Book-It '21! Book #5: "Their Eyes Were Watching God: A Novel" by Zora Neale Hurston

The all new 50 Books Challenge!

Title: Their Eyes Were Watching God: A Novel by Zora Neale Hurston

Details: Copyright 1937, Periennial Classics Edition 1998


Synopsis (By Way of Back Cover): "Fair and long-legged, independent and articulate, Janie Crawford sets out to be her own person-- no mean feat for a Black woman in the '30s. Zora Neale Hurston's classic 1937 novel follows Janie from her nanny's plantation shack to Logan Killick's farm, to all Black Eatonville, to the Everglades, and back to Eatonville-- where she gathers in "the great fish-net" of her life. Janie's quest for identity takes her on a journey during which she learns what love is, experiences life's joys and sorrows, and comes home to herself in peace."


Why I Wanted to Read It: I've been in love with the Harlem Renaissance as long as I've been in love with the Jazz Age, since my teens. Since the music, visual art, and poetry were the greatest hooks, I realized I actually had read very little of the novels and I wanted to fix that.


How I Liked It: This book has a surprise. Or maybe it doesn't. At least, I was surprised.

I've heard Their Eyes Were Watching God referenced for years. I've never seen the screen adaptation, but I heard about it. I'd heard Zora Neale Hurston referenced for years as one of the great Southern writers in American literature and one of the greatest novelists in American literature, period.

So imagine my surprise at learning this book was not an initial success at publication and it wasn't until about the 1970s that it was rediscovered and fully appreciated for the classic it is.

There's the argument that Harlem Renaissance literature was expected to be political and this book was considered to be "frivolous and unserious work." But there's also a fairly strong argument that writing a story in the 1930s in which a Black woman looks back at her life and reevaluates herself and her identity, particularly her identity as defined by men, is pretty radical. And also, it's indisputable that an author both Black and female would face additional criticism for her work.

In fact, save for some dialog we'll address, the book reads far more like a book written in at least the 1970s or 1980s and set in the 1930s. It's frequently staggering to remember that this was published in the 1930s and therefore probably unfortunately not much of a surprise that it was so ahead of its time it had to take a few decades before it was properly appreciated, and sadly the author didn't live to see the work be acclaimed the way it should've been at publication.

The book opens with utterly gorgeous prose that appears to be a staple of Hurston's work:

Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others, they sail away 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.

Now, women forget all those things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly. (pg 1)

The book sets up to be the life story of a woman straining against the bonds of what's expected of her at the time and her ways of both rebelling and acquiescing.
We get a bit of her backstory of a family, some of them similarly free spirits struggling against the difficult hands they're dealt (her mother conceives her through sexual assault and eventually after taking up drinking and staying out, abandons her daughter to live with her mother, a former slave who conceived Janie's mother from sexual assault from her master and determined her daughter would have a better life in freedom). An unhappy marriage as a young girl to a much older man who sees her as a servant leads her into another unhappy marriage to a opportunistic man later elected mayor of their town, who abuses her mentally and physically.

Janie gets the first of what feels like love when, widowed and wealthy from her late second husband's estate, she finds a free spirit who shows her kindness and they marry. The happiness is short-lived and ends in tragedy, and Janie returns to the home town she escaped, seemingly come full circle.

It's heartbreaking and beautiful in places and Hurston pushes the idea of women's identity in relation to man in a way as I said that feels far more modern than the book's publication date. She fleshes out Janie to be such a tangible character you can't help but wonder what her life would've been like decades later; would it have been at least a little easier given hard-fought social progress, or would Janie always have been destined to strain hard against society?

I will say for the sheer vividness and downright gorgeousness at times of Hurston's prose (the title of the book, for example, is taken from the text regarding observers of the 1928 Okeechobee hurricane) can sometimes be jarring when set with the phonetics in the dialog (reflecting Black characters in the deep American South in the first decades of the twentieth century):

"Ah knowed you'd be hongry. No time to be huntin' stove wood after dark. Mah mulatto rice ain't so good dis time. Not enough bacon grease., but Ah reckon it'll kill hongrey."

"Ah'll tell you in a minute," Janie said, lifting the cover. "Gal, it's too good! you switches a mean fanny round in a kitchen."

"Aw, dat ain't much to eat, Janie. But Ah'm liable to have something sho nuff good tomorrow, 'cause you done come."

Janie ate heartily and said nothing. The varicolored cloud dust that the sun had stirred up in the sky was settling by low degrees. (pg 5)

But the dialog like the prose helps set scenes and the characters linger and last.

Frequently, Hurston's prose and observations are so sharp, it's almost haunting:

There was no doubt the town respected him and even admired him in a way. But any man who walks in the way of power and property is bound to meet hate. So when speakers stood up when the occasion demanded and said "Our beloved Mayor," it was one of those statements that everybody says but nobody actually believes like "God is everywhere." It was just a handle to wind up the tongue with. (pg 48)

All in all, the novel is indisputably a masterpiece and an important part of American history and American literature. You might be surprised, as I was, that it took so long for it to receive its rightful place of reverence, but you can't dispute it.


Final Grade: A