glimpse of the woman who’d write
Twenty-six-year-old Zora was anything but heroic as she lay in her hospital bed. She felt sick and scared, downed by appendicitis and with no family or friends to visit or console her. It had been many years since she sat with her father on the sweltering porches of Eatonville, Florida, listening to her elders weave long yarns about their all-black community and its history. Back then, she was curious and spunky, reveling in her place in a respected preacher’s family. That was before her mother died and her father—a strict man, notoriously intolerant of other people’s frailties—turned into a stranger.
Something about Zora just rubbed John Hurston the wrong way. A religious man, he was anything but perfect, an infamous womanizer who internalized the hatred he had experienced at the hands of the white community before he helped found Eatonville. His blatant favoritism for her brothers and his clumsy mistreatment of the daughter who resembled him most was a brutal emotional blow for openhearted Zora. And his behavior after the death of her mother, Lucy Ann Hurston, was just the beginning of a long sequence of insults. Zora soon found herself banished to a school in Jacksonville, then abandoned there at the end of the school year by a father who, irritated by his daughter’s incessant needs and angered by her rejection of his new wife, refused to take responsibility for Zora’s welfare or tuition. His suggestion that the school just adopt her was a betrayal in the strictest sense of the word.
Still just a teen when she was dumped at school, Zora became an uneasy outcast. In a world that was brutal to black women, she had to depend on relatives and friends for support. Her life from then on out was dark, nomadic, marked by sexual assaults by her white employers, a cruel encounter with her stepmother, and a mysterious relationship she would hint at but never discuss in later years. She was working as a waitress in Baltimore when appendicitis threatened to abbreviate her already troubled life. Too poor to pay for her own treatment, Zora had to rely on the free ward of the Maryland General Hospital for care. She knew that appendicitis was a common killer, one that required swift surgery and a long recovery period—if she lived. Would she die under the knife? Had she fulfilled her purpose here on Earth?
Though stoic about the possibility of death, Zora knew she wasn’t ready to go. And so she made a wager that would reverberate throughout the rest of her life. Later she told it so: “I bet God that if I lived, I would try to find out the vague directions whispered in my ears and find the road it seemed I must follow.” Zora survived her operation and set out to fulfill her part of the bargain.
She made good on her promise. After a brief stint at Howard University in Washington, D.C., she took Harlem by storm, finding herself right at home in the jazzy, juicy renaissance that filled the neighborhood’s literary salons and rent parties in the wild 1920s. Flashy and fiercely attractive, she balanced her writing and her studies with plenty of parties and escapades. She enrolled as the only black student at Barnard College in 1925, and there she finally heard the “vague directions” she had prayed for at the hospital. For the first time, Zora realized that she could translate her interest in black vernacular culture and spiritual traditions into an actual profession. She became a cultural anthropologist, receiving her bachelor’s in anthropology at the age of thirty-six.
With superstitions and storytelling her new stock-in-trade, Zora gave in to her new obsession. On fire with the realization that “that man in the gutter is the god-maker,” she began to study black religious expression. What she found convinced her that the lowliest of blacks were at the heart of a rich cultural tradition that had never been fully appreciated. Her studies were over for now, but she still had much to learn. For all her enthusiasm, though, Zora wasn’t exactly prepared for the depth and breadth of black expression she found back home. As the prodigal daughter turned folklorist returned to the South in 1927 along with her friend Langston Hughes, she tried to make sense of the complex world of folk religion. But she wasn’t satisfied with merely transcribing sermons or interviewing preachers. In a break with the traditional anthropological stance of distance, Zora threw herself headfirst into the voodoo, conjuring, and hoodoo traditions of the black South. Soon, she was neck-deep in a strange world of dark traditions, charismatic conjurers, and mysterious rites. She began to collect experiences in addition to notes, training with the South’s most respected conjure doctors and undergoing her own spiritual experiences, including a multiday fast whose psychic visions and hallucinations were her fiery initiation into the world of the trained hoodoo practitioner.
Aflame with the power of these spiritual journeys, Zora became convinced that her calling was to convey the drama and sweep of black spirituality for all to see. Though she trained as a priest of sorts, she was no preacher: she was a witness, a disciple, a seeker driven to capture her inner vision in words. She was forty-six years old when she gave that vocation its most powerful expression, writing
Throughout the course of the book, we watch Janie survive marriages to a callous man, an attractive tyrant, and a loving younger husband. Abused, ignored, and silenced, Janie is tested again and again. Her liberation from the expectations and judgments of other humans is painfully slow, but powerful. Throughout, she puts her trust in herself and a power greater than herself. The quiet self-confidence that emerges is her tribute to God. Janie draws experience and faith together when she finally speaks up against her husband after decades of stoic silence.
Janie did what she had never done before, that is, thrust herself into the conversation.
“Sometimes God gits familiar wid us womenfolks too and talks His inside business. He told me how surprised He was ‘bout y’all turning out so smart after Him makin’ yuh different; and how surprised y’all is goin’ tuh be if you ever find out you don’t know half as much ‘bout us as you think you do. It’s so easy to make yo’self out God Almighty when you ain’t got nothin’ tuh strain against but women and chickens.”
After you get done cheering, consider that Janie isn’t just speaking for herself… she’s speaking up for a woman’s place in God’s world. Over the course of the book, Janie settles into that place for good. Women and blacks, too, are God’s creations, and criticizing them in God’s name just won’t fly for Janie (or for Zora). Again and again, Janie watches frail humans fail to do God’s work. A neighbor reveals her obsession with light skin and her internalized hatred of the black race in a hubris-ridden parody of God’s eternal judgment. Janie is mocked for her love affair with Tea Cake, the man she’s waited for all her life. And over and over again, she must look within for answers.
Marked by external strife, Janie’s inner life becomes increasingly peaceful as she suspects, then believes, that there’s something bigger out there. Though she faces death, emotional starvation, even a hurricane, Janie’s hard- won happiness is never really in danger, for she’s found redemption and resurrection on the inside. Every facet of Janie’s world, both ugly and joyful, is of God’s making and God’s own goodness; even the terror of the coming storm is made and governed by God. Janie learns that struggling against God’s ways is for the weak and confused; for Janie, nothing works but the embrace. For those whose “eyes are watching God,” acceptance of the world on the universe’s terms is the only thing that can lead to peace. Slowly, mysteriously, God restores all that has been lost. Even God-watchers, though, can’t always make sense of divine acts, and a bit of uncertainty and questioning make its way into the book’s final affirming passages:
The day of the gun, and the bloody body, and the courthouse came and commenced to sing a sobbing sigh out of every corner in the room; out of each and every chair and thing. Commenced to sing, commenced to sob and sigh, singing and sobbing…. Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.
Janie will always continue her quest for love and self-definition, whether she’s ready to walk down the road or not. Alone again, she must face some terrifying questions: Who am I? Who is God? What’s the point of faith?
