Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God is a novel about people. A fact that can get lost when categorized as African-American fiction, or women’s fiction, and hailed as a great book by a black woman before the Civil Rights Movement took hold. Unlike Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, Hurston didn’t write about black people as they compared to whites—she simply wrote about folks from Eaton Florida and they were black. The kind of people Hurston knew in a land she must have known as well as she she knew her own skin. How else might a writer write about a hurricane and all that led up to it and all that came to bear after it without knowing the land so well. The dialect is written as though it’s poetry.  The language has a rare musical quality and the pacing is perfect. Hurston was not known as a poet, but in this novel, passages could be pulled from it, given a new title and called poetry…beautiful memorable poetry. For instance, “It was the time for sitting on porches beside the road. It was the time to hear things and talk. These sitters had been tongueless, earless, eyeless conveniences all day long. Mules and other brutes had occupied their skins. But now, the sun and the bossman were gone, so the skins felt powerful and human. They became lords of sounds and lesser things. They passed nations through their mouths. They sat in judgment.”

The novel centers around the life of a beautiful woman named Janie Crawford with long flowing hair and a mind of her own. While young and at the insistence of her grandmother, she marries an older man she hardly knows and barely likes. He expects her to work harder than she wants to work. He expects her to work beyond the kitchen and do things that seem beneath her. She does not do what he tells. Even more, when she meets a sweet-smelling young man named Jody Starks she sees the promise of a life far more satisfying and so she runs off with him without ever looking back.

The two marry (there is nothing said about a second marriage without a divorce) and they move to Eatonville, a town that was created and planned as an African-American community. Starks is smart enough to buy land, build a store and a house worthy of his beautiful bride Janie. He quickly becomes the town’s mayor and Janie spends most of her time in their big house or at the store where Starks insist she keep her long hair Her hair represents life. As it is covered, so is the happiness in life that Janie is always yearning to have. By the end of their twenty years of marriage, Starks was so bitter toward Janey that he barely spoke to her from his deathbed.

After his death she finds true and lasting love with a much younger man named Tea Cakes. Tea Cakes can only be described as Janie’s soul mate and after two bad marriages her appreciation for this love is immense. He is a fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants sort of man who plays guitar, dances, gambles, and sings. Janie is always expecting him to leave her, but it seems as though such a notion never crosses hims mind. He does disappoint her, he even hits her once, and he isn’t reliable for the little things, but for better or worse he seems to genuinely love her.

As I mentioned in the opening of this review, the Hurricane scene, which is near the end, is a spectacular and emotional event. The descriptions, the turmoil, the raw human nature against the earth’s elements—these chapters alone make for a powerful short story. As a whole, Their Eyes Were Watching God is a story of strength and personal growth for a woman and a community of people that had little to no voice before Hurston. Now, with this novel, people, a time, and a culture has a solid place in American history and American literature.

See SLR’s profile of Zora Neale Hurston.