Zora Neale Hurston - Their Eyes Were Watching God

In her award-winning autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), Zora Neale Hurston claimed to have been born in Eatonville, Florida, in 1901. She was, in fact, born in Notasulga, Alabama, on January 7, 1891, the fifth child of John Hurston (farmer, carpenter, and Baptist preacher) and Lucy Ann Potts (school teacher). The author of numerous books, including Their Eyes Were Watching God , Jonahs Gourd Vine , Mules and Men , and Moses, Man of the Mountain , Hurston had achieved fame and sparked controversy as a novelist, anthropologist, outspoken essayist, lecturer, and theatrical producer during her sixty-nine years. Hurstons finest work of fiction appeared at a time when artistic and political statementswhether single sentences or book-length fictionswere peculiarly conflated. Many works of fiction were informed by purely political motives; political pronouncements frequently appeared in polished literary prose. And Hurstons own political statements, relating to racial issues or addressing national politics, did not ingratiate her with her black male contemporaries. The end result was that Their Eyes Were Watching God went out of print not long after its first appearance and remained out of print for nearly thirty years. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has been one among many to ask: How could the recipient of two Guggenheims and the author of four novels, a dozen short stories, two musicals, two books on black mythology, dozens of essays, and a prizewinning autobiography virtually disappear from her readership for three full decades?

That question remains unanswered. The fact remains that every one of Hurstons books went quickly out of print; and it was only through the determined efforts, in the 1970s, of Alice Walker, Robert Hemenway (Hurstons biographer), Toni Cade Bambara, and other writers and scholars that all of her books are now back in print and that she has taken her rightful place in the pantheon of American authors.

In 1973, Walker, distressed that Hurstons writings had been all but forgotten, found Hurstons grave in the Garden of Heavenly Rest and installed a gravemarker. After loving and teaching her work for a number of years, Walker later reported, I could not bear that she did not have a known grave. The gravemarker now bears the words that Walker had inscribed there:

ZORA NEALE HURSTON

GENIUS OF THE SOUTH

NOVELIST FOLKLORIST ANTHROPOLOGIST

(1891-1960)

• What kind of God are the eyes of Hurstons characters watching? What is the nature of that God and of their watching? Do any of them question God?
• What is the importance of the concept of horizon? How do Janie and each of her men widen her horizons? What is the significance of the novels final sentences in this regard?
• How does Janies journeyfrom West Florida, to Eatonville, to the Evergladesrepresent her, and the novels increasing immersion in black culture and traditions? What elements of individual action and communal life characterize that immersion?
• To what extent does Janie acquire her own voice and the ability to shape her own life? How are the two related? Does Janies telling her story to Pheoby in flashback undermine her ability to tell her story directly in her own voice?
• What are the differences between the language of the men and that of Janie and the other women? How do the differences in language reflect the two groups approaches to life, power, relationships, and self-realization? How do the novels first two paragraphs point to these differences?
• In what ways does Janie conform to or diverge from the assumptions that underlie the mens attitudes toward women? How would you explain Hurstons depiction of violence toward women? Does the novel substantiate Janies statement that Sometimes God gits familiar wid us womenfolks too and talks His inside business?
• What is the importance in the novel of the signifyin and playin de dozens on the front porch of Joes store and elsewhere? What purpose do these stories, traded insults, exaggerations, and boasts have in the lives of these people? How does Janie counter them with her conjuring?
• Why is adherence to received tradition so important to nearly all the people in Janies world? How does the community deal with those who are different?
• After Joe Starkss funeral, Janie realizes that She had been getting ready for her great journey to the horizons in search of people; it was important to all the world that she should find them and they find her. Why is this important to all the world? In what ways does Janies self-awareness depend on her increased awareness of others?
• How important is Hurstons use of vernacular dialect to our understanding of Janie and the other characters and their way of life? What do speech patterns reveal about the quality of these lives and the nature of these communities? In what ways are their tongues cocked and loaded, the only real weapon of these people?

S hips at a distance have every mans wish on board. S o begins Zora Neale Hurstons brilliant novel about a womans search for her authentic self and for real love. At first it might seem contradictory that a work whose central character is the remarkably resolute and resilient Janie Crawford should start with a dictum about the life of men. However, that is one of the many shrewd manifestations of Zora Neale Hurstons enormous talents: her ability to render a world complete with its codes and disciplines within a few sentences, and then placing in that world her vision of how her peoplethe women and men of her own creation, her charactersfunction, triumph, and survive. So off that metaphorically distant ship comes our heroine Janie Crawford, and suddenly we realize that she had been on her own singular journey all along, her dreams mocked to death by Time, but never totally defeated. And since women remember everything they dont want to forget, Janie Crawford recalls all the crucial moments of her life, from the time she first discovers that she is a colored little girl by searching for her face in a group photograph, to the moment she returns to Eatonville, Florida, from the Everglades, not swindled and deceived, as had been expected, but heartbroken, yet boldly defiant, after having toiled in the bean fields, survived a hurricane, and lost the man she loved.