zora neale hurston THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD WITH A FOREWORD BY MARY HELEN WASHINGTON AND AN AFTERWORD BY HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR. PERENNIAL = CLASSICS A hardcover edition of this book was originally published by J. B. Lippincott, Inc. TIIEIR llYFS WfiRE WATCHING GOD. Copyright O 1937 by Zora Neale Hurston. Renewed 1965 by John C. Hurston and Joel Hurston. Foreword copyright O 1990 by Mary I-Iden Washington. Afterword, Selected Bibliography, and Chronology copyright O 1990 by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. All rights reserved. Pnnted in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except m the case of brief quota· nons embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., lO F..aM 53rd Street, New York, N.Y. 10022. First PERENNIAL LrnlWlY editiou published 1990. First Perennial Classics edition published 1998 Perennial Classics are published by Haq,erPerennial, a division ofHarperCollins Publishers, Inc. library of Congress Cataloging-in- Publication Data Hurston, Zora Neale. Their eyes were watching God : a novel/ Zora Neale Hurston ; with a foreword by Mary Helen Wamin.gton and an afterword by Henry Louis Gares, Jr.-ht Perennial Classics ed. p. cm. ISBN 0-06-093141·8 Includes bibliographical references. l. Afro-American women-psychology--Fiction. 2. Sdf-realizatiou• Fiction. 3. Psychological fiction. I. Title. PS3515.U789T5 1999 813'.52-dcll 98-45543 98 990001 02 +IRRD-H 1098 76 54321 To Henry Allen Moe Table of Contents FOREWORD RY MARY HELEN WASHINGTON ix THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD 1 AFTERWORD BY HENRY LOUIS GATFS, JR. 195 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 207 CHRONOLOGY 211 Foreword In 1987, the fiftieth anniversary of the first publication of1'heir Eyes Were Watching God, the University of Illinois Press inserted a banner in the lower right-hand corner of the cover of their anniversary reprint edition: "1987/50th Anniversary-------STILL A BESTSELLER!" TI1e back cover, using a quote from the Satur• day Review by Doris Grumbach, proclaimed Their Eyes, "the finest black novel of its time" and "one of the finest of all time." Zora Neale Hurston would have been shocked and pleased, I believe, at this stunning reversal in the reception of her second novel, which for nearly thirty years after its first publication was out of print, largely unknown and unread, and dismissed by the male literary establishment in subtle and nor so subtle ways. One white reviewer in 1937 praised the novel in the Saturday Review as a "rich and racy love story, if somewhat awkward," but had difficulty believing that such a town as Eatonville, "inhabited and governed entirely by Negroes," could be real. Black male critics were much harsher in their assessments of the novel. From the beginning of her career, Hurston was severely criticized for not writing fiction in the protest tradition. Sterling Brown said in 1936 of her earlier book Mules and Men that it was not bitter enough, that it did not depict the harsher side ofblack life in the South, that Hurston made black southern x • Foreword life appear easygoing and carefree. Alain Locke, dean of black scholars and critics during the Harlem Renaissance, wrote in his yearly review of the literature for Opportunity magazine that Hurston's Their Eyes was simply out of step with the more serious trends of the times. When, he asks, will Hurston stop creating "these pseudo-primitives whom the reading public still loves to laugh with, weep over, and envy," and "come to grips with the motive fiction and social document fiction?" The most damaging critique of all came from the most well-known and influential black writer of the day, Richard Wright. Writing for the leftist magazine New Masses, Wright excoriated Their Eyes as a novel that did for literature what the minstrel shows did for theater, that is, make white folks laugh. The novel, he said, "carries no theme, no message, no thought," but exploited those "quaint" aspects of Negro life that satisfied the tastes of a white audience. By the end of the forties, a decade dominated by Wright and by the stormy fiction of social realism, the quieter voice of a woman searching for self-realization could not, or would not, be heard. Like most of my friends and colleagues who were teaching in the newly formed Black Studies departments in the late six• ties, I can still recall quite vividly my own discovery of Their Eyes. Somewhere around 1968, in one of the many thriving black bookstores in the country-this one, Vaughn's Rook Store, was in Detroit-I came across the