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When someone in my book club chose Their Eyes Were Watching God as our next book, I was startled. I had not thought of that novel since grad school. But I dove back in, through the thicket of phonetic dialogue that today would be verboten, and found Janie all over again. Talk about a coming of age! As a girl, “she saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight. So this was a marriage!” That innocent, erotic delight opened her to the world. “She often spoke to falling seeds and said, ‘Ah hope you fall on soft ground,’ because she had heard seeds saying that to each other as they passed.”
Then, in the flush of that first intuitive wisdom, she crashed, brought down by her grandmother’s plans for her. Nanny had devoted her life to the hope that her daughter’s life would be better: “Freedom found me wid a baby daughter in mah arms, so Ah said Ah’d take a broom and a cook-pot and throw up a highway through de wilderness for her. She would expound what Ah felt.” Instead, her daughter strayed from that careful clearing, so Nanny devoted herself to her granddaughter instead. Seeing signs of awakened sexuality, she was bent on getting Janie married.
Janie was crushed that her beloved grandmother would marry her off to someone she did not love. “Nanny had taken the biggest thing God ever made, the horizon—for no matter how far a person can go the horizon is still way beyond you—and pinched it in to such a little bit of a thing that she could tie it about her granddaughter’s neck tight enough to choke her.”
You would think that half a century later, such impulses would be dead and gone, but I remember how fiercely my great-aunt urged me to marry a boyfriend well positioned for financial success. I was as crushed as Janie, and I broke up with him instead. Given fewer choices, Janie tried to imagine herself into loving this foist-upon-her husband. “Finally out of Nanny’s talk and her own conjectures she made a sort of comfort for herself”—but it did not, could not, last.
With that established, Hurston threw a sack of bricks at us: “She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie’s first dream was dead, so she became a woman.”
I want to challenge that sentence but cannot; there is a bitter truth to it. Reality cuts like acid through the spun sugar of teenage romance. Once those dreams dissolve, you see the edges of things, the limits of love. If you are lucky, you find someone who sees the limits too, grins, shrugs, and forges on at your side. But Janie’s second husband soon turned as mean as the first. (Power and ambition, in a constrained world, will do that.) The result? Soon “she wasn’t petal-open anymore with him.” What better description for that tightening, that realization that you must still protect yourself, that this man who invades your body and tries to claim your deepest self cannot be trusted? “She had an inside and an outside now and suddenly she knew not to mix them.”
At that point, decades before feminism had a name, she became one. Quiet and compliant most days, but keeping her inner world alive, and every once in a while, speaking up: “Sometimes God gits familiar wid us womenfolks too and talks His inside business,” she informed a self-important, gossipy group of men one day. “He told me how surprised He was ‘bout y’all turning out so smart after Him makin’ yuh different; and how surprised y’all is going tuh be if you ever find out you don’t know half as much ‘bout us as you think you do. It’s so easy to make yo’self out God Almighty when you ain’t got nothin’ tuh strain against but women and chickens.”
When her bossy, callous husband fell sick, she summoned the nerve to confront him on his deathbed: “You wasn’t satisfied with me de way Ah was. Naw! Mah own mind had tuh be squeezed and crowded out tuh make room for yours in me.”
Never again, would she let that happen. As she fell in love with Tea Cake, she held herself in such check that he complained, “Yo’ face jus’ left here and went off somewhere else.” He was younger than she but insisted, “De thought uh mah youngness don’t satisfy me lak yo’ presence do.” Were we to trust him? He was quick (too quick?) with the compliments: “You’se something tuh make uh man forgit tuh git old and forgit tuh die.” But what clinched my faith in his love was his response when she offered one of those mock, wistful protests women are prone to: “If dere’s somebody else you’d ruther take, it’s all right wid me.”
“Naw,” he retorted, “it ain’t all right wid you. If it was you wouldn’t be sayin’ dat. Have de nerve tuh say whut you mean.”
