Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

I got curious to read Zora Neale Hurston after reading Prepare for Saints and seeing how the subject of that book: the development and premiere of the Virgil Thomson/Gertrude Stein opera Four Saints in Three Acts and that project’s intersection with the institutional establishment of modernism in the United States, particularly in New York, overlapped with the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston was a leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance. And then her name came up again in a recent New Yorker article (“Why Zora Neale Hurston was Obsessed with the Jews” by Louis Menand, January 13, 2025). So, I trusted that synchronicity to tell me that I needed to read this book. (I read a paperback edition published under the Amistad imprint of Harper Collins).

The novel, published in 1937, was famously written in seven weeks at the end of 1936. Hurston was living in Haiti, living off of a Guggenheim Fellowship, having recently moved from Harlem. The setting is Florida, where Hurston grew up. (She was born in Alabama in 1891 but moved to Eatonville, Florida, a black community, shortly thereafter). The novel tells the story of Janie Crawford beginning as a child first maturing into womanhood, continues through three marriages as she finds her identity and independence, and ends with her single again around age 50.

Janie is born sometime around 1880 in Florida and raised by her grandmother, a former slave. Janie’s sexual coming of age is told in the first pages, symbolized by her observation of a flowering pear tree in her front yard. Soon after, Janie is married to a man named Logan Hillocks, an arrangement that was made by Janie’s grandmother when Janie was a girl so that Janie would have the security of a man with property. Grandma’s priority of security misses Janie’s romantic nature and her yearning for an identity that is more than simply the helpmate to a man. The metaphor of a mule as a symbol of a woman’s place as simply another sort of livestock repeats several times in the book.

After an unhappy year or two with Logan, Janie is charmed by a man named Joe Starks and runs off with him. Joe takes Janie to Eatonville, a black community, where he sets himself up as leader of the town. He opens a store and gives Janie the job of clerk. He buys property. He gets himself elected Mayor. Eventually Joe’s charm wears off, and Joe’s conception of Janie’s place in society constricts her as completely as she was constricted when she was the wife of Logan Hillocks. Joe wants Janie to be a beautiful trophy for his elevated position in town, forbidding her from socializing with the common folks, and hiding herself and her beauty for his enjoyment alone. Eventually Janie is released from Joe’s bondage when he sickens and dies.

After a period of mourning, Janie, still beautiful and relatively young, but wealthy now, too, is sought after by many men. She falls for a younger man named Tea Cake. He has a sense of humor. He plays the guitar. He has an adventurous spirit. Though she worries about the age difference, Tea Cake seems to be the love match she always desired. Eventually the two are married. They leave Eatonville together. After a short time in one town, they move again to the banks of Lake Ockeechobee, where Tea Cake, and later Janie, too, work planting beans.

The big scene in this section of the novel is a hurricane that comes through the area. The title of the novel comes from this section where folks huddle in their cabins waiting to see how bad the storm is going to get. “They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God” (p. 160). The story follows Tea Cake and Janie who had not heeded early warnings to evacuate. as they hike and swim toward higher ground, Janie is swept into the rising water. She manages to grab on to a cow that is floating by but is menaced by a dog that is standing on the cow’s back. Tea Cake saves Janie by killing the dog but is bitten by the dog in the process. When the waters recede and they are able to return to their home, Tea Cake falls ill with what is revealed to be rabies too advanced by that time to treat. As he loses his mind he threatens to shoot Janie and she, in self defense shoots and kills him first.

Janie is arrested and tried. There’s a short courtroom scene. The novel ends with Janie returning to Eatonville.

The novel also begins with Janie returning to Eatonville. This involves a strange framing device. The whole novel is presented as Janie, having returned to Eatonville after the death of Tea Cake, telling the story of her adventure to her friend Pheoby as they sit together on Janie’s porch. She starts with recounting her childhood. Then she tells Pheoby the story of her life in Eatonville. But, of course, Pheoby knows this part of the story because Eatonville is where she met Janie and became her friend. At some point in their friendship Janie must have already told Pheoby about her childhood, but now she tells it again. Pheoby never interrupts Janie’s long monologue so the device fades away and the novel starts to read as either told by a third person narrator or sometimes by Janie as a first person narrator, but with the awkward memory lingering in mind that this language is supposed to be Janie’s reciting of the story to her friend. The device grows strained at the times when Janie tells Pheoby stories she already knows, or when Janie repeats long sections of dialogue in both voices, as she often does. At one point the device completely strains credulity when Janie repeats both sides of a conversation that Pheoby supposedly had privately with her husband, about Janie, when Janie wasn’t there to hear it. At that point I gave in to simple annoyance at the device and wondered why Hurston had chosen it.

The other recurrent stumbling block for me is that Huston has the characters speak in dialect and reproduces their pronunciation by using non-standard spelling. Just for a random example, here’s a line: “It’s uh sin and uh shame running’ dat po’ man way from here lak dat.” Or here’s another, “Yeah, naw. People don’t die till day time come nohow, don’t keer where you at. Ah’m wid mah husband in uh storm, dat’s all.” The dialect is helpful in establishing character. We know who these people are. But with every character in the novel speaking the same way, and much of the novel in dialogue, reproducing their speech phonetically this way makes the novel a very slow read. I don’t usually sound out words in my head as I’m reading, but there’s no other way to understand this dialogue. It made me very conscious of the act of reading and thus created a distance between myself and the novel that reduced my emotional connection and my pleasure. Add to this the further affection that the non-dialogue portions of the text are written in a very poetic English and the writing just feels schizophrenic. Here’s the opening paragraph as an example:

“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.”

I also have to say that I didn’t find the story that interesting. It’s a bildungsroman in which the lead character doesn’t actually develop that much. And it’s a novel of manners in the sense that Janie’s story is limited by the small scope available to women, particularly a poor, black women, in early 20th century southern America. There isn’t much available for her to do except find a man and then bear up with the faults of whatever man she finds. A feminist reading of the story would probably find something to praise in Janie’s gradual development and claim of her independence, but I find her character actually exceedingly passive. The first husband treats her like a farm animal, so she runs away. The second husband hides her like a trophy, but she stays with him nearly twenty years. Though the love between Janie and Tea Cake seems real, it’s not an equal marriage or an affirmation of her emancipation. And he’s no Prince Charming.

In an early scene after their marriage, Tea Cake steals $200 from Janie she had hidden away for security. Then he spends the money by throwing a big party for the townsfolk, a party he doesn’t tell Janie about and doesn’t invite her to, while she stays at home wondering where her money and her husband have gone off to and worrying he might be dead. Then when he shows up again he apologizes and promises to win the money back by gambling, which he does, but he also gets knifed in the process. Later, at Lake Ockheechobee, Tea Cake is made jealous by a woman who thinks that Tea Cake, being dark-skinned, isn’t good enough for the light-skinned Janie and she tries to convince Janie to go with the woman’s brother, instead. Janie wants nothing to do with the scheme but Tea Cake gets angry anyway, but instead of confronting the meddling woman, he beats Janie (!) as a way to show the woman that Janie is under his control. Despite the stealing, lying, violence, and beating, Janie stays with Tea Cake and continues to support him and profess her love.

In the Foreword to the edition I read, praising the novel and it’s importance, Edwidge Danticat writes:

“In class at Barnard, we gladly raised structural questions about Their Eyes Were Watching God. Was it a love story or an adventure story? We decided it could be both, as many other complex novels are. Besides, don’t adventures often include romance? And aren’t all exciting romances adventures?”

But if it’s an adventure story it contains very little adventure. And if it’s a love story, it’s not a kind of love I can romanticize.