Author: Zora Neale Hurston
Title: Their Eyes Were Watching God
Year of publication: 1937
Page count: 223
Rating: ★★★★
Hurston walked so that Toni Morrison could fly. Originally panned by several leading (male) contemporary voices of the Harlem Renaissance, Hurston’s works went out of print for decades, and she died in poverty, buried in an unmarked grave, forgotten, until Alice Walker became an advocate for her body of work in the 70’s, leading to her rediscovery. With Hurston’s reputation restored, Their Eyes Were Watching God is now rightly recognized as a classic novel in the African-American literature canon.
“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.”
This novel was on my list for years, but I admit that I was put off by the title—yet it turns out that neither religion nor God feature much at all, and it somewhat surprisingly doesn’t focus on what it meant to be a black person living in a racist society at the height of Jim Crow either. There are certainly explorations of the differences within the black community, but above all, it’s a captivating, lyrical tale steeped in symbolism about a woman defying expectations in her enduring and unapologetic pursuit of true love and independence. Set in Florida, Janie Crawford, a black woman in her forties, returns to her old town after a year-long absence, and begins to recount her life story to a friend, from her sexual awakening through her three marriages and their aftermath.
“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.”
What elevated this novel and put me in mind of Toni Morrison’s works so strongly is how masterfully Hurston blended poetic standard English narration with Southern 1930’s black vernacular in the dialogues—the prose is acutely alive. It swept me right up in the story, especially Janie’s third marriage to Tea Cake, twelve years her junior: A passionate, occasionally violent, compellingly ambivalent, yet loving partnership. Ultimately, it’s a story about learning to live for oneself rather than others, and finding one’s voice—Janie did, and thanks to Alice Walker, Hurston’s voice, not heard by enough people during her lifetime, is finally being read and appreciated, too.
“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.“
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