Their Eyes Were Watching God

What an amazing book. We did it for book group this month and I was glad for the chance to read it. I have only read Hurston's Mules and Men and that was in college, a very long time ago.

Just a few thoughts here.
1. I love the name Zora. What a great name. It was really interesting to read about the end of her life, where she fell into relative obscurity, worked as a maid the last 10 years of her life, and then was buried in an unmarked grave. The story of Alice Walker, one of the most influential writers who rediscovered Hurston, trying to find the location where she was buried was great.

2. Hurston's writing is brilliant. She moves between character dialogue in the black vernacular and beautifully written literary descriptions so gracefully, without any hint of perturbance. It occurred to me while reading this that she must have been split between two worlds: that of the writer and academic and that of the poor black woman.

3. I loved the arc of Janie's journey--her voyage to the horizon where heaven meets earth. I thought it was interesting that for Hurston, Janie's self-realization was not at all dependent on her becoming a mother, but centered on finding and loving Tea Cake.

Some of my favorite passages:

After her second husband first beat her, she has a moment of powerful self awareness.

Janie stood where he left her for unmeasured time and thought. She stood there until something fell off the shelf inside her. It was her image of Jody tumbled down and shattered. But looking at it she saw that it never was the flesh and blood figure of her dreams. Just something she had grabbed up to drape her dreams over. In a way she turned her back upon the image where it lay and looked further. She had no more blossomy openings dusting pollen over her man, neither any glistening young fruit where the petal used to be. She found that she had a host of thoughts she had never expressed to him, and numerous emotions she had never let Jody know about. Things packed up and put away in parts of her heart where he could never find them. She was saving up feelings for some man she had never seen. She had an inside and an outside now and suddenly she knew how not to mix them.

And the final paragraph of the book:

The day of the gun, and the bloody body, and the courthouse came and commenced to sing a sobbing sigh out of every corner in the room; out of each and every chair and thing. Commenced to sing, commenced to sob and sigh, singing and sobbing. Then Tea Cake came prancing around her where she was and the song of the sigh flew out of the window and lit in the top of the pine trees. Tea Cake, with the sun for a shawl. Of course he wasn’t dead. He could never be dead until she herself had finished feeling and thinking. The kiss of his memory made pictures of love and light against the wall. Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.

What a satisfying conclusion.

This book has inspired me to create an African American reading list in honor of Black History Month. I think I'll read The Souls of Black Folk (I've heard much mention of this in sociological contexts), some Toni Morrison, maybe some more Zora Neale Hurston, and maybe Cane River.