A review by Bob Tedder • In a 1975 Ms. magazine article noted author Alice Walker bluntly and without remorse told a “profoundly useful lie.” In searching for the grave of a virtually forgotten fellow author, Walker assumed the role of the dead women’s niece. Through this benign prevarication, Walker in “Looking for Zora” (Neale Hurston) succeeded in her primary goal of providing a tombstone for Hurston’s unmarked grave. Of greater importance than the gravestone, however, was the subsequent resurrection of Zora Neal Hurston’s literary legacy. Foremost among her gifts is the novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God.”
This novel is so well represented on those clickbait, must-read book lists found throughout social media that its well-deserved canonical status must be and is hereby awarded an unprecedented middle-of-discussion thumbs up. Rush to either the Mt. Gilead Library or The Speckled Paw and borrow a copy today!
That being said, what then is the attraction?
It would be disingenuous not to include Hurston and her protagonist Janie Crawford among the foremost African American women, both real and imagined, in American literature – without pointing out Hurston herself would have probably scoffed at such labeling. She tells Janie’s story with its lush literary imaging not with the burden of a toiling writer (the book was written in seven weeks) but with the joie de vivre derived from an artistic palette drawn from the rainbow.
The story of a young black woman’s physical, mental, emotional and sexual maturation in Florida during the 1920s is skillfully narrated without being overly obeisant to any of the racial shibboleths in vogue either then or now. Janie’s story – including a loveless marriage characterized by near slavery, another marriage dominated by mammon, her culminating marriage and true love “Teacake” – although racial is not racialist. The book’s disastrous denouement roaring out of 1928’s deadly Okeechobee hurricane and Janie’s trial for murder only serves to validate Janie’s universal observation that everyone “they got tuh find out about livin’ fuh theyself.” Indeed we do.