Still Searching for Zora Neale Hurston

Khiara M. Bridges* April, 2024

A review of Their Eyes Were Watching God. By Zora Neale Hurston.

Their Eyes Were Watching God. By Zora Neale Hurston. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, Inc. 1937. (Harper Perennial Modern Classics 2006 ed.). Pp. xviii, 193. $15.99.

Introduction

I first read Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God¹ when I was in tenth grade. I didn’t get it. The symbolism eluded me. I found Hurston’s rendering of the characters’ speech difficult to parse. And, perhaps most importantly, I felt ambivalent about the protagonist, Janie. I remember thinking that Janie was okay, but she didn’t hold a candle to Sethe, the heroine of Toni Morrison’s Beloved (which remains my favorite book of all time).

I had a chance to revisit Their Eyes Were Watching God when I was pursuing a Ph.D. from Columbia University’s Department of Anthropology, where Hurston had spent time some eighty years before I arrived. I came to appreciate the novel then, as my rereading of it was accompanied by an interrogation into the woman who authored it. Indeed, I came to love the novel then, but only because my study of Hurston made me understand the book even less than I understood it when I had first read it as a tenth grader. This is to say that Their Eyes Were Watching God becomes even more difficult to categorize and file away when one has insight into the novelist: a black woman who interwove her own complexity throughout the fabric of her most renowned work.

Today, Hurston is celebrated and recognized as one of the most important voices to emerge out of the Harlem Renaissance.² However, that adoration was not foreshadowed during her life. “Hurston never received the financial rewards she deserved. (The largest royalty she ever earned from any of her books was $943.75.)”³ In fact, the golden years of Hurston’s life found her working as a maid and a substitute teacher.⁴ When she suffered a stroke in 1959, she was so impoverished that she was forced to move into the St. Lucie County Welfare Home, dying there of “hypertensive heart disease” the following year.⁵ The town took up a collection to cover the costs of her funeral, raising enough money to pay for a casket and burial—but not a headstone.⁶ Hurston’s body lay in an unmarked grave in the Garden of Heavenly Rest, a blacks-only cemetery in Fort Pierce, Florida, until 1973.⁷ That is when the novelist Alice Walker found the spot where Hurston was buried in a weed-captured, snake-infested field and marked the site with a gravestone.⁸ In 1975, Walker published an essay in Ms. Magazine titled In Search of Zora Neale Hurston, sparking a renewed interest in Hurston and her works that would culminate in the canonization of Their Eyes Were Watching God.⁹

While the book received some favorable reviews when it was first published, many of Hurston’s contemporaries, including the most respected writers of the Harlem Renaissance, dismissed the book as, simply, not good. Richard Wright, whose Native Son and Black Boy offer two of the most searing portraits of the violence that antiblack racism is promised to produce, damningly wrote that “her novel carries no theme, no message, no thought.”¹⁰ Wright’s inability to see the genius of the book likely is, in part, a function of the book’s feminism: The book is about a black woman who tenaciously rejects any gender norm that limits her happiness.

Wright’s dismissal of Their Eyes Were Watching God likely is also a function of his disagreement with Hurston’s racial politics, which certainly peek through in the book. Hurston denied that racism had diminished black people. Despite chattel slavery and the country’s refusal to even attempt to repair the harm that the institution had inflicted; despite the spectacular and banal violence that Jim Crow perpetrated; despite the poverty in which the country compelled black people, save the lucky few, to live; despite all of this, Hurston insisted that the black community was whole, healthy, undamaged, and capable of self-determination. One of her most well-known quotes describes her refusal to understand herself—and, by extension, black people, generally—as having been hurt by white supremacy in a way that even mattered:

I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less. No, I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.¹¹

