Their Eyes Were Watching God

Janie Crawford

By Quinn McClurg

“‘You know, honey, us colored folks is branches without roots and that makes things come round in queer ways [...] Ah was born back due in slavery so it wasn’t for me to fulfill my dreams of whut a woman oughta be and to do [...] But nothing can’t stop you from wishin’.’”

Janie Crawford was born Black and multiracial, conceived 20 years after the end of the Civil War via assault in the violently segregated South. Despite adversity and her absent mother, her grandmother raised her, instilling within her strong hopes for autonomy, opportunity, and stability—that is before marrying Janie off to Logan Killicks, a neglectful farmer four times her age.

From here, Janie Crawford follows her desire for a fuller life as it leads her away from Killicks and through domestic labor and isolation; riches, colorism and recolonization; and eventually to catharsis, poverty, true love, adventure, and gender equality—that is before a natural disaster, crushing grief, and starting life again as a two-time widow.

As a folklorist and anthropologist, author Zora Neale Hurston excels in telling the story of Janie’s journey, especially in spite of the controversy she faced for focusing on a poor Black woman’s plight and the “informal” colloquial documentation of countless Black dialects.

In every age and passing year, there is no time in which Hurston’s 1937 masterpiece will ever be less relevant—there is no era she captures better than her own and, somehow, our ever-living now.

And, as we live in a time of recklessly growing banned book lists and autonomy-stripping legislation, Hurston still asks and answers the question of how to live as freely, fully, and as genuinely as possible—even when oppressed, dispossessed, and with the likes of even God turning its back on you—

“She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net [...] She called in her soul to come and see.”