African American · 1937
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston
A woman goes to the horizon herself rather than waiting for it to be brought to her.
The pear tree
Sixteen-year-old Janie watches a bee enter a bloom and forms an idea of what love should feel like. Hurston makes the standard explicit early so that every later compromise can be measured against it.
Marriage one: safety
Logan Killicks offers land and protection and treats her as labour. The lesson is compact: security arranged by others is usually purchased with your voice.
Marriage two: status
Joe Starks makes her the mayor's wife, puts her behind a counter and forbids her from speaking in public. Twenty years pass. Hurston's portrait of a marriage in which a woman is a display object is unsparing, and the moment Janie finally answers him back is the turn of the novel.
Marriage three: partnership
Tea Cake is younger and has no money, but he teaches her to shoot, takes her to work in the fields and talks to her as an equal. It is imperfect and includes real harm; Hurston does not present him as a reward.
Returning alone
She comes home widowed, in overalls, indifferent to the porch gossip, having been where she wanted to go. The frame of the novel is her telling the story to a friend — the same closing note as Bâ.
What to take from it
Set the standard early, and count the years you are spending against it.
Lines to keep
- “Two things everybody's got to do for themselves: go to God, and find out about living.”
- “Security arranged by others is usually purchased with your voice.”
- “She went to the horizon rather than waiting for it.”
Practice
- · Write your own pear-tree standard for love in one sentence.
- · Count how many years you have spent in an arrangement that fails it.