Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

There’s something about having to read a book that makes me not want to, no matter how good the book is.  I put off reading Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston for as long as I could because it was chosen for our Community Read.  Finally, running out of time, I got the book on CD, performed by Ruby Dee, and listened to it in the car on the way to work and home again.

I fell in love with it.  I would take this book any day over Romeo and Juliet.  (I do like Shakespeare.  I just don’t consider R&J much of a romance.) 

The over arching theme in this book, for me, is Janie’s search for love.  She is searching not just to find love for herself but to find out what love is. 

The book begins as Janie returns to Eatonville one evening, having been gone with Tea Cake for some two years, and tongues begin to wag as people watch her pass.

“It was the time for sitting on porches beside the road.  It was the time to hear things and talk.  These sitters had been tongueless, earless, eyeless conveniences all day long.  Mules and other brutes had occupied their skins.  But now, the sun and the bossman were gone, so the skins felt powerful and human.  They became lords of sounds and lesser things.  They passed nations through their mouths.  They sat in judgement.”

Only her friend Phoeby speaks up for her then goes to take her some food and hear what has gone on.  Janie is annoyed with the busybodies.

“Now they got to look into me loving Tea Cake and see whether it was done right or not!  They don’t know if life is a mess of corn-meal dumplings, and if love is a bed-quilt!”

Janie resolves to tell Phoeby everything that has gone on, not just for the past two years, but to help her understand, she must go all the way back to her childhood.  The novel encompasses decades and Janie is married three times over the course of the novel.  The first time her grandmother, Nanny, marries her off very young to a much older man, concerned that Janie have all the material things in life and protection that Nanny never had. 

“Janie had no chance to know things, so she had to ask.  Did marriage end the cosmic loneliness of the unmated?  Did marriage compel love like the sun the day?”

As many women found out, though love could grow under the circumstances of an arranged marriage, there was no guarantee and Janie did not find love with her first husband, Logan Killicks. 

Janie stays with him for a couple years but Nanny passes away and with nothing other to hold her there, she is interested when Joe Starks shows up and starts courting her.

She gives Logan one last chance but he refuses the connection she offers and the next morning Janie runs off with Joe, who she calls Jody.  They get married and head for a growing community Jody has heard of in Florida, Eatonville.

Janie spends over 25 years with Jody but it isn’t the marriage she had thought it would be.  Jody is more intent on having a trophy wife to stand by while he opens a store and becomes mayor.  He doesn’t want Janie to speak her mind or even be seen too much.  He even makes her cover her hair with a kerchief so that other men can’t see or touch it. 

Janie finally has her say when Jody is on his death bed, “Ah run off tuh keep house wid you in uh wonderful way.  But you wasn’t satisfied wid me de way Ah was.  Naw!  Mah own mind had tuh be squeezed and crowded out tuh make room for yours in me.”

Love itself can make a common ground for meeting on because both people want to please one another and both have equal power to hurt one another.  But that requires a willingness to connect and let it be seen.  Logan wouldn’t let it be seen in himself, he wanted her gratitude.  Jody just wanted someone to obey him and love him.

“…now you got tuh die tuh find out dat you got tuh pacify somebody besides yo’ self if you wants any love and any sympathy in dis world.  You ain’t tried tuh pacify nobody but yo’self.  Too busy listening tuh yo’ own big voice.”

Jody dies and Janie finally has time and money and on one to please but herself.  Then Tea Cake starts coming around.  Theirs is a different type of relationship from what Janie has experienced so far right from the beginning.

“He set it [the checkers game] up and began to show her and she found herself glowing inside.  Somebody wanted her to play.  Somebody thought it natural for her to play.  That was even nice.  She looked him over and got little thrills from every one of his good points.”

But the town doesn’t take so well to Janie taking up with Tea Cake, who is 12 years younger.  They think it’s too soon and that he isn’t an appropriate person.  So Tea Cake resolves that they need to start fresh somewhere else.  They go south to work in the bean fields and Janie has never been so happy, until the hurricane.

It’s a tragedy, there’s no denying that.  They only have two years together but Janie has more happiness in those years than in the last thirty.  She has finally found love, figured out what it is, how it is different, and even learned to love herself.

"… 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 short review cannot even begin to give you a sense of the beauty and breadth packed into this book.  I hope you'll read it for yourself.