Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (1937) (read in 2021)
Published by marco on
Standard disclaimer[1]
Janie Crawford returns to the village where she has a home, crossing past the hooting and hollering peanut gallery stationed outside the town store. She continues onward, ignoring them, to visit her friend Pheoby, who’d stood by her all the time she’d been gone and who was dying to know what had happened since she’d left.
The rest of the book is Janie recounting the story of her life that led to her, at about forty years old, sitting on that porch with her friend Pheoby.
Janie’s recounting starts off roughly, with the story of her grandmother Nanny, who’d raised her. Janie’s mother Leafy was a child of rape by Nanny’s overseer on the plantation where she’d lived. Leafy is therefore lighter-skinned than Nanny. Though Nanny tries desperately, she can’t protect Leafy from a miserable life in antebellum America. Once Leafy flowers, she is raped by a schoolteacher to produce Janie. Leafy takes to drink and runs away, leaving Janie with Nanny.
This is the setup for Janie’s life: a family whose last two generations were produced by rape. Nanny is pretty gun-shy about anyone getting a good life at this point, so she quickly marries Janie off to Logan Killicks, at age seventeen. She lives on the older man’s farm with him, but they’re not really a married couple in the sense that there’s any love in the relationship. Instead, Logan sees her as a hired hand and is constantly disappointed that she doesn’t do more.
One day after breakfast, with Logan working the fields, nattily dressed Joe Starks happens by and Janie takes a powerful liking to him. He returns a few times over the next few weeks, eventually convincing Janie to run off with him to an all-black Mecca called Eatonville in Florida. Joe has a few hundred bucks with him and he uses it wisely to buy up a bunch of land, cajole settlers to come and buy it from him, and then to open a general store to service the budding town.
Janie and Joe run the store, but Janie doesn’t love it. She realizes that Joe loves Joe and he’s put her on a pedestal and doesn’t think he needs to do anything else for her. The town is beholden to him for its start. It doesn’t sit too well with them, but it’s just kind of how things have always been.
“The town had a basketful of feelings good and bad about Joe’s positions and possessions, but none had the temerity to challenge him. They bowed down to him rather, because he was all of these things, and then again he was all of these things because the town bowed down.”
Page 50
Her life is naturally much better than with Logan Killicks, but she’s still got a chain on her. Joe won’t let her mix with the chatterers on the store’s front porch, though she’d dearly love to be closer to the townsfolk.
At one point, Joe shows mercy to a mule that’s being driven to its death by a stingy and mean, penny-pinching farmer. He buys the mule and sets it free in town, feeding it and giving it a new lease on life. When it dies, the whole town turns out for a “dragging out” ceremony—only Janie is not invited because she’s too good for it (obviously). The whole ceremony goes from farcical—“[Joe] stood on the distended belly of the mule for a platform and made gestures”—to temporarily fabulous, when the vultures circling the mule wait for their leader, “The Parson [, who] sat motionless in a dead pine tree about two miles off” to arrive and begin the feeding.
After twenty years of marriage, Janie is chafing at the leash. When Janie sees that Joe has gotten old and weak and possibly ill, she confronts him. But he has enough energy to tell her the way of the world.
““Dat’s ’cause you need tellin’,” he rejoined hotly. “It would be pitiful if Ah didn’t. Somebody got to think for women and chillun and chickens and cows. I god, they sho don’t think none theirselves.”
““Ah knows uh few things, and womenfolks thinks sometimes too!”
““Aw naw they don’t. They just think they’s thinkin’. When Ah see one thing Ah understands ten. You see ten things and don’t understand one.””
Page 71
Soon after, though, Joe weakens further and dies of failing kidneys. He would not let Janie see him in the final weeks of his life. When she finally gets inside his room, he is a shadow of his former self, weakly telling her to go.
“For the first time she could see a man’s head naked of its skull. Saw the cunning thoughts race in and out through the caves and promontories of his mind long before they darted out of the tunnel of his mouth. She saw he was hurting inside so she let it pass without talking.”
