Their Eyes Were Watching God

Emily May

Rating: really liked it

Janie saw her life like a giant tree in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and doom was in the branches.

I've spent many years wanting to read this book, but also not wanting to read it because the title made me think it was going to be heavy on religion, which is something I generally avoid in books. It's not, though. It's a wonderful, lyrical tale of a woman's life and search for independence.

Now I'm fascinated by interpretations of the title because religion and God don't feature much in the story at all. I’ve been reading about the idea that the title implies how Janie must look to God - not white people, not husbands, not well-meaning family members - to determine her future. While this theory doesn't give her much agency, it does fit with her search for a life outside of others' expectations (except God's).

It's set in Florida in the early 20th Century, at the height of Jim Crow. The novel begins with Janie Crawford sharing her life story with her friend Pheoby. We are taken back to her youth and sexual awakening-- an event that triggers her grandmother's insistence that she marry for protection. Nanny, herself, is fascinating. You feel both Janie's frustration toward her controlling grandmother, and Nanny's desire that Janie will have a better life and be taken care of.

"She was borned in slavery time when folks, dat is black folks, didn’t sit down anytime dey felt lak it. So sittin’ on porches lak de white madam look lak uh might fine thing tuh her. Dat’s whut she wanted for me – don’t keer whut it cost. Git up on uh high chair and sit dere. She didn’t have time tuh think whut tuh do after you got up on de stool uh do nothin’."

As you can see from above, the novel's dialogue makes strong use of dialect and colloquialisms.

Through three marriages and many instances of physical abuse, Janie remains fierce and unapologetic. It was a terrible time in America for a black woman to find freedom and independence, but Janie pursues it nevertheless. It's now eighty years after the book's first publication and Janie's indistinguishable spirit is as captivating as it surely always was.

In the end, the book is about defying expectations and living for oneself. Everyone in Janie's life wants and expects something from her. Her Nanny wants her to marry for protection, white men want to keep her down, darker-skinned African-Americans feel she should emphasize her lighter skin, each of her husbands wants her to behave and dress in a way that suits them. But Janie remains wholly herself throughout. I love her.

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Michael Finocchiaro

Rating: really liked it
I read this masterpiece for the first time in high school. The love story of Janie and Tea Cake is one of stupendous beauty. Zora Neal Hurston's text is a treasure:
"So she went on thinking in soft, easy phrases while all around the house, the night time put on flesh and blackness."
Early in life, Janie is taken care of by her grandmother Nanny,
"Every tear you drop squeezes a cup uh blood outa mah heart"
As she grew, "Janie waited for a bloom time, a green time and an orange time."
She is married off to an old, rich man, but grows restless,
"There are years that ask questions and years that answer."
Ultimately , she gets an answer takes off with the ambitious Jody Starks. But, her hopes are shattered as Jody's ambitions in Eatonville, FL (coincidentally Hurston's hometown) where she feels,
"Four walls squeezing her breath out." as Jody ignores her and builds his empire in the town.
He passes away and Janie meets her true love Tea Cake and she seems to have found her inner peace:
"So she sat on the porch and watched the moon rise. Soon its amber fluid was drenching the earth, and quenching the thirst of the day."
Tea Cake gives her some lessons of wisdom:
"See dat? You'se got de world in uh jug and make out you don't know it. But Ah'm glad tuh be the one tuh tell yuh."
She sheds her reticences and fears in her love for him:
"He drifted off to sleep and Janie looked down on him and felt a soul-crushing love. So her soul crawled out from its hiding place."
She never takes on any religion for:
"All gods who receive homage are cruel. All gods dispense suffering without reason. Otherwise, they would not be worshipped."
Her love is her temple as she dreamed of under the pear trees as a young girl with Nanny.
Disaster eventually strikes, as it always does, gods dispensing their unreasoning suffering.
"The wind came back with triple fury, and put out the light for the last time. They sat in company with the others in other shanties, their eyes straining against crude walls and their souls asking if He meant to measure their puny might against His. They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God."

This novel was a forgotten masterpiece published in 1935 but forgotten until Alice Walker rediscovered her - and her gravesite - in 1977. Since, it has been appreciated as the quiet, beautiful monument to a woman's strength and endurance. A must read in these times of women-hating rhetoric in Drumpf's amerikkka. The attacks on Planned Parenthood and the bullshit "reverse discrimination" are just two of the many demonstrations of why this book is important as both a feminist and anti-racist classic.