Hurston’s contention that racism had not injured black people was at odds with the views held by Wright and other members of the black cognoscenti, who believed that white supremacy had wounded, and continued to wound, black people in myriad ways—physically, economically, politically, socially, psychically. Hurston’s refusal to center white supremacy in Their Eyes Were Watching God, and her refusal to render the book’s characters in a way that suggested that white supremacy had any real significance in their lives, earned the ire of Hurston’s black contemporaries, who accused her of creating minstrels for the amusement of white society. Alain Locke, the “Dean” of the Harlem Renaissance, charged Hurston with populating her novels with “ ‘entertaining pseudo-primitives’ that white readers love to laugh with.”¹² As scholar Gorman Beauchamp summarizes it, Locke, Wright, and other members of the black elite were convinced that “Hurston’s characters ought to be doing less laughing and more sobbing.”¹³

The chasm between Hurston’s racial politics and the beliefs held by black progressives grew over time. By the end of her life, Hurston’s political commitments would lead her to being “branded a racial conservative by some and a traitor to the race by others.”¹⁴ Walker later would argue that we should celebrate Hurston despite her perplexing views on race, writing, “[W]e do not love her for her unpredictable and occasionally weird politics (they tend to confuse us).”¹⁵ Indeed, Hurston’s “weird” views about race and racism make it hard to know what lessons about race, class, and gender she intended to convey in Their Eyes Were Watching God. However, Hurston’s intentions, ultimately, may not matter. It is impossible to read Their Eyes Were Watching God today without seeing it as a searing indictment of the way that patriarchy and misogyny can show up in the lives of black women.

I. The Plot

The protagonist of the story is Janie, a physically beautiful woman whose formerly enslaved grandmother, whom she calls Nanny, raises her after her mother abandons her (pp. 4, 19–20). When Janie is sixteen years old, she has a sexual awakening that leads her to kiss a boy. Nanny, who is old and sick, spies the kiss from her bedroom. Nanny knows that she will not be around much longer to protect Janie, and she is afraid of what is promised to happen to an attractive, young, black woman alone in the world (p. 15). Nanny thus arranges for Janie to wed an older man of some means, Logan Killicks. However, the marriage is loveless; indeed, Janie finds Logan physically repulsive. So, when a “cityfied, stylish dressed man with his hat set at an angle” (p. 27) arrives in town and starts wooing Janie, she leaves Logan. She eventually marries the “cityfied” man, Joe Starks, and they move to Eatonville, an all-black town in Florida (pp. 33–34).

Joe rapidly becomes Eatonville’s most important resident—the Mayor and owner of the town’s only store (p. 43). However, Janie’s marriage to Joe is quite unfulfilling, in large part because he insists that, as the Mayor’s wife, Janie should be little more than a comely, silent ghost, removed from the community. The marriage endures for seventeen years, ending only when Joe dies of an unnamed illness (p. 87). Thus, at the age of 34, Janie finds herself a monied widow, having inherited the wealth that Joe accumulated during his life (p. 90).

Less than a year after Joe’s death, Janie falls in love with and marries Tea Cake, a 25-year-old laborer, and they move to the Everglades, where, according to Tea Cake, “[f]olks don’t do nothin’ . . . but make money and fun and foolishness” (p. 128). Tea Cake represents for Janie all the things that she wanted her life to be when she had her first kiss at the age of sixteen. Indeed, Janie’s marriage to Tea Cake has everything that she had hoped for, but never found, in her first two marriages: physical desire, sexual fulfillment, romantic love, companionship, adventure, camaraderie, laughter, joy.

