On June 29, 1997 professors of literature at Ohio
University, Marilyn Atlas and Edgar Whan, came to
Studio B in the Ohio University Telecommunications
Center to record a discussion about the novel Their
Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. They
were joined by guest scholar Annette Oxindine of
Wright State University. Here are the transcripts of the
conversation.
Marilyn Atlas - Hi, thank you. Today we’re going to be
talking about Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora
Neale Hurston. And it’s a wonderful novel, rediscovered
in 1975 by many people when the University of Illinois
reprinted it. It was originally published in 1937 and
Zora Neale Hurston is really a fascinating woman in
many ways.
And this is a novel about trying to find community. It
begins when she’s a pretty young woman and kind of
centers on her first marriage, goes through other
relationships and even one that ends in murder and
kind of attempts to explore how a woman who’s African
American in the 1930s figures out how to be real. How
to cut through certain kinds of myths that don’t work.
And part of what she learns is that it doesn’t really
work to simply accept the old myth. That even people
like one’s grandmother can tell a story that doesn’t
function for you. That love doesn’t necessarily grow
after marriage. There’s a difference between a legal
relationship and a respectful one.
I’d like to kind of start us out with the passage that
begins on page ten, very early in the book which shows
us Janie pretty separate from the myths of her world,
not dealing with the issues of class, not dealing with
issues of race or gender or rural or urban lives, but
trying to be a young woman in the springtime, trying to
see what it feels like to be alive in west Florida.
"It was a spring afternoon in West Florida. Janie had
spent most of the day under a blossoming pear tree in
the back-yard. She had been spending every minute
that she could steal from her chores under that tree for
the last three days. That was to say, ever since the first
tiny bloom had opened. It had called her to come and
gaze on a mystery. From barren brown stems to
glistening leaf-buds; from the leaf-buds to snowy
virginity of bloom. It stirred her tremendously. How?
Why? It was like a flute song forgotten in another
existence and remembered again. What?
"How? Why? This singing she heard that had nothing to
do with her ears. The rose of the world was breathing
out smell. It followed her through all her waking
moments and caressed her in her sleep. It connected
itself with other vaguely felt matters that had struck
her outside observation and buried themselves in her
flesh. Now they emerged and quested about her
consciousness.
"She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree
soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the gold
of the sun and the panting breath of the breeze when
the inaudible voice of it all came to her. She saw a
dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the
thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace
and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from the root to
tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing
with delight. So this was a marriage! She had been
summoned to behold a revelation. Then Janie felt a
pain remorseless sweet that left her limp and languid."
And I think this really represents her first of a certain
kind of sexuality and a community with nature, very
separate from what’s going to happen in the text very
soon afterwards.
What I’d like to do is kind of start a discussion a little
bit on community and nature and how it functions in
this novel.
Edgar Whan - Well, Let me, this is Edgar Whan
talking, I’m a little ill at ease on these sets, but I’ll do
the best I can. I’m kind of old and cranky and somehow
threatened by all of the cyber-jargon, but I’ve
discovered reading your comments from this format
that it liberates us from the strictures of the classroom.
Those who participate in the discussion whether they
need to or want to, want to join others in a serious
discussion. No one is trying to impress the man in the
third row or catch the eye of the woman by the
window. No one is worried about a grade or concerned
about what the teacher wants. Constraints of time and
place vanish. No dress code, no worry about
appearances. I am, in short, set at ease with the
intelligence and civility of those who have talked with
us on this Web site.
Today we continue again a reconsideration of
community. This time through Zora Neale Hurston’s
novel, published in 1937. The year I, in all my white
maleness graduated from high school in Pontiac,
Michigan.
But the power of this writing has opened me to a new
experience of a Negro woman, as the language of the
day named her. Her glory to me is that she insisted
that the respect for a person’s integrity is the basis of
community and I’m sure that our discussion and your
comments will refine this statement for me.
Annette Oxindine - I want to return to Marilyn’s
comment about nature and community. It’s interesting
that you noted our friends in cyberspace don’t have to
worry about how they’re dressed and that’s one of the
things when Janie...
Edgar Whan - And they can’t see us reading notes!
Annette Oxindine - Yes! And when Janie returns from
the muck, she returns in her overalls. And one of the
things she’s done is that she’s gotten away from Logan
Killicks’ apron which he tied on her and part, he
desecrated her, Hurston even uses the language, he
desecrated her pear tree that you were just evoking.
And when she is with Tea Cake, that relationship,
though it is problematic in some of its sexual politics, it
does connect her to nature. He wants her to work out
there with the muck where Joe Starks kept her
segregated on the porch in her blue dress.
She returns in her overalls and one of the things that
she does, she had given away everything in the house
that she and Tea Cake shared together except a
package of garden seed that Tea Cake had bought to
plant. Tea Cake was always planting things.
And I think that is very significant. She finally learns to
do that through him, but she’s planting them at the
end without him.
Marilyn Atlas - I think that’s really a wonderful
comment.
Edgar Whan - There are really three different kinds of
community she faces in these three marriages, aren’t
there?
Marilyn Atlas - Right, I think the real difference, in the
last one which is the most akin to nature, it’s still
problematic.
Edgar Whan - What do you mean "problematic?"
Marilyn Atlas - She’s not naïve about nature, even
with Tea Cake, he beats her, he has such racial
oppression himself, he feels so bad about being black. I
mean that’s one of his attractions to Janie, she looks so
much more traditionally white that most of the other
African American women.
Yet, he’s still, with all the problems, there’s still
something in that relationship that people want and
love. And that Janie herself wants and loves and
respects, even after she shoots him. She really goes
back to idealizing that relationship, so very much,
because he offered her at least part of that pear tree,
more of that pear tree than anyone else did and that’s
as close to community perhaps as one can get.
Annette Oxindine - And I think that Hurston does
something very interesting when she connects Tea
Cake’s own disavowal of who he is with his rejection of
what nature is telling him to do because the reason
that Tea Cake is in the situation where he gets bitten
by the dog and gets rabies, I mean he is trying to save
Janie, but initially he and the others could have been
saved, had he listened to those who know the land.
And Hurston makes it very clear that Tea Cake has
internalized some of his own oppression and that he
has internalized the way that whites see him even
though he has a wonderful community outside of the
whites, he still does not trust the Indians because on of
his friends says to him, "You know the Indians are
going east, man. It’s dangerous." And Tea Cake says,
"Indians don’t know much of nothing, to tell the truth,
Else, they’d own this country still. The white folks ain’t
gone nowhere, they ought to know if it’s dangerous."
And it’s because he doesn’t listen to the natives.
Edgar Whan - They did get in their dancing, though,
didn’t they?
Annette Oxindine - Yes, they did.