Watching him force total honesty from her, I breathed a sigh of relief. These two were plain with each other, and until a hurricane and a mad dog destroyed their paradise, they enjoyed each other just as young Janey dreamed could happen. “He done taught me de maiden language all over,” she confided, and the line vibrated like a tuning fork for me. When I fell in love with my future husband at the ancient age of thirty-two, I felt new again, innocent in a way I had long since given up on. So it was not too late for that freshness, even after cynicism? The hope in that makes you generous.
Janie, too. Now she could even forgive and understand Nanny: “She was borned in slavery time when folks, dat is black folks, didn’t sit down anytime dey felt lak it. So sittin’ on porches lak de white madam looked lak uh mighty fine thing tuh her. Dat’s what she wanted for me.” And that, I realize only now, is what my great-aunt—who never married and who, rumor had it, loved, hopelessly, a married man—wanted for me.
I waited instead. There is so much freedom in a reciprocal, unreserved love. Anchored, Janie gave herself full leeway, defying social norms to enjoy every minute with Tea Cake. “Ahm born but Ah ain’t dead,” she teased at one point. “No tellin’ whut Ah’m liable tuh do yet.” Her husband was easy with people; once, when she spoke critically, “Tea Cake snapped, ‘Aw, don’t make God look so foolish—findin’ fault wid everything He made.’”
And so she grew steadily more tolerant—but stayed clear-eyed. Of mean old racist Mrs. Turner, she thought, “It was inevitable that she should accept any inconsistency and cruelty from her deity as all good worshippers do from theirs. All gods who receive homage are cruel.”
A sentence that stopped me in my tracks.
Hurston wrote this novel in just seven weeks, and in that short sprint she pulled the right words for every emotion right out of the air as she ran. The depression of an unloved wife: “She got so she received all things with the stolidness of the earth which soaks up urine and perfume with the same indifference.” The fantasies that sustained her, that sense of “somebody near about making summertime out of lonesomeness.” The way the men responded to shared fear and imminent disaster, sitting around “stuffing courage into each other’s ears.” A small town’s jealousy: “It was hard to love a woman that always made you feel so wishful.” A marriage’s shorthand: “He stunned the argument with half a word. ‘Fix,’ he said and fought his way outside. He had seen more than Janie had.”
An anthropologist and writer, Hurston knew groups as well as she knew inner worlds. “Seeing the woman as she was made them remember the envy they had stored up from other times,” she wrote of the townspeople. “So they chewed up the back parts of their minds and swallowed with relish. They made burning statements with questions, and killing tools out of laughs.” Rather than recoil, Janie came to understand them. “Now, Phoeby,” she told her friend at the book’s end, “don’t feel too mean wid de rest of ‘em ‘cause dey’s parched up from not knowin’ things. Dem meatskins is got tuh rattle tuh make out they’s alive. Let ’em consolate theyselves wid talk.”
And when Phoeby reminded her of the judgment heaped upon a woman who went off with a younger man?
“You must tell ’em dat love ain’t somethin’ lak uh grindstone dat’s de same thing everywhere and do de same thing tuh everything it touch,” Janie instructed her. “Love is lak de sea. It’s uh movin’ thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets, and it’s different with every shore.”
You had to live into that realization. But what came next, our book club wondered. Did she ever fall in love again? Was she happy? Ah, she had already told us: “If you kin see de light at daybreak, you don’t keer if you die at dusk. It’s so many people never seen de light at all.” Janie had loved and been loved, and along the way, she had learned to love herself right into courage, and a free spirit, and the kindness that comes when you have no need of bitterness.
“Two things everybody’s got tuh do fuh theyselves,” she remarked. “They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin’ fuh theyselves.”
True. Even a novel this wise cannot chart a woman’s path for her. Still, I wish every teenage girl would read this book. This is a journey that, in one way or another, with luck and grace or without, we all wind up taking: away from the sweet girlish dreams and then right back to them, because once you own yourself, you are innocent again.
Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.
