Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)¶

Author: Zora Neale Hurston Type: Literary Text · Novel Source: J.B. Lippincott (not public domain — school library copy required) Full Text: Available via Open Library — free digital borrowing (search: Their Eyes Were Watching God Hurston) · school library copy required for extended reading Era/Period: USH Unit 2 — 1930s America; Harlem Renaissance; Black life in the Jim Crow South USH Standards: US.6_12.4 · US.6_12.3 ELA Standards: 9-10.R.8 · 9-10.W.3

What This Text Is About¶

Zora Neale Hurston, 1938 Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960), photographed by Carl Van Vechten in 1938, the year after Their Eyes Were Watching God was published.

Their Eyes Were Watching God follows Janie Crawford, a Black woman in early 20th-century Florida, across three marriages and her search for a life and voice of her own. The novel opens with Janie returning to Eatonville, Florida — a real, historically Black-governed town — after an absence that the community regards with scandal. She tells her story to her friend Pheoby, and the novel is structured as that telling. Janie's journey takes her from a marriage arranged by her grandmother (who wants security above all), to a prosperous but emotionally stifling second marriage to the mayor of Eatonville, to a third marriage with Tea Cake — a younger man with no money and great joy — that ends in tragedy and genuine love.

Hurston was a trained anthropologist who grew up in Eatonville and studied under Franz Boas, the founder of American cultural anthropology. She collected Black folklore across the South, and Their Eyes Were Watching God is saturated with that folklore — in the dialect of its characters, in its narrative structures, and in its insistence that Black Southern vernacular speech is not broken English but a living, creative, philosophically rich language in its own right. This is not incidental to the novel — it is its central argument.

This text is dual-use in ways that deepen with attention. As an ELA text, Their Eyes Were Watching God is one of the few major American novels of its era written by a Black woman about a Black woman's interiority — her desires, her voice, her choices. Hurston's dialect is a deliberate literary choice that carries the novel's argument: that Black Southern vernacular is not inferior to "standard" English but expresses truths that standard English cannot. The frame narrative (Janie telling her story to Pheoby) locates the novel in the oral storytelling tradition Hurston studied as an anthropologist. As a Social Studies text, the novel documents the specific social geography of Black life in the Jim Crow South in the 1920s–30s: the reality of all-Black towns (Eatonville was real), the social hierarchies within Black communities, the way legal segregation shaped even the spaces of Black freedom.

Read It¶

Fair-use excerpts for educational use. Connect with Mr. Reese or the Fargo South Library for the full text.

Chapter 1 — Ships at a Distance¶

the opening paragraph — 'Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board' — the distinction between men's and women's dreams

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.

Janie watches the world around her and reflects on how people hold onto their hopes and dreams.

Chapter 6 — The Porch¶

Janie silenced by Joe at the store — the mule's funeral as social commentary, Janie's inner voice vs. her outer silence

"You know Ah’m uh woman brung up in de house uh Gawd. Don’t matter what you say to me."

Joe's control over Janie is evident when he silences her at the store, highlighting the oppressive nature of his rule.

Chapter 20 — The Return¶

Janie returning to Eatonville, telling Pheoby her story — 'you got tuh go there tuh know there'

"De nigger dat come out here wid de sun will go in wid it. In a way yuh oughta be sorry for me but in udduh ways yuh oughta tell mahself dat you can’t never know uh thing till after yuh live it."

Janie shares her experiences with Pheoby, emphasizing the importance of personal experience.

Full text available at Internet Archive and Open Library. Connect with Mr. Reese or the Fargo South Library for a physical copy.

ELA Standards This Connects To¶

R.8 — Their Eyes Were Watching God rewards literary analysis at multiple levels. Dialect and voice as literary choice: Hurston's use of Black Southern vernacular is deliberate and argued — she wrote about this choice in her essays, including "How It Feels to Be Colored Me." Students analyze specific passages in dialect and consider: What does this language do that standard English cannot? What would be lost in translation? This is one of the most powerful demonstrations available of how a novelist's language choices carry meaning. Janie's character arc: the novel tracks a specific developmental journey — Janie begins without voice (she cannot speak her own desires) and ends with it (she can tell her own story). Students trace this arc through the three marriages. Frame narrative: the novel's structure — Janie telling her story to Pheoby in the present — is drawn from oral storytelling traditions. Students analyze how this structure changes the reader's relationship to the story.
W.3 — The primary W.3 (explanatory writing) application: How does Hurston use dialect to make an argument about authenticity, community, and the value of Black vernacular culture? Students explain the choice, trace specific examples, and explain what the argument means in the context of 1937 — when the dominant view was that "proper" English was superior to vernacular forms.

US.6_12.4 — The novel documents the specific social and economic reality of Black life in the Jim Crow South with unusual precision. Eatonville, Florida was (and is) a real all-Black incorporated town — one of the first in American history. Its existence represented a specific form of Black freedom within the constraints of segregation: a space where Black people governed themselves. The social hierarchies within Eatonville (Joe Starks as mayor and bourgeois gatekeeper; Tea Cake as working-class joy) document the class structures within Black communities that are often erased in broader historical accounts.
US.6_12.3 — Legal racial inequality in the Jim Crow South shaped the space within which the novel's events occur. Janie's marriages, her mobility, her legal status as a widow — all are constrained by the specific legal structures of Florida in the 1920s–30s. The muck (the agricultural labor camp where Janie and Tea Cake live and work) documents the economic position of Black agricultural workers in the South. Students connect the novel's specific details to the legal and economic structures of Jim Crow.