Edgar Whan - Somebody asked the Indians, "Why do
you expect a very cold winter?" "Because the white
man’s stack of wood is bigger this year."
Annette Oxindine - And they all learned to read each
others cultures, I mean that’s very necessary. But
Hurston spent so much of the time celebrating the
culture that does exist outside of the larger
impressions, but she does a wonderful job in this novel
of letting that come through without having that be the
theme and that’s one of the things we talked about
earlier with Richard Wright. He didn’t really appreciate
Zora Neale Hurston’s brand of politics because she did
celebrate the African American community instead of
just solely looking at the oppression, but it is there and
it’s very much embodied in Tea Cake.
Marilyn Atlas - It’s not perfect, I mean when she
comes back to town, the women on the porch are,
they’ve been toungeless all day because they’re
working for people who really don’t allow them any
kind of honest voice. But when they find their voice, it’s
a voice that’s not very friendly, it’s a voice of jealousy.
Edgar Whan - She left them and then came back to
them.
Marilyn Atlas - Well, they don’t quite understand. They
both want to break rules and they’re afraid of breaking
rules. I think that’s what Tea Cake represents. I mean
in some ways he is so wonderful, in some ways he is so
honest. And in other ways he’s ridiculous. And I think
that in the Indian section that you quoted is wonderful.
How can a man who has lost everything in America
because of his race say that if the Indians were smarter
they’d still have the land. What does that say about
him? It certainly causes terrible ironic problems
because had he only listened to those people who had
lost the land, he would have not died and they could
have continued, at least potentially, working on their
rather problematic relationship.
Annette Oxindine - The wonderful thing that he does
is he does teach Janie how to hunt. He takes her
seriously. He plays checkers with her. And he teaches
her how to hunt though, had he not done that, she
would not have been able to shoot him to protect
herself.
Edgar Whan - And she shot better than he did
Marilyn Atlas - And what was her best community?
Does she come home because it’s her best
community? Those women on the porch, she doesn’t
tell the story directly to them. But she tell her friend,
Phoeby, "you can tell it." Is that the best she’s got? And
how good is that? Is that enough?
Edgar Whan - We don’t know, she could have stayed
there. Maybe she could just rest and take out again.
But I think, without Tea Cake, she can’t think of
community right now. He was her community in many
ways. He touched her. I thought of her sense of humor
too. Her grandmother says, "Set me down easy, I’m a
cracked dish." Remember that?
Annette Oxindine - A broken plate, yes.
Edgar Whan - And she says, "Are you going to tell
anybody now? A chicken drink water, but he don’t pee
pee." There’s enough of that light-heartedness in there
to keep it up.
Most of the black stuff I read in the old days and black
students changed my life and taught me many things.
We read Soul on Ice and Watch Out Whitey, Black
Power’s Gonna Get Your Mama. In many ways, this is
far more powerful. You can have an existence without
being against somebody. You don’t have to define
yourself as being anti-white. You can define yourself
because you’re a person. That’s what she does. That’s
what I admire.
Marilyn Atlas - It’s more domestic. It’s subtly political.
Though it does deal with a major mayor of a black
community. It’s political in that way, but it doesn’t
honor him.
Annette Oxindine - No, because he emulates the
white hierarchical tradition and Zora Neale Hurston
worried about the effects of segregation because she
wanted to celebrate black culture and Robert
Hemenway has a quote in which he talks about the
nature of her political agenda, "she does not engage in
a sophisticated program of political propaganda, but
what she does is to turn inward to create the blues, the
folk tale, the spiritual, the hyperbolic life, the ironic
joke.
She sought to show the poetic ceremonies that
adorned life under an oppressive system. Just the
human being, the common run who love magnificence,
beauty, poetry, color, so much that there can never be
too much of it. Zora Hurston was claiming her right to
an autonomous imagination, both as a woman and a
member of the black American community. And I think,
in part, that community is reached through language.
You know, the women on the porch are jealous, but she
does, you know, Phoeby listens in a hungry way and at
the end of telling her story, Phoeby gets the gumption
to say, "I’m going to make my husband take me
fishing." She says, "I growed ten feet higher just from
listening to you."
Edgar Whan - That was nice.
Marilyn Atlas - This is very much about writing down
one’s history, however it is. And maybe one of Zora
Neale Hurston’s points is that to form a community,
first you have to be an individual. First, you’ve got to
find some segment of yourself, in nature, that’s honest
and workable.
Here’s a little quote from "How It Feels to Be Colored
Me" one of her very wonderful essays where she talks
about how it feels to be African American.
"I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorry
damned up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I
do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing
school of negrohood who hold that nature has
somehow given them a low down dirty deal and whose
feelings are all hurt about it. No, I do not weep at the
world, I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife."
And there’s the image again of eating. She does a lot
with mouths and with kissing and speaking and eating
and orally are all kind of connected with each other
which is really pretty and neat.
Edgar Whan - How much do you get out of the fact
that she’s a very attractive woman with the straight
hair and the Caucasian features?
Marilyn Atlas - Absolutely, absolutely, I mean part of
her power is that she is able to form that bridge
between African American culture and American
culture. Those were not the days like we have now
where you’re multicultural, where you are black and
white. If you were a little black, you were a part of the
black community and racism is internalized.
Maybe she didn’t hate herself as much as some African
Americans hated themselves, this is absolutely true.
She loved herself dearly, but I think that she benefited
from racism in the sense that she was a light African
American woman, and this was attractive both to
people in her own race that had kind of internalized
some of that stuff.
Edgar Whan - She says one place "I’m the only Negro
in the United States whose grandfather on his mother’s
side was not an Indian chief."
Marilyn Atlas - Yes, that’s from the same essay that I
quoted from. It’s a wonderful essay.
Annette Oxindine - But I think she also shows the
danger in Janie’s situation of how much it costs her to
be associated with the light-skinned people and that
Mrs. Turner is the one who tears apart, in many ways,
her marriage and one of the things that Mrs. Turner
says is she wants black people, she comes out pretty
much and says it to people, to be more like whites, to
class off so much that one disassociates from the
folklore and the culture.
And when Janie says, "How come you so against
black?" Mrs. Turner says, "They makes me tired,
always laughing, they laugh too loud and they sing old
songs and they’re cutting the monkey for the white
folks."
Well, one of the things that Hurston celebrated is that
culture, "de dozens," telling stories and the folklore.
She didn’t see that as cutting the monkey for the white
folks, but something very rich. So, I think Janie very
much pays the price for that, too, even though it opens
some doors for her.
Marilyn Atlas - I think that trial at the end is so
interesting and I think Zora Neale Hurston is extremely
conscious of the fact that black men will not identify
with Janie because they care about black men and that
her best allies in that kind of horror story, in that kind
of trial are, ironically, white women.
So, that’s the other side of Mrs. Turner. They don’t
want women to be beaten, they don’t women to be
hurt because that’s where they’re vulnerable. It’s very
powerfully done.

