"Ships at a distance have every man's wishes on board." That's the wonderful first sentence of Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. LOVED this book. It moved me when I didn't expect it to. I cried at the end. I wasn't expecting that I would feel so emotional about it, but I did. It's a psychologically acute novel that has a very uplifting ending. I think I was a little surprised to discover that this novel is about romantic love and its importance in the life of protagonist.
It did remind me of The Color Purple, which I read years ago, before the movie was made - and which I also loved, and which I also found uplifting.
One difficulty that I had reading the book is that there is a lot of regional dialect and slang. The dialogue is rendered phonetically and I found that I sometimes had to sound it out to understand exactly what the characters were saying. I found that I did want to know exactly what the characters were saying. There were a few times that I ran across words that I did not recognize and did not understand the meaning of simply from context, but it didn't prevent me from making a good guess based on the context. I understand that some readers would find this very challenging. I think that curiosity drove me, and the instinctive sense of identification I felt with Janie, the protagonist.
I've always wondered what the meaning of the phrase, "Their Eyes Were Watching God," was. I found out when I read the book, of course. Late in the book, the characters are caught in a hurricane - a bad one, like Hurricane Florence. As the people who've chosen to remain behind hear the wind howl they begin to understand how cataclysmic the storm is that's coming. They're waiting to see just how bad it is going to be, and they're terrified: their eyes were watching God.
Janie and Tea Cake are attempting to wait out the storm in their home:
"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."
The description of the hurricane feels very realistic, and it reminded me of the news reports we've heard lately about hurricanes striking the U.S. coast. In fact, Hurston's account was inspired by the 1928 Lake Okeechobee hurricane, which you can read about it on Wikipedia if you're interested.
Their Eyes is an affirming novel. Janie is raised by her grandmother, a former slave. When, at 16, Janie becomes interested in boys, her grandmother is afraid for her. In response, her grandmother, Nanny, marries Janie off to an older farmer. To Janie's grandmother, formal marriage to a land-owning farmer who can offer Janie financial security is the best way to protect Janie. Janie, on the other hand, is unhappy. She has ideas about love her farmer husband does not fulfill.
She meets a man, Jody, who has money and is ready to buy property and settle down. He wants Janie to run away with him. She is impressed by his self-confidence and leaves her husband. Her husband's parting words to her are an admonition that her life with him was safe and she'll regret abandoning the security he provided her.
Her marriage to Jody lasts twenty years. She soon finds that Jody is proud of his position in town (he becomes a property owner and mayor) and Jody insists that Janie cover her hair, and not participate in the conversation and gossip that takes place on the porch of Jody's store, where Janie works. Janie sees that Jody has very fixed ideas about how she should behave, and she finds them constricting. To her, Jody's ideas about his social status and her behavior prevent her from feeling loved or free.
Towards the end of their marriage, Jody and Janie have a fight in which she laughs at him. This is so hurtful to Jody that he withdraws from her. He sickens and dies, while trying to exclude Janie from his care.
When Janie attends Jody's funeral, she's honest with herself about the fact that she did not love her husband and certainly did not feel loved by him but puts on the social face that her community expects of her.
After her husband's death, she is wealthy and independent, having inherited her husband's property. Many men come courting her, telling her how sad it is for a woman to be alone and how necessary it is for a widow to remarry. Janie's not interested in any of this men. One day a man called Tea Cake visits her at the store. He begins to court her. He is younger than she is, and she finds his interest in her intriguing although she tries to talk herself out of having feelings for him. The neighbors are alarmed. Her best friend, Pheoby, tells her a cautionary tale about another widow who was exploited for her money and abandoned when her love had spent it all. Janie feels apprehensive about Tea Cake.
Tea Cake is a laborer and a gambler who takes Janie fishing and to social events. Janie begins to fall in love with him. Eventually, they go together to the Everglades, where they are the social center of a seasonal community of migrant workers. Janie sometimes takes care of the house, and sometimes works in the fields with Tea Cake. Janie feels that Tea Cake really loves her, and that this relationship is the one that she dreamed of as a girl.
After two years, a hurricane hits their community. As their home is flooded, they flee. A gust of wind blows Janie off the dyke they are traveling along and into the rising, swift-moving water as they try to get to Palm Beach. Tea Cake manages to save her but is bit by a rabid dog in the process. They reach Palm Beach and the storm ends. They think that they are safe but Tea Cake is dying. As he sickens, he becomes volatile and violent. Finally, Janie is forced to shoot him in a violent confrontation.
Janie believes she was really happy with Tea Cake. When Janie and Tea Cake are trapped in the hurricane, Tea Cake turns to Janie and asks her if she regrets staying with him when many of their neighbors left in advance of the storm. She replies:
Naw. We been tuhgether for round two years. If you kin see de light
at daybreak, you don't keer if you die at dusk. It's so many people
never seen de light at all. Ah wuz fumblin' round and God opened the door."
