Their Eyes Were Watching God
Somehow, I missed reading most anything written by Black American writers as I came of age in American public schools and studied literature at university. Granted it was the 1990s and early aughts, but it was a time in which I, in my teens and twenties, certainly thought American culture (and public education) was inclusive. In fairness, I focused my literary studies at university on British and Irish writers, taking only one semester of early American literature in the six years of my undergraduate and graduate studies. I read Fredrick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, but that was about it. As a result, I have been seeking out and reading great books by Black authors ever since. In the early years after completing my MA in literature I found myself gravitate to American authors like Toni Morrison as I attempted to fill in the massive gaps in reading. In her books I found magnificence tempered with raw pain. The power of Morrison’s writing, the moving nature of her characters and their too-often tragic circumstances shook me deeply. Somehow it took me all these years to find my way to Zora Neale Hurston’s beautiful love story Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), but it was well worth the wait.
This novel is a first-person account of one woman’s life, told in her own brave words. Janie Starks is “no more’n forty at the outside” (3), according to her friend, Pheoby, (who plays the role of audience for much of the novel’s story) when she, Janie, walks back into town in men’s overalls, head held high, seemingly single after three marriages. She refuses to demure. She is proud and fierce, but also clearly heart broken. What comes next is her own account of everything she has lived and loved and mourned up to that point. It is an inspiring story of love and trust, and yes, heartbreak too. Hovering above all the unexpected turns in Janie’s life road, however, lies a haze of hopefulness and grace. Janie is character who refuses bitterness and sorrow; instead she embraces life-affirming love and rejects fear and resentment. She is a beacon of wit and no-nonsense common sense, as well as, the heroine of a charming American love story.
Their Eyes Were Watching God incorporates the vernacular speech patterns of southern Blacks with poetic prose to create a powerful story. Hurston was, in fact, an anthropologist who studied Caribbean and Black southern culture; she brilliantly applied this study to the crafting of Their Eyes Were Watching God. From the novel’s first lines, Hurston’s prose captivate: “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” (1). Prosaic passages like these interweave with the language of the people who fill Janie’s world, the people of the early twentieth-century South. While the language may take some readers a bit of time to acclimate to, it is well-worth the attention; Hurston’s characters are dynamic and utterly human.
One of my favorite such addresses is when Janie does something “she had never done before, that is, [she] thrust herself into the conversation,” a conversation, that is, between men: “‘Sometimes God gits familiar wid us womenfolks too and talks His inside business. He told me how surprised He was ‘bout y’all turning out so smart after Him makin’ yuh different; and how surprised y’all is goin’ tuh be if you ever find out you don’t know half as much ‘bout us as you think you do. It’s so easy to make yo’-self out God Almighty when you ain’t got nothin’ tuh strain against but women and chickens’” (75). Their Eyes Were Watching God certainly succeeds in the magic of bringing characters off the page through written language; Hurston masterfully documents the lives of Southern Blacks, particularly Southern Black women, while also celebrating the hopefulness and love that runs through their lives despite the at-times unspeakable hardships.
Hurston’s achievements in Their Eyes Were Watching God are myriad. This is a novel I would urge every one to read. It captures a moment in history, but also the universals of love and grief true to all humanity. In Their Eyes Hurston presents readers with a hopeful, independent Black woman who lives her life as it comes and does not apologize for the love she has found nor the grief it has brought her.
Bibliography:
Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. Harper Perennial Modern Classics: 2006.