Edgar Whan - If you were a librarian where would you
put this book? In the African American studies or
feminine studies?
Marilyn Atlas - American studies. Also, it’s very much
about class. It’s about capitalism. It’s about marriage. I
think it has been taught and will continue to be taught
in all sorts of different ways.
One of the images I wanted to ask you both about is
the image at the end and this is a serious question.
"She pulled in her horizon like a great fishnet, pulled it
from around the waist of the world and draped it over
her shoulder, so much of life and its meshes. She
called in her soul to come and see." Is this a death
image?
Annette Oxindine - No, I think it’s a rebirth image.
Edgar Whan - She talked about her grandmother in
the horizons, didn’t she?
Annette Oxindine - Yes, her grandmother wrapped
the horizon so tight around her throat. It’s a very
powerful passage that she’s going to kill her with it
because her dreams were small and there’s one
passage where…
Marilyn Atlas - Was she taking that image back and
making it alive again?
Annette Oxindine - Yes, I think she was because one
of the townspeople says to her when she gets back,
"You looks like youse yo own daughter." And there’s a
way, I think in which she rebirths herself that she has
to come to terms with her mother and her
grandmother, but she also gives voice to that which
they could not give voice to, because her grandmother
did want to preach from a pulpit.
I think that maybe that Janie feels a lot of animosity
toward her grandmother that the narrator doesn’t
necessarily see. But I do think it’s a rebirth more than
she’s birthing herself as her own daughter.
Marilyn Atlas - It’s interesting she never forgives her
grandmother, but she still starts her story with her
grandmother. So, it’s like you have to tell the story of
your grandmother and you have to tell the story of
your mother before you can tell your own story
whether you like them or not which is kind of fun as a
family tradition in community.
You don’t necessarily have to like where you come
from, but you are where you come from. And that
image at the end very much is taking back her
grandmother, in a certain way, translating it into
something more workable. It works for me.
Annette Oxindine - And giving her grandmother a
language that her grandmother did not have access to.
There’s this beautiful passage, it’s on page 23 of the
novel, right before her grandmother dies, she’s praying
and she’s in this state where she’s trying to conjure up
images and feelings, but she can’t quite get them.
"She’s stayed on her knees so long she forgot she was
there herself." for so long she forgot she was there
herself. There is a basin in the mind where words float
around on thought and thought on sound and sight.
Then there is a depth of thought untouched by words,
and deeper still a gulf of formless feelings untouched
by thought. Nanny entered this infinity of conscious
pain again on her old knees."
She does understand that Janie wants love, deep, deep
down, she encourages her to go off and have safety,
but part of her does understand.
Edgar Whan - She knows what she faces in that world,
too.
Marilyn Atlas - We don’t hate the grandmother the way
Janie hates her grandmother. There’s no question
about it, we empathize. And Zora Neale Hurston lets us
do that. Just like she idealizes the relationship with Tea
Cake and yet we look at it from another point of view, I
think she does the opposite with the grandmother,
where she damns it and we still say (she) was a good
grandmother.
Edgar Whan - She said "Tea Cake, he done taught me
the maiden language all over." What does that mean?
Marilyn Atlas - I think the maiden language is the
language of a woman with her own body. The language
of purity.
Edgar Whan - I thought maybe it was black language.
The maiden language was black.
Marilyn Atlas - That’s interesting.
Edgar Whan - That’s what I thought. She wanted to
say, "I acknowledge it" and she does in the novel, the
beauty of the black dialect that "he done taught me"
and be proud of it. "Maiden" doesn’t seem to be the
kind of a word she’d use for a sex word. It’s kind of a
whitey, sophisticated word, maiden. Do you think it’s a
sex word.
Marilyn Atlas - It’s girlish, it’s pure. But you’re right,
it’s certainly not particularly African American.
Edgar Whan - That’s another thing, it’s wonderful the
way she works the third person and slides into first
person. Really masterful I think, the way she says
something in her own language which is her natural
language, too. She was cultivated, very smart.
Marilyn Atlas - A lot of contemporary critics deal a
great deal with the fact that Janie does not really tell
her own story and that this is very significant.
Edgar Whan - I think she says, you’ve all read it, why
tell it again? We’ve heard it all. Is this what she’s
saying? You’ve all read this thing, why should I go
through it again?
Marilyn Atlas - Well, she could do it in some other
way than the narrator taking over, but at the very
beginning when Janie is telling the story, Phoeby says,
"I don’t understand your words" and then the narrator
takes over and helps us understand Janie’s words. But I
think we could probably understand Janie’s words, if
Janie could speak them. There’s something in there, by
the end when we have that last image of pulling in the
stars, the rebirth image. But even then, Janie’s not
speaking yet.
Edgar Whan - People want one of those dramatic
statements like at the end of a lot of black stories
where the guy summarizes it all and makes an
indictment, a great speech. But that wasn’t what she
was into, I don’t think. "Native Son" does that, a whole
chapter of it. Like a lawyer summing up the ailments.
Annette Oxindine - I think she’s celebrating. This
book, from the early criticism, has been labeled very,
very affirming. Lilly Howard does that in her book and
June Jordan talks about its power and, of course, Alice
Walker, found it so powerful, she said it was the most
important book to her because of that affirmation and I
think the maiden language can certainly be looked at
as reclaiming the language of her girlhood, that
incipient moment when she comes to life, associated
with sitting with the pear tree, but it’s also the
language that Joe tried to keep her away from.
She’s a born orator, somebody tells him. No, he says,
my wife doesn’t speak. He doesn’t want her to go off
with the mule dragging and participate in what he calls
the common language whereas Tea Cake takes her on
the muck. He allows her both to speak within her
community and to speak as an individual woman. And I
think that’s something that you brought up.
Marilyn Atlas - But we don’t get to hear her speaking
directly and I wonder sometimes if Zora Neale Hurston
is telling us, through the way she wrote this…
Edgar Whan - She certainly did when she had on that
****, she gave them the word, didn’t she?
Marilyn Atlas - Right, there are times when she
