Their Eyes Were Watching God

First sentence: 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 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.

ETA: I've read this one so many times. I just absolutely love this one. I believe this is my third time to review it for the blog???? I will say that the more times I read it, the more complex I find it. Teacake and Janie's relationship is *SO* complex. On the show more one hand, as a reader, I see the abusive nature of it at times. He even takes pride in his ability to "beat" his wife, his woman, Janie. The fact that he's proud that she's publicly seen with bruises visible all over her--is disgusting and revolting. The narration--the narrative--takes this so matter-of-factly. It wasn't DANGER, DANGER, DANGER. No, it was that's just facts. Men beat women they love, end of story. In particular, the narrative points out that while white men oppress black men, black men oppress black women. Almost like a coping mechanism. It is heartbreaking as a reader to see. On the other hand, this is the only relationship [romantic, sexual] relationship in the novel where Janie has agency, has voice. Her first two relationships she had no agency, no voice, no choice. Teacake and Janie were more equals. Janie absolutely loved him heart-soul-body. She didn't really "love" or even like or respect her first two husbands. So contemporary readers have to contemplate was this relationship good? healthy? abusive? bad? Hurston's characters are so human, so flawed. There are no simple answers.

Original review:

I've read Their Eyes Were Watching God a handful of times now. (I first read it in college.) This book by Zora Neale Hurston is just beautiful and compelling. Every time I reread it I'm reminded just how beautiful and how compelling. I never quite forget, mind you. But every time I pick the book up, I'm swept into the story and experience it all over again. (The best kind of book to reread!)

Janie is the heroine of Their Eyes Were Watching God. There is a framework to the story that allows the reader to come full circle with Janie. Readers first see Janie through an outsider perspective, a gossiping group.

So the beginning of this was a woman and she had come back from burying the dead... The people all saw her come because it was sundown. The sun was gone, but he had left his footprints in the sky. It was the time for sitting on porches beside the road. It was time to hear things and talk. These sitters had been tongueless, earless, eyeless conveniences all day long. Mules and other brutes had occupied their skins. But now, the sun and the bossman were gone, so the skins felt powerful and human. They became lords of sounds and lesser things. They passed nations through their mouths. They sat in judgment. (1)

One from the group is Janie's best friend, Pheoby, she leaves the group after a few pages, and goes to her friend bringing a much welcomed plate of food. Then, together, they talk. Janie tells her friend her story--her whole story--framing things just so, explaining and justifying as need arises. It's honest and emotional.

Janie saw her life like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and doom was in the branches. (8)

To keep it short: Janie was raised by her grandmother; when she came of age (16 or so), her grandma arranged a marriage for Janie to an older man; when that marriage failed to bloom in love and happiness, Janie is swept off her feet by a traveler passing by; she leaves her first husband and is married to a second; the two settle in Florida and are influential founders of the black community; after the third husband dies, Janie finally, finally, finally falls in love, but, is Tea Cake the love of her life perfectly perfect?! Of course not! Pheoby knew her when she was married to the second husband, when she was Janie Stark. Now, she's come back to that community without Tea Cake, and everyone wants to know EVERYTHING that has happened in the past two years.

Favorite quotes:

'Dat's you, Alphabet, don't you know yo' ownself?' (9)

Oh to be a pear tree--any tree in bloom! With kissing bees singing of the beginning of the world! She was sixteen. She had glossy leaves and bursting buds and she wanted to struggle with life but it seemed to elude her. Where were the singing bees for her? Nothing on the place nor in her grandma's house answered her. She searched as much of the world as she could from the top of the front steps and then went on down to the front gate and leaned over to gaze up and down the road. Looking, waiting, breathing short with impatience. Waiting for the world to be made. (11)

Janie's first dream was dead, so she became a woman. (25)

Her old thoughts were going to come in handy now, but new words would have to be made and said to fit them. (32)

It must have been the way Joe spoke out without giving her a chance to say anything one way or another that took the bloom off of things. (43)

Every morning the world flung itself over and exposed the twon to the sun. (51)

