Making It New: 1900–1945 481of the South. In 1927, reversing the tide of the Great Migration, she returned to the
South, with the help of a scholarship, to research that folklore. The result of her
research was Mules and Men (1935), a collection of tales, songs, games, and hoodoo
practices that presented African-American folklore as a lived culture. In a way that
was innovative at the time, but later common practice among ethnographers,
Hurston placed folklore texts in their communal context so as to demonstrate the
process of their creation.
Another result of Hurston’s field work was her first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine
(1934). Based on the lives of her parents, the novel tells the story of a poet-preacher
who defines himself through his art. At its center is a sermon Hurston transcribed
from her field notes. It is fired by its author’s lifelong conviction that individuals and
communities voice themselves into being, that they achieve identity and continuity
through the telling of themselves. Something else Hurston had learned from her
research was also pivotal to her second novel, and her masterpiece, Their Eyes Were
Watching God (1937). Women, she had noticed, were denied access to the pulpit and
porch, the privileged sites of storytelling and, to that extent, denied the chance of self-
definition. Her aim, here and elsewhere in her work, became especially to revise and
adapt vernacular forms to give voice to women: to create a genuinely democratic oral
culture, or, as she put it, “words walking without masters.” “Two things everybody’s
got tuh do for theyselves,” the central character of Their Eyes Were Watching God,
Janie Crawford concludes. “They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about
livin’ fuh theyselves.” The conclusion is hard earned. Janie has to win the right to see
and speak about living for herself. She has to resist the demeaning definitions her
society would impose on her, as a black person and a woman. She has to defy the
instructions of one of her husbands not to engage in “porch talk.” She has to claim her
own voice, and in the process her own self and rightful place in the vocal community.
Raised by her grandmother, Nancy, an ex-slave who has suffered most of the abuses
heaped on black women in slavery, she is told by the old woman, “De nigger woman
is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see.” But Janie holds on to her dignity, and her
desire to realize herself, through two loveless marriages. And in her third marriage, to
an itinerant laborer and gambler much younger than her, Tea Cake Woods, she finds
love, laughter, and the opportunity to be and speak for herself. The marriage ends
tragically, with the violent death of Tea Cake. Janie, however, a “born orator,” has now
claimed her birthright. With Tea Cake, she has learned the expressive codes of her
culture; she has been given the chance to speak herself into being. She returns to her
hometown of Eatonville, at the end of the novel, a single and singular woman; there
she can now participate in the “porch talk,” the “big stories” and “big arguments” of
the community. She has come home to her true speech and her true self.
The triumph of Their Eyes Were Watching God is that its language is the literary
equivalent of the oral performances Hurston studied as an ethnographer. Vernacular
voices speak in and through the narrative, informing its dialogue and narration.
Hurston evokes a community in the act of making and remaking itself; and she links
that to the endless, restless activity of talk. She shows how a small group of people
ground themselves, begin to make sense of their trials and changes through theGGray_c04.indd 481ray_c 04 .indd 481 8 8/1/2011 7:54:03 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 03 AM