speaks directly, but much of it, even her trial…
Edgar Whan - Now on the porch she spoke up and
started doing the dozens and she gave a little speech
and he whapped her afterwards.
Annette Oxindine - Right, but at the trial it’s the
white men who speak for her and even when Mrs.
Turner is basically saying "Tea Cake is too black for
you, why don’t you do better?" She stammers, she
doesn’t really come back and have much to say, but I
think that at the end of the novel when Phoeby is
telling her "I growed ten feet tall just listening to you,"
Janie does say "You got to go there to know there."
Those are Janie’s words.
And so she validates that individual experience, too,
and maybe part of what Janie wants to say is not yet
sayable, like that unconscious place that her
grandmother was visiting because there is a tradition
there, but she has not been encouraged to be a part of
that for a long time. But that is one of the criticisms of
the novel, why doesn’t Janie say it?
Marilyn Atlas - The narrator is such a wonderful voice,
I think you feel like you’re hearing Janie when you’re
not.
Edgar Whan - You really sometimes have to remind
yourself.
Marilyn Atlas - Right, that this is the narrator. And
we’re listening. We’re so much in the role of Phoeby.
We’re listening and we’re growing ten feet tall, too. I
think people love this novel because it gives
permission to try, it gives permission to make
mistakes, it gives permission to rebel from authority in
all sorts of different forms to go back to something
very whole, very pure.
Edgar Whan - It’s really a white man’s whole
bailiwick, that trial. And what could she say? They
wanted somebody to give her a speech, so they could
win a pep talk and go up there and get in a fight and
she doesn’t want to do it.
Annette Oxindine - She knows the truth inside and
she realizes that her voice will not be heard in that
courtroom and to give her that speech and to have it
somehow change things, I think would have made it a
dishonest novel because a black woman could not
speak in that venue. And the white women were on her
side, but they were only on her side because they
didn’t value the life of black men.
I don’t know that Hurston is saying they were joining
her so much in sisterhood, because what kind of
sisterhood is it if they don’t value the love that she
had. One of the reasons they’re on her side is they
can’t imagine that she could have loved Tea Cake
anyway. So, there’s no place to speak from there.
So, maybe the narrator is getting inside in an inner
place. There’s been a lot of criticism that talks about
how women’s language is stillness, fluid space inside,
and maybe that’s part of what she’s evoking with Janie.
Marilyn Atlas - I think, too, that even though there is
obviously around speaking in this novel. Still, the
center of the story is that women, particularly, need
whether they want to or not, they need to hear each
other’s stories. And though they have to live it
themselves, that if you get the right information, not
grandma’s information, but the information of
someone who’s attempted to be organic, like Janie. It
will help you get there yourself. That you can’t really
do it alone.
Edgar Whan - Do you think women talk more than
men do? Men sit around and talk about fly rods and
women, I think, really talk. Everywhere.
Marilyn Atlas - In this novel, I’m not sure how it
works, she talks to Tea Cake. We don’t hear her, but
she seems to talk a good deal to Tea Cake.
Edgar Whan - She’s talking to Phoeby through this
whole thing, the whole book.
Marilyn Atlas - Right, the whole book is talking to
Phoeby.
Edgar Whan - Explain to these people why I went and
came back and I want you to tell them what happened.
I don’t want to tell them. I think it’s true everywhere
that women talk much more than men do. We’re pretty
rigid and stupid about things like that.
Marilyn Atlas - We don’t see men really talking to
each other. The way they use language does not form
community.
Edgar Whan - I know since I’ve been working hospice
centers, men come in, but don’t talk back and forth.
Children are the best because they know what it’s like
to be abused and helpless. Women do fine, it’s there
world to talk, openly and naturally. Men don’t seem to
do it.
Annette Oxindine - But Joe is described over and
over again as being a big voice.
Marilyn Atlas - But he’s not an honest voice.
Annette Oxindine - No, he’s not an honest voice at
all.
Marilyn Atlas - This big, Texas! Sorry Texans! It’s one
of the saddest sections and she does it very overtly,
you can’t help but feel the pain of how miserable and
for no real reason, other than Joe Starks doesn’t know
how to get what he himself wants. He’s the phoniest of
all possible mayors.
Edgar Whan - She was his trophy. He put her up there
and she said, "we’re not supposed to sit." Today,
people say "why aren’t you running?" We’d all love to
take a big piece of fat and sit down and eat it. We’re
such a culture, we have to be taught to do this. They
were getting plenty of exercise.
I like this place where he invited her down to the
glades and "she looked down on him asleep and felt his
self crushing love, so her soul climbed out of its hiding
place."
Marilyn Atlas - I don’t think it’s any accident that her
mother, Leafy, first, her name is "Leafy," i.e. she has
the potential of nature. She was raped by a school
teacher. That somehow the world of academia, the way
we pass on knowledge is not good and it doesn’t work
for African American people.
Annette Oxindine - And even her name, Alphabet,
which has that association that she doesn’t have an
identity.
Edgar Whan - Sometimes in class I’d write "therapist"
on the board and put a dash after "e"… it says "the-
rapist" … you get a lot of moans around the class when
you do that.
Annette Oxindine - The other thing, there’s a lot, not
just the pear tree itself, but a lot of reference again to
nature and things having roots because Granny tells
her that "us black folk don’t have roots." But yet her
daughter’s name is Leafy and she hides her in a tree.
And Tea Cake’s name is Verigible Woods, that’s his
given name.
Edgar Whan - Those names are interesting. I keep
thinking of our names. People laugh at those, but
Theodore means "gift of God." And in the 17th century,
the guy named "Praise God Bare Bones" which is
"Hallelujah Bare Bones" and "Fly Fornication Jones."
But, we laugh at those, but we try to see the humor
when it’s translated. You can find the same thing here,
"Running Bear" and Edgar means "protector of the
just." Linda means "serpent."
It’s kind of funny when we see language growing that
way. My daughter came home and talked about this
boy named Jack. I said which Jack do you mean? She
said his lives in Cleveland. So, we pick up "Jack from
Cleveland." Isn’t it exciting to talk about language?
Marilyn Atlas - It is and the language here is very
beautiful, it’s very poetic, you’re really moved through
the novel very quickly when you read it.
Edgar Whan - You have to get used to it at first.
