Dolors's Reviews > Their Eyes Were Watching God

“To meet as far this morning 

From the world as agreeing 

With it, you and I 

Are suddenly what the trees try

To tell us we are: 

That their merely being there 

Means something; that soon 

We may touch, love, explain.”
Some Trees by John Ashberry.

Janie returns to Eatonville with the sunbeams glowing on her shoulders giving her the appearance of a luminescent and almost unearthly goddess whose bare feet voluptuously caress the dusty road. Women on porches sing a harmonious chorus of gossip and covetousness while men stare greedily at Janie’s lustrous and long hair and sweeping hips moving to the rhythm of a life washed by the sea tides of love and scented by the pear blossoms of desire.
Pheoby, Janie’s best friend and confidante, loses no time to meet the newcomer and inquires after the reasons of her unexpected homecoming.
It’s under the shadows of dusk, when languid leaves and elongated branches dance at the tune of ephemeral loves and perennial memories, that Janie discloses her journey in flashbacks and unconsciously intertwines her ultimate search for fulfillment as a woman with the three marriages in her life.

From Nanny’s sour aftertaste of slavery that comes with the sustained abuse in the hands of the white master, the debasement inflicted by the mistress and the burden of attaining freedom and not knowing what to do with it, to the subtle division between those with fairer skins and those with darker ones, Zora Neale Hurston elevates Janie’s story to an icon portraying the richness of the Afro-American oral culture and its folkloric dialect, symbolizing the survival of the African spirit after decades of merciless oppression and gratuitous atrocity.

“You know, honey, us colored folks is branches without roots and that makes things come round in queer ways. You in particular. Ah was born back due in slavery so it wasn’t for me to fulfill my dreams of whut a woman oughta be and to do.” (p. 31)

The magic of Hurston’s writing style relays not only in the use of the Afro-American dialect but also in the contrasting classical lyricism of some passages that bond life, love and sensuality together with natural imagery like trees, celestial bodies, seas and shores, which brings enchanting reminiscences of the melodic British Romantic Poets, creating a counter effect for the drumming rawness of the allegorical vernacular.

“Janie saw her life like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and doom was in the branches."(p.20)

The natural world offers silent wisdom to sixteen years old Janie when laying down languorously in the shade provided by the branches of the pear tree, where the bees hum and disappear in the hidden crevices of its blossoms, she understands the mystery of sexuality.

“She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun and the painting breath of the breeze when the inaudible voice of it all came to her. 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 marriage!” (p. 24)

But the trodden path of life will show Janie that marriage doesn’t compel love like the sun the day. Forced to marry Mr. Killicks, an older farmer who is supposed to offer her the security Nanny so much covets for, passionate Janie discovers that some bees stifle the female spirit, which is screaming out loud to be acknowledged to apparently deaf ears. Defying convention and showing uncommon valor, Janie rebels against stupor and elopes with Joe Starks, an ambitious man who has plans to become a “big voice” in Eatonville. Unaware at first of Joe’s chauvinism, Janie believes to have found a worthy companion and marries him only to discover throughout the years that her second husband has tyrannical opinions about the role of women in society. Relegated to a mere personal possession, Janie witnesses her own voice drown into the vast ocean of isolation and degradation.
Both Killicks and Starks profane that pear tree ignoring the over-ripe fruit that has been waiting to be cherished as it deserved and it is not until many years later, when Janie becomes a forty years old and attractive widow, that Tea Cake appears disguised as the bee that blossoming Janie has been waiting for during all her life, making her soul crawl out from its hiding place.

“He could be a bee to a blossom – a pear tree blossom in the spring. He seemed to be crushing scent out of the world with his footsteps. Crushing aromatic herbs with every step he took. Spices hung around him. He was a glance from God.” (p.161)

And so Janie’s melody is finally listened to and her soul sings cloud-high along Tea Cake’s sweet-scented one while they both stare at the dark waters, while their eyes are watching God.
But nature, as life, can be miraculous one minute and treacherous the next, and Janie will have to face the tide of misfortune and swim with courage in order not to be dragged by the relentless currents of injustice and despair.
Zora Neale Hurston writes with the vivid force of the unheard and the defeated, revealing uncomfortable truths about race and gender while kissing each one of her words with uncanny lyricism and giving voice to the silenced by the weight of history. The shores are waiting to be shaped by the sea of love and waves of memories will sweep the tragedy of mortality imprinting a permanent image on a never-ending horizon. It’s only a matter of keeping the watch in the darkness, trusting that God is looking back.

“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.” (p. 284)