She mourns Tea Cake but is comforted by knowing that they really loved each other. Tea Cake has made her feel deeply satisfied, and she feels validated, in a way that she never had in her two marriages. She returns to the town where she lived with Jody, and tells Pheoby the whole story.
Janie tells Pheoby:
"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."
In her bedroom that night, Janie thinks about Tea Cake:
"The day of the gun, and the bloody body, and the courthouse came
and commenced to sing a sobbing sigh out of every corner in the room;
out of each and every chair and thing. Commenced to sing,
commenced to sob and sigh, singing and sobbing. 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 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."
The Great American Read PBS show recently finished; it was seeing Their Eyes Were Watching God that reminded I've been meaning for a long while to read this book, and inspired me to finally undertake this work. At the end, the results of a months-long voting for the most popular novel was revealed. Their Eyes Were Watching God came in at #51. I wonder if it would have even been that high on the list had Dr. Gates not encouraged viewed to read this book. I can think of tons of reasons why it's not higher on the list, but I can of one really great reason for it to be on the list: I'm nothing like Janie Crawford. I think I loved this book because, perhaps because Jody takes Janie to live in a community that is entirely African-American, or perhaps for some other reason, Hurston seems to me convey an appreciation for community that is reflected in her storytelling. Perhaps it's also reflected in the Janie's wish to socialize on the front porch, and in the "sass" she has to share with her neighbors and her husband. She's telling a woman-centered story. Janie's journey to self-actualization moved me greatly and gave me joy.
Note: The 2000 edition of this novel that I checked out from the library has a forward by Edwidge Danticat, the Haitian-American novelist, and a note on publication history by Richard Wentworth, a former director of the University of Illinois Press.
Danticat details her personal history with the novel: Danticat attended Barnard College, where she studied the novel for the second time, and which Hurston herself had attended. Danticat notes with pride that Hurston wrote the novel while in Haiti, and somehow found time for it amid her work as an anthropologist. Danticat points out that one of the strengths of the novel is its communal quality. I sense this, without being able to point out exactly how this is so (perhaps in part because the town Jody brings her to live in is an all African-American community). Danticat reports that students in her class debated whether Their Eyes should be regarded as a story of adventure, and I agree that it should My very favorite part of Danticat's account of her own personal relationship with the novel is that she reports that she first read the novel in high school, in an elective black history class at Clara Barton High School in Brooklyn, in a class taught by a teacher during his lunch hour. It reminds me of how moved I was when I bought a compilation of Anita O'Day's albums issued by a couple in Bristol using their garage as as their office. I think a lot of people think that culture is for other people. To me, it's for all of us and the work that we do to preserve and celebrate culture may go unnoticed but is heroic and important.
In the "Note on publication history," Wentworth writes: "The story of how the University of Illinois Press became the publisher of Their Eyes Were Watching God is one of the most interesting publishing stories of recent decades. In the 1970s, the University of Illinois Press published the African-American poet Michael S. Harper, who passed the word that a friend of his named Robert E. Hemenway was working on a major biography of a neglected African-American writer, Zora Neale Hurston. Professor Hemenway's book was indeed major and compelling, so the University of Illinois signed him up and published Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography in 1977. Professor Hemenway also advised his editor that it would be a good idea to acquire the rights, if possible, to Hurston's most important book, Their Eyes Were Watching God." The Press did acquire the rights, and published Their Eyes, and in ten years sold 350,000 copies, a big success for an academic press. Wentworth goes on to explain that the foundation for this success was Hurston's rediscovery by African-American writers in the '60s and '70s and especially by Alice Walker who wrote an important essay about Hurston's work for Ms. Magazine, "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston." A petition to reissue the book was also circulated at the Modern Language Association Convention in 1975. I want to share this story because it makes me feel hopeful, and because it shows the important role that cultural institutions have in our shared life.
A friend suggested that I read "Looking for Zora," Alice Walker's 1975 essay (published in Ms. Magazine) about visiting Zora Neale Hurston's home town. If you have any interest in this novel or its author, I recommend you read it: it's available as a .pdf Google document on the internet. It's a great essay: it's a road trip story, very entertainingly told. For me, it explains so much about Their Eyes Were Watching God. I see that Janie's community was based on large part on the all-African-American town that Hurston grew up in, and that Janie's husband was based on the real-life mayor, and that Janie herself was likely based on part on a woman Hurston knew and who Alice talks to on her trip. This essay was instrumental in reigniting interest in Hurston's life and work.
The edition I read has a introduction by Edwidge Danticat, and in her introduction, Danticat mentions that some are skeptical about Hurston's claim that she wrote Their Eyes in six weeks while visiting Haiti. Gosh, I do not feel skeptical about that claim. It seems to me that Their Eyes tells the story of the people Hurston grew up with and is a kind of literary foundation myth. I imagine that being in a country like Haiti, where everyone is descended from the African disapora would have reminded Hurston of her own home town. With that inspiration, I think it might have been very easy to think up the story and fill it with fictional portraits.