Annette Oxindine - But even students who have been
reluctant that I have taught, students who come into a
novel class and say, "Can’t we read Tom Clancy?" It’s
amazing, male students as well, once they get ten or
fifteen pages into the book, it takes over.
Edgar Whan - Somehow I think you’re making fun of
them. I guess it’s hard, politically correct, they’re
making fun of the way they talk. But she was doing it.
Back in 1937, there were books called Amos and Andy.
They were comic books and they talked this way. And I
had that flash when I saw this. This is not the way
people talk.
Annette Oxindine - I think that this is one of the
criticisms that was leveled against Hurston is that
perhaps she was playing into stereotypes and what she
was trying to do is to show the beauty of language and
not play into the stereotypes.
Marilyn Atlas - But to take back the culture. I think
that when we were talking about that net image. She
likes to play it for more than one direction. I think she
wants to let us hear it for the first time, the beauty, the
richness, the meaning. I was really surprised at the
level of Richard Wright’s anger, an inability to perceive
what I thought was a novel that really dealt with
everything that he wanted dealt with.
Annette Oxindine - There was a controversy of her
play that they wrote together. They had a falling out
and I think that as a woman writer she was up against
a lot. (note: Hurston and Langston Hughes had a falling
out over the authorship of the play, Mule Bones, on
which they had worked together in 1930)
Edgar Whan - And people were very violent about it. I
remember kids used to get angry about "I’m Dreaming
of a White Christmas." Black kids teased me about
that. Everything was seen in terms, as it should have
been, in terms, as they began to see what happened to
them, of violence. And I suppose they resented her, the
woman, during all of this. We can’t take them very
seriously and she’s a "hanky head" that’s what I
meant. They used to call Martin Luther King "de Lawd."
They’d make fun of him, too…
Marilyn Atlas - What do you do with Janie’s money at
the end? If it’s about community and she’s kind of got
one and doesn’t have one. She’s also quite moneyed
compared to her community members. Does it make it
harder?
Edgar Whan - In terms of how much, I guess, how
much you can stand. I can stand a little more without
corruption. Money’s only bad when you think you have
earned it. When you get it free, you can live with it all
right. When you think you’ve earned it, then you’re
really dangerous.
Marilyn Atlas - What do you think Zora Neale Hurston
thinks about it? In terms of money, does she find it
separating individuals?
Edgar Whan - She certainly never had much, did she?
Her life was one battle after another.
Marilyn Atlas - Janie, she had the house. Oh, Zora
Neale Hurston had a comfortable white patron.
Annette Oxindine - But she died in poverty. She
worked as a manicurist and a maid and she had a lot of
professional jobs.
Marilyn Atlas - Even though she was a graduate from
quite a classy college. Which one was it, Barnard?
Annette Oxindine - Yes, she went to Barnard for a
while and then she also went to Howard University and
I think she worked with Franz Boas, maybe at
Columbia.
But, I think that one of the reasons that everybody’s so
concerned about Janie’s money is because they think
that Tea Cake only wants her to take it away. That’s
part of that concern, too. There’s the story about Annie
Tyler, who went away with a young man and was
devastated and was broke. I think that Janie having
money when she gets back to them is... they wanted
her to be broken, they wanted her to be knocked down
a notch, so they could love her a little bit more, I think.
Edgar Whan - One place she said, "She hated her
grandmother and had hidden it all these years under a
cloak of piety. She had been getting ready for her
great journey to the horizons in search of people. It
was important to all the world that she find them and
they find her. But she had been whipped like a cur dog
and run off the back road after things."
That’s her attitude, I’ve chased things, I want to find
people, I want them to find me. Every time I turn
around, somebody sent me some things.
Annette Oxindine - My favorite image of the things is
that she wants flowers, she wants nature, and Joe
doesn’t say pretty things to her and later she’s not ***
with him anymore, but one of the things he does buy
her is a lady’s size spit pot with sprigs of flowers
painted around the pot.
Edgar Whan - That’s wonderful, her own spittoon.
Annette Oxindine - But I don’t really think of her as
being moneyed at the end because she gives away her
possessions, but you’re right, she’s still does.
Marilyn Atlas - Compared to her community.
Edgar Whan - About three hundred dollars, a lot of
money then.
Marilyn Atlas - But she has fifteen hundred in the
bank, too. Is that the amount?
Annette Oxindine - I think so. Tea Cake gambled
some of that away.
Marilyn Atlas - But she doesn’t take it all with her. So,
she’s only willing to be robbed so far, in case she’s
wrong. And she has the house.
Edgar Whan - She sold the store, but she had the
house still.
Annette Oxindine - And she chopped down the tree
which I thought was very interesting. She had Tea Cake
chop down the tree which was a sign of possession.
She chopped down the tree that was Joe Starks. That’s
one of the things I love about this novel is that it’s so
complicated with what Hurston is doing with the
imagery.
And the same thing with Janie, she’s willing to go out
on a limb, but she does tuck away a little bit aside. I
think that Hurston does that at so many different turns.
Marilyn Atlas - You get the same thing in Huckleberry
Finn. He could care less about money, but he’s hiding
his. He could care less about money, but if it’s on the
ground, he’s going to have to pick it up and put it in his
pocket and not say a word. So, there’s a lot of
ambivalence.
Annette Oxindine - You need money to have a voice.
And Hurston certainly realizes that.
Edgar Whan - She certainly did.
Marilyn Atlas - Alice Walker put on her gravestone, "A
genius of the South, novelist, folklorist, anthropologist"
and I think that in this novel she really is a genius of
the South. She creates a black community for us that I
think for most readers during our time and even during
her own time.
In America, there weren’t so many communities where,
for better or worse, where people were run by their
own people. An African American community like
Eatonville was something that really separated some
blacks because of that internal ruling from people who
lived in communities that were so strictly run by white
people.
But here, I think she really puts together that love of
language, the need to tell stories, real stories with
what she’s collected as a folklorist and an
anthropologist.
Edgar Whan - Those are fun to read, too and you can
see a lot of those mixed in here. What about the title?