slender little paperback (bought for 75¢) with a stylized portrait of Janie Crawford and Jody Starks on the cover-she pumping water at the well, her long hair cascading down her hack, her head turned just slightly in his direction with a look of longing and expectancy; he, standing at a distance in his fancy silk shirt and purple suspenders, his coat over one arm, his head cocked to one side, with the look that speaks to Janie of far horizons. What I loved immediately about this novel besides its high Foreword • xi poetry and its female hero was its investment in black folk tradi• tions. Here, finally, was a woman on a quest for her own identity and, unlike so many other questing figures in black literature, her journey would take her, not away from, but deeper and deeper into blackness, the descent into the Everglades with its rich black soil, wild cane, and communal life representing immersion into black traditions. But for most black women readers discovering Their Eyes for the first time, what was most compelling was the figure of Janie Crawford-powerful, articulate, self-reliant, and radically different from any woman character they had ever before encountered in literature. Andrea Rushing, then an instructor in the Afro· American Studies Department at Harvard, remembers reading Their Eyes in a women's study group with Nellie McKay, Barbara Smith, and Gail Pemberton. "I loved the language of this book," Rushing says, "but mostly I loved it because it was about a woman who wasn't pathetic, wasn't a tragic mulatto, who defied everything that was expected of her, who went off with a man without bothering to divorce the one she left and wasn't broken, crushed, and run down." The reaction of women all across the country who found themselves so powerfully represented in a literary text was often direct and personal. Janie and Tea Cake were talked about as though they were people the readers knew intimately. Sherley Anne Williams remembers going down to a conference in Los Angeles in 1969 where the main speaker, Toni Cade Bambara, asked the women in the audience, "Are the sisters here ready for Tea Cake?" And Williams, remembering that even Tea Cake had his flaws, responded, "Are the Tea Cakes of the world ready for us?" Williams taught "lbeir Eyes for the first time at Cal Srare Presno, in a migrant farming area where the students, like the char• acters in Their Eyes, were used to making their living from the land. "For the first time," Williams says, "they saw themselves in these xii • Foreword characters and they saw their lives portrayed with joy." Rushing's comment on the female as hero and Williams's story about the joy• ful portrayal of a culture together epitomize what critics would later see as the novel's unique contribution to black literature: it affirms black cultural traditions while revising them to empower black women. By 1971, Their Eyes was an underground phenomenon, sur• facing here and there, wherever there was a growing interest in African-American studies-and a black woman literature teacher. Alice Walker was teaching the novel at Wellesley in the 1971-72 school year when she discovered that Hurston was only a footnote in the scholarship. Reading in an essay by a white folklorist that Hurston was buried in an unmarked grave, Walker decided that such a fate was an insult to Hurston and began her search for the grave to put a marker on it. In a personal essay, "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston," written fur Ms. magazine, Walker describes going to Florida and searching through waist-high weeds to find what she thought was Hurston's grave and laying on it a marker inscribed "Zora Neale Hurston/'A Genius of the South'/Novelist/ Folklorist/Anthropologist/1901-1960." With that inscription and that essay, Walker ushered in a new era in the scholarship on Their Eyes Were Watching God. By 1975, 1heir Eyes, again out of print, was in such demand that a petition was circulated at the December 1975 convention of the Modem Language Association (MI.A.) to get the novel back into print. In that same year at a conference on minority literature held at Yale and directed by Michael Cooke, the few copies of Their Eyes that were available were circulated for two hours at a time to conference participants, many of whom were reading the novel fur the first rime. In March of 1977, when the MIA Commission on .Minority Groups and the Study of Language and Literature pub• lished its first list of out of print books most in demand at a national Foreword • xiii level, the program coordinator, Dexter Fisher, wrote: "Their Eyes Were Watching God is unanimously