Janie Crawford in Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston
Faith hasn’t got no eyes, but she’s long-legged But take de spy-glass of Faith And
look into dat upper room When you are alone to yourself When yo’ heart is burnt with fire, ha!
REVEREND C. C. LOVELACE,
AS TRANSCRIBED BY ZORA NEALE HURSTON
Years later, she’d clock a man with her pocketbook and step over his unconscious body on the way to a rent party. She’d sweat out her bruises and blessings in a mysterious Haitian voodoo ritual. But in 1917, there was no glimpse of the woman who’d write Their Eyes Were Watching God or become a keen cultural anthropologist with a “burning bush inside.” At the time, Zora Neale Hurston was just a young woman who made a bet with God.
Twenty-six-year-old Zora was anything but heroic as she lay in her hospital bed. She felt sick and scared, downed by appendicitis and with no family or friends to visit or console her. It had been many years since she sat with her father on the sweltering porches of Eatonville, Florida, listening to her elders weave long yarns about their all-black community and its history. Back then, she was curious and spunky, reveling in her place in a respected preacher’s family. That was before her mother died and her father—a strict man, notoriously intolerant of other people’s frailties—turned into a stranger.
Something about Zora just rubbed John Hurston the wrong way. A religious man, he was anything but perfect, an infamous womanizer who internalized the hatred he had experienced at the hands of the white community before he helped found Eatonville. His blatant favoritism for her brothers and his clumsy mistreatment of the daughter who resembled him most was a brutal emotional blow for openhearted Zora. And his behavior after the death of her mother, Lucy Ann Hurston, was just the beginning of a long sequence of insults. Zora soon found herself banished to a school in Jacksonville, then abandoned there at the end of the school year by a father who, irritated by his daughter’s incessant needs and angered by her rejection of his new wife, refused to take responsibility for Zora’s welfare or tuition. His suggestion that the school just adopt her was a betrayal in the strictest sense of the word.
Still just a teen when she was dumped at school, Zora became an uneasy outcast. In a world that was brutal to black women, she had to depend on relatives and friends for support. Her life from then on out was dark, nomadic, marked by sexual assaults by her white employers, a cruel encounter with her stepmother, and a mysterious relationship she would hint at but never discuss in later years. She was working as a waitress in Baltimore when appendicitis threatened to abbreviate her already troubled life. Too poor to pay for her own treatment, Zora had to rely on the free ward of the Maryland General Hospital for care. She knew that appendicitis was a common killer, one that required swift surgery and a long recovery period—if she lived. Would she die under the knife? Had she fulfilled her purpose here on Earth?
Though stoic about the possibility of death, Zora knew she wasn’t ready to go. And so she made a wager that would reverberate throughout the rest of her life. Later she told it so: “I bet God that if I lived, I would try to find out the vague directions whispered in my ears and find the road it seemed I must follow.” Zora survived her operation and set out to fulfill her part of the bargain.
She made good on her promise. After a brief stint at Howard University in Washington, D.C., she took Harlem by storm, finding herself right at home in the jazzy, juicy renaissance that filled the neighborhood’s literary salons and rent parties in the wild 1920s. Flashy and fiercely attractive, she balanced her writing and her studies with plenty of parties and escapades. She enrolled as the only black student at Barnard College in 1925, and there she finally heard the “vague directions” she had prayed for at the hospital. For the first time, Zora realized that she could translate her interest in black vernacular culture and spiritual traditions into an actual profession. She became a cultural anthropologist, receiving her bachelor’s in anthropology at the age of thirty-six.
With superstitions and storytelling her new stock-in-trade, Zora gave in to her new obsession. On fire with the realization that “that man in the gutter is the god-maker,” she began to study black religious expression. What she found convinced her that the lowliest of blacks were at the heart of a rich cultural tradition that had never been fully appreciated. Her studies were over for now, but she still had much to learn. For all her enthusiasm, though, Zora wasn’t exactly prepared for the depth and breadth of black expression she found back home. As the prodigal daughter turned folklorist returned to the South in 1927 along with her friend Langston Hughes, she tried to make sense of the complex world of folk religion. But she wasn’t satisfied with merely transcribing sermons or interviewing preachers. In a break with the traditional anthropological stance of distance, Zora threw herself headfirst into the voodoo, conjuring, and hoodoo traditions of the black South. Soon, she was neck-deep in a strange world of dark traditions, charismatic conjurers, and mysterious rites. She began to collect experiences in addition to notes, training with the South’s most respected conjure doctors and undergoing her own spiritual experiences, including a multiday fast whose psychic visions and hallucinations were her fiery initiation into the world of the trained hoodoo practitioner.
Aflame with the power of these spiritual journeys, Zora became convinced that her calling was to convey the drama and sweep of black spirituality for all to see. Though she trained as a priest of sorts, she was no preacher: she was a witness, a disciple, a seeker driven to capture her inner vision in words. She was forty-six years old when she gave that vocation its most powerful expression, writing Their Eyes Were Watching God in just seven weeks in 1937 while studying voodoo in Haiti.
