of order, but I did like reading this and seeing where some of their ideas about the young Zora came from. The town and the alligator stories were especially interesting to me.

I did have a little bit of a hard time with the dialect that the book is written in. I think for about the first half of the book, I was laboriously sounding out each word and translating it in my head. I finally learned to just let go. I could read at pretty much my normal speed and still understand everything. I wish I had managed to do that earlier.

There was some beautiful writing in here.

“When God had made The Man, he made him out of stuff that sung all the time and glittered al over. Some angels got jealous and chopped him into millions of pieces, but still he glittered and hummed. So they beat him down to nothing but sparks but each little spark had a shine and a song. So they covered each one over with mud. And the lonesomeness in the sparks make them hunt for one another.”

“It is so easy to be hopeful in the daytime when you can see the things you wish on. But it was night, it stayed night. Night was striding across nothingness with the whole round world in his hands . . . They sat in company with the others in other shanties, their eyes straining against cruel walls and their souls asking if He meant to measure their puny might against His. They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.”

“She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun and the panting breath of the breeze when the inaudible voice of it all came to her. She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight.”

Take some time to get acquainted with this book and you will meet a character whom you won't soon forget. Highly recommended. ( )