at the top of the list." Between 1977 and 1979 the Zora Neale Hurston renais• sance was in full bloom. Robert Hemcnway's biography, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography, published in 1977, was a runaway bestseller at the December 1977 MIA convention. The new University of Illinois Press edition of Their Eyes, pub• lished a year after the Hemenway biography in March of 1978, made the novel available on a steady and dependable basis for the next ten years. I Love Myself When I Am Laughing ... And Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A 7,0ra Neale Hurston Reader, edited by Alice Walk.er, was published by the Feminist Press in 1979. Probably more than anything else, these three literary events made it possible for serious Hurston scholarship to emerge. But the event that for me truly marked the beginning of the third wave of critical attention to Their Eyes took place in December 1979 at the MIA convention in San Francisco in a session aptly titled "Traditions and Their Transformations in Afro-American Letters," chaired hy Robert Stepto of Yale with John Callahan of Lewis and Clark College and myself (then at the University of Detroit) as the two panelists. Despite the fact that the session was scheduled on Sunday morning, the last session of the entire con• vention, the room was packed and the audience unusually attentive, In his comments at the end of the session, Stepro raised the issue that has become one ofthe most highly controversial and hotly con• tested aspects of the novel: whether or not Janie is able to achieve her voice in Their Eyes. 'What concerned Stepto wes the courtroom scene in which Jani.e is called on not only to preserve her own life and liberty but also to make the jury, as well as all of us who hear her tale, understand the meaning of her life with Tea Cake. Stepto found Janie curiously silent in this scene, with Hurston telling the xiv • Foreword story in omniscient third person so that we do not hear Janie speak-at least not in her own first-person voice. Stcpto was quite convinced (and convincing) that the frame story in which Janie speaks to Pheoby creates only the illusion that Janie has found her voice, that Hursron's insistence on telling Janie's story in the third person undercuts her power as speaker. While the rest of us in the room struggled to find our voices, Alice Walker rose and claimed hers, insisting passionately that women did not have to speak when men thought they should, that they would choose when and where they wish to speak because while many women had found their own voices, they also knew when it was better not to use it. What was most remarkable about the energetic and at times heated discussion that followed Stepto's and Walker's remarks was the assumption of everyone in that room that Their Eyeswa.'i a shared text, that a novel that just ten years earlier was unknown and unavailable had entered into critical acceptance a.'> perhaps the most widely known and the most privileged text in the African-American literary canon. That MIA session was important for another reason. Walker's defense ofTanie's choice (actually Hurston's choice) to be silent in the crucial places in the novel turned out to be the earliest feminist reading of voice in Their Eyes, a reading that was later supported by many other Hurston scholars. In a recent essay on Their hJes, and the question ofvoice, Michael Awkward argues that Janie's voice at the end of the novel is a communal one, that when she tells Pheoby to tell her story ("You can tell 'em what Ah say ifyou wants to. Dar's just de same as me 'cause mah tongue is in mah friend's mour") she is choosing a collective rather than an individual voice, demonstrat• ing her closeness to the collective spirit ofthe Afiican-American oral tradition. Thad Davis agrees with this reading of voice, adding that while Janie is the teller of the tale, Pheoby is the bearer of the tale. Davis says that Janie's experimental life may not allow her to effect changes beyond what she causes in Pheoby's life; hut Pheoby, Foreword • xv standing within the traditional role of women, is the one most suited to take the message back to the conununity. Although, like Stepto, I too am uncomfortable with the absence ofJanie's voice in the courtroom scene, I think that silence reflects Hurston's discomfort with the model of the male hero who asserts himself through his powerful voice. When Hurston chose a female hero for the story she faced an interesting dilemma: the female presence was inherently a critique of the male-dominated folk culture and therefore could not be its heroic representative. When Janie says at the end of her story that "talkin' don't amount to much" if it's divorced from experience, she is testifying to the limitations of voice and critiquing the culture that celebrates orality to the exclusion of inner growth. Her final speech to Phcoby at the end of Their Eyes actually casts doubt on the relevance of oral speech and supports Alice Walker's claim that women's silence can be intentional and useful: 'Course, talk.in' don't amount ruh uh hill uh beans when yuh can't do nothin' else ... Pheoby, you got tuh go there tuh know there. Yo papa and yo mama and nobody else can't tell yuh and show yuh. 