Jody, dat wuz uh mighty fine
thing fuh you tuh do. ’Tain’t everybody
would have thought of it, ’cause it ain’t no everyday thought. Freein’ dat mule makes uh mighty big man outa
you. Something like George Washington
and Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln, he had de
whole United States tuh rule, so he freed de Negroes. You got uh town, so you freed a mule. You have tuh have power tuh free things and
dat makes you lak uh king uh something.” (58)[1]
Janie Starks, the female
protagonist of Zora Neale Hurston’s most famous novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), makes this comment to her
second husband Joe Starks (Jody) after an episode involving Matt Bonner’s ornery
mule. Matt, a resident of the township
of Eatonville where Joe presides as mayor, is famously impecunious and many
consider him justly rewarded for overworking and underfeeding his mule, a
creature that seems to exhibit a mind of its own, to Matt’s great displeasure. After some local men start baiting the mule
in front of Joe’s general store, Janie rebukes them under her breath, saying
the beast has “had his disposition ruint wid mistreatment” (56). On overhearing his wife’s statement, Joe—in
one of his more magnanimous moments—bargains with Matt for possession of the mule
in order to give it a rest after a life of abuse, prompting Janie’s
comment.
Though
in many ways these mule stories make up part of the varied folkloric material
Hurston strategically employs throughout the novel, it also allegorizes aspects
of a theme raised in the first half of the book, a theme most baldly stated in
Chapter Two when Janie is given a lecture by her aging grandmother:
Honey, de white man is de ruler of everything as fur as Ah
been able tuh find out. Maybe it’s some
place way off in de ocean where de black man is in power, but we don’t know
nothin’ but what we see. So de white man
throw down de load and tell de nigger man tuh pick it up. He pick it up because he have to, but he
don’t tote it. He hand it to his
womenfolks. De nigger woman is de mule
uh de world so fur as Ah can see. Ah
been prayin’ fuh it tuh be different wid you.
Lawd, Lawd, Lawd! (14)
The immediate irony of Janie’s praise
of her husband’s action is that although he has just exhibited the ennobling
behavior of a liberator, the fact is that Janie’s aging husband, the virtual
ruler of the township, has begun to oppress his wife, treating her as his own virtual
mule. After the episode in question (yet
even before it), Joe tries to control his wife’s every move, forcing her to
wear a head rag in his store so that no one will see her “beautiful” hair (the sign
of her mixed heritage) and shooing her away from the men who gather on the
front porch of his general store to chat and tell stories. He even mocks her before the locals whenever
she deviates by a jot or a tittle from his requirements of her as his wife—requirements
he imposes as a sort of “New Negro” capitalist and powerbroker of a thriving,
all-black township. In a sense, Joe has
become the uncharitable Matt Bonner over African-American womanhood in this
novel, deviating from his earlier, more inspiring role as liberator and king, to
become a mean-spirited domestic dictator rationalizing his controlling tendencies
by telling Janie that she, as his wife, is a cut above everyone else and that
she needs to set an example. The example
he wants her to set can only be done, apparently, by restraining her “Negro”
impulses, repressing her free spirit, and avoiding unnecessary interaction with
the townspeople—people Joe considers “puny” and “trashy” and whose illiterate
talk he dismisses as “gum-grease” (54).
This attitude of
Joe’s becomes especially pronounced whenever Janie expresses interest in the
popular tales of everyday black life being told on the front porch of the
couple’s general store. We realize from Janie’s
desire to listen to and participate in these story-telling sessions that
Hurston is subtly equating the rights of African-American women with the free choice
of authors to decide what materials and forms might be suitable for the times. Hurston is in a contest with her male
contemporaries over story-telling rights, as it were, at a moment of cultural
ferment in the African-American community typically referred to as the Harlem and
Chicago Renaissances.
Is
there a meta-fictional point to Janie’s comment apropos of relations not only between
black men and women, but between black writers (of both sexes) and the community
they represent—especially with regard to what constitutes appropriate subject
matter and thus provides a viable aesthetic for a rising class of black intellectuals? The difference between Joe’s and Janie’s
cultural and ideological outlook has much to do with the kinds of subject
matter poets and novelists such as Richard Wright and Langston Hughes were producing
and ideologically espousing at the time.
Wright and Hughes were the rising stars of the African-American literati
and Hurston’s Joe Starks of Eatonville—an ambitious, self-made man with
political instincts and a desire for power and prestige—seems, in retrospect,
to parody Hurston’s male counterparts, particularly Wright, whose Native Son would be published the
following year. Starks has come to
challenge the status quo by asserting his identity as a man of action and
knowledge in a bid to challenge white prejudice and complacency—the attitude
that black men were irreparably inferior and could never compete with whites.