Page 77
Janie inherits the house and the store and quite a bit of money in the bank. This naturally draws suitors from far and wide—and the townsfolk are all of the opinion that Janie had better settle down with someone because it’s completely unseemly for a woman to own anything. This is a theme throughout the book: that the culture at that time was just unrelentingly misogynistic.
“Honey, de white man is de ruler of everything as fur as Ah been able tuh find out. Maybe it’s some place way off in de ocean where de black man is in power, but we don’t know nothin’ but what we see. So de white man throw down de load and tell de nigger man tuh pick it up. He pick it up because he have to, but he don’t tote it. He hand it to his womenfolks. De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see.”
Page 14
Janie is unimpressed with this all, enjoying a certain amount of freedom for the first time in her life. She dismisses all suitors until a young man named Tea Cake Woods shows up to sweep her off of her feet. He’s 28 years old and adores and worships her. He asks her for nothing, instead using his prodigious gambling skills—and his willingness to work—to finance his courtship. They run off to Jacksonville, Florida to be married. Janie has $200 pinned to her blouse, but Tea Cake doesn’t know about it—at first.
When Tea Cake discovers it, he actually does take it, but he spends it on a grand party that he thought she wouldn’t be interested in. This part is a bit confusing because Janie truly loves him and forgives him his trespass. He swears he can win it all back—and does! He wins back $320 dollars, returning the $200 to Janie. All she had to do was stitch him up a bit from the light knifing he’d taken when he left the game with all of the money.
They take their money and move to the “muck” in the Everglades, where they take up work planting and harvesting beans, among “[p]eople ugly from ignorance and broken from being poor.” They don’t always see eye-to-eye—and Janie is sometimes taken with jealousy—but Janie is finally in a loving relationship, where she is loved for being herself rather than as a field-hand or as a trophy or for her money.
When a big hurricane is coming in, Tea Cake and Janie decide to stick it out. This, despite the fact that all of the Seminole, most of the animals, and most of the rest of the town has long since headed east to safety. “Several men collected at Tea Cake’s house and sat around stuffing courage into each other’s ears.”
They soon regret their decision and flee their home with their cash, heading for Palm Springs, on the east coast of Florida. They hole up in a house for a while, but soon flee it, leaving their traveling companion to sleep out the storm.
On the road, they get trapped in some rising water. Exhausted, Janie grabs onto the tail of a cow that swims by. On the cow’s back is a large dog that turns on her, snarling. Tea Cake pulls together his remaining energy and swims out to her, using his switchblade to subdue the dog and send it to its watery grave—but not before the dog bites him in the face.
Janie and Tea Cake make it to Palm Springs and Tea Cake is healed a few days later. With the hurricane past, they join the exodus westward, back to the “muck” and their home. After a few days, though, Tea Cake complains of stomach pains and a lack of hunger. He is unable to even drink water. He has rabies. The doctor says that it is much too late to do anything now and that Tea Cake should be in a ward to protect people from him as he goes through the last throes of the disease. Janie can’t bring herself to do this and keeps him at home, to care for him until the last.
She’s not stupid, though, and, while she doesn’t unload his pistol, she does make sure the barrel is lined up so the three bullets will show up only after three empty shots. She keeps the long rifle for herself, having become an incredibly good shot thanks to Tea Cake’s tutelage. Tea Cake, mad with the disease, confronts Janie with the pistol, fires three times empty, and Janie puts him down with a single rifle shot to the heart.
The town turns on her, of course, because she’s a woman. There is a trial and the jury of twelve white people unanimously find in favor of Janie after only five minutes. Janie throws a magnificent funeral for Tea Cake, after which the townspeople forgive her. They instead find another scapegoat—the young man whom Tea Cake had madly—and completely unjustly—accused Janie of carrying on with.
