A (2:25)

So here's how this goes. We're still getting our feet wet with this, but we're going to talk about who Hurston was, what this book is, our first impressions of reading it. We'll do some plot. There'll be a chance to jump off if you're worried about spoilers. But I will say this. We are not on. We're not watching the wall for every single spoilery thing we could say along.

B (2:42)

With this book is more than 75 years old.

A (2:45)

But here's the thing, Rebecca. People may I mean, here's it. But it's true.

C (2:48)

Yes.

A (2:49)

More about books than literally any other genre. Any other format is like there are people discovering this every day. There are 18 year olds out there. Hello and welcome. And I'm so sorry if you're cheating on your homework.

B (2:59)

You're in a pretty good place. Actually.

A (3:00)

No, you're not cheating. You're doing research. Look list. There are ways to cheat on homework. And now that are go beyond listening to a couple of us talk about.

B (3:09)

Actually, I think there's a way to spin the fact that you listen to a podcast as extra credit rather than cheating. So.

A (3:14)

Well, just don't. Just don't pass off my ideas, which are other people's ideas, as your own. Yeah, that's easy to do. This season of Zero to well Read is sponsored by ThriftBooks. Thrift Books. 19 million books, CDs, movies, games, gifts. But we're here to talk about books. We're here to talk about Their Eyes Were Watching God. And you can get my beloved Perennial Library Edition 1990 release on ThriftBooks.com right now in good condition for $4.19. You can get a couple other cool additions too. Please do not buy the cd, excuse me, DVD of the movie starring Halle Berry. Please don't get that one. The one you see a lot right now is the 75th anniversary edition of Their Eyes Were Watching God. That's a paperback, came out in 2006 from Amistad Press. Really nice edition there. You can get a very good copy of that for six. You can get it for new at for 1495. And if you're really pinching pennies, you can get acceptable copy for 559. Another one that came out recently, there's this deluxe edition. We've got some spread just going on. It's the deluxe edition came out alongside the PBS Great American reed top 100. You can get a very good version of that for $5.29. I think that's probably the best deal you're going to find. And if you spend more than 15 bucks, you get free shipping on orders inside the US and if you sign up for the Reading Rewards program, every purchase gets you closer to a free reward, which is a new book. Thanks so much to Thriftbooks for sponsoring zero to, well read. So we're going to get into it here. So if you're new to the show, which you probably are, because we're just getting started here, what this is is we want you to know something about this book if you haven't read it. We want to make the show itself entertaining. We also want to talk about the books to each other and have a chance to engage with books that I don't think this is unfair to say have more bite to them than most things we read. Because these are bonafide classics for a reason. Generally speaking.

B (5:23)

Yes. Yeah. And also to give you some hooks to hang conversation on. If you want to talk about these books, whether you plan to read them or not, whether you have read them or not. And if you did read this, but like me, if you haven't read it since high school and you're looking for a reminder of what happens or maybe, maybe a nudge that you, you actually do want to go back and reread this, we want to give you some sources of conversation there as well. So we'll spend a lot of time in what it feels like to read this book right now, how to tell if this is something that you should go pick up. And then if you decide it's not for you or you just also want some notes, we'll give you a little cocktail party crib sheet, a couple highlights that you can take with you just in case somebody corners you at a party someday and asks you what you thought about their eyes for watching God.

A (6:08)

Or even maybe in the more fundamental way, you just kind of want to know what the deal is with something. Because even reading, you can get a lot of the information about who Hurston was and what this book is on Wikipedia or ask Chat GPG to summarize it to you. I'll tell you right now, it is not the same as reading it, but we're gonna try to give you some sense of what the reading experience is like. So you haven't. You just can fill in a little bit of the blanks if you have one here and, you know, make it part of your understanding of literary history and what books are and can do. But also this particular here.

