How and why did you first become interested in, and attracted to, Their Eyes Were Watching God?

Only a few books have affected me so profoundly that I can distinctly remember the circumstances of reading them: where I was sitting, the sun’s position in the sky, who else was in the room, what the temperature was. Their Eyes Were Watching God is one of those books. About thirty-five years ago I was assigned the novel in a graduate seminar at Northwestern University. I read Their Eyes Were Watching God in my Chicago apartment, pencil in hand, on an old red velvet reading chair, under a cheap lamp’s bad light. From the first lines of the novel’s extraordinary second paragraph—“So the beginning of this was a woman and she had come back from burying the dead”—I neither set down the thick paperback nor managed to write a word in its margins.¹ I read it in one sitting and when I came to its last line—“She called in her soul to come and see” (184)—I stood up and took my phone off the hook; I simply could not talk. I have now read the novel at least thirty times, but sometimes that stunned revelry still returns to me when I am reading or teaching Their Eyes Were Watching God.

For that same graduate course, I was assigned to report on the novel’s reception history—how it was first seen and reviewed, and how its reputation has fared since then. I discovered that the novel was immensely popular when it first appeared, although it was not always well understood. In time, interest waned. By the time Hurston died in January of 1960, her books were all out of print, and she was impoverished. She was not unheard of, however. Dedicated readers, most of them Black, kept her reputation alive by passing dog-eared copies of her books to new generations. A Florida Deputy Sheriff, Patrick Duval, saw a bonfire in Hurston’s backyard after her death and helped extinguish the flames destroying her personal effects. He was one of these fans. Duval took Hurston’s soggy, burned papers home and spent two years trying to find a library that would take them. Thanks to him, there is a Zora Neale Hurston archive in Florida.²

It seemed extraordinary to me that a writer who was immensely popular—a Book-of-the-Month Club author, two-time Guggenheim fellow, a recipient of numerous awards and prizes—could then fall into almost complete obscurity, and then rise again to become an icon of both Women’s Studies and Black Studies, with hundreds of articles and dissertations devoted to her work. These sea changes seemed to be an important way to diagnose changing cultural attitudes and taste, to better understand what we value in our literature and why. So, I wrote a dissertation about how literary reputations rise and fall and how we might develop a language for talking about what those changes mean. Hurston was at the center of that project.

My first teaching job was at Yale University, which contains the extraordinary James Weldon Johnson collection of African American literature, a rich trove to which many Black writers donated their papers, largely thanks to the efforts and enthusiasm of Hurston’s white friend Carl Van Vechten. Amongst those papers were dozens of Hurston’s letters, some of the best and most striking writing she’d ever done. I was reading these letters while working on my first book, The Erotics of Talk: Women’s Writing and Feminist Paradigms, a book inspired in many ways by Their Eyes Were Watching God and with the novel as its center. When I discovered that no book had yet (then) been published of a Black woman writer’s letters, I realized how important it was that Hurston’s letters reach the public.

The more than 600 letters that combine with short biographical sections to comprise my collection Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters,³ were located in over three dozen libraries scattered across the nation—in the archives, if they existed at all, of the friends and associates with whom Hurston corresponded. Quite a few of these letters are about Their Eyes Were Watching God, how it fit into Hurston’s career ambitions, what inspired it, how she felt about its reception. They help make sense of many of the more complex themes and ideas in the novel.

At the time of its publication, Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters included every letter then extant which Hurston had written, and more than double the number of letters I expected to find (a very few additional ones have been found in the two decades since). It seemed evident that Hurston’s correspondents knew that Hurston’s reputation would soar again one day and that her private writings would become works of major cultural significance.

What do you find most interesting and/or appealing about this book?

The novel is so bold; it has extraordinary chutzpah, to use a word from my own traditions. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston takes one of the oldest literary forms—the quest romance—and reshapes it completely, claiming it as her own. The medieval quest romance is usually a story of male heroism—the great knight, renowned for his chivalric deeds. The knight’s quest, an epic adventure, has significance for everyone. Achieving his goal—bringing back the Holy Grail for example—restores the world.

Hurston’s knight is a young Black Southern girl. Her quest is for the “ecstatic,” “frothing,” “creaming” (11) fulfillment she sees in a blossoming pear tree. Put simply, Hurston makes the epic quest romance a young Black girl’s search for an orgasm.

