Ms. Smarty Pants Know It All

Zora Neale Hurston drew me right in from the very beginning of Their Eyes Were Watching God. It was the language and her skill with it. Experienced readers know that there are certain writers who just have a gift for putting down language that harmonizes with your very being. They just know that flow, rhythm, and wavelength.

There is a lot of dialect and colloquial spellings all throughout the pages, but it didn’t slow me down. It wasn’t a chore to read through this at all.

The story starts with something of a mystery. Janie, the heroine of the novel, is returning home alone. We’re told that she left a while ago although the exact circumstances are not revealed just yet.

The entire town wants to know why she’s back and by herself. It falls to her best friend Pheoby to go over and try to get the story. From here, Janie tells Pheoby her life story.

This seems like a pretty standard plot device except … once we get into Janie’s biography, the narrative switches from the first-person into the third-person.

We discussed this novel at book club and luckily, someone read a few critiques of the book. She shared that the book essentially set the tradition of the black female voice in literature. Hurston didn’t really have anyone to emulate as she wrote.

Their Eyes Were Watching God may be unorthodox by conventional literary standards, but it takes a lot from feminine oral story telling traditions.

I found Hurston’s treatment of Janie to be very unorthodox as well. For the majority of the novel, I did not like this main character. And Hurston, I felt, did not try to manipulate me into feeling differently. She let the character stand on her own.

Instead, I really enjoyed meeting all the other characters that came into Janie’s life. They were interesting, funny, and helped set such a tone for each location in the story.

Hurston does a great job of painting pictures—of a place, of a time, and of people in general. I can see why this book is considered a ground-breaking classic.

Even independent of the plot, just having a black female protagonist is so significant in the development of American literature. And having a black female writer demonstrate such skill paved the way for so many other authors. I wouldn’t hesitate to read more of her works in the future.

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