The two lead a happy life among friends in the Everglades for a little over a year before a massive hurricane touches down. Janie and Tea Cake, who refused to evacuate the area, are forced to flee in the middle of the storm (p. 161). During their flight to escape the flood, Janie is blown into “water like lakes—water full of things living and dead. Things that didn’t belong in water” (p. 165). Tea Cake jumps into the water to rescue her; he is successful, but he is bitten by a dog in the process (p. 166). Eventually, the storm ends, the water recedes, and the two return to the settlement where they had made a home. However, a month later, Tea Cake becomes seriously ill. A doctor conjectures that the dog that bit Tea Cake had infected him with rabies, which is invariably fatal. The doctor warns Janie that Tea Cake will suffer a horrible death; moreover, he cautions her that she should stay “stay out of his way,” as “he’s liable to bite somebody else, specially you” (p. 177). The doctor is prescient, as the next night, a feverish, delirious Tea Cake accuses Janie of abandoning him (p. 183). Tea Cake attempts to kill Janie—indeed, he fires his gun at Janie—but Janie shoots him dead, saving her life in the process (p. 184). After she is acquitted of the murder, she returns to Eatonville, heartbroken, but satisfied at having lived a life worth living and having loved the love of her life (pp. 188, 191, 193).

II. Gender Norms and Gendered Institutions

a. Feminist? Black Feminist?

It is understandable why Their Eyes Were Watching God has been received as an exemplar of black feminism (although “black feminism” would not coalesce into a theoretical framework until several decades after the book’s publication).¹⁶ Janie has the audacity to want a fulfilling life. In fact, she insists on it. She is unsatisfied with simply existing; instead, she wants to live. Now, although the protagonist of the book is a black woman who has the nerve to aspire for an enchanted life, the work nevertheless raises some questions about the propriety of its designation as a work of black feminism.

First, can we fairly describe Their Eyes Were Watching God as feminist? For one, Tea Cake assaults Janie to prove to the community in which they live that he holds the power in his relationship; Janie responds to the assault by becoming even more affectionate and in love with Tea Cake,¹⁷ a plot point to which Part IV returns. Additionally, while the novel tells the story of a black woman’s journey towards self-actualization, the journey is accomplished through sequential marriages to men. As scholar Jennifer Jordan writes, Janie “never defines herself outside the scope of her marital or romantic involvements.”¹⁸ We might wonder whether it is possible to rehabilitate this aspect of Janie’s journey into a feminist framing.

I believe we can. I read Janie as having not depended on men and marriage to discover herself but instead using her marriages as a readily available medium through which she would self-actualize. Consider Hurston’s description of the day Janie decides to leave her first husband for Joe Starks. Janie muses, “What was she losing so much time for? A feeling of sudden newness and change came over her. Janie hurried out of the front gate and turned south. Even if Joe was not there waiting for her, the change was bound to do her good” (p. 32; emphasis added). Janie did not need her husbands to help her locate truths about herself. Rather, male suitors and the convention of marriage were accessible to her, and she uses them as a device for finding herself.

Second, is something particularly black about the feminism many have attributed to the novel? Janie’s complaints about her marriage to Joe Starks resemble white feminists’ complaints about sexism. Joe is clear that Janie’s role as his wife—the Mayor’s wife—consists of working in the town store when it suits him, cooking his meals, being pretty, and, probably most importantly, staying quiet (pp. 53–55, 71–72). Janie’s “sole purpose is to serve as an ornament and symbol of her husband’s social status.”¹⁹ Differently stated, Joe places Janie on a pedestal, high above the other people in the town. He puts Janie in a “gilded cage,” separating her from her neighbors. Are these objections to pedestals and cages not identical to the grievances against patriarchy that white feminists have outlined?²⁰ If Hurston’s rendering of Janie’s marriage to Joe sought to “expose[] the domestic bliss of middle-class America as an empty dream,” ²¹ how is this exposé different from the exposés white feminists have executed about the soul-crushing, spirit-defeating constraints of occupying the roles of “wife” and “mother”?