Hurston’s move was bold by any standards, and even more so in the context of the time. Long-standing racist stereotypes of Black women as sexually abandoned put particular pressure on any representation of Black female sexuality. As Black feminist critic Deborah McDowell has written, “given this context, it is not surprising that a pattern of reticence about black female sexuality dominated novels by black women in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. They responded to the myth of black women’s sexual licentiousness by insisting fiercely on her chastity.”⁴ Prohibitions against representing Black female sexuality were, in fact, so strong that Hurston’s friend, Black journalist George S. Schuyler, wrote out “Instructions for Contributors” to The Saturday Evening Quill that baldly stated that “nothing that casts the least reflection on contemporary moral or sexual standards will be allowed. . . . Keep away from the erotic!”⁵ Hurston did not keep away from the erotic. She penned one of the most erotic scenes in American literature.

She also added an important layer to her own bold sexual representation. Janie wants what she has seen. “Oh to be a pear tree—any tree in bloom!” (11) Janie thinks. Janie does not, however, go off only in search of an orgasm like the “love embrace” she witnesses “stretched on her back” under a blossoming pear tree: “the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight” (11). Instead, the fulfillment Janie seeks is described less as sexual and more as social. Janie is filled with “that oldest human longing—self revelation” (6). She is in search of a chance to tell her own story, which is why Pheoby Watson’s “hungry listening” (10) is such a vital part of Janie’s quest. I call this drive an “erotics of talk.”⁶

Hurston elevates self-revelation to reveal how rarely it can be achieved. That is the novel’s chief social indictment. And it provides the novel’s form—a framed tale in which the protagonist tells her story to one listener alone.

Do you think the book has any weaknesses? If so, what are they?

There are two moments in the novel that are truly out of step with its otherwise strong feminist and anti-racist messages.

In Chapter 17, Tea Cake, Janie’s third love and the “bee to her blossom,” has what the novel calls a “brainstorm” (140). Tea Cake is jealous of others’ interest in Janie and to relieve the “awful fear inside him,” he beats Janie. This is treated as normal, almost enviable. It is not treated as the terrible breach it is, nor is it condemned. “Being able to whip her reassured him in possession. No brutal beating at all. He just slapped her around a bit to show he was boss” (140). The scene strikes a peculiar note. But it is not a lone instance. In a much later novel, Seraph on the Suwannee, Hurston treats marital rape with similar complacency and nonchalance. Both scenes have caused critics years of consternation.

In Chapter 18 Janie watches a band of Seminole Indians go by. Then another. And another. “Hurricane coming,” they say. “Everybody was talking about it that night.” But the community doesn’t listen to the Seminoles. The community falls prey to the prejudices that they see all around them. “Indians are dumb anyhow, always were” (147). This prejudice is important. Hurston is insisting here—quite provocatively—that internalized racism can be passed on by the oppressed. But the depiction of the Seminole Indians relies on an amalgam of stereotypes, and the awkward representation undercuts the lesson.

These weaknesses have to be put in context. Hurston wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God in only seven weeks, while in Haiti, at the end of a Guggenheim Fellowship partly spent in Jamaica studying the culture of the Maroons, the descendants of escaped slaves. She was working on the Maroon project at the same time as she was writing the novel. She was also ill when she wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God. Even a masterpiece can have weak moments.

Are there any portions or passages in the novel that you find especially successful?

The pear tree scene is, of course, enormously successful, and I’ve already spoken about Hurston’s boldness in writing—especially given the context of the time—one of the sexiest scenes we have in modern American literature.

The other scene I find particularly successful is the trial scene that comes towards the end of the novel. It is a brilliant generic turn, inside of a novel that takes advantage of a range of different genres: the framed tale, the romance, the bildungsroman, the fairy tale, and others. The trial scene is particularly resonant and powerful from the perspective of the African American literary tradition, given that part of the repressive apparatus of slavery was denying enslaved persons a legal and civic voice by denying them the right to testify in court, including on their own behalf.

The trial scene follows the novel’s tragic turn. Tea Cake contracts rabies trying to save Janie in the hurricane. Mad from rabies, he tries to kill Janie, who must shoot him in self-defense. On trial for his murder, Janie must tell her story to save her own life. The stakes could not be higher. This makes the twist that Hurston gives to this scene even more surprising.