Their Eyes Were Watching God is Zora’s tour de force, a testament to the external and internal beliefs that drive a heroine to transcend herself and survive everything that God and the elements throw her way. The book follows Janie Crawford, a woman who learns early on that God will do things in his own way and his own good time. As much a volume on faith as a rumination on personal power, self-worth, and love, Their Eyes Were Watching God embodies Zora’s own personal struggle with her beliefs as it follows Janie’s attempts to define and assert her inner strength. And it does so by focusing on a woman who, by 1930s Southern standards, is the least deserving of a powerful spiritual experience.
Throughout the course of the book, we watch Janie survive marriages to a callous man, an attractive tyrant, and a loving younger husband. Abused, ignored, and silenced, Janie is tested again and again. Her liberation from the expectations and judgments of other humans is painfully slow, but powerful. Throughout, she puts her trust in herself and a power greater than herself. The quiet self-confidence that emerges is her tribute to God. Janie draws experience and faith together when she finally speaks up against her husband after decades of stoic silence.
Janie did what she had never done before, that is, thrust herself into the conversation.
“Sometimes God gits familiar wid us womenfolks too and talks His inside business. He told me how surprised He was ‘bout y’all turning out so smart after Him makin’ yuh different; and how surprised y’all is goin’ tuh be if you ever find out you don’t know half as much ‘bout us as you think you do. It’s so easy to make yo’self out God Almighty when you ain’t got nothin’ tuh strain against but women and chickens.”
After you get done cheering, consider that Janie isn’t just speaking for herself… she’s speaking up for a woman’s place in God’s world. Over the course of the book, Janie settles into that place for good. Women and blacks, too, are God’s creations, and criticizing them in God’s name just won’t fly for Janie (or for Zora). Again and again, Janie watches frail humans fail to do God’s work. A neighbor reveals her obsession with light skin and her internalized hatred of the black race in a hubris-ridden parody of God’s eternal judgment. Janie is mocked for her love affair with Tea Cake, the man she’s waited for all her life. And over and over again, she must look within for answers.
Marked by external strife, Janie’s inner life becomes increasingly peaceful as she suspects, then believes, that there’s something bigger out there. Though she faces death, emotional starvation, even a hurricane, Janie’s hard-won happiness is never really in danger, for she’s found redemption and resurrection on the inside. Every facet of Janie’s world, both ugly and joyful, is of God’s making and God’s own goodness; even the terror of the coming storm is made and governed by God. Janie learns that struggling against God’s ways is for the weak and confused; for Janie, nothing works but the embrace. For those whose “eyes are watching God,” acceptance of the world on the universe’s terms is the only thing that can lead to peace. Slowly, mysteriously, God restores all that has been lost. Even God-watchers, though, can’t always make sense of divine acts, and a bit of uncertainty and questioning make its way into the book’s final affirming passages:
The day of the gun, and the bloody body, and the courthouse came and commenced to sing a sobbing sigh out of every corner in the room; out of each and every chair and thing. Commenced to sing, commenced to sob and sigh, singing and sobbing…. Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.
Janie will always continue her quest for love and self-definition, whether she’s ready to walk down the road or not. Alone again, she must face some terrifying questions: Who am I? Who is God? What’s the point of faith? Does God even care? Why must we start over and over, transcend ourselves again and again?
Like Janie, Zora had reason to question God in the years following the publication of her now-indelible classic. She needed all the faith she could muster to face the years that awaited her. Her growing literary fame and colorful persona had their price. In 1948, she was not only accused of molesting three boys but was the victim of a brutal slander campaign by an unrelated party whom she had met only once. The claims were entirely fabricated—Zora was in Honduras at the time of the alleged attacks—but it took six months to acquit herself, and the rest of her life to overcome the effect of the attacks. Though Zora prevailed in court and all charges were dropped, the rumors surrounding this incident just wouldn’t die with the case. Her tattered reputation never managed to recover. Exhausted by a legal battle that had become so cruelly personal, Zora struggled to bounce back.
Zora lived out the last years of her life in almost complete obscurity, fading into forgotten territory along with other lights of the Harlem Renaissance. Overshadowed by new modes of expression, she was mocked for her dramatic, dialect-focused writing style. Her name was entirely neglected by the 1950s, her powerful books long out of print. Plagued by failing health and uncertain finances, she focused instead on her spiritual search as she worked as a substitute teacher and even a maid. But time did not rectify her financial position or mend her fragile health. Tragically, her former friends had almost totally abandoned her by the time she died in 1960. She didn’t leave anything behind, not even money enough to be buried in a marked grave.