The difference is that this familiar objection to patriarchy shifts when a black woman, writing in a nation just pulling itself out of the Great Depression, makes it. When Hurston critiques pedestals and gilded cages, the intended audience for the complaint—those who should hear the complaint and alter their behavior in light of it—stops being chauvinistic men who constrain women in this way and, instead, becomes black women who might aspire to a middle-class life of quasi-leisure. Janie’s lonely marriage to Joe Starks cautions black women that they “should not covet the seemingly privileged roles of middle-class white women.”²² In speaking to black women about the necessity of being careful about what you wish for, the caution becomes distinctly black and feminist.

b. The Violence of Gender Norms

While many readers will find the brevity of the time Janie spends with the love of her life to be the saddest part of Their Eyes Were Watching God, I found Janie’s relationship with her grandmother, Nanny, to be far more devastating.

Like Janie, Nanny once wanted her life to be something remarkable. Nanny tells Janie, “Ah wanted to preach a great sermon about colored women sittin’ on high, but they wasn’t no pulpit for me” (p. 16). Her dreams deferred, Nanny spends her life working for a white family,²³ while doing her best to raise her daughter and, eventually, her granddaughter. Knowing that she is nearing the end of her life, Nanny forces Janie to marry Logan Killicks because she is afraid of the violence, abuse, and degradation that would surely befall Janie without the security that Nanny, her only living family, provides her. Explains Nanny, “Ah can’t die easy thinkin’ maybe de menfolks white or black is makin’ a spit cup outa you” (p. 20). Nanny conceptualizes the institution of marriage as a shield, and, in an abundance of love, she foists it upon Janie: “’Tain’t Logan Killicks Ah wants you to have, baby, it’s protection” (p. 15).

Nanny imagines that forcing Janie to comply with gender norms and find shelter in a gendered institution will save her from violence. And who can blame Nanny for believing as much? Nanny endured the brutality of slavery, an institution that methodically stripped the enslaved of family, marriage, and beloved community. Nanny had no father, no mother, no husband, no protection (p. 8). She had been made a spit cup. So, Nanny sought to provide the things that she lacked to Janie so that Janie might have a defense against a promised cruelty. However, Janie resents—indeed, hates—Nanny for conscripting Janie into marriage at the age of sixteen and limiting Janie’s world. After Joe Starks’ death, Janie reflects on her grandmother:

Here Nanny had taken the biggest thing God ever made, the horizon—for no matter how far a person can go the horizon is still way beyond you—and pinched it in to such a little bit of a thing that she could tie it about her granddaughter’s neck tight enough to choke her. She hated the old woman who had twisted her so in the name of love.²⁴

What a crushing admonition! The hatred that Janie feels for Nanny counsels those of us who are parents, guardians, and mentors to be careful with how we wield gender norms. Even when attempts to force children, adolescents, and young adults to accept timeworn values and institutions are done with love and the best of intentions, the younger generation may end up hating their would-be disciplinarians for attempting to constrict the fullness of their lives with the ideas of yesteryear.

III. Reproductive Oppression and Reproductive Justice

As mentioned earlier, Nanny was born into slavery. Moreover, the man who purported to own Nanny was the father of Nanny’s daughter, Janie’s mother (p. 17). While we do not know whether Nanny’s owner forcibly raped Nanny, we do know that her child was conceived under conditions of violence. And we also know that consent is impossible under such conditions.

Janie is also the product of rape. Janie’s mother, who is never named in the novel, was raped by her schoolteacher when she was seventeen, a trauma from which she never recovered (p. 19).

Inasmuch as both Nanny and Janie’s mother conceived their children through nonconsensual sex—and inasmuch as the children that they both bore could hardly be described as products of their agency—Hurston could have decided to “heal” the intergenerational reproductive violence that Nanny and Janie’s mother endured by allowing their descendent, Janie, to conceive and reproduce under healthy, nonviolent conditions. But, quite brilliantly, Hurston does not pursue this resolution. Janie’s journey of self-discovery does not involve childbearing. Indeed, Janie never longs for a pregnancy or a child. This might be the most feminist characteristic of the novel.