Their Eyes Were Watching God is one of the most beautifully evoked portraits of a woman of color that I have ever read.

Jesse (JesseTheReader)

Rating: really liked it
I have mixed feelings on this book. On one hand I loved the writing style and I loved the main character and following her journey through life's struggles. On the other hand it was slow moving, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I felt things could've been cut to keep the story moving better. I understand why this is such a well loved classic, but I didn't love it as much as I'd hoped to! :(

Jeffrey Keeten

Rating: really liked it
”Dey gointuh make ‘miration ‘cause mah love didn’t work lak they love, if dey ever had any. Then you must tell ‘em dat love ain’t somethin’ lak uh grindstone dat’s de same thing everywhere and do de same thing tuh everything it touch. Love is lak de sea. It’s uh movin’ thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets, and it’s different with every shore.”

Janie Crawford knows about love. She knows how life is with it and she knows how life is without it. She had three marriages with varying degrees of success. The first was a marriage with a much older man when she was on the verge of womanhood. Her Grandmother, fearing her own death, and wanting to make sure that Janie had some security in her life made arrangements with a man of means to be her husband. Nanny wasn’t worried about love, but about whether a man could provide. She was looking at her granddaughter’s future with old eyes. Love and lust, from her withered view, were just enticements best skipped for the security of a solid roof and a steady diet of square meals. Nanny was a force of nature and any protest that Janie may have thought about making was quickly swallowed up in the gale force wind of her grandmother’s will.

”Nanny’s head and face looked like the standing roots of some old tree that had been torn away by storm. Foundation of ancient power that no longer mattered. The cooling palma christi leaves that Janie had bound about her grandma’s head with a white rag had wilted down and become part and parcel of the woman. Her eyes didn’t bore and pierce. They diffused and melted Janie, the room and the world into one comprehension.”


Zora Neale Hurston

It wasn’t long before a smooth talking man by the name of Joe Starks came along and told her all the wonderful things he would be doing with his life. With barely a twist of her arm she jumped in the buggy with him and moved to Eatonville, Florida where an all black community was being formed into a town. Joe could see the potential and opened up a general store/post office and started making money hand over fist. He didn’t like the way the men looked at Janie and had her tie up her lovely hair everyday so as not to rile up so much lust in the male population. He was controlling and had words of “wisdom” to attach to everything he instructed her to do.

”You sho loves to tell me whut to do, but Ah can’t tell you nothin’ Ah see!”
“Dat’s ‘cause you need tellin’’ Joe rejoined hotly. “It would be pitiful if Ah didn’t. Somebody got to think for women and chillun and chickens and cows. I god, they sho don’t think none theirselves.”

Now Joe just seemed to fold all up in himself and took sickly and died leaving Janie with a good stack of green and as good a living as she wanted to make. Now Janie was North of forty, but was still a damn good looking woman.

"The men noticed her firm buttocks like she had grape fruits in her hip pockets; the great rope of black hair swinging to her waist and unraveling in the wind like a plume; then her pugnacious breasts trying to bore holes in her shirt. They, the men, were saving with the mind what they lost with the eye.”


The Lovely Halle Barry played Janie Crawford in the 2005 movie version

The men of the community that had been having unnatural thoughts that came...well...very naturally to them regarding this married woman soon found themselves on the outside track once she became a widow. A young man by the name of Tea Cake showed up and suddenly for the first time Janie found out what love felt like. Dear lord did the community carry on about this old woman shaking the sheets with this youngster with no money and no name for himself. Janie herself was suspicious even pushed him about the thought that his intentions might be built on false pretenses.

”Janie, Ah hope God may kill me, if Ah’m lyin’. Nobody else on earth kin hold uh candle tuh you, baby. You got de keys to de kingdom.”

Now what woman could resist that.


I'm ready. Where do you want to go?

They moved down in the Everglades to pick beans by day and for Tea Cake to shake the dice by night. He could pick a mean guitar as well and sang songs for the entertainment of all those hard working people.

Yo’ mama don’t wear no Draws
Ah seen her when she took ‘em Off
She soaked ‘em in alcoHol
She sold ‘em tuh de Santy Claus
He told her ‘twas aginst de Law
To wear dem dirty Draws

Like all her other husbands Tea Cake is not above being jealous. Men kept circling around her like bees looking for a hive.

