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Their Eyes Were Watching God
P.S.
"She Was the Party"
by Valerie Boyd
Zora Neale Hurston knew how to make an entrance. On May 1, 1925, at a literary awards dinner sponsored by Opportunity magazine, the earthy Harlem newcomer turned heads and raised eyebrows as she claimed four awards: a second-place fiction prize for her short story "Spunk," a second-place award in drama for her play Color Struck, and two honorable mentions.
The names of the writers who beat out Hurston for first place that night would soon be forgotten. But the name of the second-place winner buzzed on tongues all night, and for days and years to come.
Lest anyone forget her, Hurston made a wholly memorable entrance at a party following the awards dinner. She strode into the room-jammed with writers and arts patrons, black and white-and flung a long, richly colored scarf around her neck with dramatic flourish as she bellowed a reminder of the title of her winning play: "Colooooooor Struuckkkk!" Her exultant entrance literally stopped the party for a moment, just as she had intended. In this way, Hurston made it known that a bright and powerful presence had arrived.
By all accounts, Zora Neale Hurston could walk into a roomful of strangers and, a few minutes and a few stories later, leave them so completely charmed that they often found themselves offering to help her in any way they could.
Gamely accepting such offers-and employing her own talent and scrappiness-Hurston became the most successful and most significant black woman writer of the first half of the 20th century. Over a career that spanned more than thirty years, she published four novels, two books of folklore, an autobiography, numerous short stories, and several essays, articles, and plays.
Born on January 7, 1891, in Notasulga, Alabama, Hurston moved with her family to Eatonville, Florida, when she was still a toddler. Her writings reveal no recollection of her Alabama beginnings. For Hurston, Eatonville was always home.
Established in 1887, the rural community near Orlando was the nation's first incorporated black township. It was, as Hurston described it, "a city of five lakes, three croquet courts, three hundred brown skins, three hundred good swimmers, plenty guavas, two schools, and no jailhouse."
In Eatonville, Zora was never indoctrinated in inferiority, and she could see the evidence of black achievement all around her. She could look to town hall and see black men, including her father, John Hurston, formulating the laws that governed Eatonville. She could look to the Sunday Schools of the town's two churches and see black women, including her mother, Lucy Potts Hurston, directing the Christian curricula. She could look to the porch of the village store and see black men and women passing worlds through their mouths in the form of colorful, engaging stories.
Growing up in this culturally affirming setting in an eight-room house on five acres of land, Zora had a relatively happy childhood, despite frequent clashes with her preacher-father, who sometimes sought to "squinch" her rambunctious spirit, she recalled. Her mother, on the other hand, urged young Zora and her seven siblings to "jump at de sun." Hurston explained, "We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground."
Hurston's idyllic childhood came to an abrupt end, though, when her mother died in 1904. Zora was only thirteen years old. "That hour began my wanderings," she later wrote. "Not so much in geography, but in time. Then not so much in time as in spirit."
After Lucy Hurston's death, Zora's father remarried quickly-to a young woman whom the hotheaded Zora almost killed in a fistfight-and seemed to have little time or money for his children. "Bare and bony of comfort and love," Zora worked a series of menial jobs over the ensuing years, struggled to finish her schooling, and eventually joined a Gilbert & Sullivan traveling troupe as a maid to the lead singer. In 1917, she turned up in Baltimore; by then, she was twenty-six years old and still hadn't finished high school. Needing to present herself as a teenager to qualify for free public schooling, she lopped ten years off her life-giving her year of her birth as 1901. Once gone, those years were never restored: From that moment forward, Hurston would always present herself as at least ten years younger than she actually was.
Apparently, she had the looks to pull it off. Photographs reveal that she was a handsome, big-boned woman with playful yet penetrating eyes, high cheekbones, and a full, graceful mouth that was never without expression.
