to Eatonville, and it is there, on the back steps of
her house, that she retraces the phases of her epic
journey aloud with Phoeby. The novel ends with a
moment of anointing and expansive acceptance as
Janie ascends to her bedroom. The lamp in her
hand becomes “a spark of sun-stuff washing her
face in fire” and the open windows of her room
“had broomed out all the fetid feeling of absence
and nothingness.” Tea Cake’s spirit returns,
“prancing around her,” and the “kiss of his mem-
ory” makes “pictures of love and light against the
wall.” In this instance, she finds peace, which is
seamlessly “pulled in her horizon like a great fish-
net. Pulled it in from around the waist of the world
and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in
its meshes! She called in her soul to come and
see.” This final synthesis of stories told and images
beheld brings the novel to a inspired close.
The response to Hurston’s incisive and passion-
ate literary endeavor was mixed. Ralph Thomson,
writing for THENEWYORKTIMES,was impressed by
Hurston’s talent and the distinctive ways in which
she was writing race fiction. Unlike a host of white
authors who write “aboutthe Negro,” he observed,
“Miss Hurston writes outof the Negro and this dis-
tinction makes comparison dangerous if not down-
right futile” (Thomson, 23). While Thomson did
find fault with this “unusual piece of work” and was
unimpressed, for instance, by the strength of the di-
alect, he did admit that “Miss Hurston does not for-
get her sober interest when writing fiction.” “[T]his
novel has passages, even pages,” he intoned, “that
are as faithful expressions of Negro character as one
could find in an anthropologist’s notebook,” and the
novel as a whole left “no question that it is further
evidence of a marked and honest talent.” “Those
who have overlooked Miss Hurston thus far,” he in-
sisted, “will make no mistake in beginning to read
her now.” (Thomson, 23).
Hurston suffered the criticism of her literary col-
leagues and some prominent Harlem Renaissance
leaders, however. RICHARDWRIGHTlamented the
fact that the book reinforced the notion that the
“Negro folk-mind” was uncomplicated and apoliti-
cal. STERLINGBROWNagreed, proposing that “Her
characters eat and laugh and cry and work and
kill; they swing like a pendulum eternally in that
safe and narrow orbit in which America likes to see
the Negro live; between laughter and tears”
(Hemenway, 241). In January 1938 ALAINLOCKE
savaged the book in a 1937 review of books by and
about African Americans. His most generous com-
ment referred to the work as “folklore fiction at its
best,” but he insisted that the book had no intel-
lectual heft, political sensibility, or social critique.
He suggested that Hurston’s literary endeavors
elicited serious questions about her vocation and
philosophical engagement. “When will the Negro
novelist of maturity, who knows how to tell a story
convincingly—which is Miss Hurston’s cradle gift,
come to grips with motive fiction and social docu-
ment fiction?” he asked (Boyd, 310). The attack
left Hurston steaming, and she penned a rebuttal
to OPPORTUNITY,but editor CHARLESS. JOHNSON
refused to publish it. In a February 1938 letter to
JAMESWELDONJOHNSON, Hurston revealed that
she thought the shoddy evaluation to be part of a
pattern of “envious picking on me” and she was
tired of it. “[I]f you will admit the truth,” she wrote
to Johnson, “you know that Alain Locke is a mali-
cious, spiteful, litt[l]e snot that thinks he ought to
be the leading Negro because of his degrees. Foiled
in that, he spends his time trying to cut the ground
from under everybody else. He lends out his pa-
tronage and takes in ideas which he soon passes off
as his own” (Kaplan, 413). As biographer Valerie
Boyd notes, Hurston was dedicated to creating
work that exceeded the narrow constraints of “so-
cial document fiction” that Locke and others glori-
fied. Hurston rallied to her own defense, insisting
that writers of color had the right to creative free-
dom and that they should not be scripted by the
white majority or the African-American elite to
focus solely on race.
Contemporary evaluations of Their Eyes Were
Watching Godside with Hurston’s insistent claim.
The book has enjoyed a revival that has secured its
author’s reputation as an impassioned, insightful,
and innovative writer, one who transforms anthro-
pological details into absorbing narrative and
whose creative work is steadied by her penchant
for keen and farsighted cultural analysis. It inspired
a movie made for television, coproduced by Oprah
Winfrey.Bibliography
Boyd, Valerie. Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora
Neale Hurston.New York: Scribner, 2003.Their Eyes Were Watching God 511