It seems like an unlikely title for this book.
Marilyn Atlas - I think it has to do with the ending, it
has to do with the terrible, terrible tornado and it has
to do with, ultimately, when we’re in crisis and we’re
running. Our eyes are looking to what’s going to
happen up there.
Edgar Whan - She could have said something else,
too.
Annette Oxindine - I think we have to look at what
Tea Cake was looking at. Tea Cake’s looking for signs,
they’re trying to basically decide on their salvation.
What moment do we need to get out of here to save
ourselves? And he’s looking at all the wrong places.
He’s looking at the Indians, he’s waiting to see when
the white men leave.
Marilyn Atlas - The people with knowledge.
Edgar Whan - It’s not that big to make it a title, is
what I’m saying. Usually a title tells you what to look
for in a story. I don’t get that in here, do you?
Marilyn Atlas - It’s a spiritual story.
Edgar Whan - I got the Biblical reference which is
wrong, but we’ll…
Marilyn Atlas - It’s a really good question, it’s "their
eyes" not even "our eyes."
Annette Oxindine - A very communal title.
Marilyn Atlas - It’s a visual image, it’s about eyes,
about seeing when so much of this is about mouths
and talking. But we’re using more than one sense here.
No matter what else we’re doing, I think that sense
that we’re not enough and that we’re small people in a
world where there are things like hurricanes and
tornadoes that can ruin lives.
Edgar Whan - Still, that explains it, but it doesn’t
explain it.
Marilyn Atlas - I think there is a religious element in
this. First of all, I think probably her community was
very religious.
Edgar Whan - Her father was a minister.
Marilyn Atlas - And her grandmother wanted to write
sermons. So, there’s that whole religious element
that’s very much on the underside of this now.
Annette Oxindine - And Tea Cake is the son of the
evening sun. He can also be red, although I don’t buy it
as a Christ image. But I think so much of what
oppresses Joe Starks oppresses Logan Killicks and
certainly Tea Cake and hence, causes Janie’s
oppression is that these men are looking to the white
culture to help define who they are and who they
should be.
Joe Starks, she goes through great lengths to talk
about how he wants to light up the city like God and
how he lives in this big white house. And she even
says, they’re like living in servant’s quarters. I think
that’s why he’s so empty because he’s looking to other
systems that inherently are going to produce self-
hatred.
If you’re looking toward the white man to get your
direction, to get your sense of self, you are going to
end up feeling self-hatred. You’re not going to be able
to build a real community because Joe Starks, even
though he is mayor, doesn’t celebrate folklore, doesn’t
celebrate African-American culture.
He sees those people as being trashy. He doesn’t want
Janie to associate with them. And so "their eyes were
watching God" and it says, too "six eyes were
questioning God." It doesn’t necessarily say that God
answers.
Marilyn Atlas - Right, in most literature He or She,
does not.
Edgar Whan - There are some notable exceptions, the
stone tablets and all that.
Annette Oxindine - Janie also questions God at the
end of the story when Tea Cake is dying and she asks
him for help. She says, "It wasn’t exactly pleading, it
was asking questions. The sky stayed hard looking and
quiet so she went inside the house. God would do less
than He had in His heart."
And I think that’s theologically a very interesting idea
that the suffering and pain in the universe does not
reflect who God is. "God would do less than He had in
His heart." His heart is so much bigger than the total of
human injustice. It would suggest the tornado was not
an act of God.
Edgar Whan - That’s true we all say it’s a large front
coming out of Nevada.
Marilyn Atlas - Are we getting our hurricanes and
tornadoes mixed up?
Annette Oxindine - We probably are. We’re
landlocked, it’s a hurricane, but we haven’t seen one in
a long time.
Marilyn Atlas - She give us the same words, but she
gives them to us with a difference. She’s very modern.
And she is really coming from a world where people
are experimenting with language and repetition and all
that good stuff because first it say questioning God.
Then they were watching God which is a real different
kind of image. Not why are you doing this, but what is
it that you’re doing and what can we learn from this
experience, if anything.
And I think the reader, again, does learn. We learn to
listen to the Indians to avoid all of this. We learn that
part of it’s chance, but part of it’s a certain kind of
wisdom. We probably learn that a community will
forgive you and is very wonderful, but you have to be
careful because it can also hurt you. And it does.
She gets everything she needs and everything she
doesn’t need from the same source. Kind of an
Adrienne Rich image. It’s the same place. She can’t be
alone. She can’t make it alone. And yet the people
she’s with hurt her. Some she forgives; some she does
not. And how they hurt her and why they hurt her, it’s
to very different extents.
Annette Oxindine - It’s because they’re vulnerable in
ways. I think at the end it’s wonderful. Janie’s sort of
forgives them and Phoeby’s hard on them. And she
says to Phoeby, "Don’t be too hard on them." And
Phoeby’s like, "I’m going to tell everybody your
righteous story." She (Janie) says "don’t feel too mean
wid de rest of ‘em, because they parched up from not
knowin’ things. Dem meatskins is got tuh rattel tuh
make out they’s alive. Let ‘em colsolate theyselves wid
talk." Then she says, "talkin’ don’t amount to (much)."
That’s when she says, "you’ve got tuh go there tuh
know there… Two things everybody’s got tuh do fuh
theyselves. They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh
find out about livin’ fuh theyselves."
And I think that that stresses the individuality in the
other image that is very important at the end when she
talks about love being like the sea. She says that it’s
different for everyone because it touches the shore, it
takes its shape from the shore it meets and it’s
different for every shore.
And I think she allows for that individual experience to
be honored within the community and forgives people
for not understanding, but ultimately, I think the book
celebrates her quest and suggests maybe she can
come back home again if she doesn’t expect too much
from the people.
Edgar Whan - Respect is the key word. I know that
Dick Gregory would say, we spent an evening here with
him once, he said, "Love means go around to the back
door and get a pair of shoes." He also said, "One of our
children just died and people called me up." The first
thing he said was "it’s okay, I had her insured for a
million dollars." And the second thing he said was, "I
couldn’t love him because I didn’t respect him, I didn’t
know him." You can’t love them if you don’t know them
and don’t respect them. And that’s a very key thing