Zora also had a fiery intellect, an infectious sense of humor, and "the gift," as one friend put it, "of walking into hearts." Zora used these talents-and dozens more-to elbow her way into the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, befriending such luminaries as poet Langston Hughes and popular singer/actress Ethel Waters.
Though Hurston rarely drank, fellow writer Sterling Brown recalled, "When Zora was there, she was the party." Another friend remembered Hurston's apartment-furnished by donations she solicited from friends-as a spirited "open house" for artists. All this socializing didn't keep Hurston from her work, though. She would sometimes write in her bedroom while the party went on in the living room.
By 1935, Hurston-who'd graduated from Barnard College in 1928-had published several short stories and articles, as well as a novel (Jonah's Gourd Vine) and a well-received collection of black Southern folklore (Mules and Men). But the late 1930s and early '40s marked the real zenith of her career. She published her masterwork, Their Eyes Were Watching God, in 1937; Tell My Horse, her study of Caribbean Vodou practices, in 1938; and another masterful novel, Moses, Man of the Mountain, in 1939. When her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, was published in 1942, Hurston finally received the well-earned acclaim that had long eluded her. That year, she was profiled in Who's Who in America, Current Biography, and Twentieth Century Authors. She went on to publish another novel, Seraph on the Suwanee, in 1948.
Still, Hurston never received the financial rewards she deserved. (The largest royalty she ever earned from any of her books was $943.75.) So when she died on Jan. 28, 1960-at age sixty-nine, after suffering a stroke-her neighbors in Fort Pierce, Florida, had to take up a collection for her February 7 funeral. The collection didn't yield enough to pay for a headstone, however, so Hurston was buried in a grave that remained unmarked until 1973.
That summer, a young writer named Alice Walker traveled to Fort Pierce to place a marker on the grave of the author who had so inspired her own work. Walker found the Garden of Heavenly Rest, a segregated cemetery at the dead end of North 17th Street, abandoned and overgrown with yellow-flowered weeds.
Back in 1945, Hurston had foreseen the possibility of dying without money-and she'd proposed a solution that would have benefited her and countless others. Writing to W.E.B. Du Bois, whom she called the "Dean of American Negro Artists," Hurston suggested "a cemetery for the illustrious Negro dead" on 100 acres of land in Florida. "Let no Negro celebrity, no matter what financial condition they might be in at death, lie in inconspicuous forgetfulness," she urged. "We must assume the responsibility of their graves being known and honored." Du Bois, citing practical complications, wrote a curt reply discounting her argument.
As if impelled by Hurston's words, Walker bravely entered the snake-infested cemetery where the writer's remains had been laid to rest. Wading through waist-high weeds, she soon stumbled upon a sunken rectangular patch of ground that she determined to be Hurston's grave. Unable to afford the marker she wanted-a tall, majestic black stone called "Ebony Mist"-Walker chose a plain gray headstone instead. Borrowing from a Jean Toomer poem, she dressed the marker up with a fitting epitaph: "Zora Neale Hurston: A Genius of the South."
Valerie Boyd is the author of the award-winning Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston. Formerly the arts editor at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, she is a professor at the University of Georgia's Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication.
A Protofeminist Postcard from Haiti
by Valerie Boyd
Zora Neale Hurston wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God under emotional duress. She'd kept the novel "dammed up" inside for months, she would recall, and she wrote it under "internal pressure."
By the fall of 1936, when Hurston began working on her transcendent tale of a black woman's journey of self-discovery, she had already made a name for herself as a promising novelist and anthropologist. In 1934, Hurston had published her first novel, Jonah's Gourd Vine-partly a fictionalized account of her parents' marriage-to critical acclaim. "Jonah's Gourd Vine can be called without fear of exaggeration the most vital and original novel about the American Negro that has yet been written," the New York Times declared. A year later, Hurston published Mules and Men, a book of folklore that grew out of her experience as a daughter of the black South.
