I first came to African American writing when I was fourteen years of age in 1974. I had a mixed race English teacher who allowed us to read books not on the curriculum if we knuckled down to the work on the timetable.
She introduced us to the work of James Baldwin and I fell in love. I fell in love with the wonderful language, and the complex lives that were so far from my own life. I also fell in love with the gappy toothed smile of the little man Baldwin turned out to be. Reading Baldwin led to the works of other African American writers as they became available to us, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, John Wiseman and others.
The lives of African Americans in the 1970s wasn’t so much better than in the 1960s and before, and segregation issues were still alive and prospering, after all, Martin Luther King’s dream had not that long been let off like a balloon into the ether. In my 20s I had an African American friend, only a few years older than myself, who told of how she had been chased out of school by her white friends fathers wielding baseball bats and violent dogs on chains. However, this isn’t the world of Hurston’s characters.
‘Their Eyes were Watching God’ is probably the most famous novel written by Zora Neale Hurston. I came to her work via an essay in Alice Walker’s ‘In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens’, in the 1980s. Walker was partially responsible for the resurgence of Hurston’s career, although by then Hurston had been long dead.
Written in 1937, the novel is split (unequally) into three parts, the three marriages of Janie, the main character, who is a mullatto (mixed race person), whose mother may well have been raped by the son of her white ‘employer’.
The story is told retrospectively, with Janie sitting on the porch stairs telling her best friend Pheoby what has happened to her and why she has returned. The chattering town’s folk will learn about Janie’s story by word of mouth via her friend. The writing is rich in patois which resonates in your ear, and you float along as if on a wave of melted caramel.
Janie was raised by her grandmother who enforces a marriage to a much older black man of station when Janie reaches 17, just before her own death. She wants to know that Janie is safe before she dies. After a number of unsatisfactory years with Mr Killicks, Janie leaves town with Joe, who has his eye on being a man of power in the first black town that is beginning to form itself. He marries Janie and takes her with him, however his own enthusiasm for position does not lead Janie to the kind of life she expects.
It separates her from the people of the town because Joe demands that she stand outside of the lives of the ordinary town’s people as she is the Mayor’s wife. Joe transforms the village, but his efforts are as likely to get him resented as thanked, and Janie is seen as standoffish and high and mighty.
After Joe’s early death, Janie, now in her forties, is wooed by a man who comes to the town called ‘Tea Cake’ and she goes with him to find work in ‘the muck’ in the Everglades or Glades. A hard working, hard life kind of place where people flock during certain seasons to harvest beans. Their world is harsh but satisfying, full of community and warmth, where Janie and Tea Cake’s home is the centre of entertainments, dancing, music and dice. However the workers do not heed the signs when the Native American Indian’s start to leave the area warning of a hurricane, and they leave it too late to leave the area and many die in the floods that follow. Janie and Tea Cake survive, but Tea Cake is bitten by a mad dog and a month after his return he suffers wild rages and jealousies, and madness that lead to his death.
The novel title is taken from a line during the hurricane, when they are watching what nature is about to do next, 'their eyes were watching God'.
Janie returns to the town in which she was the Mayor’s wife to reclaim her home there and settle down and tell her story.
Hurston’s writing is deeply entrenched in the oral tradition, and much of her work is anthropological, ethnological and steeped in the folk tradition. She collected folktales and songs and studied old religions including voodoo.
There is a very fine biography of Hurston by Valerie Boyd called ‘Wrapped in Rainbows’, and Hurston wrote an autobiography ‘Dust Tracks’. As well as novels and anthropology she also wrote plays and short stories. Her voice can be heard on the disk which accompanies a delightful volume of facsimile documents about her life ‘Speak, so you can speak again’, published by Doubleday, 2004.
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