Their Eyes Were Watching God

Their Eyes Were Watching God is for me a purely pleasurable reading experience. I find Hurston's poetic prose meaningful, profound, and weighty without ever being pompous or overwritten. Hurston is a folklorist by trade and a collector of tales. I read a good deal of Of Mules and Men a while back and see in this novel the same love of how people communicate with one another, how stories and ribbing games are more than just ways to pass the time; they are the very root of who we are and how we connect.

At one point in the novel, when Janie is disillusioned by Joe's desire to keep her "proper" and "respectable," Janie reflects upon where her life went wrong. She says, and I can't find the passage now, so I am quoting from memory, that in the course of her first two marriages "she went out in search of people" but has only found "things." Like Janie, this novel goes out in search of people, and that is precisely what it brings back to us, characters and world fully developed and rich. In many ways, the novel reminds me of Grapes of Wrath, in that Hurston shares Steinbeck's love of the poetry of common speech. Steinbeck's novel has of course at its roots a political concern, and while Hurston touches upon racism and Southern social politics, they are merely peripheral, an undeniable element that surrounds the characters but never touches their souls.

And this is an amazing and modern love story that I find very uplifting. Their is no meaningless poetry is Tea Cakes wooing of Janie. He lets her experience life by involving her in all his doings. And he involves her because he wants to share all his experiences with her, not because he wants to be some guiding principle in her life. Playing checkers, fishing at midnight, working in the muck of the glades, they are true partners and lovers with whom I can whole-heartedly identify.

And this romantic relationship makes the book wholly unique to me. In a romance, the writer must always find a way to keep the lovers apart, to create tension with misunderstanding, jealousy, and ill-timed meetings, but Hurston does away with that. Instead, she creates her climax when one lover is out of his mind, sick with a disease he contracted while rescuing his love; our hero must shoot her own hero in self defense, a horrible and painful fate made all the more horrible because of their true love and friendship.

This was my second time reading this novel, and I would readily read it again.