”Before the week was over he had whipped Janie. Not because her behavior justified his jealousy, but it relieved that awful fear inside him. Being able to whip her reassured him in possession. No brutal beating at all. He just slapped her around a bit to show who was boss. Everybody talked about it next day in the fields. It aroused a sort of envy in both men and women. The way he petted and pampered her as if those two or three face slaps had nearly killed her made the women see visions and the helpless way she hung on him made men dream dreams.”


Yeah they are looking at you Zora.

Now there are hurricanes, heart breaks, rabid dogs, lustful men, stiletto knives, and a young girl blossoming into a beautiful woman that has to find her place in the geometry and geography of love. Hurston has a keen eye for observation and an attentive ear for conversation. I had so many notes and jotted down so many page numbers of amazing quotes that if I’d worked them all into this review I’d go way over my allotted word count.

Now Zora Neale Hurston did not become famous for being a gifted writer. She worked as a substitute school teacher, librarian, freelance writer, and even as a maid towards the end of her life. When she suffers a stroke in 1959 she is forced to enter the St. Lucie County Welfare Home where she remains until her death on January 28th, 1960 from hypertensive heart disease. She is buried in an unmarked grave in the Garden of Heavenly Rest, Fort Pierce.

In the 1970s Alice Walker becomes an advocated for Hurston’s body of work. Through Walker’s efforts Zora’s reputation is restored and her works begin to be added to the syllabuses of major universities. As a final tribute to Hurston, Walker finds the approximate point of her internment and puts a grave marker on the site. This is vindication for a voice that was not heard by enough people when she was alive, but now at last she is being read, discussed, and loved.

If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com
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Fabian

Rating: really liked it
A story as melancholic for its relationship to the writer's own life/destiny as another Southern masterpiece "Confederacy of Dunces." I cannot imagine that this isn't Toni Morrison's true foundations of prose--the beauty of which borders on the sublime. The modernism of "Their Eyes" lies in the intermixing of 1930's black vernacular with poetic lines which themselves carry astute and precise craft--this is outstanding. Lightning in a bottle--that's what this book reads like.

I love to choose sides in literary battles--most of which are absurd but still funny to reminisce about (as if the reader himself was actually there). Richard Wright versus Zora Neale Hurston. A 500 page discourse on the unfairness of being black ("Native Son"), vs. this, a behemoth underdog, a "rediscovered" gem of a novel which sings and never underwhelms. "Their Eyes" is better, Hurston a better writer, THE END. Janie the pre-feminist heroine is incredibly free--restraints are identified & gotten rid of properly--& this independence can be seen in the intrepid style with which high & low literature interplay. The prose is severely, sincerely alive.

The sadness comes when you realize that Hurston was outright forgotten--she had to be found, her grave properly marked, by none other than Alice Walker (the topic for a screenplay perhaps?). Even the man at the end of "Their Eyes" has a proper burial, while she, the progenitor of it all was utterly forgotten--but re-found by smart and freeminded readers. The prophecy is chilling, but the body of work is its stark opposite--alive, beautiful, raw, human, poetic, godly.

Adina

Rating: really liked it
“The sun was gone, but he had left his footprints in the sky.”

A masterpiece. Zora Neale Hurston does the impossible, she perfectly combines beautiful poetic prose with the Southern black slang of the 30’. The result swept me of my feet and transported me in the middle of an all in-love story. Imperfect, passionate, sometimes violent but it was impossible to look somewhere else because of its beauty. The narrator was perfect and it made me feel the atmosphere of the place and time.

I finally read Their Eyes Were Watching God thanks to Marlon James and his podcast. It is one of his favourite novels and now I can see why. As other reviews also mentioned, I was surprised by the plot. I was expecting it to be a novel mostly about racial conflicts but instead I read about a courageous woman who dumps two unsuited husbands in order to find her true love.

“Love is lak the sea. It's uh movin' thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets, and it's different with every shore.”

Did I mentioned how much I loved the writing?

“She couldn't make him look just like any other man to her. He looked like the love thoughts of women. He could be a bee to a blossom - a pear tree blossom in the spring. He seemed to be crushing scent out of the world with his footsteps. Crushing aromatic herbs with every step he took. Spices hung about him. He was a glance from God.”

"It is so easy to be hopeful in the daytime when you can see the things you wish on. But it was night, it stayed night. Night was striding across nothingness with the whole round world in his hands . . . They sat in company with the others in other shanties, their eyes straining against cruel walls and their souls asking if He meant to measure their puny might against His. They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God."

