Their Eyes Were Watching God

The first page, which gives the ending away

Hurston opens with ships and horizons, then narrows to one sentence of plot: so the beginning of this was a woman and she had come back from burying the dead. Somebody is already dead on the first page. A reader who knows the title also gets the title's source in the same opening, where the dead are described as the sudden dead, their eyes flung wide open in judgment. Both phrases are planted before Janie has a name.

The choice costs Hurston all the suspense and buys her something else. A reader cannot spend the novel wondering whether the marriage to Tea Cake will last, so the reading attention goes to how Janie talks and what she notices. The book is not built to surprise. The book is built so that a woman's account of her own life arrives after the fact, from a woman who already knows how it turned out and tells it anyway.

Then the voice changes. The outside narrator hands the story to Janie on her back porch, with lemonade and one listener, and the register drops from ships and horizons into Florida speech. Hurston makes the handover audible. A reader can hear the moment the book stops being narrated at Janie and starts being told by her.

Three marriages, three ways of being spoken to

Janie's grandmother, called Nanny, marries her at sixteen to Logan Killicks for sixty acres and a house with an organ in the parlour. Killicks wants a second mule and buys one so Janie can plough behind it. Hurston writes almost nothing about his inner life, which is the treatment he gets. What Janie learns under him is not about him at all: she finds out that she knew things that nobody had ever told her, for instance the words of the trees and the wind.

Joe Starks arrives in a coat and a hat, buys land, founds the town of Eatonville, becomes its mayor, and puts up the first street lamp. At the lamp-lighting he preaches over it: and when Ah touch de match tuh dat lamp-wick let de light penetrate inside of yuh, and let it shine, let it shine, let it shine. Mrs. Bogle answers by singing Jesus, the light of the world. Hurston lets Starks be genuinely impressive here and then shows the cost: he will not let his wife make a speech, and he will not let her sit on the store porch where the talk is.

Tea Cake's courtship is a checkers game. He teaches her to play, which nobody had bothered to do, and she says he has taught her the maiden language all over. The phrase is doing precise work. Janie's complaint about the first two marriages was never only about work or money. Janie had been shut out of the talk, and the third husband's gift is a vocabulary.

Hurston does not make Tea Cake safe. He takes Janie's money for a night out, plays cards, gets cut with a razor, and beats her once, and the novel reports the beating without excusing it and without abandoning him. The marriage is the best thing that happens to Janie and it is not a reward. A reader looking for a husband who deserves her will not find one in any of the three.

The store porch, and why the mule matters

In Chapter 6 a yellow mule belonging to a man named Bonner becomes the town's running joke. The men on the store porch invent whole scenes about the mule, argue about it, hold competitive lies about how thin it is, and eventually give it a funeral. Hurston had spent years writing down exactly this kind of talk in Florida for Mules and Men, and here she puts the fieldwork straight into a novel.

The mule is also the book's argument in an animal. Nanny had told Janie that the Black woman is the mule of the world. Logan Killicks had bought a mule to work beside her. When the men on the porch turn a mule into a comic hero and bury it with speeches, Hurston is letting a whole town do in play what the novel does at length. What looks like a digression is the theme handled by the people it applies to.

Janie is standing behind the store counter for all of it, listening and forbidden to join in. That is the shape of the middle of the book: the best conversation in Eatonville happening ten feet from a woman who is not allowed to speak. Hurston does not state the injustice. She lets a reader hear a good scene and notice who is missing from it.

The storm, the title, and a courtroom

Down on the muck below Lake Okechobee, Janie and Tea Cake pick beans and the house fills every night with people and stories. The Seminole neighbours leave first, heading east. The white landowners stay. Tea Cake stays too, and Hurston makes the decision turn on a piece of reasoning: if the white people are not moving, the storm cannot be serious. The novel treats that as a fatal misreading of who has good information.

The title arrives in the middle of the storm, in one sentence: they seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God. Hurston had already used the words twice in different forms on the first page. A reader has been handed the phrase, then the storm, then the phrase again as its explanation. The people in the shack are not praying. The people in the shack are looking at something that is not answering.

Earlier, in Chapter 16, the narrator had said the same thing about smaller gods: half gods are worshipped in wine and flowers, real gods require blood. The line comes while Janie is watching a neighbour, Mrs. Turner, keep an altar to light skin and pale features. Hurston sets that petty worship beside the hurricane deliberately. One god takes flowers. The other takes a husband.

The book ends in a courtroom, and the courtroom is the second of two judgment scenes that bracket the action. Janie is tried by a white judge and an all-white jury, with the Black men of the muck sitting behind her wanting to testify against her and not permitted to. She is acquitted by the people with no claim on her and condemned by the people who knew her. Hurston then sends her home to give the account to Pheoby Watson, and the first page's promise is kept.