Their Eyes Were Watching God

“The wind came back with triple fury, and put out the light for the last time. They sat in company with the others in other shanties, their eyes straining against crude walls and their souls asking if He meant to measure their puny might against His.  They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.” – Zora Neale Hurston

Read more novels. That was #2 on my list of 20 goals for 2020, and I have read four so far, including the classic from Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God. It was probably Oprah’s made-for-television adaptation in 2005 that placed the captivating title in my subconscious, and I am glad. Whatever made me pick up a copy at the used bookstore has my deep gratitude. What a powerful and beautiful story.

I won’t soon forget the primary characters, including the moment I walked with them into the line that generated the title of the book. Having lived through a powerful hurricane myself, sitting in the dark with Janie and Tea Cake as a reader was easy to do, straining and staring in awe at God.

Nor will I forget the Afterword by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., as he attempted to share the author’s complicated life and legacy. Gates introduced me to Hurston, Barnard grad with multiple Guggenheims, prominent author and figure of the Harlem Renaissance, who died an ignominious death in a welfare home and was buried in an unmarked grave. Gates showed me Hurston, criticized by her rival, Richard Wright, for the way she approached Black America in her novels, who responded that she wanted to write a novel that was “not a treatise on sociology.”  As Alice Walker (The Color Purple), whom Hurston inspired, wrote, Hurston portrayed “a sense of black people as complete, complex, undiminished human beings.” Black people as, in a word, people.

It took all this to help me understand what captivated me so about this particular love story. I appreciate treatises on sociology, particularly those that help me develop a greater sense of race consciousness, but this was quite simply—and by “simply” I mean that highest compliment of somehow making the ineffable obvious—a human love story.

It helps me remember today that, although Black History Month is now over for 2020, black history month is, in fact, every month.