Commentators have found Janie’s lack of procreation somewhat inexplicable. As scholar Molly Hite has written, “Janie’s . . . three marriages somewhat miraculously produce no children.”²⁵ Further, some scholars have argued that Hurston erred when she did not end the book with a pregnant Janie. As Beauchamp writes, “My ending, Janie carrying Tea Cake’s child, would have been better.”²⁶ However, Hurston’s ending, in my view, carries the most incisive, disruptive message. It declares that cis women’s lives can be fulfilling and whole without pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood. It announces that the apotheosis of heterosexual love is not necessarily childbearing. It affirms that a cis woman’s self-actualization need not take the form of birthing and parenting a child. The message remains a powerful one, audaciously inconsistent with hegemonic sentiment, nearly a century after Hurston first shared it.

IV. On the Matter of Intimate Partner Violence

One of the most challenging aspects of the novel is the fact that Tea Cake assaults Janie after he becomes fearful that another man, the brother of one of the community’s residents, will woo Janie away. “Before the week was over he had whipped Janie. . . . No brutal beating at all. He just slapped her around a bit to show he was boss” (p. 147). Tea Cake explains to his friends that he hit Janie because he wants to communicate to would-be suitors that he “is [the] boss” and has “control” over Janie (p. 148). Even more disturbingly, the community responds to Tea Cake’s assault on Janie with admiration and jealousy: “It aroused a sort of envy in both men and women. The way he petted and pampered her as if those two or three face slaps had nearly killed her made the women see visions and the helpless way she hung on him made men dream dreams” (p. 147).

What should we make of this? It seems clear that if Their Eyes Were Watching God is to be received as a feminist novel, we ought not to take this normalization—indeed, romanticization—of intimate partner violence seriously. That is, if the novel is to be feminist, then it might be necessary for Hurston to have written the scene with irony, as a critique of intimate partner violence.

However, the evidence suggests this reading would be unfaithful to Hurston’s intentions. It appears that Hurston herself was not critical of intimate partner violence—at least not when it failed to rise to a certain level of brutality. Hurston’s autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, reveals that Janie’s relationship with Tea Cake was inspired by a relationship that Hurston had with a younger man. Hurston writes of an evening in which she slapped her boyfriend and he hit her back:

He paid me off then and there with interest. No broken bones, you understand, and no black eyes. I realized afterwards that my hot head could tell me to beat him, but it would cost me something. . . . Then I knew I was too deeply in love to be my old self. For always a blow to my body had infuriated me beyond measure. . . . But somehow, I didn’t hate him at all. . . . He went out and bought some pie and I made a pot of hot chocolate and we were more affectionate than ever.²⁷

In this passage, Hurston makes clear that she did not want physical violence to be a part of her romantic relationships. But it also does not appear that she was disgusted, frightened, or particularly disturbed by male violence towards their female partners. One does not get the sense that she considered intimate partner violence to be an invariable expression of patriarchal dominance or misogyny. Instead, for Hurston, intimate partner violence was something that, when exercised in moderation, could inflict no damage, simply making the couple “more affectionate than ever.” It then becomes difficult to believe that Hurston intended for Tea Cake’s assault on Janie to be understood as a critique of intimate partner violence. As Jordan writes, “Whatever Hurston’s attitude toward male dominance, she accepts as commonplace a certain type of physical violence between the sexes.”²⁸ If Jordan is right, are modern audiences wrong for insisting that Their Eyes Were Watching God is a feminist novel?

To answer this question, we might consider Richard Wright’s critique of Hurston. As noted above, Wright was derisory of Hurston’s work because he felt that she did not take white supremacy seriously enough.²⁹ In Wright’s reading, Hurston’s failure to come to terms with the myriad forms of violence that antiblack racism has inflicted on black people left her to create black characters that were uncannily happy—fools that would shuck and jive for the entertainment of white audiences. Wright accused Hurston of continuing the tradition of “the minstrel technique that makes the ‘white folks’ laugh.”³⁰ Indeed, Beauchamp worries that Wright may have been correct—that some of the laughs that the novel gives us “depend on condescension, even contempt, for the pretentions of a ‘dumb old darkie.’ ”³¹