C (6:40)

Today'S episode is brought to you by Avery Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House, publishers of Playful by Cass Holman with Lydia Denworth we're all born playful, but we tend to disconnect from that instinct as we grow older and get bogged down in productivity, culture, among other things. But in the book Playful How Play Shifts Our Thinking, Inspires Connection, and Sparks Creativity, Renowned designer and play expert art Cass Holman advocates for adults to embrace open ended, unstructured play with no obvious goal or purpose. The book shows us that play helps us build problem solving skills, find joy in tough times, and literally improves our individual and collective well being. Adopting a playful mindset is crucial in helping us overcome fear, failure and embrace new ways of thinking, de stress, reset and connect with each other. It also grows our creativity at every stage of our lives and helps us find joy in bleak times. I mean, need all of that, some of that, every bit of that. Okay, so make sure to pick up Playful by Cass Holman with Lydia Denworth and thanks again to Avery Books for sponsoring this episode. Today's episode is brought to you by Harlequin, a leading publisher of romantic fiction delivering feel good high stakes and heart pounding stories across every kind of love. No matter what kind of romance you love to read, Harlequin has it for you. And in one of their latest books, Accidentally Wedded to a Werewolf by Isabel Taylor, we've got some snowed in goodness. We've got some small towns and some unusual residents. So when a snowstorm hits during her travels, Luna Stack finds herself stranded in Clawhaven, Alaska, a cozy small town with more than a few unusual residents. Well, things go from bad to complicated when Luna accidentally drinks a potion that tethers her to Oliver Musgrove, the local grumpy innkeeper who also happens to be a werewolf. Now these two opposites are stuck spending the winter together while they wait for the antidote. And although they might not want anything to do with each other, the bond says otherwise. Make sure to pick up Accidentally Wedded to a Werewolf by Isabel Taylor. And thanks again to Harlequin for sponsoring this episode. Today's episode is brought to you by Hachette Audio, publishers of the audiobook Poppy A Labyrinth of Plants and A Story of Beginnings by Miriam Gerba Read by Miriam Gerba from the award winning author of Creep comes a powerful book about a writer at the peak of her powers. At once a love letter to California and a literary tour de force that tells the story of resilience and reclamation through relationship with plants, memory, myth and indigenous knowledge. Miriam Gerba has lived in California her entire life with its plants and soils, forests and ecology, immersing herself in the language of the landscapes as refractive through the languages and memories of her ancestors. In Poppy State, California plants serve as structural anchors in a wildly inventive work of narrative non fiction that is part botanical criticism, part personal storytelling and part study of place. We love a non fiction genre, Bender. And if you do too, make sure to pick up Poppy State by Miriam Gerba. Red by Miriam Gerba. And thanks again to Hachette Audio for sponsoring this episode.

A (10:05)

Okay, let's do who was Hurston? Okay, Rebecca, so this is I studied Hurston. I've read well at the time of my I've read all of the things published in her lifetime. Let's put that it's been a while, but I've read them all.

B (10:20)

And this is in a zone of book like in a time period of book that you are particularly interested in.

A (10:25)

Post World War I. Really till about World War II is what I used to study and talk and write about Harlem Renaissance and the Harlem Rosen authors particular among them. This book is not actually a Harlem Renaissance book. I can get into that in a minute. Even though Hurston is, because these are things I care about. But I'll say this about Hurston, she is an interesting author in person as we are going to I mean we should not start here.

B (10:50)

Yes, she's a fascinating this just a fascinating life. I read the 75th anniversary edition paperback and one of the many pieces of supporting material that it has is a timeline of her life and career. And it's, you know, where she was born, things that happened in her education, the fact that she wrote this book in like seven weeks. But also all sorts of really surprising and a real diverse array of experiences in work, in art, in politics and culture and not in like a predictable or straightforward fashion.

A (11:21)

Yeah. And like what happens with most things over time, they get flattened out, reduced, fuzzied, and no one is more damage done to who they were than Hurston. Plus, would no one else be more pissed off about it than Hurston would would have been her life. Right. To sort of get flat and essentialized, turned into. You can't see this now these really beautiful covers this series I have of these a bunch of reissues. But like they're all kind of the same and they don't stand out from each other. She was a radical individual. And I think that's one thing to know in ways that don't neatly fit into, you know, what we think about when we talk about sort of the tradition of black women's writing that she's talking about. And all of them are individual people. But I mean, I'll start here. She was a Republican. She didn't like the New Deal. She was Against Topeka Brown vs Board of Education because she thought if facilities were actually equal, there wasn't much to be gained for black kids and maybe something to be lost by not having access to black teachers who maybe would foreground black culture. Like, I'm not saying I agree with those. She was an interesting thief in an iconoclast in ways that remain to this day. And I think that's something to take. If you don't know anything about Hurston. She was an iconoclast in ways even at the time, even now, are not sort of fully assimilated into like standard ass left of center, you know what I'm saying? Like, she just doesn't do that.