“Us colored folks is too envious of one ’nother. Dat’s how come us don’t git no further than us do. Us talks about de white man keepin’ us down! Shucks! He don’t have tuh. Us keeps our own selves down.””
Page 39
Without Tea Cake, there is no Florida for Janie, and she returns to Eatonville and Pheoby. She is happy with how her life turned out. She wishes, of course, that she could have had Tea Cake longer, but she is grateful for the time she had. She doesn’t care about the nattering of the people on the store’s front porch,
“[…] don’t feel too mean wid de rest of ’em ’cause dey’s parched up from not knowin’ things. Dem meatskins is got tuh rattle tuh make out they’s alive. Let ’em consolate theyselves wid talk. ’Course, talkin’ don’t amount tuh uh hill uh beans when yuh can’t do nothin’ else.”
She knows that her love with Tea Cake was finally the right one. She knows that no-one should tell anyone else what to do with love, that those who do, don’t know what they’re talking about.
“Then you must tell ’em dat love ain’t somethin’ lak uh grindstone dat’s de same thing everywhere and do de same thing tuh everything it touch. Love is lak de sea. It’s uh movin’ thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets, and it’s different with every shore.””
This book is absolutely wonderfully written. The southern patois takes some getting used to, but after a while, it flows as if it were your own dialect. Although the author/narrator does not write in patois, she does have a way of expressing herself that you don’t read much anymore. For example, early in the book, she writes of the evening during which Janie regaled Pheoby with her tale,
“Time makes everything old so the kissing, young darkness became a monstropolous old thing while Janie talked.”
Page 7
After Pheoby’s gone home and Janie is in her home, alone, she feels a hint of loneliness. She goes upstairs to her bedroom, a room still teeming with memories of her first days with Tea Cake,
“The kiss of his memory made pictures of love and light against the wall. Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.”
[1] Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me of what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I’m happy for you.↩
Citations
“Time makes everything old so the kissing, young darkness became a monstropolous old thing while Janie talked.”
Page 7
“Through pollinated air she saw a glorious being coming up the road. In her former blindness she had known him as shiftless Johnny Taylor, tall and lean. That was before the golden dust of pollen had beglamored his rags and her eyes.”
Page 11
““So you don’t want to marry off decent like, do yuh? You just wants to hug and kiss and feel around with first one man and then another, huh? You wants to make me suck de same sorrow yo’ mama did, eh? Mah ole head ain’t gray enough. Mah back ain’t bowed enough to suit yuh!””
Page 13
“Honey, de white man is de ruler of everything as fur as Ah been able tuh find out. Maybe it’s some place way off in de ocean where de black man is in power, but we don’t know nothin’ but what we see. So de white man throw down de load and tell de nigger man tuh pick it up. He pick it up because he have to, but he don’t tote it. He hand it to his womenfolks. De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see.”
Page 14
“Ah wanted you to look upon yo’self. Ah don’t want yo’ feathers always crumpled by folks throwin’ up things in yo’ face. And Ah can’t die easy thinkin’ maybe de menfolks white or black is makin’ a spit cup outa you: Have some sympathy fuh me. Put me down easy, Janie, Ah’m a cracked plate.””
Page 20
“Us colored folks is too envious of one ’nother. Dat’s how come us don’t git no further than us do. Us talks about de white man keepin’ us down! Shucks! He don’t have tuh. Us keeps our own selves down.””
Page 39
““Let colored folks learn to work for what dey git lak everybody else. Nobody ain’t stopped Pitts from plantin’ de cane he wanted tuh. Starks give him uh job, what mo’ do he want?”
““Ah know dat too,” Jones said, “but, Sam, Joe Starks is too exact wid folks. All he got he done made it offa de rest of us. He didn’t have all dat when he come here.”
““Yeah, but none uh all dis you see and you’se settin’ on wasn’t here neither, when he come. Give de devil his due.””
Page 48
“The town had a basketful of feelings good and bad about Joe’s positions and possessions, but none had the temerity to challenge him. They bowed down to him rather, because he was all of these things, and then again he was all of these things because the town bowed down.”
