Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
Learning to recognize someone's voice
As a little girl, sometimes I would lie awake in bed at night, waiting to hear my parents come upstairs. On nights when I had a hard time falling asleep, it was comforting to hear their familiar footfalls on the stairs. I didn't have to see them in order to know who was on their way: my dad walked slower and heavier, always pausing at the front door to make sure it was locked, while my mom walked a bit faster, as if going upstairs was one more thing she wanted to accomplish before the end of the day.
Teaching students to identify an author's voice is like explaining how to recognize the people in their homes based on the sounds they make when they walk around. Each person does it - writes or walks - in a unique way. And the longer you spend with someone, the more familiar you become with their particular method.
Zora Neale Hurston has an unmistakable voice that is so much fun to explore. When I taught American literature at an all-girls school, her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God was my favorite part of the curriculum.
I’ll be honest: it’s a tough read. But just like life, while it might be tough or intense at times, it is also shockingly beautiful.
Hurston grew up at the turn of the century in Eatonville, Florida, the first all-Black incorporated town in the United States. As a young woman, she moved north to study anthropology at Barnard College. In the 1920s and 1930s, she was the life of the party during the Harlem Renaissance, a movement that celebrated African American literature, music, drama, and art and gave us legends like Langston Hughes and Louis Armstrong.
Her studies in anthropology brought her back to Eatonville and later to Haiti to gather and record Black folk stories. It was on her trip to Haiti – which came on the heels of a massive breakup with a man several years her junior – that she wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God in just a few short weeks.
Many elements of the story seem to be inspired by Hurston’s own life. Set mostly in a town that is almost identical to Eatonville, it follows the life of Janie Crawford as she grows from a naive teenager living with her grandmother, through three different relationships, to a 40-something single woman who has finally come home to herself.
As Hurston tells the story, she switches back and forth between two distinct voices. When characters speak, Hurston uses her training as an anthropologist to record the Black dialect of the south. (The audiobook performed by Ruby Dee is excellent – I always recommend it to students struggling to read the dialect.) For instance, when Janie returns to her hometown at the beginning of the novel, setting up the frame for her to tell her life story, her former neighbors gossip about her behind her back:
“What she doin coming back here in dem overhalls? Can’t she find no dress to put on?--Where’s dat blue satin dress she left her in?--Where all dat money her husband took and died and left her?--What dat ole forty year ole ‘oman doin’ wid her hair swingin’ down her back lak some young gal?”1
The narrator, however, in the same scene, sounds a bit different:
“Seeing the woman as she was made them remember the envy they had stored up from other times. So they chewed up the back parts of their minds and swallowed with relish. They made burning statements with questions, and killing tools out of laughs. It was mass cruelty. A mood come alive. Words walking without masters, walking altogether like harmony in a song.”2
In his afterword in my copy of the book, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., a contemporary literary critic and professor at Harvard, explains this unique feature of Hurston’s voice. He says that Hurston “constantly shifts back and forth between her ‘literate’ narrator’s voice and a highly idiomatic black voice…It is this usage of a divided voice, a double voice unreconciled, that strikes me as her great achievement, a verbal analogue of her double experiences as a woman in a male-dominated world and as a black person in a nonblack world.”3
While I love the hopeful themes of self-discovery, feminism, and independence in this novel, what I really loved teaching was how Hurston managed to use literary devices to capture essential elements of her life. Through dialect, imagery, and personification, she not only tells us a story, but also reveals glimpses of her upbringing, her culture, and even her lived experience of race and gender.4 In other words, what makes this book so amazing is not what she says but how she says it.
Because of this, reading and teaching this book over and over again, year after year, felt like getting to know Hurston as a human being. The more I learned to recognize her voice, the more I appreciated her mastery of literary technique: she is able to express her perspective on life not only in the characters, plot, and themes of her novel, but also in her style, in the way she walks around on the page.
Thinking about Hurston’s voice in the context of the Catholic imagination calls to mind another voice that people have been trying to recognize and describe for thousands of years. When people think about the voice of God, they often imagine (or even hope for) a booming thunderous sound or a flashing neon sign. In my experience, God’s voice sounds more like the quiet footfalls of my loved ones on the stairs. The more time I spend with Him in prayer, in Scripture, and in creation, the more confident I feel in my ability to recognize the unique and subtle movements of the Spirit in the rooms of my heart. And the more often I listen and respond to these movements, the more gratitude I feel for their themes of unconditional love, a call to adventure and relationship, and deep, abiding peace.
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What I’ve been reading and writing lately:
With three kids at home all summer, I’ve been writing a lot of grocery lists and text messages to friends scheduling play dates. I am managing to read Scripture most (not all!) mornings though, and I even wrote a small reflection on a line from last Tuesday’s readings on my Instagram. In this season, I count these little moments as big wins!
Coming up…
Next month, I plan to write about my favorite book in the Bible, which you may have never read. Be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss it!
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (Harper Perennial Modern Classics: 2006), 2.
Ibid.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., afterward to Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston (Harper Perennial Modern Classics: 2006), 203.
And what about the n-word, which shows up multiple times in this novel? How do you talk about it with a group of mostly white, privileged high schoolers? As an English teacher, I felt it was part of my job duties to explain words – their origins and meanings – to my students. This article from Teaching Tolerance helped me frame my lessons on this catastrophic word. Address it head on: for the sake of your Black students, even if they aren’t in the room, draw attention to it the first time it comes up in the text; do not gloss over it. Refer to the text: show everyone that the characters use it when they are angry at each other; rarely is it a term of endearment. Explain the history: this word is grounded in hate; it was intentionally used to destroy a person’s dignity and humanity. Then look your students in the eye and say explicitly and seriously – even if your hands and voice are shaking – “You are never allowed to use this word, especially if you are white.”