Though Hurston left Eatonville, Florida, as a teenager, she returned there again and again in her fiction. She also made frequent visits to the village-and to many other places in the South-to study black folk culture under the tutelage of famed anthropologist Franz Boas, her professor at New York's Barnard College. After earning a bachelor's degree from Barnard, becoming a bright light of the Harlem Renaissance, and dropping out of a PhD program at Columbia University, Hurston won a Guggenheim fellowship to study indigenous religious practices in Jamaica and Haiti. The fellowship also gave the famously independent author a way out of a problematic love affair.
For more than a year, Hurston, a divorcee in her mid-forties, had been dating a man twenty years her junior. A graduate student at Columbia University, his name was Percival McGuire Punter. Though she would later identify him only by his initials in her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, Hurston noted that he "was tall, dark brown" and "magnificently built." But, she hastened to add: "His looks only drew my eyes in the beginning. I did not fall in love with him just for that. He had a fine mind and that intrigued me. When a man keeps beating me to the draw mentally, he begins to get glamorous."
In short order, Hurston and Punter were immersed in an intensely passionate, mutually satisfying romance-a relationship that the thrice-married Hurston called "the real love affair of my life."
Eventually, Punter asked her to give up her career, marry him, and leave New York. The idea of giving up her career was chilling. "I really wanted to do anything he wanted me to do," Hurston wrote, "but that one thing I could not do."
"Punter did not seem to understand that Hurston's work was her sustenance. "I'm tired of seeing you work so hard," he told her. "I wouldn't want my wife to do anything but look after me." But Zora needed to do more with her life than look after a man, no matter how wonderful he might be. "I had things clawing inside of me that must be said," she tried to explain. "I could not see that my work should make any difference in marriage. He was all and everything else to me but that. One did not conflict with the other in my mind. But it was different with him. He felt that he did not matter to me enough. He was the master kind. All or nothing, for him."
Hurston and Punter continued to see each other, despite this fundamental conflict, and mutual jealousies erupted and escalated. If Punter smiled too broadly at a woman on Seventh Avenue, Zora fumed. If she accepted a kiss on the cheek from a male acquaintance, Punter smoldered. Their love became blissful misery. "We were alternately the happiest people in the world," Zora recognized, "and the most miserable."
One night, an argument turned particularly ugly. "Something primitive inside me tore past the barriers and before I realized it, I had slapped his face," Hurston remembered. Angry over some week-old hurt, Punter struck back. To Hurston's horror, she and Punter were soon trading slaps and shoves. "No broken bones," she recalled, "and no black eyes," but combat nonetheless. Stunned by the wrong turn their passion had taken, the two ended up on the floor together, entwined in mutual apologies.
But something had changed for Hurston. "Then I knew I was too deeply in love to be my old self," she admitted. "For always a blow to my body had infuriated me beyond measure... But somehow, I didn't hate him at all." Hurston-"delirious with joy and pain"-had lost hold of herself. And this frightened her.
The Guggenheim fellowship, as she saw it, was "my chance to release him, and fight myself free from my obsession." With this justification, Hurston said a hasty farewell to her beloved and sailed off to Jamaica, where she threw herself into her research in an attempt to smother her feelings for Punter.
A few months later, she moved on to Haiti, which released a flood of emotions that forced her to sit down and write-sometimes late at night after a strenuous day of research for her forthcoming book on Haitian Vodou and Caribbean culture. Commanded by a "force somewhere in Space," as she dramatically put it, Hurston started writing a novel, working urgently for days on end. All the while, her love for Punter stayed on her mind. "The plot was far from the circumstances," she noted, "but I tried to embalm all the tenderness of my passion for him in Their Eyes Were Watching God." In just seven weeks, right before Christmas 1936, Hurston finished her second novel.