with black people who have been put down and get no
respect and I think it’s the same way with women, too.
So any community has to have respect. Love is, of
course, the best, but what do we mean by this? A
mushy kind of love?
Marilyn Atlas - Why Tea Cake? Why the name Tea
Cake?
Edgar Whan - He’s so sweet.
Marilyn Atlas - He’s so sweet and also the food
image? The hungry, the mouth imagery, maybe.
Annette Oxindine - Yes, if we go back to being
pollinated, he suggests sweetness.
Edgar Whan - What about Motor Boat? I like him.
Annette Oxindine - Or Sop the Bottom, the guy who
always sops the bottom of the bowl.
Edgar Whan - Who Flung? If we had ever known
where our names came from…
Marilyn Atlas - I think when we read this we want to
go back, we want to know more about Zora Neale
Hurston. We want to search for her like Alice Walker
did because, my God, where she came from and where
she went and what she was able to create is truly
astounding. It’s a miracle. And it’s wonderful.
Edgar Whan - And she wrote this quickly, didn’t she?
In just a couple of weeks?
Annette Oxindine - Seven weeks on this. She said
that she was writing out of the tenderness, out of a
love affair that she had had. There’s not a whole lot
known about that.
Marilyn Atlas - I never believe women writers or even
men, when they say how long they wrote it because I
think there’s something like kids studying. "I only
studied for two minutes, I only studied for fifteen
seconds, I didn’t even open the book." And I think
you’ve got that, "for me, it just came, straight from
God."
Edgar Whan - On the Road, he said "I just typed, I
never took my fingers off the typewriter" and it reads
like that, too.
Marilyn Atlas - Right.
Annette Oxindine - I mean she was writing it every
day of her life is another way to look at it.
Marilyn Atlas - And she did mythologize her life,
absolutely.
Annette Oxindine - And her age.
Marilyn Atlas - And her age, right.
Annette Oxindine - We think she was born in 1901,
but estimates range pretty widely.
Edgar Whan - Of course she had been writing it her
whole life. I remember 1937, we didn’t even know
blacks existed and for her to come out with this was
really strange.
Marilyn Atlas - It was the middle of the Harlem
Renaissance. There was so much art being created
during that time.
Edgar Whan - Yes, but it didn’t leak out to Pontiac,
Michigan, I’ll tell you that.
Marilyn Atlas - It didn’t leak out quite as much. Some
writers did like Jean Toomer’s Cane went out among
the high modernists and was considered a wonderful,
gigantic, brilliant high modernist success. But, Zora
Neale Hurston’s book got some attention, but so much
of it was negative attention.
People just didn’t know what to do with it. It wasn’t
exactly a romance.
Annette Oxindine - And they didn’t know what to do
with her.
Edgar Whan - How would she let us think they talked
like that? That was just funny. Amos and Andy was on
every night. They would say "Buzz me Miss Blue" and it
was a big gag. You’re all prepared for all of this stuff,
well, a minstrel show and you had to get over that.
Nowadays, they don’t use that kind of language. Just a
hint of it, just a flake of it.
Marilyn Atlas - You know I think that minstrel show
image is a really important image, too. Because part of
it is you’ve got to tell it, but to some extent, you’ve got
to tell its slant, the Emily Dickinson image, so people
can read it, so people can hear it. And she very much
writes this to communicate and I think, at least my
sense of her audience, is that it includes African
Americans who need their own history as well as white
people who need the history of their country and the
universe. It’s all local and this is her locality.
But, if you read her autobiography I think she
mythologized herself. Dust Tracks on a Road, it’s
wonderful and you get a certain Zora Neale Hurston.
But the scholars who are writing about her say, if you
want the real Zora Neale Hurston, of course there are
so many…
Edgar Whan - The Gnostics know who she is.
Marilyn Atlas - No, it’s not just that, but there’s so
many papers at Yale at the Beinecke Library that give
you all the chapters she left out. She presented a
certain Zora Neale Hurston and it was part of that
minstrel show image.
Annette Oxindine - And she understood that she was
speaking to different audiences and that might explain
why the different narrative voice goes on. But one of
my favorite things she ever said about understanding
dual discourse is that when a police officer stopped her
for going through a red light, she said "white people
stop at red lights." It’s like she got it, she understood.
Marilyn Atlas - I wonder if she got the ticket? It’s such
a wonderful line. If it was a nice literate police officer,
he would have let her go.
Edgar Whan - I wonder if it would have gone if it were
her voice all the without the narrator.
Marilyn Atlas - My students ask that question. They
think not. I think yes. First of all, there had been many
people who wrote in dialect before her both white and
black who were interested in southern dialect and
African dialect.
I think that was a political gesture. I think Janie
absolutely couldn’t honestly tell her own story. I think
she couldn’t have Janie tell it because she didn’t have
the words.
Edgar Whan - If there was nothing in there but
dialect, would you have read it?
Annette Oxindine - Yes, because it’s beautiful.
Marilyn Atlas - I love her dialect. Whenever she
speaks, it’s like, "Oh Janie, yes!"
Edgar Whan - But you got your way into it, and you’ve
got this other thing gradually. If you saw the whole first
thing, it would be difficult. I don’t know. It would be just
as good, but I think it would take a while to understand
it.
Annette Oxindine - I think she wants us to see the
artistry. She said "whatever the Negro does of his own
volition, he embellishes his religious services for the
greater part excellent prose poetry. Both prayers and
sermons are tooled and polished until they are true
works of art. The prayer of the white man is considered
humorous in its bleakness. The beauty of the Old
Testament does not exceed that of a Negro prayer."
And in many ways the books is that kind of a prayer, I
think.
Marilyn Atlas - And we’re back again to "their eyes
were watching God."
Edgar Whan - She said "trying to be like the white
man is just lynching ourselves."
Marilyn Atlas - And since we don’t have too much
time and one of our missions is, to use a religious term,
is to talk about community. What can we say to
summarize? What is Zora Neale Hurston saying? What
is Janie saying about the need of other people?
Edgar Whan - In any community, no matter what you
do, I have to be respected. I don’t want your love, I
don’t want your vote, I want respect. And I think no
community cannot have it. I don’t think any marriage
can exist without respect. I think marriage is a
community. She gives you three different kinds there
and they don’t work.
But if you love somebody, you can do it in a very funny