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. The language of the men in Their Eyes is almost always divorced from any kind ofinteriority, and the men are rarely shown in the process of growth. Their talking is either a game or a method of exerting power. Janie's life is about the experience of relationships, and whiJe Jody and Tea Cake and all the other talk· ing men are essentially static characters, Janie and Pheoby pay closer attention to their own inner life-to experience-because it is the site for growth. xvi • Foreword If there is anything the outpouring of scholarship on Their Eyes teaches us, it is that this is a rich and complicated text and that each generation of readers will bring something new to our under• standing of it. If we were protective of this text and unwilling to subject it to literary analysis during the first years ofits rebirth, that was because it was a beloved text fur those of us who discovered in it something of our own experiences, our own language, our own history. In 1989, I find myself asking new questions abour Their Eyes----questions about Hurston's ambivalence toward her female protagonist, about its uncritical depiction of violence toward women, about the ways in which Janie's voice is dominated by men even in passages that are about her own inner growth, In Their Eyes, Hurston has not given us an unambiguously heroic female character. She puts Janie on the track of autonomy, self• realization, and independence, but she also places Janie in the posi• tion ofromanric heroine as the object of Tea Cake's quest, at times so subordinate to the magnificent presence of Tea Cake that even her interior life reveals more about him than about her. What Their Eyes shows us is a woman writer struggling with the problem of the questing hero as woman and the difficulties in 1937 of giving a woman character such power and such daring. Because Their Eyes has been in print continuously since 1978, it has become available each year to thousands of new readers, It is taught in colleges all over the country, and its availability and pop• ularity have generated two decades of the highest level of scholar• ship. But I want to remember the history that nurtured this text into rebirth, especially the collective spirit of the sixties and seven• ties that galvanized us into political action to retrieve the lost works of black women writers. There is a lovely symmetry between text and context in the case of 1heir Eyes: as Their Eyes affirms and cel• ebrates black culture it reflects that same affirmation of black cul• ture that rekindled interest in the text; Janie telling her story to a Foreword • xvii listening woman friend, Pheoby, suggests to me all those women readers who discovered their own tale in Janie's story and passed it on from one to another; and certainly, as the novel represents a woman redefining and revising a male-dominated canon, these readers have, like Janie, made their voices heard in the world of let• ters, revising the canon while asserting their proper place in it, MARY HELEN WASHINGTON •1 Ships at a distance have every man)s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men. Now, women forget all those thlngs they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly. So the beginning of this was a woman and she had come back from burying the dead. Not the dead of sick and ailing with friends at the pillow and the feet. She had come back fium the sodden and the bloated; the sudden dead, their eyes flung wide open in judgment. The people a.II saw her come because it was sundown. The sun was gone, but he had left his footprints in the sky. It was the time for sitting on porches beside the road. It was the time to hear things and talk. These sitters had been tongueless, earless, eyeless conveniences all day long. Mules and other brutes had occupied their skins. But now, the sun and the bossman were gone, so the skins felt powerful and human. They became lords of sounds and lesser things. They passed nations through their mouths. They sat in judgment. 