Published in September 1937, Their Eyes Were Watching God is the story of Janie Crawford, a deep-thinking, deep-feeling black woman who embarks on a search for her own self. Janie's journey begins at sixteen, when her dying grandmother marries her off to Logan Killicks, an older man with sixty acres, a mule, and a lump of fatback on his neck that Janie despises. Rebelling against Logan's attempts to turn her into a workhorse, Janie runs off with Joe Starks, a citified fellow with big dreams and a big voice. Joe marries Janie and takes her to Eatonville, where he soon becomes mayor, postmaster, and primary landowner. The kind of man with "uh throne in de seat of his pants," as one character puts it, Joe Starks is clearly modeled on Joe Clarke, the mayor of Eatonville during much of Hurston's childhood there. Cowed by Joe's chauvinism, Janie becomes "a rut in the road," as Hurston writes. But after Joe's death, the forty-year-old Janie falls in love with Tea Cake, a free-spirited laborer much younger than herself. Obviously cut from the same cloth as Hurston's own younger man, Tea Cake is Janie's true love-or, in the author's words, he is "sun-up and pollen and blooming trees." With Tea Cake, Janie is free to become herself.
Among the challenges that Janie and Tea Cake face together is a devastating hurricane, patterned after the 1928 Lake Okeechobee hurricane that killed nearly 2,000 people in the Florida Everglades. Though Hurston was not in Florida during that storm, she later interviewed many of its survivors; she also was able to re-create the hurricane in vivid detail because she herself had survived a 1929 hurricane in the Bahamas.
Hurston freely used such incidents from her own life to inform Their Eyes Were Watching God, which is, at heart, a love story inspired by her relationship with Punter. But Tea Cake is not Punter, and Janie is not Zora Neale Hurston. To be sure, Hurston imbued Janie with some of the questing quality that characterized her own life. But Janie is more conventional than Hurston ever was; consequently, she seeks her identity in the eyes and arms of men. Hurston, on the other hand, sought her identity in her own self, in her work, in speaking (and writing) her own mind.
In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston ransacked the language-the King's English as well as Eatonville's Ebonics-to achieve a precision of expression that was stunning. For more than 15 years, through her previous books as well as numerous short stories and plays, the author had been working to capture in words the beauty and the complexity of her Eatonville experience-and of the rural, self-educated black folks who'd been her neighbors there. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, she finally achieved this elusive goal. Significantly, she did so by making a crucial revision to her memories of the village: In all her previous attempts to depict Eatonville in fiction, the storytellers had been mostly men. In this novel, however, Hurston put her story in the mouth and the mind of a woman-and the result is a book of extraordinary appeal.
Because Hurston placed Janie on the road to self-realization and independence, Their Eyes Were Watching God has been hailed as a feminist novel. Whether Hurston saw it that way or not, she certainly used it to convey her view that women were the equals of men in every way-and that their inner lives were infinitely rich and worthy of exploration.
Given these protofeminist themes, the book was not well received by some male critics. Richard Wright, soon to become the best-selling author of Native Son, categorically dismissed Hurston's book: "The sensory sweep of her novel carries no theme, no message, no thought," he wrote.
Over the years, of course, most critics have emphatically disagreed with Wright's dim assessment of Hurston's novel, which is now required reading in high schools and colleges throughout the country. "There is no book more important to me than this one," Alice Walker has said. And Oprah Winfrey has called Their Eyes Were Watching God her "favorite love story of all time." Winfrey's admiration for the novel inspired her to produce a television adaptation of it, which aired for the first time on March 6, 2005. Starring Academy Award winner Halle Berry as Janie, the TV movie was watched by an estimated 24.6 million viewers, further entrenching the novel in the public consciousness and in the American literary canon.
Today, Their Eyes Were Watching God is widely regarded as a masterpiece. In 1937, though, the jury was still out, but certainly leaning in Hurston's favor. The book earned rave reviews; Hurston was featured in several newspaper profiles; and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Edna St. Vincent Millay sent Hurston a telegram congratulating her on her new novel. "God does love black people, doesn't He?" Hurston joked with a friend. "Or am I just out on parole?"