Samadrita

Rating: really liked it
Here is a woman who led a wretched life for years, doomed to stagnate in the drab depths of oblivion even after her death which had gone under the radar and generated no nostalgia-soaked, emotional obituaries. She lay in an unmarked grave in the Garden of Heavenly Rest, Florida, treated by her own contemporaries like an outcast because of a difference in perspectives, to be resuscitated and acknowledged as one of the foremost powerful voices that ever reverberated across the African-American literary landscape years later. And here is her creation, a 'coffee-and-cream' skinned Janie Crawford, a child born out of a possible rape, a sure forerunner to Toni Morrison's Sethe, Denver and Beloved or Alice Walker's Celie and Nettie. A mulatto woman in a white man's world, who grew aware of an identity not shackled by notions of race, skin color, and even gender, who could look beyond the small horizon carelessly conferred on her by an era which was bluntly apathetic to her kind, who could aspire to be free of a legacy of mere victimhood.
And here I am, trying to make sure I do not fuse Zora and Janie together, unable to decide how to love, revere and pity them at the same time.

I watched the young and carefree Janie, who bubbled over with an enthusiasm for life, eventually morph into the Janie who embraced the bittersweet realization of having loved and lost. My eyes traced her unsure footsteps from financial servitude to financial stability, from the daily battle of ignoring the sting of self-denial to grasping at a life free of emotional subservience. I loved the hapless, innocent Janie who consented to being passed over like property from her grandmother's ownership to her first husband's just as much I admired the Janie who found her salvation in Tea Cake's good-natured laughter after two marriages which had simultaneously stripped her of her last shred of self-esteem and caused her to listen to that stifled inner voice. And I felt a strange kind of happiness building up inside for the Janie who would not succumb to the temptation of self-loathing like the misguided Mrs Turner, the Janie who found the firm ground of self-awareness to tread on while the world of conflicting ideas rotated on its axis like ever.

Zora Neale Hurston had a rich dual voice - one of them fearlessly recounting the quirks characterizing the Black American community in the deep south still clinging on to the outer fringes of a white-dominated society intertwined with the lyrical, oneiric voice of a philosopher and a feminist, possibly one of the first among her kind. And it is this wholly harmonious union of these two voices which transforms this bildungsroman into a honeyed ballad of love and grief, of psychological bondage and emancipation.

"He looked like the love thoughts of women. He could be a bee to a blossom-a pear tree blossom in the spring. He seemed to be crushing scent out of the world with his footsteps. Crushing aromatic herbs with every step he took. Spices hung about him. He was a glance from God."

Janie never bore a grudge against her 'God' for making her path to fulfillment so long and arduous. She merely watched Him with hopeful eyes, lovingly accepting all He bestowed on her. And I watched Janie with a tear-strained smile.

Robin

Rating: really liked it
I was prepared, based on the many five star reviews for this novel by many of my esteemed Goodreads friends, for a worthy book. I was prepared, based on its 1937 publishing date and its setting of Eatonville, Florida and then the Everglades, that important racial themes would be present. What I wasn't prepared for, however, was to be knocked over completely by the shimmering, feathery-fine, poetic prose. I wasn't prepared to be told a courageous, all-in, love story.

Zora Neale Hurston's incredible book is the story of Janie Crawford, a middle aged black woman who has had three marriages. Her grandmother (Nanny) was a slave who had been abused by her white master. Her mother (Leafy) was also a victim of rape. She started drinking and disappeared, leaving Nanny to raise Janie. After seeing Janie kiss a boy as a teenager, Nanny insists on Janie marrying a man she didn't know or love, thinking that this was how she could be safe and happy.

The familiar people and things had failed her so she hung over the gate and looked up the road towards way off. She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie's first dream was dead, so she became a woman.

She runs off and marries another man, Joe, who turns out to be a controlling misogynist. Despite providing materially for her, Janie is isolated and unhappy.

So gradually, she pressed her teeth together and learned to hush. The spirit of the marriage left the bedroom and took to living in the parlour. It was there to shake hands whenever company came to visit, but it never went back inside the bedroom again.

And then, she meets Tea Cake. He's twelve years younger, but he is her match. And she lives with him, wholly and sensuously, the way she imagined the way it would be as a teenager, looking upon a pear tree:

She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight.

Oh MY. Are you dying yet? With this writing? No? Then, read on these few short samples:

The sun was gone, but he had left his footprints in the sky.

