Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
My rating: 5 of 5 stars Biblical, Ebonic, Sensual, Sad, Funny, Revelatory Dusk in Eatonville, a small all-black town in Southern Florida in 1928. Janie Crawford Killicks Starks Woods returns to her house in town after having been gone almost two years living with her third husband, Vergible Woods, AKA Tea Cake, in “the muck” of the Everglades: planting and picking beans, hunting and fishing, dancing and storytelling, laughing and loving. Janie has returned to Eatonville after burying Tea Cake. Walking in unaffectedly sexy and free forty-year-old beauty though clad in muddy overalls, “her firm buttocks like she had grape fruits in her hip pockets; the great rope of black hair swinging to her waist and unraveling in the wind like a plume; then her pugnacious breasts trying to bore holes in her shirt,” barely noticing the greedy-eyed men or the envy-eyed women of the town, Janie is magnificent. No matter that the women cruelly gossip about her, hating her for looking younger than forty, for having been married for twenty years to Joe Starks, the town mayor and post master and store owner and de facto emperor, and then for having had the temerity after Joe’s death to turn down all the older decent single men’s offers of marriage in order to run off with Tea Cake, a man without fixed occupation at least ten years her junior. Janie’s only friend in town, Phoeby Watson, visits her to give her a plate of mulatto rice and to hear what happened to her while she was away. The rest of the novel depicts Janie’s life story up to that point: her attempt to find a way to live so as to “utilize myself all over.” To live not as her loving but limiting grandmother wanted her to (marrying for stability not love) but rather as she had felt during a sensual epiphany beneath a blossoming pear tree at age sixteen “With kissing bees singing of the beginning of the world!” Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) is a rich, potent novel composed in two registers: the standard-English third-person narration that is Biblical, poetic, ironic, and sensual; and the Ebonic dialogue that is demotic, southern, witty, and colorful. The gap between the two is striking, as in the following passage: “They sat there in the fresh young darkness close together. Pheoby 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. Pheoby held her tongue for a long time, but she couldn’t help moving her feet. So Janie spoke. ‘Naw, t’aint nothing’ lak you might think. So ‘tain’t no use in me telling you somethin’ unless Ah give you de understandin’ to go ‘long wid it. Unless you see de fur, a mink skin ain’t no different from a coon hide. Looka heah, Pheoby, is Sam waitin’ on you for his supper?’” I’d never read anything by Hurston before, and her writing amused, moved, and enriched me. The vivid descriptions of everything from barbecued meat (“the seasoning penetrated to the bone”) to love: “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.” And the savory characters’ lines: “If dat was my wife, I’d kill her cemetery dead,” or “Put me down easy, Janie, Ah’m a cracked plate,” or “Ah’m gonna sweep out hell and burn up de broom.” There is much about the human condition as differently experienced by men and women. Janie’s first two husbands have no appreciation for her mind or soul, wanting only an obedient worker in the house who is thankful to be kept therein. Of her first marriage, we read, “She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie’s first dream was dead, so she became a woman.” Her second husband thinks women and chickens are of equal intelligence and that she should be grateful for what he gives her, though “She got nothing from Jody but what money could buy.” Janie is thirsting for love and poetry--the bees among the blossoms--and experience: “You got to go there to know there.” The novel also says much about the difficulties of black life in America, in ways still relevant today. Janie’s grandmother (who as a slave was raped by her master) tells her, “Honey, de white man is de ruler of everything as fur as Ah been able tuh find out.” Partly as a result, “us colored folks is branches without roots and that makes things come roun in queer ways.” White and black bodies (really all the same of course) are treated with egregious difference after a hurricane. Then there is the pathetic skin color snob Mrs. Turner who takes to Janie because of her coffee and cream-colored skin, Mrs. Turner telling her that she’s too good for the dark-skinned Tea Cake and scorning dark black people as an affront to her white God. Speaking of God, the title of the novel refers to a moment of existential fear during an apocalyptic hurricane. This connects to a provocative earlier passage: “All gods who receive homage are cruel. All gods dispense suffering without reason. Otherwise they would not be worshipped. . . Fear is the most divine emotion. It is the stones for altars, the beginning of wisdom.” As she reads the audiobook, actress Ruby Dee savors every word, from the narration to the black vernacular, convincingly voicing all manner of characters and moods. She makes the audiobook a five-star experience. (I'd give the novel itself four stars because I thought some of the humorous scenes of people debating or teasing go on a little too long.) Evocative blues guitar picking periodically closes or opens scenes, perhaps to start or end different audiobook disks. Readers who want to see a mother of Toni Morrison and Alice Walker at her peak or are interested in the African American experience centered in early 20th-century Florida but speaking to all people in any time should read this book. View all my reviews
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