Their Eyes Were Watching God

Their Eyes Were Watching God

Janie Crawford is a beautiful color woman who does things her own way. She doesn't do things the way society says she should, and she doesn't acknowledge the whispers that take place behind her back as she walks past. In the book Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston captures Janie's path as she goes on a search to find herself.

My favorite part of this book is when Janie tell about when she found out she was colored. She grew up in a white house hold and one day when she and the children were out playing in the yard, a man came by and took a picture of them. Then about a week later the man comes by the house to get paid for the picture and all the children were looking at the picture and everyone had been pointed out except for a dark girl. Janie then asked, "where is me? I don't see me?" and this made everyone laugh. Miss Nellie, the mother of the white children, pointed her out. Janie looked at the picture a long time and saw it was her dress and her hair and said, "Aw, aw! Ah'm colored!"

This part made me laugh because it reminded me of my nephew. My family is very colorful and we see no color boundaries of any sort. One day my mom was talking to my nephew and somehow the topic of skin color had come up and my nephew, who is half black, said "Well...My moms orange, my papas shiny, and my nana black! Just like me!" And it was so great because he didn't know the difference. And that's the way it really should be. All of the negative things in this world are things we were not born with. These are all things that are taught, whether we mean for them to be or not.

This books show the struggles that Janie had to go through in the 1930s. They were never really racial issues, but issues that you would have to go through as a woman in general. But being black did put a bit of a damper on the things she would have liked to do. She was raised by her grandma after her mother ran off. Her Nanny loves her, but her Nanny's life as a slave and her own experience with Janie's mother, changed her worldview. Her Nanny's primary desire was to marry off Janie as soon as possible to a husband who could take care of her. But Janie had her own desires. She was unhappy with the man her Nanny had chosen, and she ended up running off with a different guy and getting married to him. Then after he died she fell in love with a younger man named who Tea Cake. After just 9 months of courtship they got married, and 2 years later there was a hurricane that hit their home in the Everglades. As they desperately fled the rising waters Tea Cake was bit by a dog, and did not realize the condition of the dog. Three weeks later he becomes ill, and in his rabies-induced madness began to accuse Janie of having an affair and began to fore a pistol at her. Janie was then forced to kill him, in order to save herself. Then while being tried for murder in front of an all white