The morning road air was like a new dress.

The stillness was the sleep of swords.

No hour is ever eternity, but it has its right to weep.

So while I was dizzy with delight, swooning over this writing, I was alternately impressed with the dialogue, written in the dialect of Southern black people of the time. Hurston shows herself to be a master of both poetic prose and colloquial language, and weaves them seamlessly back and forth.

While she highlights the ever present racial problems between blacks and whites, she also shows the problems and hindrances caused within her own community, which in some ways are just as limiting. Within the black community there exists a class system, and people are expected to keep to their place. She zeroes in specifically on a woman's place within this culture, and then, in relation to her man.

Through all this, shines the love story of Janie and Tea Cake. It is a love that is unhesitating, accepting, passionate and pure. It pulses with adventure and life, and the beating of two devoted hearts.

Love is lak the sea. It's uh movin' thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets, and it's different with every shore.

I have every admiration for Zora Neale Hurston, who is not only a truly dazzling writer, but an inspiring woman. I learned after reading this book that she was the daughter of former slaves, and that she grew up in the town of Eatonville, where her father was elected mayor. She was a graduate student at Columbia University. Though her life ended in poverty and in an unmarked grave, she left behind a powerful and lasting legacy.

Zain

Rating: really liked it
I Mean...What Can I Say?

So sad such a talented person has to die indigent. Zora Neal Hurston, born 1891, died in abject poverty in 1960.

Although l have read this book several times, each time l read it, l see a different story that she is trying to tell.

Unfortunately, though many people don’t want to admit it, the relationship between black men and black women is still the same.

Although Janie doesn’t stand up for herself, and fight back, thankfully, black women today are fighting back.

I don’t know how things were happening for my female ancestors who lived in Africa, hundreds of years ago, but I know they have suffered a great deal living in America.

With white men being the king of the world and their white women with them, the black man could have a place at the bottom of the pits.

And lying underneath him, throats under his heel, lies the black woman barely alive.

I have been told by family members that the women in this world feel that it is her duty to make a man feel like a man. They say that in America, for a black man, it is very hard to do.

I disagree completely. If a woman has to become a whipping post, and be abused, to make someone feel that his manhood is not challenged, then that man has no idea what manhood is about.

Some people may disagree with me, but that is your choice.

Five fantastic stars ✨.

emma

Rating: really liked it
Two things:
1) This is deserving of the one-of-the-great-classics-of-the-20th-century title.
2) Every book should be large print.

To elaborate on both:

This is a beautifully written, brilliantly characterized, and consuming read. I tend to hate historical fiction, but when it's done like this I love it completely.

Equally significantly, I accidentally bought the large-print version of this book, and now I want to do that forever.

Those are my two PSAs.

Bottom line: Read this book, and give large print editions the respect they deserve.

--------------
pre-review

i should have paid more attention the first time. or any attention at all, rather.

review to come / 4 stars

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currently-reading updates

i read this in school and do not remember a single thing about it.

realizing i may have only pretended to read this in school.

Michael

Rating: really liked it
Written in lush prose that blossoms around lines of vernacular dialogue, Their Eyes Were Watching God follows Janie Crawford as she wades through three turbulent marriages toward a state of financial and emotional independence. The story begins at its end, with a forty-something Janie returning to her old town after years spent elsewhere; her best friend Pheoby calls upon her, and Janie begins to recount her many travels and experiences to Pheoby. But, despite the frame's promise that Janie will be the one to narrate most of the novel, the narrative is in fact split between long stretches of dialogue and the voice of an omniscient narrator. From the start, then, the novel is interested in problematizing the ownership and interpretation of Janie's life story, a story of one Black woman's endurance in the face of vitriolic misogyny and racism. The narrative's clash between voices forces readers to consider on what terms, in what ways, and to whom Janie's story is told. The book's well-structured plot makes for a highly absorbing reading experience, even as its distinctive structure compels readers to remain acutely aware that they are reading a work of literary artifice.

AJ Griffin

Rating: really liked it
Another "I don't remember it very well, but I know I liked it" story. Here's what I do recall:

A) The main character was a woman, and she had something like 3 lovers throughout the book. Saucy.
B) One of these dudes was named either Teabag, Cornbread, Teabread, or Breadbag. Or something.
C) There was some issue with the weather towards the end.
D) Zora Neal Hurston got arrested for fucking a kid, or something (I guess that wasn't really in the book, but whatever).


