Their Eyes Were Watching God review by Josh

Their Eyes Were Watching God is the story of Janie Crawford, a light-skinned Black woman born around the turn of the 20th century.

As a teenager, Janie is briefly trapped in a dismal arranged marriage to an older farmer. But she meets and marries a charismatic younger man named Joe “Jody” Starks, who takes her to the all-Black town of Eatonville, Florida, where he is elected mayor and establishes a successful general store.

Janie is unhappily married to Jody for roughly 20 years. He is controlling and, frankly, something of a dick.

There is a poignant scene as Jody lies on his deathbed, when Janie tries to have a heart-to-heart conversation with him about their life together. She says, “Maybe Ah ain’t been sich uh good wife tuh you.” He replies that this is because she doesn’t have any sympathy for anyone. She tells him it isn’t that; it’s that he never let her show any sympathy for him. Jody responds defensively again, and Janie says, “Ah ain’t here to blame nobody. Ah’m just tryin’ tuh make you know what kinda person Ah is befo’ it’s too late.”

There ought to be a name for this particular feeling: having lived with someone for many years and realizing that, in some important way, you never really knew them—or they never really knew you.

In TV shows, an impetuous character will sometimes announce that they’re planning to marry someone they just met, and a prudent friend will ask, “Do you even know when their birthday is?” The joke assumes that an important part of knowing someone well enough to marry them is accumulating enough biographical details about them. But Janie and Jody illustrate something more profound: you can spend twenty years with someone and still fail to know them at all.

After Jody kicks the bucket, Janie starts her life over again. She marries a man named Tea Cake, who is everything Jody was not. He is feckless, irresponsible, and a gambler, but he loves Janie and cares about her happiness.

There is a curious subplot in the second half of the book involving a colorist woman named Mrs. Turner, who takes a liking to Janie because she is light-skinned. Mrs. Turner is incredulous that Janie does not consider herself superior to her darker-skinned husband and friends.

“I can’t stand black niggers,” she says. “Ah don’t blame de white folks from hatin’ ’em ’cause Ah can’t stand ’em mahself. ’Nother thing, Ah hates tuh see folks lak me and you mixed up wid ’em.” She goes on to argue that “If it wuzn’t for so many black folks it wouldn’t be no race problem. De white folks would take us in wid dem. De black ones is holdin’ us back.”

Mrs. Turner’s colorism isn’t merely about skin tone; she also associates darker skin with improper behavior. She complains about “uh black woman goin’ downde street in all dem loud colors, and whoopin’ and hollerin’ and laughin’ over nothin’.” She explains that she would never see a Black doctor and that “Ah don’t go in no nigger store tuh buy nothin’ neither,” because, in her view, “Colored folks don’t know nothin’ ’bout no business.”

Mrs. Turner goes on to condemn the recently deceased Booker T. Washington, whom she says “didn’t do nothin’ but hold us back—talkin’ ’bout work when de race ain’t never done nothin’ else.” Although she doesn’t mention him, I get the sense that Turner would have been more sympathetic to W.E.B. Du Bois and his theory of the “Talented Tenth.” Du Bois believed that a relatively small, highly educated Black elite would need to provide the intellectual and political leadership necessary for the advancement of the race. There was a certain tactical logic to this view, particularly at a time when Black Americans were being systematically denied political power. But Mrs. Turner illustrates a potential danger in the broader idea of racial uplift through an educated elite: the people best positioned to gain acceptance from white society might also be tempted to adopt its standards of respectability, including its prejudices about darker-skinned Black people. Something like this happened in various colonial societies, where European powers sometimes cultivated intermediary elites whose privileged position gave them a stake in the existing racial hierarchy. Hurston's point, as I read it, is not that Du Bois was advocating colorism, but that any hierarchy within a subordinated group can create opportunities for the dominant hierarchy to reproduce itself from within.