2 • Zora Neale Hurston Seeing the woman as she was made them remember the envy they had stored up from other times. So they chewed up the back parts of their minds and swallowed with relish. They made burning statements with questions, and killing tools out of laughs. It was mass cruelty. A mood come alive. Words walking without masters; walking altogether like harmony in a song. "What she hung on. Dis love! Dar's just whur's got us uh pullin' and uh haulin' and sweatin' and doin' from can't see in de mornin' till can't see at night. Dar's how come de ole folks say dat bein' uh fool don't kill nobody. It jus' makes you sweat. Ah betcha you wants some dressed up dude dat got to look at de sole of his shoe everytime he cross de street tuh see whether he got enough leather dere tuh make it across. You can buy and sell such as dem wid what you got. In facr you can buy 'cm and give 'em away." "Ah ain't studyin' 'bout none of'em. At de same time Ah ain't takin' dat ole land tuh heart neither. Ah could throw ten acres ofit 24 • Zora Neale Hurston over de fence everyday and never look back to see where it fell. Ah feel de same way 'bout Mr, Killicks too. Some folks never was meant to be loved and he's one of 'em." "How cornet" "'Cause Ah hates de way his head is so long one way and so flat on de sides and dat pone uh fat hack uh his neck." "He never made lus own head, You talk so silly" "Ah don't keer who made it, Ah don't like de job. His belly is too big too, now, and his toe-nails look lak mule foots. And 'tain't nothin' in de way of him washin' his feet every evenin' before he comes tuh bed, 'Tain't nothin' tuh hinder him 'cause Ah places de water for him Ah'd ruthcr be shot wid tacks than tuh turn over in de bed and stir up de air whilst he is in dere. He don't even never mention nothin' pretty." She began to cry "Ah wants things sweet wid mah marriage lak when you sit under a pear tree and think Ah , " "'Tain'tnouse in you cryin', Janie, Grandma done been long uh few roads herself. But folks is meant to cry 'bout somethin' or other, Better leave things de way dcy is, Youse young yet, No rellin' whut monr happen befo' you die, Wait awhile, baby: Yo' mind will change," Nar_my sent Janie along with a stern mien, but she dwindled all the rest of the day as she worked, And when she gained the privacy of her own little shack she stayed on her knees 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 hy words, and deeper still a gulf of formless feelings untouched hy thought, Nanny entered this infinity of conscious pain again on her old knees, Towards morning she muttered, "Lawd, you know mah heart, Ah done de best Ah could do, De rest is left to you," She scuffled up from her knees and fell heavily across the bed. A month later she was dead, Their Eyes Were Watching God • 25 So Janie waited a bloom time, and a green time and an orange time. But when the pollen again gilded the sun and sifted down on the world she began to stand around the gate and expect things. What things? She didn't know exactly. Her breath was gusty and short. She knew things that nobody had ever told her. For instance, the words of the trees and the wind. She often spoke to falling seeds and said, "Ah hope you fall on soft ground;' because she had heard seeds saying that to each other as they passed. She knew the world was a stallion rolling in the blue pasture of ether. She knew that God tore down the old world every evening and built a new one by sun-up. It was won• dcrful to see it take form with the sun and emerge from the gray dust of its making. The familiar people and things had failed her so she hung over the gate and looked up the road towards way off. She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie's first dream was dead, so she became a woman. •4 Long before the year was up, Janie noticed that her husband had stopped talking in rhymes to her. He had ceased to won• der at her long black hair and finger it. Six months back he had told her, "ff Ah kin haul de wood heah and chop it fuh yuh, look Iak you oughta be able tuh tote it inside. Mah fust wife never bothered me 'bout choppin' no wood nohow. She'd grab dat ax and sling chips lak uh man. You done been spoilt rotten." So Janie had told him, "Ah'm just as stiff as you is stout. If you can stand not to chop and tote wood Ah reckon you can stand not to git no dinner. 