You know those books that sit on your shelf and mock you for being too hesitant to pick them up? We all have them. They sit there, perched on the edge of the shelf like hooligans on a stoop tossing out insults to passersby and just daring them to pick them up and give 'em a spin. For me, Their Eyes Were Watching God was the ringleader of my abusive books. It would yell vicious things at me as I sat near the shelf and once, in collusion with my long-time archenemy gravity, contrived to whap me upside the head. Suffice to say, I was intimidated. Yet we all have to face our fears at some time and February seemed like the right time for me.Looking back on my years-long avoidance of this book, I can't help but think that I make some truly awful decisions. This is one of the most lyrically beautiful books that I have ever read and, at the same time, one of the most ground-breaking portraits of an independent woman's voice that I've ever come across. Neale Hurston's book is simultaneously a work of art and a strong declaration of independence for the entire female gender.Janie is a woman who first tries to conform herself to the molds that she has been taught in the form of two very dissatisfying marriages to men who feel compelled to, after heaping praise upon her for her independent spirit, snuff it completely out. After the death of her second husband, Janie chucks social propriety out the window and listens instead to that niggling voice inside that dares her to dream of a better life, even if the person she wants to share that life with is far beneath her on the limiting rungs of social positioning. Instead this man, the charming and appreciative Tea Cake, is a rascal who cares more about enjoying the everyday moments of life than he does for climbing to the top of the dung heap. His very lack of sober seriousness is what draws Janie to him, his living example proof of what is possible for her.Hurston's style is beautiful, her poetic prose balanced perfectly with spot-on accurate renderings of the rural Southern dialect. J.D. Salinger, who I hold in the absolute highest esteem when it comes to rating dialogue, is put to shame by Hurston's ability to craft the slow drawl and missing consonants in her characters' speech. Reading it can not help but conjure each person's voice within your head so that, after a while, it's as though you're listening to a radio telecast rather than reading a book.

To meet as far this morning From the world as agreeing With it, you and I Are suddenly what the trees tryTo 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 Janies 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, Janies best friend and confidante, loses no time to meet the newcomer and inquires after the reasons of her unexpected homecoming. Its 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 Nannys 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 Janies 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 wasnt for me to fulfill my dreams of whut a woman oughta be and to do. (p. 31) The magic of Hurstons 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 doesnt 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 Joes 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 Janies melody is finally listened to and her soul sings cloud-high along Tea Cakes 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. Its only a matter of keeping the watch in the darkness, trusting that God is looking back. Love is lak de sea. Its uh movin thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets, and its different with every shore. (p. 284)

4.5/5She 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. But she had been whipped like a cur dog, and run off down a back road after things.What do you live for? Love? Security? Money? Hope? There's something to said for any of them in every combination with one another, the melding usually a three of the four legs of a stool that is never quite stable. A great deal of literature is generated by that shakiness, that unsturdy swaying as time sends the legs protruding and withdrawing, thinning and thickening as one attempts to keep their balance in the constant effort to reach. A great deal of debate is generated by those variables in flux, questions of what is worthy of thought, form, and the crying out of the body, mind, and soul.Do you know what should always be given priority in literature all day, every day, factoring in all the issues of both reality and culture, of faith and physical function? I certainly don't. Not even my love of social justice blinds me to the strength of Hurston's beliefs, her desire to see black literature in US reflecting more than the all too consuming racism. Her effort to write with the goal of "racial healtha sense of black people as complete, complex, undiminished human beings, a sense that is lacking in so much black writing in literature", as so wonderfully stated by Alice Walker.She got nothing from Jody except what money could buy, and she was giving away what she didn't value.I loved Native Son, I'm well aware of Trayvon Martin and the far too many others like him, I appreciate Richard Wright for writing on such a powerful issue that affects the US to this day, but I hate him for his decrying of Hurston and all that she wrote for. He is Jody, capable of great things with his ideas of equality, progress, and men, writer of brilliant sociological treatises and powerful indictments of racism at the expense of only a few 'girlfriends in a refrigerator.' Idealistic as it is to argue for that 'only', foolish as it is to dream beyond the Titan of whites and their institutional oppression of blacks, selfish as it that a story grants love and financial stability to a black woman, the unlikeliest of unlikelihoods, here we are."They's mighty particular how dese dead folks goes tuh judgment," Tea Cake observed to the man working next to him."Look lak dey think God don't know nothin' 'bout de Jim Crow law."While racism is factored into the book, it is not allowed to hollow out the heart and reign in the center of things. Here, it is only a single factor in the lives of black people, replete with life, love, every facet of culture from dialect to public life. Perhaps more suspension of disbelief is required for reading such a story where hope is not immediately shackled to threat and made to understand who is king. Perhaps it is the lack of a king that is the most unsettling, his grandiose ideals of money always before love turned on its head by the queen with her own views of a life worth living. Equal rights and financial stability are all very well, but the patriarchy is not the highest one should be hoping for."...Dat's whut she wanted for medon't keer whut it cost. Git up on uh high chair and sit dere. She didn't have time tuh think what tuh do after you got up on de stool uh do nothin'. De object wuz tuh git dere. So Ah got up on de high school lak she told me, but Pheoby, Ah done nearly languished tuh death up dere. Ah felt like de world wuz cryin' extry and Ah ain't read de common news yet.""Maybe so, Janie. Still and all Ah'd love tuh experience it for just one year. It look lak heben tuh me from where Ah'm at.""Ah reckon so."Here's to Zora Neale Hurston for going against the flow. Here's to Alice Walker who brought her back to the seat of honor she so richly deserves. Here's to authors seeing the value in their beliefs without stomping on those of others.Here's to a book that not only lives, but celebrates.