Janie finds herself in a segregated Southern courtroom, facing two equally hostile audiences. The Black community, seated in the balcony, has “their tongues cocked and loaded . . . They were all against her she could see.” The white community is represented by its all-male jury: “twelve strange men who didn’t know a thing about people like Tea Cake and her” but who were going to pass judgment and decide if Janie would live (176). Janie notices silenced female observers and wishes she could speak to them instead. She sits in silence as a parade of men tell her story for her: the sheriff, the doctor, the attorneys. By the time it is her turn to speak, Janie has already been rendered irrelevant. Hurston’s trial scene is a symbolic history of Black American life.

Janie tells her story, but the novel does not. This all-important moment is not rendered in the novel. We hear only that she testified and then stopped. And when she stops speaking, no one seems to notice, because they have not paid any attention to her speech: “She had been through for some time before the judge and the lawyer and the rest seemed to know it” (178). Janie is acquitted not because of the power of her voice, but because of the low value the jury places on Tea Cake’s—they don’t much care that a Black man has lost his life. Nothing Janie can say to them would have made much of a difference.

The novel contrasts this failed moment of storytelling to the satisfaction of talking to Pheoby: “‘Lawd!’ Pheoby breathed out heavily, ‘Ah done growed ten feet higher from jus’ listenin’ tuh you, Janie’” (182). Hurston privileges self-revelation as Janie’s deepest desire, even as she depicts the social conditions allowing such self-revelation as highly circumscribed. Only once, and only with Pheoby, does Janie finally (and fully) exercise this desire. Only Pheoby—not Tea Cake, not the jury, not “Mouth Almighty,” and not the reader—can satisfy the “hungry listening” conditions that allow Janie a voice. The more store the novel sets by such storytelling, the stronger is its indictment of how rarely it can occur.

Are there any approaches to the book you find less appealing, and why? In particular, are there any studies of the novel you cannot recommend?

Hurston situates her novel in an unnamed part of the South, and she sets it in an unnamed historical moment. This has led too many critics to conclude that the novel is ahistorical and set in a mythical, undeterminable past. But the conversation between Pheoby and Janie occurs, in fact, at a very precise and significant historical moment, one that many of Hurston’s Black readers would have quickly caught in 1937, even if it has escaped the notice of more recent readers.

In Chapter Two, Nanny reminds Janie of her family history. She describes how, during slavery, her plantation master and Janie’s grandfather left to join the Civil War when Janie’s mother, Leafy, was a week old. He departs just after Sherman’s troops have invaded Atlanta, which gives us the date of 1864. Seventeen years later, we learn, Leafy is raped by a Black schoolteacher (part of the long history of white and Black male abuse of Black women that has embittered Nanny). This gives us the date of Janie’s birth as either 1881 or 1882. Janie is sixteen when Nanny tells her this history: 1897 or 1898. She is forty when she returns home and sits down on her back porch, to talk to Pheoby: 1921 or 1922.

1921 and 1922 are the opening years—the anni mirabilis—of the vaunted Harlem Renaissance that Hurston took part in. They are the inaugural years of the movement credited with Black America’s self-determined artistic explosion, its greatest resistance to racism. Inspired and in some ways inaugurated by the triumphant return of the Black 369th Regiment from World War I in 1919, the Harlem Renaissance often took its cues—and even some of its aesthetic—from militarism. The most often-reprinted works, the ones that became almost anthems, such as W.E.B. Du Bois’s “Returning Soldiers” and Claude McKay’s “If We Must Die,” were often masculinist.

Their Eyes Were Watching God evokes the Harlem Renaissance only to turn away from it. Janie and Pheoby are on a back porch, with their backs to the North, symbolically thumbing their noses to this great flowering in which Hurston participated. Their disaffection is part of the novel’s complicated feminism, Hurston’s way of critiquing a movement that was male-dominated and insufficiently attentive to the needs, and voices, of Black women. Janie and Pheoby find sustenance and support in one another, and not in the larger political/cultural movement. The frame narrative, combined with the novel’s careful historical dating, creates a pointed critique of a movement which, by 1937, had ended with Hurston feeling unsatisfied by its achievements.