Somehow I managed to get through this before my "oh, I should think about black people?" phase, without even batting an eyelid of thought at it. I must have been busy.

Kevin Ansbro

Rating: really liked it
Zora Neale Hurston was born to write.
This 1930s deeply human story of one indefatigable black woman's life, loves and catastrophes dazzled and delighted me from start to finish.
It was apparently written in a hurry and the story does have a breakneck feel to it. Characterful expressions burst from its pages; the syncopated, lively dialogue of the black people of the day is lush and gorgeous to read.
But please don't accept my effusive review as a recommendation. This book is not a generic crowd-pleaser and won't suit all tastes.
It is dialogue heavy and at times I felt I was reading a theatre script, rather than a novel.

I've seen that some readers weren't able to get to grips with the spoken vernacular, which surprises me no end. This white English/Irish guy had no problem whatsoever and, in fact, the person whose review inspired me to read this (@Lisa) is Swedish and she clearly had no difficulty either!
Lisa's review

For me, the writing was irresistible. I do however think it wouldn't be for everyone.

Melissa Rudder

Rating: really liked it
When I teach Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, I tell my students the Alice Walker headstone story and teach the book as a Black Feminist novel that is far, far ahead of its time. I noticed this year that my introduction made my students expect the protagonist, Janie, to jump from the novel's pages as a woman warrior, take no shit from anyone, and--I don't know--burn her bra. But the real beauty of Hurston's novel is that her heroine is a real character living in a real world--albeit, one that is touched by literary genius and reflective of literary genres as varied and vital as (Hurston's scholarly focus) African American Folk Tradition and the odyssey of the "high mimetic form". (A Black woman presented as the hero of an epic journey in 1937--simply amazing.) Janie struggles. Janie submits. Janie silences herself. But Janie grows. And, in my mind, a revolution begins.

Hurston's character construction is superb. At once, her characters are strongly allegorical AND so real that they are breathing entities in the reader's mind (and disturbingly remind you of that uncle you don't really like). Janie is as real as they come. By the end of the story, I, as a reader, am her best friend Pheoby, sitting on that porch with her and listening her to tale. I understand her insecurities, I feel her pain, I smile as she inexplicably giggles for two pages, and I am full of that emotion the conclusion of Hurston's epic tale creates.

I love that Hurston gives her readers the tools to understanding Janie's motivation and responses very early in the book in the form of her beautifully constructed pear tree and mule metaphors. It is a wonderful book to teach to those teenagers who still think literary analysis is a sham that teachers come up with to torture students, because Hurston stitches her novel together with meaningful patterns of metaphors and symbols that deliberately guide readers through Janie's experience.

Hurston's literary talent shines in her ability both to construct believable, life-like dialogue in strong southern dialect and to create poetic prose rich in metaphor and meaning, as well as in her ability both to spin a tale that leaves the reader in greedy suspense and to write a story that says so much about the nature of love, power, language, race, gender, and identity. The more I read this book, the more I like it.

On a side note: As the book is so strongly embedded in oral tradition, my classes listen to a few chapters of the audio book, which is read by Ruby Dee (who also played the role of Janie's grandmother in Oprah's movie). It is simply fantastic. If you're a fan of the book, you should definitely listen to it.

Lisa

Rating: really liked it
"Love is like the sea. It's a moving thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from the shore it meets, and it's different with every shore."

In the beginning, there was Nanny. Nanny knew what it meant to be a slave to men. And Nanny had a daughter. She saw what happened to her, how she chose to escape pain in oblivion. And Nanny was scared. She was so scared that she wanted to prevent the same thing from happening to her daughter's daughter, even if it meant that she had to force her grandchild to be unhappy. As long as she was unhappy in a different, secure way, with an old and stable man by her side.

That is the background of Janie Crawford's story. She is in her early forties, and starts telling a friend her life story in beautiful, colloquial language. And what a life it is! So common and typical, and yet individually painful and loving.

Three men, three facets of female experience. Three ways to love and respect each other, and to abuse and kill each other's spirit. Sometimes our family's fear of suffering makes us suffer more than anything we could possibly live through ourselves. And sometimes we find love where we least expect it.

Janie sings the Ballad of the Gaol of Woman:

"Some love too little, some too long,
Some sell, and others buy;
Some do the deed with many tears,
And some without a sigh:
For each (wo)man kills the thing (s)he loves,
Yet each (wo)man does not die."

Recommended to humanity!