way. With love you can smother people and I think
many people do.
Marilyn Atlas - But even Phoeby, her best friend
who’s going to listen to this whole story and grow ten
feet. At the beginning of the story, first, she sits with
the other women who are rejecting her. First, she plays
her cards right. First, she makes sure that these
women who are rejecting Janie are not also rejecting
her.
Edgar Whan - It’s a nice framed story. It’s like Ulysses
coming home.
Marilyn Atlas - Does this friendship ever work
absolutely? Is that one of the things she’s saying? That
we need each other…
Annette Oxindine - I think she wants us to see the
larger connectedness. One of the things that breaks
down relationships between individuals are the
different hierarchies within the community. And I think
that the fact that she triumphs in overalls and she’s
oppressed in a blue satin dress. And when she’s sitting
on the porch, when she connects with the land and she
sees herself as part of the community, those women
are threatened by her because of the fact that they are
kept separate because power is meted out in such an
unfair way. And that’s why they have to be careful.
They’re not free to completely love and associate with
her.
Edgar Whan - Whatever else, she’s a free person and
they’re always dangerous. If the university produced
ten free people a year, they’d close it down.
Marilyn Atlas - Oh, how sad.
Annette Oxindine - I’m more optimistic, I’ll say
twenty-five. I’m younger.
Edgar Whan - Would you save this city for twenty-
five? No? Twenty? And they went down the line and
there was nobody left. Maybe with our population
increase you could say fifteen.
Marilyn Atlas - Is she free at the end?
Annette Oxindine - Well, then we’d have to get into
the whole discussion of what freedom is. I do think she
is free to articulate who she is herself a little bit more. I
think she does come back as her own daughter.
Edgar Whan - She’s killed the money myth. She’s
killed all the myths. She’s been through them and
found all of them for what they were worth.
Marilyn Atlas - She does end single and childless.
Which is I’m not sure is such a positive statement if
you have to be your own daughter that’s a pretty self-
contained system. There’s a wonderful side of it in
terms of individual identity, but there’s the other side
of it that she’s not managed with all her beauty and all
her wisdom.
Annette Oxindine - Maybe Hurston is suggesting that
a woman to give birth does not have to give birth to a
biological child, but she’s giving birth to other women,
she’s giving birth to a story.
And I think one of the reasons that those other people
can’t hear, there’s a wonderful line in here. At the very
beginning, Hurston says an envious heart makes a
treacherous ear and they’re envious because freedom
is very, very scary.
Janie understands that and it would be nice I guess if
there were a little Janie and go on and tell her story
from an early age.
Marilyn Atlas - But maybe that’s not necessary,
maybe that’s part of it, we’re all interconnected, we
are all related, that the biological stuff is just maybe
not so absolutely essential. It’s nice, but it’s not
necessary.
Annette Oxindine - But she sees, the way that Janie
sees nature in the very beginning is interesting
because she talks about seeds falling and she said "I
hope you fall on soft ground because she had heard
seeds say that to each other as they passed. She reads
into seeds and into nature, a community. She’s
personifying it, of course. But she reads in nature a
kind of gentleness.
Edgar Whan - I love what she says about Jody, "He
walked around as if he had a throne in his pants." Like
a king.
Marilyn Atlas - Not such a comfortable image. She’s
better with Tea Cake who’s got a guitar, who
represents art and music, not flowers painted on a
spittoon, but a little bit more of the real thing.
Annette Oxindine - And he does sell the guitar to
marry her, I think, to get the money to marry her.
Edgar Whan - You get down in that muck and you’re
really going to be with nature or against nature, I’ll tell
you that.
Marilyn Atlas - A little de Maupassant, in terms of the
comb and the long hair.
But, yes, I suppose one can be as cynical as one wants
about that relationship, but it helped her toward her
own voice even if it wasn’t perfect.
Edgar Whan - Go to page eighty-two and read that
over again, that beautiful diatribe against him. She
really spills out. I said it wasn’t like Camille dying
gradually, but she really lays him out.
Marilyn Atlas - And she’s been taken to task for that,
Zora Neale Hurston, in terms of "how cruel." It only
takes her twenty-one years to speak, but that she
dared to speak even then. Lots of room for different
perspectives.
Edgar Whan - He was just on the verge of Jordan, it
seems a little late for her to do that.
Marilyn Atlas - Well, if she couldn’t do it earlier, it’s
better late than never, I suspect. But people have
responded in terms of the harshness of that.
Edgar Whan - Remember, he tried to class her,
"class" as a verb, he tried to class you, make you sit on
that porch, be different from the rest.
Marilyn Atlas - He isolated her. He took her away
from the community. He took her voice and he took her
away from the community and she was simply an
object and it took her a long, long time to move away
from that. And to feel the anger because when you’re
silenced, I think that it’s really hard to realize that
maybe you shouldn’t be. If everyone’s telling you the
same thing, that it’s okay, maybe it is. And I think
there’s a lot of oppression in this text.
Annette Oxindine - Yes, Phoeby even says to her
"you classed off" and she says "No, Jody classed me
off."
Marilyn Atlas - Right, not my choice.

Edgar Whan - Yes, that was a nice passage. To sit still

is to class. If you’re not out there picking up rutabagas.

Marilyn Atlas - And she becomes her own listener,

too. It’s almost like as we read the story and we read
the narrator, she’s hearing her own story. And she
becomes part of her community.

Annette Oxindine - Yes, that might be another way to

read the net around her shoulders, too.

Edgar Whan - And if she’s telling the story, do you

have to believe it? But that’s another step, if you want
to get into that. Is she telling a true story or is she
telling a story?

Marilyn Atlas - Is she making it up?

Edgar Whan - You have a very real option to disagree

with that narrator when you get old and cynical.

Annette Oxindine - I mean, is any story true?

Marilyn Atlas - Right.

Edgar Whan - That’s true.

Marilyn Atlas - But it’s a nice story and it’s a better

myth than what her grandmother gave her. So, there’s
an improvement, in terms of the generations.

Edgar Whan - "She was mine there was just no truth

to tell." That’s another one. That’s enigmatic.

Marilyn Atlas - With Zora Neale Hurston, there are

lots of truths to tell and she tells them all. I love the
book.

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