'Scuse mah freezolity, Misr' Killicks, bur Ah don't mean to chop de first chip." "Aw you know Ah'm gwine chop de wood fuh yuh. Even ifyou is stingy as you can be wid me. Yo' Grandma and me myself done spoilt yuh now, and Ah reckon Ah have tuh keep on wid it." One morning soon he called her out of the kitchen to the barn. He had the mule all saddled at the gate. "Looka heah, LilBit, help me out some. Cut up desc seed taters fuh me. Ah got tub go step off a piece." "Where you goin'?" "Over tuh Lake Citytuh see uh man about uh mule," Their Eyes Were Watching God • 27 "Whut you need two mules fuh? Lessen you aims to swap off dis one." =Naw, Ah needs two mules dis yeah. Taters is goin' tuh be taters in de full. Bringin' big prices. Ah aims tuh run two plows, and dis man Ah'm talkin' 'bout is got uh mule all gentled up so even uh woman kin handle 'im." Logan held his wad of tobacco real still in his jaw like a ther• mometer of his feelings while he studied Janie's face and waited for her to say something. "So Ah thought Ah mout as well go see." He tagged on and swallowed to kill time but Janie said nothing except, "Ah'll cut de p'raters fuh yuh. When yuh comin' back?" "Don't know exactly. Round dust dark Ah reckon. It's uh sorta long trip-specially if Ah hafter lead one on de way back." When Janie had finished indoors she sat down in the barn with the potatoes. But springtime reached her in there so she moved everything to a place in the yard where she could see the road. The noon sun filtered through the leaves of the fine oak tree where she sat and made lacy patterns on the ground. She had been there a long time when she heard whistling coming down the road. It was a cityfied, stylish dressed man with his hat set at an angle that didn't belong in these parts. His coat was over his arm, but he didn't need it to represent his dothes. The shirt with the silk sleevebolders was dazzling enough fur the world. He whistled, mopped his face and walked like he knew where he was going. He was a seal-brown color but he acted like Mr. Washburn or some• body like that to Janie. Where would such a man be coming from and where was he going? He didn't look her way nor no other way except straight ahead, so Janie ran to the pump and jerked the han• dle hard while she pumped. It made a loud noise and also made her heavy hair fall down. So he stopped and looked hard, and then he asked her for a cool drink of water. 28 • Zorn Neale Hurston Janie pumped it off until she got a good look at the man. He talked friendly while he drank. Joe Stark'> was the name, yeah Joe Starks from in and through Georgy. Been workin' for white folks all his life. Saved up some money-round three hundred dollars, yes indeed, right here in his pocket. Kept hearin' 'bout them buildin' a new state down heah in Floridy and sort of wanted to come. But he was makin' money where he was. But when he heard all about 'em mak:in' a town all outa colored folks, he knowed "Dey dead, Ah reckon. Ah wouldn't know 'bout 'em 'cause mah Grandma raised me. She dead too." "She dead toot Well, who's lookin' after a lil girl-chile lak you?" "Ah'm married." "You married? You ain't hardly old enough to be weaned. Ah betcha you still craves sugar-tits, doncher?" "Yeah, and Ah makes and sucks 'em when de notion strikes me. Drinks sweeten' water too." "Ah loves dat mahself. Never specks to get too old to enjoy syrup sweeten' water when it's cools and nice." "Us got plenty syrup in de barn. Ribbon-cane syrup. If you so desires=-" "Where yo' husband at, Mis' er-er." The1t Eyes Were Watching God 411, 29 "Mah name is Janie Mae Killicks since Ah got married. Userer be name Janie Mae Crawford. Mah husband is gone tuh buy a mule fuh me tuh plow. He left me cuttin' up seed p'taters." "You behind a plow! You ain't got no mo' business wid uh plow than uh hog is got wid uh holiday! You ain't got no busi• ness cuttin' up no seed p'raters neither. A pretty doll-baby lak you is made to sit on de front porch and rock and fan yo'self and eat p'tarers can't never expect tuh better our choice, Ah move dat we make Brother Starks our Mayor until we kin see further." "Second dat rnotlonll!" It was everybody talking at once, so it was no need of putting it to a vote. "And now we'll listen tuh uh few words uh encouragement from Mrs. Mayor Starks." The burst of applause was cut short by Joe taking the floor himself "Thank yuh fuh yo' compliments, but mah wife don't know nothin' 'bout no speech-makin'. Ah never married her for nothin' lak dat. She's uh woman and her place is in de home." Janie made her face laugh after a short pause, but it wasn't too easy. She had never thought of making a speech, and didn't know if she cared to make one at all. It must have been the way Joe spoke out without giving her a chance to say anything one way or another that took the bloom off of things. But