Janie, on the
other hand, seems preoccupied with the everyday, the neglected, the forgotten,
the vernacular: those aspects of
African-American culture that fell through the cracks of this interracial
struggle or which seemed all too picturesque or even sentimental for the new, more
“modernizing” impulse toward competition and provocation. The quintessence of this nostalgic,
anthropologically-searching attitude can be seen in Hurston’s depiction of
agricultural labor in the region of the Florida Everglades—“down on the muck”
as her protagonists say. But it can also
be seen in Janie’s “self-actualization” as a woman protagonist, something she begins
to achieve only when she talks back to—or “undercuts” (as essayist Rachel
DuPlessis calls it)[1]—her
second husband shortly before his death. The
process of self-actualization is only fully achieved with Janie’s choice of Tea
Cake as her future husband: her third,
more exciting antidote to the domineering Starks and Logan Killicks who precede
him. Tea Cake—her sweet-talking,
guitar-strumming, gambling man—is clearly the embodiment of an alternative
African-American lifestyle characterized in part by his more sensitive,
responsive attitude toward women, or at least toward one woman, Janie Starks. It is a cultural style captured to some
extent by the Blues, but also in the “love game” Janie anticipates enjoying with
Tea Cake, something she dissociates completely from the “race after property
and titles” (114).[2] In effect, Janie is returning to the moment
of sexual awakening she experienced as a teenager while fantasizing about
Johnny Taylor under the “blossoming pear tree” (10) in her grandmother’s backyard. It was
a fantasy her grandmother would quickly preempt by marrying the girl off to the
old, propertied farmer, Logan Killicks, just after delivering Janie the lecture
quoted above.
As Michael Awkward notes in his introduction to New Essays on Their Eyes Were Watching God, the issue of how best to represent the “Negro” of the time was the subject of furious debate in African-American literary circles in the Twenties and Thirties:
As Michael Awkward notes in his introduction to New Essays on Their Eyes Were Watching God, the issue of how best to represent the “Negro” of the time was the subject of furious debate in African-American literary circles in the Twenties and Thirties:
In an era when Afro-American literature was viewed by many
black intellectuals and white readers as an occasion for direct confrontation
of white America’s racist practices and its effects on Afro-Americans,
Hurston’s imaginative landscape, which generally did not include maniacal white
villains or, for that matter, superhumanly proud, long suffering blacks, seemed
inappropriate and hopelessly out of step.
In addition to the gender-determined nature of literary reputations
during the period […] Hurston’s reputation also suffered as a consequence of
disputes about how blacks ought to be portrayed in literature. Sensitive to the need to improve white
America’s perception of Afro-Americans, some powerful black intellectuals,
including [Alain] Locke and W. E. B. Du Bois, believing that literature
represented the most effective means by which to begin to dispel racist notions
that black Americans were morally and cognitively subhuman, insisted that
Afro-American writers were obligated to present Afro-Americans in the most
favorable—and flattering—light possible.
(10)
Although Joe Starks might at first
seem to fit the bill of such a character—a leader, innovator, and liberator of
sorts—his patronizing, patriarchal behavior toward Janie and others provides an
extremely unflattering portrait of such
a figure, primarily because of his incapacity to treat women or other social dependents
(or inferiors) with any respect. As the
new, undaunted representative of African-American initiative and determination,
Starks is both brilliant and proud. But
the people he seems destined to represent gradually begin to chafe, like Matt
Bonner’s mule, under the yoke of his domineering attitude. They feel both slighted and intimidated and
the sentiments are not unfamiliar to Joe’s wife. Yet when Joe up and dies and Janie attaches
herself to a young man her neighbors consider insufficiently provisioned with a
fortune, they reveal an almost abject adherence to the kind of work ethic their
former mayor imposed. They start disparaging
Tea Cake as a symbol of everything that characterized their distinctness from
white society before the arrival of Mayor Starks: their folkways, their blues, and their unambitious
agrarian lifestyle. Such things are now
considered undeserving of Janie’s status as the widow of the great Joe
Starks.
