Zora Neale Hurston, Haiti, and Their Eyes Were Watching God

9 - “All Those Signs of Possession”: Love and Death in Their Eyes Were Watching God

215 9 “All Those Signs of Possession” Love and Death in Their Eyes Were Watching God Cynthia Ward Gods always behave like the people who make them. —Hurston, Tell My Horse As Zora Neale Hurston’s biographer, Robert Hemenway, plainly states, “Their Eyes Were Watching God is a love story” (Zora Neale Hurston, 231). Perhaps more accurately, Hurston’s most frequently read and most deeply loved novel is a quest-for-love story. But what kind of love? Sexual love? Platonic love? Communal love? Self love? The narrative tells us that Janie Mae Crawford’s “conscious life had commenced” with what amounts to a sexual experience under a pear tree in bloom that led her in search of “a personal answer” for “a bee for her bloom” (Their Eyes, 10, 11, 32). Carla Kaplan claims that the novel,“reduced to its basic narrative components[,] . . . is the story of a young woman in search of an orgasm” (“Erotics of Talk,” 137); the “pain remorseless sweet that left [Janie] limp and languid” while watching a “dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom” suggests that the novel’s protagonist had already experienced physical orgasm; it is that experience which triggers her search. In longing for “kissing bees singing of the beginning of the world,” Janie is, above all, “waiting for the world to be made” (Their Eyes, 11). Initially, in observing the sexual activity of the bees and the “flies tumbling and singing, marrying and giving in marriage,” Janie thinks that her “personal answer” would inevitably be found in marital sex. “So this was a marriage!” her indirect discourse declares immediately prior to her orgasm (11). After a year of marriage to Logan Killicks, an older man her grandmother Nanny forces her to marry for his property and protection, Janie learns “that marriage did not make love” (25). Even though she initially suspects that Joe Starks, the “citified, stylish dressed” stranger who 216 Cynthia Ward comes down the road, “did not represent sun-up and pollen and blooming trees,” she nevertheless runs away with and marries him, blindly— and, it turns out, mistakenly—trusting that “from now on until death she was going to have flower dust and springtime sprinkled over everything. A bee for her bloom” (27, 29, 32). Whether or not her third husband, Vergible “Tea Cake” Woods, represents her bee, the object of her quest, has been much debated. While some critics, such as Hemenway, see Tea Cake as instrumental to Janie’s self-fulfillment, others, such as Kaplan, see Tea Cake’s violent and controlling behavior toward Janie as troubling. The narrative ends with Janie admonishing her interlocutor, Pheoby, to tell the people that “love is lak de sea. It’s uh movin’ thing, but still and all, it takes is shape from de shore it meets, and it’s different with every shore” (191). And so it seems to be with Hurston’s readers, who discern a wide variety of interpretive shorelines in the novel. There is no mistake, however, about the note of triumph and contentment Janie experiences at the end of the novel. She obviously finds what she was seeking; the question is what does she find? While Janie’s quest begins with her passively “waiting for the world to be made,” what she discovers on her “great journey to the horizon” is the importance of her participation in actively making the world (11, 89). This imperative, which propels both the narrative and the thematic elements of the novel, is also at the heart of West African and African diasporic belief systems, which honor above all the generative forces put into play by living humans, who are responsible for creating and maintaining both this world and the “otherworld”: the world that the ancestors and spirits inhabit. Just as much as Their Eyes Were Watching God is a story about love and the affirmation of life, it is equally a story about death. While Janie’s “conscious life” begins with a sexual experience and the desire for love, the narrative frame and setting begin—and end—with death: “So in the beginning of this was a woman and she had come back from burying the dead” (1). Janie relates her story to Pheoby at the end of the day, as “the kissing, young darkness became a monstropolous old thing,” and in the fall of the year (7).1 But death is not the end. Just as Janie returns from her journey to the horizon...