Zora Neale Hurston

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston uses the older practice of misspelling words to render their sounds in academic English, but one cannot regret the results. Her anthropological training must have forced her to think precisely about those sounds and about the sounds of academic English itself, but the precision of the shading and the consistent ingenuity of her characters' expression makes the novel sing.

Eyes launches en medias res with a view of a strong and attractive 40-year-old African-American woman rendered through the chatter of local gossips in a rural Southern setting. A woman, she's judged even by other women for her sexuality, and the backstory that constitutes the novel describes her romantic life from early adulthood. One might wonder about her more formative life, the earlier life within her family, but the focus of this narration remains incompletely internal. Once we enter this woman's thoughts, we remain with her throughout the 3rd-person narrative, but we are privy to only those thoughts that pertain to fairly public event. She does not philosophize or fantasize extensively; her reflections do not lean to revery, memory, or comparison, but responds to those situations that confront her. Thus, we experience in series the impacts of her men upon her.

One should not take impacts to mean that Hurston leaves her character helpless or passive. Eyes is no romanticization of independent womanhood, but it portrays that independence nonetheless. Every husband the protagonist has beats her at some point, but Hurston renders the whole of it matter-of-factly, so much so that the events remain largely incidental to the narrative, not only for Hurston, but for her protagonist. One is left feeling simply that there's little more to expect from men. No moral judgments pertain, though in every case but one each man loses what he fights for by his folly.

The one case in which a man beats his woman and retains her, Hurston bends over backward to provide him and her every excuse. He is herded into it by not only jealousy but genuine circumstance, though circumstance not of his wife's doing. He does not hit her hard enough to cause physical damage. She appears distraught more than anything by how badly he must feel to be driven to such an act, and so forth. The narrative focus retreats considerably from her throughout these events, reporting the opinions of co-workers and friends who cannot know exactly what understandings the couple might have reached. The event becomes a mutual misfortune to which both react with sympathy and understanding to correct.

A central fact of her life with Tea-Cake, the one good husband, is that she shares with him his pleasures and woes. They're his, not hers -- or they would not have been hers had she been alone. But they're also events native to a lower-class African American in the early 20th century rural American South. They work side by side in the fields. Tea Cake gambles -- winning, losing, and at one point coming home with knife wounds. In this she experiences with him the violence of both (some) African-American and (some) workingclass life. She need not do so. She could easily convince him to partake of some part of the fortune she's come to through her previous marriage to snooty and ambitious Jody. He refuses out of pride; because she approves of his pride and its motives she allows his refusal.

Retaining her own money and living from his becomes an act of generosity or liberality on her part. She may allow her money and property to not matter, so she can give Tea Cake the priviledge of his life with her, the life of relatively poor people in love being better than various classes of social pretension, even with authentic security. The couple does not treat wealth with contempt; they just never really find a way to include it in what they want to do, given that it seems always tainted by various people and their various expectations.

It's interesting the extent to which this is an African-American novel and these can be African-American decisions without the presence of a white person ever intruding. The shadow of white America exists only in the deeply assumed poverty of these people, the pretensions of one woman to whiteness, the persistent insecurity of the men, and formally trained Hurston's need to misspell words to render her characters' voices. I hesitate to write that Hurston even rejected the inclusion of a white community. The idea may have never occurred to her. But her decision or non-decision allows her characters to dispense with dealing with social circumstance and engage the more universal matter of humanity. I would like to write the same about matters of gender; here Hurston could not achieve the same apartheid so thoroughly. Yet her act of minimizing the response to male violence without ever denying it makes all the protagonist's emotions not only available to but assumable by male readers, just as many non-black readers can identify with a poverty established by some force established somewhere off the stage from the life we experience.

So Hurston manages a wonderfully particular, consumingly universal narrative of just the ideas with which she opens her piece. I wonder what would have become of this work had examined romantic choices against a more direct backdrop of racism and engineered poverty, had the flood that washed away the principle characters been the flood of noncaring and dullness that almost buried Hurston's work and forced her to work out her last years as a maid while another generation suffered for what she might have taught. I wonder what might have happened had the mad dog that gave Tea Cake rabies to end their romance and the book been the racist madness or insective corporate-ism that severs couples in the world we share. The book might have been more, but could not easily have been more complete.