anyway, she went down the road behind him that night feeling cold. He strode along invested with his new dignity, thought and planned out loud, unconscious of her thoughts. "De mayor of uh town lak dis can't lay round home too much. De place needs build.in' up. Janie, Ah'll git hold uh some• body ruh help out in de store and you kin look after things whilst Ah drum up things otherwise." "Oh J town needs some light right now." "Unh hunh, it is uh little dark right long heah." '"'Course it is. "Iain't no use in scufflin' over all dese stumps and roots in de dark. Ah'll call uh meetin' bout de dark and de roots right away. Ah 'll sit on dis case first thing." The very next day with money out of his own pocket he sent off to Scars, Roebuck and Company for the street lamp and told the town to meet the following Thursday night to vote on it. Nobody had ever thought of street lamps and some of them said it was a useless notion. They went so far as to vote against it, but the majority ruled. But the whole town got vain over it after it came. That was because the Mayor didn't just take it out of the crate and stick it up on a post. He unwrapped it and had it wiped off carefully and put it up on a showcase for a week for everybody to see. Then he set a time for the lighting and sent word all around Orange County for one and all to come to the lamplighting. He sent men out to the swamp to cut the finest and the straightest cypress post they could find, and kept on sending them back to hunt another one until they found one that pleased him. He had talked to the people already about the hospitality ofrhe occasion. «y'all know we can't invite people to our town just dry long so. I god, naw; We got tuh feed 'em something, and 'tain't nothin' people laks better'n barbecue. Ah'll give one whole hawg mah ownself. Seem lak all de rest uh y'all put tuhgether oughta be able tuh scrape up two mo'. Tell yo' womenfolks tuh do 'round 'bout some pies and cakes and sweet p'rater pone." That's the way it went, too. The women got together the Their Ryes Were Watching God • 45 sweets and the men looked after the meats. The day before the lighting, they dug a big hole in back of the store and filled it full of oak wood and burned it down to a glowing bed of coals. It took them the whole night to barbecue the three hogs. Hambo and Pearson had full charge while the others helped out with turning the meat now and then while Hambo swabbed it all over with the sauce. In between times they told stories, laughed and told more stories and sung songs. They cut all sorts of capers and whiffed the meat as it slowly came to perfection with the seasoning penetrating to the bone. The younger boys had to rig up the saw-horses with boards for the women to use as tables. Then it was after sun-up and everybody not needed went home to rest up for the feast. By five o'clock the town was full of every kind of a vehicle and swarming with people. They wanted to see that lamp lit at dusk. Near the time, Joe assembled everybody in the street before the store and made a speech. "Polkses, de sun is goin' down. De Sun-maker brings it up in de mornin', and de Sun-maker sends it ruh bed at night. Us poor weak humans can't do nothin' tuh hurry it up nor to slow it down. All we can do, ifwe want any light after de settin' or befo' de risin", is tuh make some light ourselves. So dat's how come lamps was made. Dis evenin' we'se all assembled heah tuh light uh lamp. Dis occasion is something fur us all tuh remember tuh our dyin' day. De :first street lamp in uh colored town. Lift yo' eyes and gaze on it. And when Ah touch de match tuh dat lamp• wick let de light penetrate inside of yuh, and let it shine, let it shine, let it shine. Brother Davis, lead us in a word uh prayer. Ask uh blessin' on dis town in uh most particular manner." While Davis chanted a traditional prayer-poem with his own variations, Joe mounted the box that had been placed for the purpose and opened the brazen door of the lamp. As the word 46 • Zora Neale Hurston Amen was said, he touched the lighted match to the wick, and Mrs. Bogie's alto burst out in: We>Jl walk in de light, de beauuful light Come where the dew drops of mercy shine bright Shine all around us by day and by night Jesus, the l£ght ofthe world. They, all of them, all of the people took it up and sung it over and over until it was wrung dry, and no further innovations of tone and tempo were conceivable. Then they hushed and ate barbecue. When it was all over that night in bed Jody asked Janie, "Well, honey, how yuh lak bcin' Mrs. Mayor?" "It's all right Ah reckon, but don'tyuh think it keeps us in