Page 50
“Out in the swamp they made great ceremony over the mule. They mocked everything human in death. Starks led off with a great eulogy on our departed citizen, our most distinguished citizen and the grief he left behind him, and the people loved the speech. It made him more solid than building the schoolhouse had done. He stood on the distended belly of the mule for a platform and made gestures.”
Page 60
This is a farce! Wonderful!
“The Parson sat motionless in a dead pine tree about two miles off. He had scented the matter as quickly as any of the rest, but decorum demanded that he sit oblivious until he was notified.”
Page 61
Now it’s fabulous! The Parson is a vulture.
““Dat’s ’cause you need tellin’,” he rejoined hotly. “It would be pitiful if Ah didn’t. Somebody got to think for women and chillun and chickens and cows. I god, they sho don’t think none theirselves.”
““Ah knows uh few things, and womenfolks thinks sometimes too!”
““Aw naw they don’t. They just think they’s thinkin’. When Ah see one thing Ah understands ten. You see ten things and don’t understand one.””
Page 71
“Janie could see Jody watching her out of the corner of his eye while he joked roughly with Mrs. Robbins. He wanted to be friendly with her again. His big, big laugh was as much for her as for the baiting. He was longing for peace but on his own terms.”
Page 72
“The years took all the fight out of Janie’s face. For a while she thought it was gone from her soul. No matter what Jody did, she said nothing. She had learned how to talk some and leave some. She was a rut in the road. Plenty of life beneath the surface but it was kept beaten down by the wheels. Sometimes she stuck out into the future, imagining her life different from what it was. But mostly she lived between her hat and her heels, with her emotional disturbances like shade patterns in the woods—come and gone with the sun. She got nothing from Jody except what money could buy, and she was giving away what she didn’t value.”
Page 76
“Then one day she sat and watched the shadow of herself going about tending store and prostrating itself before Jody, while all the time she herself sat under a shady tree with the wind blowing through her hair and her clothes. Somebody near about making summertime out of lonesomeness.”
Page 77
“For the first time she could see a man’s head naked of its skull. Saw the cunning thoughts race in and out through the caves and promontories of his mind long before they darted out of the tunnel of his mouth. She saw he was hurting inside so she let it pass without talking.”
Page 77
“A big laugh started off in the store but people got to thinking and stopped. It was funny if you looked at it right quick, but it got pitiful if you thought about it awhile.”
Page 78
She captures the essence of memes and hot takes 80 years before we grew enamored of them.
““But anyhow, watch yo’self, Janie, and don’t be took advantage of. You know how dese young men is wid older women. Most of de time dey’s after whut dey kin git, then dey’s gone lak uh turkey through de corn.””
Page 113
“Permanent transients with no attachments and tired looking men with their families and dogs in flivvers. All night, all day, hurrying in to pick beans. Skillets, beds, patched up spare inner tubes all hanging and dangling from the ancient cars on the outside and hopeful humanity, herded and hovered on the inside, chugging on to the muck. People ugly from ignorance and broken from being poor.”
Page 131
“They made good money, even to the children. So they spent good money. Next month and next year were other times. No need to mix them up with the present.”
Page 132
“Ah hates dat woman lak poison. Keep her from round dis house. Her look lak uh white woman! Wid dat meriny skin and hair jus’ as close tuh her head as ninety-nine is tuh uh hundred! Since she hate black folks so, she don’t need our money in her ol’ eatin’ place. Ah’ll pass de word along. We kin go tuh dat white man’s place and git good treatment. Her and dat whittled-down husband uh hers! And dat son! He’s jus’ uh dirty trick her womb played on her.”
Page 143
“Saturday afternoon when the work tickets were turned into cash everybody began to buy coon-dick and get drunk. By dusk dark Belle Glade was full of loud-talking, staggering men. Plenty women had gotten their knots charged too. The police chief in his speedy Ford was rushing from jook to jook and eating house trying to keep order, but making few arrests.”