B (12:44)

These are heterodox ideas then and they're heterodox ideas now. And I think Hurston seems to have sort of prided herself on being able to do that, being able to contain multitudes. And that especially radical individualism comes through in this book quite a bit.

A (13:00)

Yes. She was born in 1891 in Alabama, the daughter of sharecroppers and a preacher and a teacher. There's a lot of misinformation out there. I think my. I ride for dust tracks on the Road, which is their largely, well, not largely, substantially fabricated memoir. She changed a lot of dates. She said she was born in 1901 to get a scholarship to Barnard earlier because she needed to be younger to be eligible for it, and then sort of kept that all the way through. Born in Alabama, but then moved with her family to Eatonville, Florida, which is one of the early first black owned and operated towns. Her father was a mayor and a preacher and a high muckety muck there. And that is the setting of Their Eyes Were Watching God. Something in reviews of this book, people didn't believe, like a place like this could exist. So there's one for historical lessons for you. At the same time, as an early reader, as student, she discovered books and really realized that as epiphany. And there's even a. There's a sentence in here about. I think it's Janie's like, because she hadn't read books, she didn't know X.

B (13:57)

Yes.

A (13:57)

She didn't know the world was wide and complicated. And there's a lot out there. And that is an early age. Hurston sort of turned to Books and art and folklore and language and music and some other things to encounter the wider world. Her experience growing up in Eatonville was such that she claims. And you never know with Hurston if this thing is true or not.

B (14:15)

Yeah, Claims does a lot of work here.

A (14:17)

Yeah. One of her, one of her iconic quotes is, I'm not afraid of death. I'm afraid of being misunderstood. And which is funny for someone who made up a bunch of stuff about herself. But anyway, like, she claims that at one point she, she didn't even realize she was black until it was pointed out to her because everyone around her was black. That black was a thing.

B (14:34)

Gets those experiences in the book as well and gets that line about I'm not afraid of death, I'm afraid of standing.

A (14:42)

Yeah. She bounced around school. She was identified as someone with potential. Bounced around, attended Howard. She co founded the school newspaper there, the Hilltop, which then is what, Hillman College in the Cosby show and then.

B (14:56)

Another one, famous hbcu.

A (14:59)

What's the, the fake, the fake black college in the Cosby was. It's Hillman. Right. And then Lena Waithe has named her imprint after Hillman College. So it goes all the way back to, to Hilltop and Howard. There she was identified and I don't remember. I read the definitive biography a while ago. I don't remember how it happened, but she got hooked up with a trustee at Barnard College who said, I can get you into Barnard. I get you a scholarship. Do you need to be a little younger? Oh, wait, Zora says I am a little bit younger. You know, let me check my records about how old I am. And she was the only black student at Barnard and then started working with Franz Boas as Columbia's, I think as a graduate student. She didn't, she didn't get a PhD eventually, I don't believe, I'm pretty sure I should say that's equivocating for no reason. But Franz Boa is a legendary anthropologist, collector of folklore, and then toured the south. And she then, of course, was in New York at a precipitous time. In her early days in college, she was writing short stories and plays and reviews. She caught the attention of Elaine Lockett Howard, who is one of the Shepherds, the elder statesman of the Harlem Renaissance. And she got some opportunity there, wrote a couple of short stories, the Gilded Suspicion Sweat, which got some acclaim, got her some readership. And then she got the chance to tour the south repeatedly at one time with Alan Lomax, the famed oral historian, talking to black people for Alan Lomax, she would do the kind of the fixer, like whoever went in front of Bourdain to get all the interviews and stuff, that's what she would do. But it gave her a wonderful chance to spend a lot of time and wallow and roll around in the muck, as we will find of these places and in these spaces. There's this great story, again, I cannot vouch for authenticity, of her pulling up to, like, Langston Hughes, his house in a red convertible and said that we're going to the like, too good to be true also. Don't you want it to be true? So, like, wonderful. And as she did this, like, her big project became as an anthropologist, as an artist, I would say, and as a person, that there is no hierarchy of race or culture. Like black American English stands alongside the Queen's English or Shakespeare's English or French or whatever else it might be. And I think by extension, you know, one gender's experience does not get trumped by another gender's experience, nor does one person's experience necessarily not only isn't, but it can't be synonymous with any other person's experience, even if they live next door to the person in a small town in the middle of Eatonville, Florida, where no one else comes from. So she's fiercely independent. Throughout her life. She was fired from gigs and she lost gigs because she didn't do things the way people wanted her to. To do them.