uh kinda strain?" "Strain? You mean de cookin' and waitin' on folks?" "Naw, Jody, it jus' looks lak it keeps us in some way we ain't natural wid one 'nother. You'se always off talkin' and fi:xin' things, and Ah feels lak Ah'm jus' markin' time. Hope it soon gits over." "Over, Janie? I god, Ah ain't even started good. Ah told you in de very first beginnin' dat Ah aimed tuh be uh big voice. You oughta be glad, 'cause dat makes uh big woman outa you," A feeling of coldness and fear took hold of her. She felt far away from things and lonely. Janie soon began to feel the impact of awe and envy against her sensibilities. The wife of the Mayor was not just another woman as she had supposed. She slept with authority and so she was part of it in the town mind. She couldn't get but so dose to most of them in spirit. It was especially noticeable after Joe had forced through a town ditch to drain the street in front of the Their Eyes Were Watching God • 47 store. They had murmured hotly about slavery being over, but every man filled his assignment. There was something about Joe Starks that cowed the town. lt was not because of physical fear. He was no fist fighter. His bulk was not even imposing as men go. Neither was it because he was more literate than the rest. Something else made men give way before him. He had a bow-down command in his face, and every step he took made the thing more tangible. Take fur instance that new house of his. It had two stories with porches, with bannisters and such things. The rest of the town looked like servants' quarters surrounding the "big house." And different from everybody else in the town he put off moving in until it had been painted, in and out. And look at the way he painted it-a gloaty, sparkly white. The kind of promenading white that the houses of Bishop Whipple, W. B. Jackson and the Vanderpool's wore. It made the village feel funny talking to him• just like he was anybody else. Then there was the matter of the spittoons. No sooner was he all set as the Mayor-post master• landlord=storekeeper, than he bought a desk like Mr. Hill or Mr. Galloway over in Maitland with one of those swing-around chairs to it. What with him biting down on cigars and saving his breath on talk and swinging round in that chair, it weakened people. And then he spit in that gold-looking vase that anylxxiy else would have been glad to put on their front-room table. Said it was a spit• toon just like his used-to-be bossman used to have in his bank up there in Atlanta. Didn't have to get up and go to the door every rime he had to spit. Didn't spit on his floor neither. Had that golded-up spitting pot right handy. But he went further than that. He bought a little lady-size spitting pot for Janie to spit in. Had it right in the parlor with little sprigs of flowers painted all around the sides. It took people by surprise because most of the women dipped snuff and of course had a spit-cup in the house. But how 48 4iJI, Zora Neale Hunton could they know up-to-date folks was spitting in flowery little things like that? It sort of made the rest of them fed that they had been taken advantage of Like things had been kept from them. Maybe more things in the world besides spitting pots had been hid from them, when they wasn't told no better than to spit in tomato cans. It was bad enough for white people, but when one of your own color could be so different it put you on a wonder. It was like seeing your sister turn into a 'gator. A familiar strangeness. You keep seeing your sister in the 'gator and the 'gator in your sister, and you'd rather not. There was no doubt that the town respected him and even admired him in a way. But any man who walks in the way of power and property is bound to meet hate. So when speak• ers stood up when the occasion demanded and said "Our beloved Mayor," it was one of those statements that everybody says but nobody actually believes like "God is everywhere." It was just a handle to wind up the tongue with. As time went on and the ben• efits he had conferred upon the town receded in rime they sat on his store porch while he was busy inside and discussed him. Like one day after he caught Henry Pitts with a wagon load of his rib• bon cane and took the cane away from Pitts and made him leave town. Some of them thought Starks ought not to have done that. He had so much cane and everything else. But they didn't say that while Joe Starks was on the porch. When the mail came from Mair land and he went inside to sort it out everybody had their say. Sim Jones started off as soon as he was sure that Starks couldn't hear him. "It's uh sin and uh shame runnin'