I read Their Eyes Were Watching God over the course of like a month. That is not a very good reading speed. The book is only 200 pages or so and it moves a long at a very reasonable pace. The time it took was more of a function of me than of the book itself. However, after finishing it, I realized that I really enjoyed the world that Zora Neale Hurston created within those pages. That may have been one of the things that made me take my time. It’s fascinating because movies and music unfold in real time and they’re not that way. But with books, the author is in many ways an interior decorator for your mind’s eye. A good book can craft a place that you can visit; a place where you can spend time; a place populated with people you feel like you know despite never hearing their voices or seeing them in the flesh. It can also serve as a time machine: transporting you to a time before you were born with people you probably wouldn’t have known had you been alive then.
This book does exactly that. Early 20th century Florida through the eyes of a black lady. That’s where I was taken. And Zora Neale Hurston is a great storyteller. The story on its surface is a tragic love story. It’s also a coming of middle age tale for the protagonist Janie. Her actual coming of age is stolen from her by her first two husbands and she only realizes true love and happiness when she meets her third husband Tea Cake. And their relationship is sweet. It is misunderstood by the people in the town where she’s spent her adulthood and even by the community she and Tea Cake find in the Everglades. The condemnation of the people in the town and on the muck demonstrate Hurston’s astute understanding of that culture in that time. I felt like I was there and she helped me understand that time and place while communicating a meaningful story at the same time. That’s why people like this book.
I did have a few gripes with the book. And it was funny, I read the afterword by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and he explained to me why my opinions were wrong. I looked up Gates. He is a literary critic, Harvard Professor and public intellectual. He was the guy that got to have a beer with Obama and Biden after the cops arrested him for being black.
My issue was that the book, like most books, is split between dialogue and narrative. Hurston commits to capturing every nuance of the African American dialect that was predominant in Florida in the early 20th century. When the story goes back to 3rd person narration, her prose is more or less in standard dialect. I could read just her prose for hours on end—she’s an amazing writer. When the narration ends and we return to dialog scenes, I found it jarring. The level of difficulty of deciphering the dialect and getting at the meaning behind the characters’ speech was harder for me than when reading her prose, which flowed so effortlessly through my brain.
In Gates’ afterword, he points to my biggest issue with the book—the jarring difference between the narration and the dialog—as one of the book’s greatest strengths. I’ll just quote Gates here:
The representation of her sources of language seems to be her principal concern, as she constantly shifts back and forth between her “literate” narrator’s voice and a highly idiomatic black voice found in wonderful passages of free indirect discourse. Hurston moves in and out of these distinct voices effortlessly, seamlessly, just as she does in Their Eyes to chart Janie’s coming to consciousness. It is this use of divided voice, a double voice unreconciled, that strikes me as her great achievement, a verbal analogue of her double experiences as a woman in a male-dominated world and as a black person in a nonblack world, a woman writer’s revision of W.E.B. Du Bois’s metaphor of “double-consciousness” for the hyphenated African American.
Her language, variegated by the twin voices that intertwine throughout the text, retains the power to unsettle.
So, in the afterword, Gates offered me the old, “your wrong and here’s why”. And I see what he’s saying. But there was a part of me that wishes I hadn’t read the afterword, which inevitably led me to read the 1975 Ms. Magazine article by Alice Walker where she searches for the grave of Zora Neale Hurston. You see, all of this context was fascinating. The fact that Zora Neale Hurston was the preeminent female African American writer of her age, but was shunned by her male contemporaries. The fact that after publishing 4 novels, 2 collections of folklore and a celebrated autobiography, she faded into obscurity, working as a maid in central Florida before dying alone is wild.
I enjoyed Their Eyes Were Watching God entirely on its own merits. Adding this context was both sad and superfluous. But, like a car wreck you can’t look away from it was extraordinarily interesting. Also, there were some insights into Hurston’s personality and character that made her out to be a total badass. For instance, when Richard Wright—perhaps the preeminent male African American author of that time—criticized Hurston’s novel for lacking an appropriate call to action on the nascent civil rights movement, Hurston said that she was trying at long last to write a black novel, not a treatise on sociology. I totally get what she means. In fact, it is this attitude that prompted Alice Walker to say that Hurston was a symbol of, “racial health—a sense of black people as complete, complex, undiminished human beings, a sense that is lacking so much in black writing and literature.”
I could speculate that growing up in Eatonville, the town that was founded and run by African Americans and was very real, but also a major setting for Their Eyes Were Watching God informed Hurston’s opinions on these matters. But all of that speculation takes focus away from the novel. I guess what I am getting at is, it is difficult to read a 85 year-old novel written by a black lady and not try to parse her place in the social, cultural and political milieu of the time. But, like Hurston herself said, she was trying to write a novel, not a treatise on sociology. And it is a great novel. That is the reason why it has stood that test of time and it is totally worth reading. I give it an A. And that’s all I have to say. Okay. Goodbye.