My annual re-read of Their Eyes Were Watching God
And thank you for sharing your reading thoughts with me.
Every year around Valentine’s Day, I track down the latest copy of Their Eyes Were Watching God in my house and I come to it looking for all the manifestations of love and beautiful sentences I have missed since the last time I read it.
The beginning, where Janie Crawford is sitting among the blooming flowers of a tree talking to her friend Pheoby who has her words “in her mouf,” telling her all the horizons her soul has seen since she last sent the town’s tongues to wagging. In the annals of Black female friendship and sisterhood and sister friends in literature, Their Eyes Were Watching God ranks up there in terms of a beautiful opening scene. There is no intimacy like telling your girl all the mess that went down with the people you thought you’d love forever.
I must have read this book for the first time when I was assigned it. I was 15, on my way to boarding school and completely in awe of the work Alice Walker had done to honor Hurston — a Capricorn writer like me. I loved the cover, woodcut beauty in green and teal and purple highlights.
But I was most smitten with the dynamic love of Janie. This willful Southern woman, whose grandma was trying to look out for her and marry her off as soon as she began to blossom, could not have imagined a man like Jody Starks or Logan Killicks or Tea Cake even. All she could see was security -- or the guise of it — as the love that would go on and continue for her beloved grandchild.
And what a lesson in the seasons of love and loving and lovers, how they rise and fall, they rise with passion and heat like the summer and freeze, threatening to keep us stuck in place, like the intolerant tundra that is winter. There’s a lesson here, too, about how to begin and how to end - that last line, she called her soul to come and see? Epic.