Janie stood where he left her for unmeasured time and thought. She stood there until something fell off the shelf inside her. Then she went inside there to see what it was. It was her image of Jody tumbled down and shattered. But looking at it she saw that it never was the flesh and blood figure of her dreams. Just something she had grabbed up to drape her dreams over. In a way she turned her back upon the image where it lay and looked further. She had no more blossomy openings dusting pollen over her man, neither any glistening young fruit where the petals used to be. She found that she had a host of thoughts she had never expressed to him, and numerous emotions she had never let Jody know about. Things packed up and put away in parts of her heart where he could never fidn them. She was saving up feelings for some man she had never seen. She had an inside and an outside now and suddenly she knew how not to mix them. (72)

All next day in the house and store she thought resisting thoughts about Tea Cake. She even ridiculed him in her mind and was a little ashamed of the association. But every hour or two the battle had to be fought all over again. She couldn't make him look just like any other man to her. He looked like the love thoughts of women. He could be a bee to a blossom--a pear tree blossom in the spring. He seemed to be crushing scent out of the world with his footsteps. Crushing aromatic herbs with every step he took. Spices hung about him. He was a glance from God. (106)

The wind came back with triple fury, and put out the light for the last time. They sat in company with the other in other shanties, their eyes straining against crude 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. (160)

No hour is ever eternity, but it has its right to weep. (184)

Have you read Their Eyes Were Watching God? What did you think? show less

After reading just one paragraph, just one sentence of Their Eyes Were Watching God, I was immediately under the spell of Hurston's gorgeous and skillful writing. Reading just those few sentences made me wonder why I ever waste my time reading anything less majestic. Here it is:

"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 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" show more (pg. 1).

Their Eyes Were Watching God is about an African American woman named Janie living in Florida in the early 20th century. As a teenager, Janie lives with her grandmother and dreams of beauty, love, and nature:

"Janie had spent most of the day under a blossoming pear tree in the back-yard. She had been spending every minute that she could steal from her chores under that tree for the last three days. That was to say, every since the first tiny bloom had opened. It had called her to come and gaze on a mystery. From barren brown stems to glistening leaf-buds; from the leaf-buds to snowy virginity of bloom. It stirred her tremendously. How? Why? It was like a flute song forgotten in another existence and remembered again. What? How? Why? This singing she heard that had nothing to do with her ears. The rose of the world was breathing out smell. It followed her through all her waking moments and caressed her in her sleep. It connected itself with other vaguely felt matters that had struck her outside observation and buried themselves in her flesh. Now they emerged and quested about her consciousness." (pg. 10-11).

Janie must grow up quickly, however, when her grandmother finds her a husband. Janie has opinions, oh yes she does, and good ideas, but her new husband doesn't care to hear them. She doesn't love him: "She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie's first dream was dead, so she became a woman" (pg. 25).

The first chance she gets, Janie runs away with another man - a sharp-dressed stranger who promises adventure and new experiences in a "town all outa colored folks" (pg. 28) called Eatonville farther south in Florida. Joe Starks catches Janie's interest because "he spoke for far horizon. He spoke for change and chance" (pg. 29).

Janie becomes the wife of the mayor and richest man in town, but in exchange she has to learn to keep quiet and do as she's told. It's no life for the smart and spirited Janie, but she lives it for years until her husband dies.

When Janie finally insists on living the life she's always wanted, she learns everything she's been missing about love, freedom, happiness, and even grief. Her adventures take her from Jacksonville, FL, down to the Everglades.

One fascinating and significant aspect of the novel is it's emphasis on oral history. Janie, having returned to Eatonville, tells her friend Pheoby her life story:

"'If they wants to see and know, why they don't come kiss and be kissed? Ah could then sit down and tell 'em things. Ah been a delegate to de big 'ssociation of life. Yessuh! De Grand Lodge, de big convention of livin' is just where Ah been dis year and a half y'all ain't seen me.'
"They sat there in the fresh young darkness close together. Phoeby eager to feel and do through Janie, but hating to show her zest for fear it might be thought mere curiosity. Janie full of that oldest human longing - self revelation" (pg. 6-7).

Her initial aim is to explain to Pheoby where she's been and what she's been doing, but she soon realizes that "'tain't no use in me telling you somethin' unless Ah give you de understandin' to go 'long wit it. Unless you see de fur, a mink skin ain't no different from a coon hide" (pg. 7). So she starts the story from the beginning. Oral histories are, of course, very important culturally for the African American community. As slaves, most didn't know how to read or write, so they told stories and sang songs. Janie's story becomes part of that tradition.

