Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston
McGraw Hill
Published: June 2000
ISBN: 0072434228
Reviewed by Marlive, TheGRITS.com
Reviewed on Amazon.com
Their Eyes were Watching God is a haunting story told in the black vernacular about one woman's search for true love and independence. At age 16, Janie Crawford believes that she has every right to find true love on her terms. The day she lay beneath a pear tree in her grandmother's backyard and witnessed a bee pollinating there was the day she realized the sensual pleasures she wanted very much to experience in her life. But instead of her being able to explore these feelings and find her soul mate, she is confined to a couple of loveless marriages.
The first was to a much older man, Logan Killicks, out of financial security and respectability (under the advisement of her grandmother). The second marriage to Jody Starks was out of desperation to escape her first marriage and for security. But it will be Janie's third marriage to a much younger man, Tea Cake, which allows her to feel a sense of freedom in choosing someone to love openly for the very first time. Of course when the Eatonville community she lives in shows their displeasure over her relationship with Tea Cake, Janie throws caution to the wind by marrying and moving away with him to start a new life in the Everglades. Even though her third marriage ends tragically with her killing Tea Cake in self-defense, she doesn't seem to regret her experience. In fact, she makes peace with all that has happened in her life and returns to Eatonville in spite of the envious stares and gossip from the people speculating what happened between her and Tea Cake. She comes back no longer under the ownership of a man, but as a self-assured independent woman who owes no one any explanations.
After reading this novel and discovering that Zora Neale Hurston was the recipient of 2 Guggenheims, the author of 4 novels, 12 short stories, 12 essays, 2 musicals, and 2 black mythologies, I could not help wondering how this literary giant disappeared from us for nearly 3 decades. To my disappointment I learned that her disappearance was due to her peers (mainly Richard Wright) criticizing her openly and publicly for not writing about the so-called "serious social trends" of the time. But what I cannot understand is how her peers could not think what happened to Janie Crawford (and women like her) by husbands and the community at large was not a serious social trend of the time. Just because Zora chose to write about the injustices done within the black community rather than the injustices done to the black community did not make her works any less poignant. The appeal and rediscovery of this novel by scholars, women writers, and the American public in general has definitely made Their Eyes were Watching God into a timeless classic of the Harlem Renaissance era.