C (17:32)

Yeah.

B (17:33)

And these are.

A (17:33)

That's just how it went.

B (17:34)

Like inherently political ideas. Right. That especially in the time that she's writing, that, like women's stories, women's experiences are just as important as men's, and that no form of expression of the English language or of any other language is more valid than others. But she. I. I noticed this in my reading, and you have it in the notes as well, like she did not intend to be a political writer. That as the writing of the Harlem Renaissance becomes increasingly political, she sort of falls out of favor. And I think that's one of the things that makes this book work so well and that it continues to resonate, is that the inherent feminism is just there. Janie's insistence on the importance of her own story carries through that as we'll get into. Much of the book is told in dialect that, you know, if we cycled it up to today, we might talk about as African American vernacular English. And that she doesn't, you know, apologize for it. She doesn't explain it. There aren't footnotes. There's not A translation. This is just the way that she's telling the story. And the fact that she's chosen to do it this way is her own way of insisting this is a valid way to do it. I will force you to engage with this way of storytelling with this form of language because it is just as valid as something that is more formally respected. I think Zora Neale Hurston would not have had much space for respectability politics.

A (18:58)

No, no, that's a fair. That's. That's an absolutely perfect way of putting in sort of modern parlance she was even fired at one point for being too qualified for one position. Which is like that shouldn't be a thing. I don't know why you would do this personally. She's like a famous wit in Bon vivant. Like making sloe gin in the bathtub for a house party. Quick with a one liner. She's everything you think Dorothy Parker was and is. I think with a little more on the resume, frankly in the longer form.

B (19:26)

The resume is fascinating.

A (19:28)

The resume is extremely. A litany of books. A couple novels. These mixed genre. Tell My Horse is memoir, poetry, anthropology, fiction. Really blending genres as much as he's plending experiences of other kinds. She wasn't afraid to mix it up in her personal and professional life. She was married three times. Other long running serious relationships interspersed throughout. This book was actually written at the end of one of these relationships. The main male character t case is based on someone named Percy Punter, which doesn't sound like a real name, but we're gonna like with Hurston, you just got to be careful, you know. You know is that was a real person's name. I do believe that 94 and then she really mixed it up famously with Richard Wright. And Richard Wright did not like this book. She did not like Richard Wright telling her what he liked and didn't like about the book.

B (20:20)

Fun conversation to imagine.

A (20:21)

I mean there's. There's a. I don't know. It probably is cropped up in other cultures and other populations, but really starting with Langston Hughes and Du Bois. In the early days of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes wrote this essay called the Negro and the Racial Mountain, arguing they just wanted to write about black people. Like he wasn't concerned with make. You know, making it overtly for the cause being overtly political mode of literature as Albert Murray once called it. We would call it sort of. I guess now we'd be like about the struggle further principally and further into sort of black. Civil rights, I guess is economic and civil rights. And Wright thought that she was wasting her opportunity and that this was actually a minstrel show. These kinds of things were minstrel shows for white people because they're look at the funny black people and look at all the funny things they get up to. And Du Bois and Wright really thought, you know, to a first approximation, if anything they did could prevent one lash from falling on a black person, that they wanted to do that. Right. I think that's a pretty. You know, it's an interesting argument because both sides make a lot of sense. Hurston and Hughes and Claude McKay and some others were of the mind. Like we're interested in celebrating black people as they are. And that is not overtly political, but that's what we want to do. That's what art can do. That's a humanizing enterprise oven in itself. I think over time it's been yes, and rather than this versus that. But when there was so few space, there's so. And this is true today for different kinds of identities in black people. Tills 2 not as much self space, sort of metaphorically and physically for these identities. The book that got to be the bestseller. Right. It mattered because of placement value. Right.