She may have died impoverished and irrelevant, but Zora’s faith in herself and her God brought forth great things during her lifetime. By fusing her talent with a restless spiritual quest, she was able to document and further the beauty her God had made. She took that old bet with God one step further, translating the sights she saw and the sounds she heard into a powerful vernacular.
Ironically, Zora’s choice of self-expression—the dialect of the people for whom she fought so hard professionally and personally—was criticized, even mocked, in her own day. But the last thirty years have revived her reputation, thanks in part to the relentless efforts of Alice Walker, another dialect-driven woman writer whose work has changed the face of American literature. Back in print and deserving of a place on any modern heroine’s bookshelf, Their Eyes Were Watching God was made into a TV movie produced and hosted by Oprah Winfrey and has been read by countless students. It’s a book that was written to be reread and constantly rediscovered, interpreted through the lens of our own diverse spiritual experiences. And it lost none of its power as it traveled from popularity to unsung obscurity and back again. “There is no book as important to me as this one,” wrote Alice Walker. “There is enough self-love in that one book—love of community, culture, traditions—to restore a world. Or create a new one.”
Fraught with meaning and laden with doubt and emotion, faith and spirituality can be touchy topics for even the bravest heroine. Some leap straight into the fire, eager to find themselves in the flames. Others dance around faith, play with it for a moment before dropping it with scorched fingers. But whether the road to spiritual fulfillment is one of religious belief or strong inner conviction, it’s one each heroine must travel, be its result faith, atheism, or something in between.
Janie’s trials would bring down a stronger woman with nothing to believe in. Part of the reason her story has remained raw, compelling, is that she doesn’t have all the answers. When faced with the full force of God’s wrath, Janie questions, reconsiders, uncovers something inside of her that’s as elemental as a hurricane. Her faith in herself is as strong as her faith in God, and she couldn’t withstand what she has to endure without both. But Zora doesn’t just leave us with questions: she shows the answers, too, in an ending that is mournful and lonely and comforting all at once. Their Eyes Were Watching God finishes with reassurance, but also with a challenge to honor the world in all its beauty and confusion, to draw it as close to us as we dare, to sit with its power even as we face down our own questions about faith.
Not that the questions ever really subside—I for one am a woman whose spirituality is as much about doubt as conviction. But even I find relief and comfort in Janie’s steadfast search for the truth, her willingness to face even a hurricane if that’s what it’s going to take to be at peace with her God. Again and again, she demonstrates a readiness to learn, to understand, and question. And over and over again, she is shown something far greater and more mysterious than anything she can muster, bigger and more powerful than the men who dominate her or the culture that subordinates her. It’s during these frequent moments of humility that Janie emerges as a force of greatness. Her power as a heroine doesn’t beat you over the head; it smolders quietly, unseen and unacknowledged by all except the forces that count in the end.
A modern heroine’s trials may seem more internal than sweeping, but each one is an opportunity to prove her own mettle. The destination, the vehicle, are beside the point: faith can be expressed in one’s self as well as in any church. It’s all in the balance between inner conviction and external storm. Even the most faithful among us have their occasional crises, whether brought on by spiritual malaise or moral quandary. And Zora Neale Hurston has given us something to take with us on the way: a document of her own conviction, struggle and doubt, a heroine who questions and fights right alongside us, staring down the hurricane that exposes both her frailty and her faithfulness.
I know I’m not the only person who finishes Their Eyes Were Watching God with a sigh of mixed relief and longing. It can be intimidating to walk into faith with a woman who pursued it in its most extreme and forceful expressions and who articulated hers so fearlessly. It’s certainly exhausting to place ourselves in the hands of an author for whom work, life, and faith melded and meshed so seamlessly. But Zora is a good guide, offering two alternatives in one heroine who forges through a hurricane even as she questions her purpose on Earth. Zora didn’t shy away from the ancient ritual, the pungent fruit, but she hands us our share in manageable bites. In the pages of Their Eyes Were Watching God, she’s always there to remind us that, even if the storm gets up in our nostrils and tears out all our hair, we’re still protected, still capable of moving forward on faith’s road.
A keen anthropologist, a wordsmith with a divine mission, Zora admired her culture for daring to “call old gods by a new name.” As heroines, we must practice that courage daily as we seek our own truths. The flip side of faith is having faith placed in us by others. Sadly, neither Zora nor Janie really received that honor during their lifetimes. That’s something we can rectify as we look for company on our way down faith’s path. As I cultivate faith in myself and strive to deserve the trust others place in me, I have two companions at the ready: both Janie Crawford and the truth-stretcher and truth-seeker that cohabited Zora’s vibrant soul.
READ THIS BOOK:
• When you’re not sure if you’re going to church or going through the motions
• At first sight of external or internal hurricanes
• When your cares seem trivial in the face of depressing world events
JANIE’S LITERARY SISTERS:
• Maya Angelou in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
• Edna Pontellier in The Awakening, by Kate Chopin
• Kristin Lavransdatter in The Wreath, by Sigrid Undset