Their Eyes Were Watching God is a masterpiece on many levels. It is a masterpiece of African American literature. It's a masterpiece of women's literature. It's a mixture of poetry and dialect. It's a novel about marriage and independence. It's a novel about love and money. It's a novel about self-sacrifice and self-fulfillment. Above all, it's a novel about men and women making their way through life.

I can't recommend Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God enough. Novels don't get much better than this. show less

[I listened to the audiobook version narrated by Ruby Dee]

Phenomenal.

I'm not sure if it was the fact that I listened instead of reading it, but Ruby Dee's touch to the characterization of each person in this story made it. Without it, I doubt I would have enjoyed it as much. It is a period piece come to life, with all of its colors. Listening to this book was like listening to a grandmother tell her story on a small porch while sipping lemonade or iced tea. There are rough parts, there are happy parts, and in the end, she is (somehow) right there in front of you, and you now know how she, your magnificent grandmother, got there.

I can't say if this is a must read, but I can promise that it is a must-listen.

So I've been reading through the Harlem Renaissance lately, that period between 1920 and 1940 that had this explosion of black literature. I read Allain Locke's The New Nego, a compilation with guys like Langston Hughes and Jean Toomer - great stuff. Really smart. And I read Jean Toomer's Cane, the Harlem Renaissance's entry into the modernist novel: really ambitious, fractured, weird, brilliant but not entirely successful. I read Nella Larsen's Quicksand: great plot, great characters, not always the most elegant writing. I read George Schuyler's Black No More, a satire about a guy who develops a serum that turns black people white. Effective satire, fun to read...not quite good enough to make it into the canon.

And then I read Their show more Eyes Were Watching God, and it was just amazing. Ambiguous, shifty, deep, smart, perfectly put together.

Hurston fought with Richard Wright about the point of the Harlem Renaissance. He said black authors have to engage with white people, with the fight for equality. Hurston is defiantly unconcerned with white people: this is a book about black people, almost wholly unconcerned with what white people are up to. Today it seems silly that anyone would question that, but at the time she came under fire, and her book sank out of sight for 30 years until Alice Walker went and dove down and got it.

Hurston was an anthropologist, she collected and studied black folklore, and she weaves it into this book in a way that adds to and comments on the story - and it's also wicked entertaining. This is the earliest mention I know of The Dozens, the game of dissing that today comprises my entire relationship with TD.

It's held up since then and it holds up now. Loads of people have attacked it as being a belated black entry into the canon for PC reasons. But why this and not those other books I mentioned above? This because it's better. It's wonderful. This is a book that stands up.

I was hanging out with this friend of mine tonight who I hadn't seen for a few years and she was like "Dude, you read sortof a weird amount of books so I can't really keep up on FB, but anything stand out for you over the past...years?" and I was like "Yeah, Their Eyes." I like this book. show less

11.24.2024 Read this as a GR group On the Southern Trail selection for November. This is what I thought this time around:

This was my second read, a slower, fuller read. Now it's double love for me.

I'd say that the story is about exactly what Hurston has Janie announce in the beginning: it's about a woman finally making it to the "Grand Lodge" of living. There are sublime passages throughout about Janie's struggle to get there. And make it she did, finally fully participating in a community, enjoying it with a man that made her laugh and feel good to be alive. She got her hands dirty, her hair mussy. She danced, sang, and laughed too loud. She got to put in her "dozens" (the banter of insults) without remonstration.

What she reached was a show more distinctly female experience that included navigating among men with manly egos broken on the rack of White America, who in turn used violence of word and deed against those even weaker.

In the end, Janie (and Hurston, too, I think) did not offer a single apology for surviving after being made of mud by God, broken into a million pieces. She still glittered.

It is sad how much flap Hurston took for this perspective. Her literary contemporaries, Wright and Ellison, were part of the broken men, strongly rejected a realistic aspect of their culture. They couldn't embrace it as valid as any other culture is because they wanted a place of respect at the White table. Even the later 2017 Trudier Harris thesis didn't accept, in my opinion, the fullness of the messge of the novel. She discounted Janie by using the concept of "infertility," as if fertility is somehow a kind of overriding worthiness. (Insert idiotic Single Cat Lady comment here.)

