Their Eyes were watching God, Zora Neale Hurston

North America Project 2022

A hurricane is ripping through the night. Three or four African-American workers are huddled in a shack in the Florida Everglades, waiting for the levees holding back the waters to give way, or the roof and the walls shielding them from the crashing rain to disappear. Hurston writes, they were not staring into the dark, “their eyes were watching God”.

I listened to this seminal American novel yesterday (as I write), driving down from Port Hedland, and now I must get my thoughts down on ‘paper’ before they disappear into the ether. Their Eyes were watching God (1937) was Hurston’s second novel. I reviewed her first, Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934) – a fictionalized account of her father’s life – a couple of years ago, and concluded by hoping that her next would have a female protagonist, and here we are.

I can’t tell you how the novel begins because a lot of it is dialogue and the dialogue is all dialect and it takes a while before you (I) work out what is being said, but once you do it flows. Anyway, the beginning doesn’t matter, it’s mostly just Janie and Phoebe talking, and then we get Janie’s story and Janie grows up and does life and goes away and finally comes back and sits down and talks to Phoebe and we’re back where we started.

What interested me most about the dialogue was why did Hurston choose to write that way. Maybe two thirds of the narrative is carried forward by discussions between the main characters; but more than that, secondary characters and secondary issues are also accorded great chunks of dialogue. Hurston is writing/recording talk for talk’s sake: describing the give and take during card games, or all the teasing the completely peripheral Matt suffers about the way he treats his mule.

It is clear that Hurston is saying ‘I am Black and this is what being Black sounds like’. I can’t tell from my limited American reading how close Hurston is to the beginning of Black American Literature, but she must be pretty close. And she is highly educated; an anthropologist; her chosen field is, I think, poor rural Blacks in the South; she is a poet (and playwright); and you would imagine that she is well-read, thoughtful about Modernism, about innovation in literature to more closely represent Black modes of thought and speech.

Hurston (1891-1960) grew up in the self-governed, all-Black community of Eatonville, Florida. Despite some disruptions, especially to her high school education, she made her way to Howard University, where she got her first degree at age 29, and then to Barnard College at Columbia University.

When Hurston arrived in New York City in 1925, the Harlem Renaissance was at its zenith, and she soon became one of the writers at its center. Shortly before she entered Barnard, Hurston’s short story “Spunk” was selected for The New Negro, a landmark anthology of fiction, poetry, and essays focusing on African and African-American art and literature. In 1926, a group of young black writers including Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Wallace Thurman, calling themselves the Niggerati, produced a literary magazine called Fire!! that featured many of the young artists and writers of the Harlem Renaissance.

Wiki

I haven’t read Langston Hughes, and I know I should. And I really haven’t read much on Hurston, except Melanie/GTL on Hurston’s collections of Southern Black folk stories. But my impression at this point in my reading is that Hurston is a thoughtful and innovative writer; not just writing about Black people, her people; but writing with all the rhythms and poetry of everyday Southern Black speech. The working poor had been making their way into Eng.Lit. over the previous century (starting with North and South?) but I wish the US had a Trove (searchable database of all Australian newspapers) and I could see how critics responded to this overthrowing of all the white, middle class values Eng.Lit. holds so dear.

The story, as distinct from the writing, is of a young rural woman, Janie, brought up by her grandmother when her mother deserts her. It stands out in the story-telling that Janie is a quiet, reserved girl, only slowly, over the space of twenty years growing into assertive, independent womanhood; and that you are not told this, but feel it in her speech as she matures.

I’m sure most of you know the story, those of you educated in America will no doubt have dissected it at length. Briefly, her grandmother, dying, worried how Janie will get on without her, marries her off to an older farmer. The farmer treats Janie as just another useful farm animal (Janie is attractive but sex is rarely even implied, let alone discussed). Janie runs off with another guy, Jody Starks.

Starks takes her to Eatonville where he is soon the store owner, property developer and mayor. Janie is expected to work in the store, which she doesn’t enjoy, but is also expected to be a cut above the townspeople when she would rather be of them.

The years pass. Starks dies leaving Janie well off. A handsome younger conman, Tea Cake, courts her and she goes off with him, happily enduring the ups and downs of his erratic life. They end up picking beans in the Everglades. There’s the hurricane, graphically described. And the novel, as I said, draws to an end with Janie returning to Eatonville.

At this point, two thirds of the way through my North American project, I am finding the First Nations/Indigenous writing flat, relatively unemotional, though the stories are important, and the African-American writing vibrant, full of life and poetry. And yes, I’m generalizing off a very small sample. Hurston, like James Baldwin, doesn’t include white characters in her story, but has them off at a distance, a malevolent other; as when, for instance, white men round up Black men to bury the dead after the hurricane, the whites in coffins and the Blacks in mass graves.

Of course, racism is the common theme of the project, the constant reality of Black and Indigenous life under settler colonialism. So while I am enjoying the writing, I am also feeling less and less certain about what I can do, as a settler, to make a difference (and Albomp embracing Shaq O’Neal to promote the Voice to Parliament doesn’t help).

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Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes were watching God, first pub. 1937. Audiobook – Harper Audio, 2004, read by Ruby Dee. 6 hrs 44 min.