Page 149
“The next day, more Indians moved east, unhurried but steady. Still a blue sky and fair weather. Beans running fine and prices good, so the Indians could be, must be, wrong. You couldn’t have a hurricane when you’re making seven and eight dollars a day picking beans. Indians are dumb anyhow, always were.”
Page 155
““De Indians gahn east, man. It’s dangerous.”
““Dey don’t always know. Indians don’t know much uh nothin’, tuh tell de truth. Else dey’d own dis country still. De white folks ain’t gone nowhere. Dey oughta know if it’s dangerous.”
Page 156
“Several men collected at Tea Cake’s house and sat around stuffing courage into each other’s ears.”
Page 156
“The wind came back with triple fury, and put out the light for the last time. They sat in company with the others 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.”
Page 160
“The guards had a long conference over that. After a while they came back and told the men, “Look at they hair, when you cain’t tell no other way. And don’t lemme ketch none uh y’all dumpin’ white folks, and don’t be wastin’ no boxes on colored. They’s too hard tuh git holt of right now.””
Page 171
“And then too, Janie, de white folks down dere knows us. It’s bad bein’ strange niggers wid white folks. Everybody is aginst yuh.”
““Dat sho is de truth. De ones de white man know is nice colored folks. De ones he don’t know is bad niggers.” Janie said this and laughed and Tea Cake laughed with her.”
Page 172
““She didn’t kill no white man, did she? Well, long as she don’t shoot no white man she kin kill jus’ as many niggers as she please.”
““Yeah, de nigger women kin kill up all de mens dey wants tuh, but you bet’ not kill one uh dem. De white folks will sho hang yuh if yuh do.”
““Well, you know whut dey say ‘uh white man and uh nigger woman is de freest thing on earth.’ Dey do as dey please.””
Page 189
““Naw, Ah ain’t mad wid Janie,” Sop went around explaining. “Tea Cake had done gone crazy. You can’t blame her for puhtectin’ herself. She wuz crazy ’bout ’im. Look at de way she put him away. Ah ain’t got anything in mah heart aginst her. And Ah never woulda thought uh thing, but de very first day dat lap-legged nigger come back heah makin’ out he wuz lookin’ fuh work, he come astin’ me ’bout how wuz Mr. and Mrs. Woods makin’ out. Dat goes tuh show yuh he wuz up tuh somethin’.””
Page 190
Jaysus she sho is powerful good at showin de miserableness and small-mindedness and egocentricity of folks.
“Dey gointuh make ’miration ’cause mah love didn’t work lak they love, if dey ever had any. Then you must tell ’em dat love ain’t somethin’ lak uh grindstone dat’s de same thing everywhere and do de same thing tuh everything it touch. Love is lak de sea. It’s uh movin’ thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets, and it’s different with every shore.””
Page 191
““Now, Pheoby, don’t feel too mean wid de rest of ’em ’cause dey’s parched up from not knowin’ things. Dem meatskins is got tuh rattle tuh make out they’s alive. Let ’em consolate theyselves wid talk. ’Course, talkin’ don’t amount tuh uh hill uh beans when yuh can’t do nothin’ else. And listenin’ tuh dat kind uh talk is jus’ lak openin’ yo’ mouth and lettin’ de moon shine down yo’ throat. It’s uh known fact, Pheoby, you got tuh go there tuh know there. Yo’ papa and yo’ mama and nobody else can’t tell yuh and show yuh. Two things everybody’s got tuh do fuh theyselves. They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin’ fuh theyselves.””
Page 192
“Then Tea Cake came prancing around her where she was and the song of the sigh flew out of the window and lit in the top of the pine trees. Tea Cake, with the sun for a shawl. Of course he wasn’t dead. He could never be dead until she herself had finished feeling and thinking. The kiss of his memory made pictures of love and light against the wall. Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.”
Page 193