It may be overstating the point to claim that some of the characters in the novel are minstrels. Instead, it may be more accurate to say that Hurston wrote characters that reflected the black community in all of its complexity and heterogeneity. Some members of the black community are fiercely intelligent, while others are rather dim-witted. Some black people are kind and generous, while others are mean and miserly. Some are worthy of respect and admiration, while others deserve nothing but censure and disapprobation. Indeed, these contrasting characteristics often coexist in a single person. To deny the black community’s disparateness is to caricature black people. Hurston’s choice to render characters that are lovable in some respects, and contemptible in other respects, represents a choice to create characters that resemble actual people.

I believe this is how we should understand Tea Cake’s assault on Janie and the community’s reception of it.³² Irrespective of Hurston’s own personal beliefs about the propriety of intimate partner violence, I believe there is a certain amount of “condescension, even contempt”³³ that we ought to feel when the couple’s friends idealize their relationship because Janie did not defend herself during the assault, but rather cowered, cried, and eventually became more demonstrative in her affection towards Tea Cake.³⁴ Consider that Tea Cake’s friend, Sop-de-Bottom, reacts to the assault by saying, “Tea Cake, you sho is a lucky man. . . . Lawd! wouldn’t Ah love tuh whip uh tender woman lak Janie! Ah bet she don’t even holler. She jus’ cries, eh Tea Cake?” (pp. 147–48). As readers, we are invited to understand that this sentiment is a product of a community that, although wise in many ways, is unknowing and riddled with shameful misogyny in other ways.

Moreover, we are invited to understand that there is some disagreement about the propriety of intimate partner violence. There is an earlier scene in the novel in which the neighbors in Eatonville contemplate a woman, Mrs. Tony, who periodically begs Joe Starks to give her free food from the store despite the fact that her husband provides for her (pp. 73–75). One neighbor says that if Mrs. Tony were his wife, he would “kill her” for making a fool out of him (p. 75). However, another responds that Mrs. Tony’s husband would “never hit her. He says beatin’ women is just like steppin’ on baby chickens. He claims ’tain’t no place on uh woman tuh hit” (p. 75). If Their Eyes Were Watching God is to be a feminist novel, we have to understand that Mrs. Tony’s husband is absolutely correct. Indeed, there is no place on any person to be hit by their lover. People who believe something different are well-deserving of critique. The fact that some portion of the community holds these damaging beliefs does not make it a community of minstrels or “pseudo-primitives.” It just makes it deeply, deeply flawed.

Conclusion

School districts across the nation are currently on a tear, banning books that either discuss racism in terms that propose that it persists in meaningful ways in the post-Civil Rights present or suggest that LGBTQ people are valuable, normal members of society that deserve respect, protection, and equality.³⁵ Although Their Eyes Were Watching God landed on a banned books list in 1997 after a Virginia parent challenged the novel’s language and oblique references to sex,³⁶ it has escaped more recent censorship campaigns. Given the radical elements in the novel—it is about a black woman who loves herself enough to be unsatisfied with a quiet, middle-class life—I wondered what makes the novel “safe” to the empowered, entitled agents of censorship who are remaking curricula across the country. I wondered whether the book’s perceived safety is due to Hurston’s refusal to make white supremacy a main character in the novel—the engine that drives the plot. I wondered whether its seeming innocuousness is because the characters in the novel reflect Hurston’s conviction that antiblack racism has not reduced black people; her characters are, on the whole, joyful and not at all shrunken by a hostile white world. I wondered whether Hurston’s complexity has made the book ambiguous enough to be considered benign by the forces of suppression currently in seats of power. And I wondered whether this indirection will have worked to diminish my respect for Their Eyes Were Watching God when I inevitably revisit it in another twenty years.

* Professor of Law, University of California, Berkeley, School of Law.