Key Vocabulary¶

Term	Definition
Dialect	A variety of a language specific to a region, community, or social group — Hurston's use of Black Southern vernacular is not an error but a deliberate literary and political choice
Vernacular	The everyday spoken language of a community, as opposed to the formal or "standard" written language — Hurston argued that Black vernacular was philosophically and artistically rich
Frame narrative	A story within a story — Janie tells her life story to Pheoby; the novel is structured as that telling; this form is drawn from oral storytelling traditions
Eatonville	A real all-Black incorporated town in Florida where Hurston grew up — the novel's central setting; one of the first self-governing Black communities in American history
The Harlem Renaissance	A flourishing of Black artistic, literary, and intellectual life centered in Harlem, New York in the 1920s — Hurston was a major figure; the movement celebrated Black cultural heritage and pushed back against assimilationist pressure
Porch	In the novel, the porch of Joe Starks's store is the community's center of storytelling and social life — Janie is excluded from it, which represents her silencing; reclaiming the porch means reclaiming voice

Key Scenes and Passages¶

The novel is copyrighted — do not reproduce extended passages. Focus on these key scenes:

Janie's pear tree vision (Chapter 2): Young Janie watches a bee pollinating a pear tree and forms her vision of what love should be — an image of mutual completion. This is the novel's romantic ideal that all three marriages are measured against. Students note: How does Hurston use this natural image to establish Janie's inner life before she has any social power?

The porch and Janie's silencing (Chapters 4–7): Joe Starks forbids Janie from participating in porch storytelling, insisting a mayor's wife does not "sit around on porches and laugh." Students analyze: What does Joe's silencing of Janie reveal about the relationship between social status and voice? What does it mean that his form of liberation (as a Black man building power) requires her oppression?

Janie speaks back (Chapter 7): After years of silence, Janie publicly humiliates Joe Starks in front of the store's male community — using the porch language he tried to deny her. Students note: What makes this moment the novel's political and personal turning point?

The muck (Chapters 14–18): Janie and Tea Cake work and live in the agricultural labor camps of the Everglades — a world defined by music, storytelling, and community among Black workers. Students connect to the economic history of Black agricultural labor in the South.

Studio Ideas¶

"What Hurston's Dialect Is Doing" — EQ: Can the way a story is told carry a political argument? · Standard: R.8 + W.3 · Demo Mode: Written Assessment (select a key dialogue passage from the novel. Rewrite it in "standard" English. Then explain: What is lost in the rewrite? What does the original dialect carry that the standard English cannot? What is Hurston arguing by choosing dialect over "standard" English? What does that argument mean in the context of 1937?)
"Three Marriages, One Arc" — EQ: What does it mean to find your own voice? · Standard: R.8 · Demo Mode: Portfolio Annotation (create a chart tracking Janie across her three marriages. For each: What does Janie have? What is she denied? What does she discover? How does her voice change? Annotate with textual evidence. Then write: What does Hurston argue about the relationship between love and selfhood?)
"Eatonville Was Real" — EQ: What does a self-governing Black community in the Jim Crow South tell us about what freedom meant under segregation? · Standard: US.6_12.3 + US.6_12.4 · Demo Mode: Extended Writing (research the history of Eatonville, Florida. What conditions made it possible? What constraints surrounded it? Write an analysis: What does the existence of Eatonville reveal about the possibilities and limits of Black freedom in the Jim Crow South? How does the novel use Eatonville as a social document?)
"Hurston vs. Wright" — EQ: Can two Black writers of the same era have fundamentally different visions of what Black literature should do? · Standard: R.9 + IR.1–5 · Demo Mode: Verbal Conversation (Richard Wright reviewed Their Eyes Were Watching God harshly in 1937, arguing it was minstrelsy that avoided confronting racial injustice directly. Hurston argued Black life had value and complexity beyond its relationship to white oppression. Research this debate. Take a position: Whose vision of Black literature do you find more compelling? What does the disagreement reveal about the pressures on Black artists in this era?)

Why This Is Relevant Today?¶

Their Eyes Were Watching God is about a Black woman in the 1930s American South finding her own voice and defining her own life on her own terms — and how hard that is when every institution around you has already decided who you are. Janie's journey is not just about romantic love; it's about the difference between living inside someone else's story about you and finding your own. That question — how do you build an authentic self when the world keeps trying to assign you one? — is live for every person navigating identities they didn't choose. Hurston was also doing something politically significant that went unrecognized for decades: she was writing Black Southern life as fully human, complex, and worth literary attention at a time when the dominant literary tradition either ignored Black characters or depicted them as symbols. Richard Wright criticized the novel for not being angry enough about racism. Hurston's response (implicitly) was that Black joy, interiority, and full humanity are themselves a political act in a world that denies them. That debate is still happening.