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The years took all the fight out of Janie’s face. For a while she thought it was gone from her soul. No matter what Jody did, she said nothing. She had learned how to talk some and leave some. She was a rut in the road. Plenty of life beneath the surface but it was kept beaten down by the wheels. Sometimes she stuck out into the future, imagining her life different from what it was. But mostly she lived between her hat and her heels, with her emotional disturbances like shade patterns in the woods-come and gone with the sun. She got nothing from Jody except what money could buy, and she was giving away what she didn’t value.
The visual imagination on display in Their Eyes Were Watching God shares its clarity and iconicity with Christian storytelling-many scenes in the novel put one in mind of the bold-stroke illustrations in a children’s Bible: young Janie staring at a photograph, not understanding that the black girl in the crowd is her; Joe Starks atop a dead mule’s distended belly, giving a speech; Tea Cake bitten high on his cheekbone by that rabid dog. I watched the TV footage of Hurricane Katrina with a strong sense of déjà vu, thinking of Hurston’s flood rather than Noah’s: “Not the dead of sick and ailing with friends at the pillow and the feet… [but] the sodden and the bloated; the sudden dead, their eyes flung wide open in judgment…”
Above all, Hurston is essential universal reading because she is neither self-conscious nor restricted. She was raised in the real Eatonville, Florida, an all-black town; this unique experience went some way to making Hurston the writer she was. She grew up a fully human being, unaware that she was meant to consider herself a minority, an other, an exotic or something depleted in rights, talents, desires and expectations. As an adult, away from Eatonville, she found the world was determined to do its best to remind her of her supposed inferiority, but Hurston was already made, and the metaphysical confidence she claimed for her life (“I am not tragically colored”) is present, with equal, refreshing force, in her fiction. She liked to yell “Culllaaaah Struck!” [9] when she entered a fancy party-almost everybody was. But Hurston herself was not. “Blackness,” as she understood it and wrote about it, is as natural and inevitable and complete to her as, say, “Frenchness” is to Flaubert. It is also as complicated, as full of blessings and curses. One can be no more removed from it than from one’s arm, but it is no more the total measure of one’s being than an arm is.
But still, after all that, there is something else to say-and the “neutral universal” of literary criticism pens me in and makes it difficult. To write critically in English is to aspire to neutrality, to the high style of, say, Lionel Trilling or Edmund Wilson. In the high style, one’s loves never seem partial or personal, or even like “loves,” because white novelists are not white novelists but simply “novelists,” and white characters are not white characters but simply “human,” and criticism of both is not partial or personal but a matter of aesthetics. Such critics will always sound like the neutral universal, and the black women who have championed Their Eyes Were Watching God in the past, and the one doing so now, will seem like black women talking about a black book. When I began this piece, it felt important to distance myself from that idea. By doing so, I misrepresent a vital aspect of my response to this book, one that is entirely personal, as any response to a novel shall be. Fact is, I am a black woman, [10] and a slither of this book goes straight into my soul, I suspect, for that reason. And though it is, to me, a mistake to say, “Unless you are a black woman, you will never fully comprehend this novel,” it is also disingenuous to claim that many black women do not respond to this book in a particularly powerful ma
This is a beautiful novel about soulfulness. That it should be so is a tribute to Hurston’s skill. She makes “culture”-that slow and particular [17] and artificial accretion of habit and circumstance-seem as natural and organic and beautiful as the sunrise. She allows me to indulge in what Philip Roth once called “the romance of onself,” a literary value I dislike and yet, confronted with this beguiling book, ca
Almost-but not quite. Better to say, when I’m reading this book, I believe it, with my whole soul. It allows me to say things I wouldn’t normally. Things like “She is my sister and I love her.”
[9] See chapter 16 for a sad portrayal of a truly color-struck lady, Mrs. Turner.
[10] I think this was the point my mother was trying to make.
[11] As Kafka’s The Trial plumbs that ancient buildup of cultural residue that is called “Jewishness.”
[12] Down on the muck, Janie and Tea Cake befriend the “Saws,” workers from the Caribbean.
[13] Until they read books featuring nonwhite characters. I once overheard a young white man at a book festival say to his friend, “Have you read the new Kureishi? Same old thing-loads of Indian people.” To which you want to reply, “Have you read the new Franzen? Same old thing-loads of white people.”
[14] At its most common and banal: catching a beat, following a rhythm.
[15] In the Oxford English Dictionary: “Schmaltz n. informal. excessive sentimentality, esp. in music or movies. ORIGIN 1930s: from Yiddish schmaltz, from German Schmalz ‘dripping, lard.’ ”
[16] Is there anything less soulful than attempting to define soulfulness?
[17] In literary terms, we know that there is a tipping point at which the cultural particular-while becoming no less culturally particular-is accepted by readers as the neutral universal. The previously “Jewish fiction” of Philip Roth is now “fiction.” We have moved from the particular complaints of Portnoy to the universal claims of Everyman.