As
feminist critics have been claiming since the Eighties, Janie represents a
nexus of cultural codes that express a range of attitudes about race, gender, age,
and class—social determinants that routinely interact, overlap, and compete. She is a rich man’s wife who opts to work
manually “down on the muck” with her new husband; she wears overalls upon
returning to Eatonville in a sign of trans-gendering after her trial for murder;
she is beautiful but also over forty; her hair and earlier upbringing in a
white family’s house nevertheless establish her as an individual who transverses
racial expectations while simultaneously risking white prejudice. Despite these transgressive qualities, Janie expresses
a concerted determination to identify with the folkways of Southern blacks through
her original, self-actualizing decision to quit her position of status in
Eatonville to go work in West Florida with Tea Cake as a migrant laborer. Hurston even goes so far as to voice a
political position through Janie when, in a conversation with a Mrs. Turner—the
black proprietor of an eating house who perversely prefers whites to negroes or
“[a]nyone who looked more white folkish than herself” (144)—Janie speaks up for
the social reformer and educator Booker T. Washington. She makes this effort of articulation in a
way that seems to critique the newer discourse of double consciousness analyzed
by W. E. B. DuBois in his famous book The
Souls of Black Folk, where he insists on the radical modification of such
consciousness.[3] By resisting the struggle against double consciousness
and thus stubbornly emphasizing black difference—even a kind of cultural insulation
from white influence—Hurston is refusing to accept the bourgeois standards of
white society that set the terms of that “radical modification.” Insistent competitiveness with white society
is, as Hurston suggests in her autobiography Dust on the Tracks,[4]
ironically undermining black uniqueness through an over-preoccupation with racial
confrontation such that blackness becomes standardized in a virtually
white American mold. As DuPlessis
writes, Hurston “has a decided racial bifocality” (98), but she has it in a way
that attempts to transcend, not thwart, double consciousness by acting as if
racial difference, while real and present (because imposed), does not have to
be decisive, absolute or unbridgeable. Their Eyes Were Watching God tends to
substantiate this attitude by avoiding introducing into the novel any white
characters at all except at crucial moments:
those of Janie’s formative years in a white family’s house and again at
her trial for murder (the “White House” of the law, as Claude McKay might call
it). It’s a strange kind of double-consciousness
game, one that doesn’t so much address the problems of racial injustice as use racial
difference as a way to confront inequities within the black community itself,
especially those between men and women.
At
the same time that Hurston’s narrative draws its female protagonist both firmly
and affirmatively into Southern folk life, Janie—as the inheritor of certain
white racial traits and as the romantic object of a love affair that
sentimentally appeals to white sensibilities—is found “not guilty” by an
all-white Florida jury at her trial for shooting Tea Cake. Based on these values and the definitive
forensic testimony revealing that she was defending herself against a man who
had succumbed, unknowingly, to rabies, Janie is redeemed and set free by white
society to the dismay and anger of the black male community who sees her as
unfairly benefiting from privileges only a Negro female (especially one of
mixed heritage) might enjoy at the expense of black males. These males would otherwise take a
proprietary attitude toward such a female (just as they did when they tried to
prevent Janie from choosing Tea Cake as her mate) and thus assume her guilt in the
shooting of Tea Cake. In the end, it’s
white society that grants justice in this novel, and it comes as a shock to anyone
interested in American history or racial justice—especially at a time when
America’s current judicial system is serving black males so abominably and when
even black female victims of domestic abuse (such as Marissa Alexander) can be threatened
with twenty-year sentences by state prosecutors for trying to protect
themselves in their homes[5]
while the same state prosecutors uphold the stand-your-ground defense of armed white
assailants who murder young black men in their own neighborhoods and homes.
Finally,
the vexed ambivalence that seems to characterize Hurston’s depiction of
African-American gender and race relations emerges most conspicuously as a
competition between cultural voices: the
vernacular English of Janie Starks—who tells her story to Pheoby Watson by
saying, “You can tell ’em what Ah say if you wants to. Dats just de same as me ’cause mah tongue is
in mah friend’s mouf”—and the omniscient, third-person, Standard English narration
provided by Hurston in the rest of the work.
By relentlessly juxtaposing these two voices and thus playing a kind of
authorial double consciousness game, Hurston rhetorically re-enacts the
cultural conflict between the races that the book seems otherwise to repress. Yet she does so by way of her own, narrative appropriation
of English diction to serve the cultural purposes of African-Americans,
divulging in the process her virtuosity and quick-change capacity. This act of literary artifice suggests that
both rhetorical forms are a kind of verbal sleight of hand or cultivated mimicry
that anyone with genuine literary talent can muster and master—regardless of
race or gender.
[1]
See Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “Power, Judgment, and Narrative in a Work of Zora
Neale Hurston: Feminist Cultural
Studies” in New Essays on ‘Their Eyes
Were Watching God.’ Michael Awkward,
ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990:
101-102.
[2]
Another, more contemporary version can be detected in Toni Cade Bambara’s
characterization of Larry in the short story “Medley.” It’s perhaps worth noting that the female
character Sweet Pea ultimately rejects Larry’s lifestyle to become a
hardworking single mom focused like a beam on her daughter’s future.
[3]
See W. E. B. Du Bois, “Of Our Spiritual Strivings” in The Souls of Black Folks. New
York: Penguin, 1989 (1903): 5.
[4]
DuPlessis quotes Hurston from her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road, adding her own analysis: “‘I must tell the
tales, sing the songs, do the dances, and repeat the raucous sayings and doings
of the Negro furthest down’ (DT
177). This aesthetic position is a
conscious repudiation of the ‘better-thinking Negro’ who ‘wanted nothing to do
with anything frankly Negroid…. The
Spirituals, the Blues, any definitely
Negroid thing was just not done’ (DT 233).”
From DuPlessis: 100 (see endnote #2).
[5]
She was eventually released in a plea deal.
