Getting started

From the very first instance of a character speaking in Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston’s writing style makes the reader take notice:

“What she doin coming back here in dem overhalls?”

Much has been said about Hurston’s use of vernacular speech in the book. Fellow writer Richard Wright criticized Hurston for what he saw as giving white readers the stereotypes of African Americans that they expected.

However, after the revival of interest in her work in the 1970s and beyond, those same characters’ speech patterns were no longer seen as pandering to white readers but a reflection of Hurston’s anthropological training, her affirmation of people as they are, and her outright talent as a writer:

“Her fidelity to diction, metaphor, and syntax… rings, even across forty years, with an aching familiarity that is a testament to Hurston’s skill and to the durability of black speech.”
  –Sherley Anne Williams, Foreword to Their Eyes Were Watching God (Univ. of Illinois Press, 1978)

How do you feel about the way Janie speaks? Do you find it easy to follow along? What impact does it have on the story? Is it more real to you, or is it a stumbling block to understanding?

–

“Between Laughter and Tears,” review of Their Eyes Were Watching God written by Richard Wright (New Masses, (5 October 1937: 22-23).

Reviews of Their Eyes Were Watching God, 1937-1938 (Univ. of Virginia)

The Sound of 1930s Florida Folk Life (NPR): Zora Neale Hurston participated in a WPA program that documented Florida culture in the 1930s. Hear her sing “Evalina.”  Hear Zora Neale Hurston’s recordings held by the Florida Memory Project

“Power of Prose: African American Women” by Christa Smith Anderson (PBS’ “Do You Speak American?”)

Ruby Dee reads an excerpt of Their Eyes Were Watching God (HarperAudio) (via Salon.com)

“Looking for Zora”

It seems appropriate to begin our look at Their Eyes Were Watching God with Alice Walker, the woman widely credited as having an important role in the revival of popular interest in Zora Neale Hurston’s work that began in the 1970s. 

Zora Neale Hurston had been dead for more than a decade, buried in an unmarked Florida grave when Alice Walker’s 1975 essay “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston” was published in Ms. magazine. The essay relayed Walker’s trip ito Florida in search of Hurston’s grave and her conversations with the people she met, some of whom had remembered Hurston and some who hadn’t. It was during this trip that Alice Walker purchased a headstone for Hurston that she had inscribed “genius of the South.”

In her forward to Robert Hemenway’s Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (University of Illinois Press, 1977), Walker wrote,

“We are a people. A people do not throw their geniuses away. And if they are thrown away, it is our duty as artists and as witnesses for the future to collect them again for the sake of our children, and, if necessary, bone by bone.” (emphasis in original)

Unfortunately, ”In Search of Zora Neale Hurston” isn’t available online (believe me, I think I’ve looked just about everywhere) but it was republished in Walker’s book In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (Harcourt Brace, 1983) as “Looking for Zora,” along with “Zora Neale Hurston: A Cautionary Tale and A Partisan View,” the forward to Robert Hemenway’s book quoted above. The book is available at APL’s Main Library (click here to see if it’s checked in). 

Related links of interest:

In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens by Alice Walker (link to APL catalog)

Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography by Robert Hemenway (link to APL catalog)

Video clips of Finding a World that I Thought Was Lost: Zora Neale Hurston and the People She Looked at Very Hard and Loved Very Much, Alice Walker’s Virginia Guildersleeve lecture at Barnard, Oct. 2003

Photographs of Zora Neale Hurston’s gravesite