Their Eyes Were Watching God Summary: Janie Crawford's Three Marriages and One Life
What Their Eyes Were Watching God is about
Zora Neale Hurston's 1937 novel opens with a woman coming home. Janie Crawford, African-American and in her forties, walks back into the town she left a year earlier. The neighbours watch and talk. Janie sits down with her friend Phoeby and tells her everything, and that telling is the novel.
What follows is the story of three marriages and one long argument with other people's plans for her. Janie is raised by her grandmother, Nanny, who was enslaved and who has very fixed ideas about what safety looks like for a Black woman. Janie's own ideas are different. She has an image of what love should feel like, formed early, watching a pear tree in bloom. Nothing in her first marriage comes close to it.
The book moves from a farm, to the all-Black town of Eatonville, to the bean fields of the Everglades in southern Florida. Hurston wrote it in Haiti in seven weeks. She said she was "under internal pressure" at the time and later wished she could write it again, though she also felt it held "all the tenderness of my passion".
The main characters
Janie Crawford is the centre of everything. Hurston described the novel as the story of Janie's "ripening from a vibrant, but voiceless, teenage girl into a woman with her finger on the trigger of her own destiny". She is not passive, but for long stretches she is silenced, and the book tracks the slow return of her voice.
Nanny, Janie's grandmother, carries the family's history. As a young enslaved woman she was raped by her owner and gave birth to a daughter, Leafy. Leafy was later raped by her schoolteacher and became pregnant with Janie, then drank, stayed out and eventually left the baby behind. Nanny transfers all her hopes from Leafy to Janie. She wants her granddaughter protected, and protection in her mind means marriage to a man with land.
Logan Killicks is that man. An older farmer, he wants a domestic helper rather than a wife. He thinks Janie does not work hard enough and that she is ungrateful.
Joe "Jody" Starks is the second husband, a smooth talker who takes Janie to Eatonville, buys land, opens a general store and becomes mayor. He is ambitious and he succeeds. He also wants Janie as a trophy, forbids her from joining the town's social life, and treats her as property to control and to hit. Their marriage lasts twenty years.
Vergible Woods, known as Tea Cake, is a young drifter and gambler who plays the guitar for Janie and treats her with respect. He is younger than her and has no money, and she has both age and an inheritance to consider. She falls for him anyway. Their marriage is loving and also volatile, at times violent, and it is the one Janie chose entirely for herself.
Phoeby is the listener, the friend who sits through the whole account and makes the telling possible.
The themes
Voice is the big one. Jody's control is mostly a control of speech, and Janie's most direct words to him come only when he is dying, when she tells him he never knew her because he would not let her be free. The whole book is framed as Janie finally speaking at length, on her own terms.
Then there is the gap between security and love. Nanny's logic is the logic of survival after slavery, and the novel treats it seriously without agreeing with it. Janie wants something Nanny cannot imagine asking for.
Freedom, identity and coming of age run through all three marriages, and Janie's coming of age happens in her thirties and forties rather than in her teens. Hurston also writes race and class with an unusually specific eye, from the self-governing Black town of Eatonville to the migrant bean fields of the Everglades.
How it ends
Skip this section if you want the novel to surprise you. After Jody dies, Janie inherits his estate and refuses a string of suitors before choosing Tea Cake. They marry, move to Belle Glade and work the bean harvest. The 1928 Okeechobee hurricane hits. Tea Cake saves Janie from drowning and is bitten by a dog in the process. He develops rabies and becomes jealous and erratic. When he tries to shoot her, she kills him with a rifle in self-defence and is charged with murder. At the trial Tea Cake's Black male friends turn against her while a group of local white women come to support her. An all-white jury acquits her. She buries Tea Cake lavishly, is forgiven by his friends, and returns to Eatonville, where the gossip begins exactly as she expected. The novel closes where it opened, with Janie finishing her story to Phoeby.
Why it still matters
The book was poorly received by the African-American community when it appeared. It took decades to recover. Alice Walker's 1975 article "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston" in Ms. magazine, followed by Robert Hemenway's 1980 biography, brought Hurston back into the literary conversation. Since then the novel has been recognised as a landmark of the Harlem Renaissance, as Hurston's best-known work, and as a foundational text for African-American literature and women's literature alike. Time magazine put it on its 2005 list of the 100 best English-language novels published since 1923. It is now standard reading in American literature, African American studies and gender studies courses.
It suits readers who want a love story with real teeth, anyone drawn to Southern and Floridian writing, and students meeting the Harlem Renaissance for the first time.