From Nanny we learn that the history of male-domination is long and cuts across race lines. Nanny is both an anti-feminist voice—urging Janie to marry a man she does not love and cannot desire—and also a strong advocate for Black feminism, discouraged by obstacles to Black women in the public sphere. “‘Ah wanted to preach a great sermon about colored women sittin’ on high,’” she tells Janie. “‘But they wasn’t no pulpit for me’” (15). Nanny’s history as a Black enslaved woman, raped by her master, and mother to a daughter raped by a schoolteacher (a figure often revered in Black post-bellum communities) gives her a particular purchase on both sexual abuse and romantic ideology. Nanny fears for Janie’s safety and wants to see her protected from “de menfolks white or black . . . makin’ a spit cup outa her” (19)—raping and abusing her. Nanny urges marriage for practical reasons. She doesn’t think much of cultural ideals of love and romance. Love, Nanny states, in one of the funniest moments of what can be a very funny novel, is just a form of social control, a tool of the patriarchy: “Dat’s de very prong all us black women gits hung on. Dis love!” (22).

The men in Hurston’s life wanted a conventional woman, who would take a back seat to them, including the lover who inspired Their Eyes Were Watching God. “This man,” Hurston wrote in her autobiography, “meant to be the head . . . [and] my career balked the completeness of his ideal. . . . No matter how soaked we were in ecstasy, the telephone or the doorbell would ring, and there would be my career again.”⁷ Had Hurston herself caved to romance ideology we would never have had her great works. Her three marriages were all short-lived.

The novel’s feminism is too often missed. Certainly Richard Wright missed that message altogether when he maintained, shortly after the novel appeared, that it had “no theme, no message, no thought.”⁸ Wright was not alone in missing the fact that Their Eyes Were Watching God is a political novel.

How do you foresee study of the book developing over coming decades? Are there any approaches worth pursuing that have not yet been fully pursued?

Increasing attention is now being paid to Hurston’s other writing: anthropology, journalism, drama, film, and nonfiction. She was very unusual in American letters in her ability to work across various genres. Her folklore and nonfiction are important in their own right. They also help to correct long-standing confusions about her politics. Hurston has sometimes been charged with turning her back on her community and sometimes with being a Conservative (a charge which this volume’s editor repeats and with which I disagree). Her other writings, and her interest in folklore, make her deepest commitments to her community—and to its history—evident. Hurston was fiercely committed to Black history and to honoring Black traditions.

Her letters help clarify her commitments. For example, in 1945, Hurston wrote an extraordinary letter to W.E.B. Du Bois, from whom she’d been estranged for many years and who she once had dubbed “Dr. Dubious.” But she felt so strongly that Black history needed to be honored, and she hoped so fervently that Du Bois might help her to do so, that she reached out to him across decades of silence. From a houseboat outside of Daytona Beach, Hurston wrote: “My Dear Dr. Du Bois: As Dean of American Negro Artists, I think it is about time that you take steps toward an important project which you have neglected up to this time. Why do you not propose a cemetery for the illustrious Negro dead? . . . Let no Negro celebrity, no matter what financial condition they might be in at death, lie in inconspicious [sic] forgetfulness. We must assume the responsibility of their graves being known and honored.”⁹ The terrible irony of Hurston being buried fifteen years later in an unmarked grave should not be lost on us.

Hurston’s deep commitments to honoring Black traditions informed all of her extraordinary work as a folklorist, some of which continues to see the light of day after many decades.¹⁰ Those commitments informed her years interviewing Cudjo Lewis, former slave and survivor of the last slave ship to be brought to the United States, fifty years after slavery had been outlawed. Those commitments informed Hurston’s many years trying to convince others that this slave ship, the Clotilda, was buried in the waters off of Alabama and should be raised and exhibited. Allowing “our people to forget” she wrote Du Bois, lets their “spirits evaporate.”¹¹

Hurston was enormously complex and even contradictory. Her feminist politics of voice, like her early Black nationalist aesthetic, has long befuddled critics. As more and more of her unpublished works come to light, we stand a better chance of seeing her fully, with all of her complications intact. Because she was often askew of the cultural protocols of the many different communities she collaborated with—critical of the male leadership of the Harlem Renaissance and intolerant of the pettiness of academia, for example—some of that complexity has been lost. A full restoration of her corpus—across all her beloved genres—can help us reconstruct and honor what a truly original writer Hurston was.

Notes

Works Cited