Thankfully there were and are other African-Americans that see and share Hurston's larger perspective. In my copy of the novel there is a splendid literary Afterword by Henry Louis Gates, Jr where he writes, "...her work celebrates rather than moralizes." Yes! Hurston celebrated her culture, and especially given the time it was written, that is her genius. And I can't express how much I loved that.

Another intellectual giant, James Baldwin, in his 1963 The Fire Next Time made the same point in essay form as Hurston made in this novel: that African-Americans should not modify their culture, their souls, so as to be accepted by White Americans. Baldwin reminds us that White Americans hurt themselves, hurt their very own souls, by their prejudices. Hurston's vision of her culture's "glittering," was echoed in Baldwin's vision of cultures uniting as "all the stars aflame."

In her 1928 essay "How it Feels to Be Colored Me", Hurston writes she is not "tragically colored" and explains "No, I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife."

So that's exactly how I read this work--as a genius ode to the joys of life, even as the world was, is, and always is so very worthy of weeping.

05.27.2020 First reading review:
I have just closed Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. Aka I-am-not-tragically-colored-Hurston.*

It took a few chapters, to begin getting those brain zing "Oh!" feelings. There's something here. I went on. Started getting a deeper pleasure and became awash in various things to think about. Oh! I was reading a lyrical and ethnographic ode to joy. I was reading an anthropological snapshot of the black American south of the 1930s. I was reading early feminism, in the best sense of that word. I became fully engaged and sighed at the end.

It was one of those times I wished I was a Book Club kind of person. Who did the three men Janie marry represent from the broader world? Why isn't romantic love generally considered as a vitally important human condition to write about, except when it causes high drama or trauma? Did I think Janie's relationship with Tea Cake was a healthy one? How deliberate was it that Hurston wrote about an exclusive black American experience without much mention of whites and none as distinct characters?

I pecked around a bit to learn more of the back story about Hurston and this novel.

I saw that Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, her peers, more than missed her contribution, they dismissed it. Ellison called Their Eyes a "blight." Wright was equally scathing, reviewing the work as a deliberate kowtowing to white readers' stereotypes. I'm suspicious of their motives, myself, wondering if they didn't have their important political socio-economic blinders on. Bah. She didn't see her life as a "plight" -- although Lord knows, she didn't have it easy, especially near the end. I wish Hurston would have been alive to enjoy the accolades and profits, and sorry she had to have known some unrighteous stings.

Now I gotta give myself a cheer on this last little bit, a touch of serendipity. This was my first book choice after my personal, big To Read dump where I deleted 600 titles that over the years I had added due to some ridiculous sense of immortality. This book is exactly the kind for which I was clearing the decks. Hope it's a good sign of more things to come.

Time to go back and read the foreword by Edwidge Danticat and the afterword by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. for a serious post-read craving.

Update: I've read the foreword and the afterword and the special sections including a timeline and a couple of essays by Valerie Boyd. Cravings satisfied for now. Man, Gates is awesome. Bravo HarperCollins.

A humble one hundred thanks to Alice Walker for resurrecting Hurston's work in the 1970s.

*A quick must-read is Hurston's essay "How It Feels to be Colored Me." A lovely 10 minute audio rendition can be heard on Youtube here, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Cgjj6Pp7Co show less

After I finished reading this, I felt like Pheoby: "Ah done growed ten feet higher from jus' listenin' tuh you, Janie."

Although some of this book was troubling to this 21st-century feminist, when the book and its protagonist Janie are taken on their own terms, it's a compelling story, an epic romance, and a womanist version of the heroic quest. Above all, it does what every excellent book does: help us learn more about what it means to be human.

I read this on a yearly basis for a class I teach. It's a quick read, but it's packed with an unprecedented amount of substance. Toni Morrison and Alice Walker owe everything to this modern novel. The humor, pain, and beauty of the southern black woman's experience in early-twentieth century America is perfectly captured in remarkable, poetic prose. My students struggle with Hurston's dialogue, but that's what gives these characters such a realistic and beautiful voice. Required reading.