Erin Blakemore - The Heroine's Bookshelf - Life Lessons, from Jane Austen to Laura Ingalls Wilder

Aflame with the power of these spiritual journeys, Zora became convinced that her calling was to convey the drama and sweep of black spirituality for all to see. Though she trained as a priest of sorts, she was no preacher: she was a witness, a disciple, a seeker driven to capture her inner vision in words. She was forty-six years old when she gave that vocation its most powerful expression, writing Their Eyes Were Watching God in just seven weeks in 1937 while studying voodoo in Haiti.

Their Eyes Were Watching God is Zora’s tour de force, a testament to the external and internal beliefs that drive a heroine to transcend herself and survive everything that God and the elements throw her way. The book follows Janie Crawford, a woman who learns early on that God will do things in his own way and his own good time. As much a volume on faith as a rumination on personal power, self-worth, and love, Their Eyes Were Watching God embodies Zora’s own personal struggle with her beliefs as it follows Janie’s attempts to define and assert her inner strength. And it does so by focusing on a woman who, by 1930s Southern standards, is the least deserving of a powerful spiritual experience.

Throughout the course of the book, we watch Janie survive marriages to a callous man, an attractive tyrant, and a loving younger husband. Abused, ignored, and silenced, Janie is tested again and again. Her liberation from the expectations and judgments of other humans is painfully slow, but powerful. Throughout, she puts her trust in herself and a power greater than herself. The quiet self-confidence that emerges is her tribute to God. Janie draws experience and faith together when she finally speaks up against her husband after decades of stoic silence.

Janie did what she had never done before, that is, thrust herself into the conversation.

“Sometimes God gits familiar wid us womenfolks too and talks His inside business. He told me how surprised He was ‘bout y’all turning out so smart after Him makin’ yuh different; and how surprised y’all is goin’ tuh be if you ever find out you don’t know half as much ‘bout us as you think you do. It’s so easy to make yo’self out God Almighty when you ain’t got nothin’ tuh strain against but women and chickens.”

After you get done cheering, consider that Janie isn’t just speaking for herself… she’s speaking up for a woman’s place in God’s world. Over the course of the book, Janie settles into that place for good. Women and blacks, too, are God’s creations, and criticizing them in God’s name just won’t fly for Janie (or for Zora). Again and again, Janie watches frail humans fail to do God’s work. A neighbor reveals her obsession with light skin and her internalized hatred of the black race in a hubris-ridden parody of God’s eternal judgment. Janie is mocked for her love affair with Tea Cake, the man she’s waited for all her life. And over and over again, she must look within for answers.

Marked by external strife, Janie’s inner life becomes increasingly peaceful as she suspects, then believes, that there’s something bigger out there. Though she faces death, emotional starvation, even a hurricane, Janie’s hard-won happiness is never really in danger, for she’s found redemption and resurrection on the inside. Every facet of Janie’s world, both ugly and joyful, is of God’s making and God’s own goodness; even the terror of the coming storm is made and governed by God. Janie learns that struggling against God’s ways is for the weak and confused; for Janie, nothing works but the embrace. For those whose “eyes are watching God,” acceptance of the world on the universe’s terms is the only thing that can lead to peace. Slowly, mysteriously, God restores all that has been lost. Even God-watchers, though, can’t always make sense of divine acts, and a bit of uncertainty and questioning make its way into the book’s final affirming passages:

The day of the gun, and the bloody body, and the courthouse came and commenced to sing a sobbing sigh out of every corner in the room; out of each and every chair and thing. Commenced to sing, commenced to sob and sigh, singing and sobbing…. Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it 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.

Janie will always continue her quest for love and self-definition, whether she’s ready to walk down the road or not. Alone again, she must face some terrifying questions: Who am I? Who is God? What’s the point of faith? Does God even care? Why must we start over and over, transcend ourselves again and again?

Like Janie, Zora had reason to question God in the years following the publication of her now-indelible classic. She needed all the faith she could muster to face the years that awaited her. Her growing literary fame and colorful persona had their price. In 1948, she was not only accused of molesting three boys but was the victim of a brutal slander campaign by an unrelated party whom she had met only once. The claims were entirely fabricated—Zora was in Honduras at the time of the alleged attacks—but it took six months to acquit herself, and the rest of her life to overcome the effect of the attacks. Though Zora prevailed in court and all charges were dropped, the rumors surrounding this incident just wouldn’t die with the case. Her tattered reputation never managed to recover. Exhausted by a legal battle that had become so cruelly personal, Zora struggled to bounce back.

Zora lived out the last years of her life in almost complete obscurity, fading into forgotten territory along with other lights of the Harlem Renaissance. Overshadowed by new modes of expression, she was mocked for her dramatic, dialect-focused writing style. Her name was entirely neglected by the 1950s, her powerful books long out of print. Plagued by failing health and uncertain finances, she focused instead on her spiritual search as she worked as a substitute teacher and even a maid. But time did not rectify her financial position or mend her fragile health. Tragically, her former friends had almost totally abandoned her by the time she died in 1960. She didn’t leave anything behind, not even money enough to be buried in a marked grave.

She may have died impoverished and irrelevant, but Zora’s faith in herself and her God brought forth great things during her lifetime. By fusing her talent with a restless spiritual quest, she was able to document and further the beauty her God had made. She took that old bet with God one step further, translating the sights she saw and the sounds she heard into a powerful vernacular.

Ironically, Zora’s choice of self-expression—the dialect of the people for whom she fought so hard professionally and personally—was criticized, even mocked, in her own day. But the last thirty years have revived her reputation, thanks in part to the relentless efforts of Alice Walker, another dialect-driven woman writer whose work has changed the face of American literature. Back in print and deserving of a place on any modern heroine’s bookshelf, Their Eyes Were Watching God was made into a TV movie produced and hosted by Oprah Winfrey and has been read by countless students. It’s a book that was written to be reread and constantly rediscovered, interpreted through the lens of our own diverse spiritual experiences. And it lost none of its power as it traveled from popularity to unsung obscurity and back again. “There is no book as important to me as this one,” wrote Alice Walker. “There is enough self-love in that one book—love of community, culture, traditions—to restore a world. Or create a new one.”

Fraught with meaning and laden with doubt and emotion, faith and spirituality can be touchy topics for even the bravest heroine. Some leap straight into the fire, eager to find themselves in the flames. Others dance around faith, play with it for a moment before dropping it with scorched fingers. But whether the road to spiritual fulfillment is one of religious belief or strong inner conviction, it’s one each heroine must travel, be its result faith, atheism, or something in between.