B (22:03)

If you get a shot.

A (22:04)

Yes, you should. What do you do with your shot?

B (22:06)

Yes, how you should use it? What do you owe the particular group that you represent or what might you owe them?

A (22:13)

And Hurston herself, I mean, this goes to some more political stuff. She was against the New Deal. She thought it made people too depend on the government, especially. Especially black people. She. I can't remember exactly the poker metaphor she used or the card metaphor. It's like I can play the card game. I just know some of the people are cheating. But that I know they're cheating helps me. Yeah, I can't fix the game, but that's a. I want to be dealt in. Like, I don't need. I don't want. I have to play the cards. I'm dealt them. So I'm just gonna play it. And anything that's not that I really don't give a about, I'm gonna. I believe in myself and my own individual experience enough that I'm just going to play the cards at diary and people can. I don't want to say whine, but, you know, make a case that black people need more assistance or different programs or things like this. Again, I'm not saying I believe these. I'm just saying this is where she was at the time and maybe would still be today. It's like if it's if we really get the same treatment, then let the chips fall where they may, and each individual is going to need to take their own responsibility for their own outcomes in their own lives. And again, things aren't that simple. I don't know that she would believe those things now. Maybe she would. I don't know. But I think this is one of those cases where we pigeonhole people because of their identity when they don't necessarily line up with it. And I think that's important to remember. I think that's important to know that this happens.

B (23:30)

I think I agree in general and especially for this writer and this story and the way that the story falls out of favor in the 30s and 40s and then gets revived in the 60s by black women writers. You call it the Hurston Renaissance. Alice Walker sort of unearths Zora Neale Hurston and writes this essay called Looking for Zora in 1975. But then Robert Hemenway, who you took classes from at the University of Kansas, he also was a Hurston scholar. And so let's talk a little bit about Zora Neale Hurston and sort of how this comes back and now it's remained on syllabi in the popular conversation about books, but how it was rescued. And then we can get into plot summary.

A (24:15)

So their eyes comes out in 1937. This is, you know, the Harlem Renaissance, to a first approximation, can be dated to, like the stock. The stock market crashing. 1929. Black writing becomes more overtly political. The locust moves to, like Chicago black cars movement later, more and more political. And she doesn't follow that. Right. The sales don't work out. She can't support herself directly with her novels because that's just the market has moved. I think we could get into other things going on, especially the people who, you know, moved markets then weren't thinking about Hurston as much there. She tries a bunch of other stuff, has a stroke, finds herself living in a welfare home state and dies in 1960 and is buried in essentially an unmarked grave. And is. Had been forgotten by the literary establishment, such as it was even before that. But there'd been a little smoldering embers. You know, the books had been found by black women in bookstores and looking back and looking for a usable past as black women be. You know, this is something Courtney Thorson talks about. The group is these black women in the 60s and early 70s accumulating a power, accumulating some voice, accumulating some weight that they can. They can throw around. And one of those includes becoming the editor at Ms. Magazine. One of these women commissions Alice Walker to write this essay about going to find Zora Neale Hurston's grave in 1975. And that's really the match that lights a spark. There's this famous MLA Sunday morning convention, a panel that's like, packed to the gills, people ready to fight about what Hurston meant and didn't. I've been to these. What a scene. I once gave a paper at a regional PMMLA that had four people in attendance.

B (25:55)

MLA is modern language association for folks but English.

A (25:59)

English Nerds, the principal academic group for literature professors and scholars. And that comes out Hemingway's bio in 1977. And then there's a reissue. Harper and Rowe had the rights. They gave it to Universal University of Illinois, where Heman Wade written the book. And it sold so well, they got them back. The first reissue by Harper and row sold out 75,000 copies in the first. I mean, just a. Just all of a sudden, Rebecca, like, all of a sudden it was a thing.

B (26:27)

How many of these books that we talk about as classics were very nearly completely.

A (26:33)

We're two for two almost. I mean, essentially we're two for two with, with G. And with the books.

B (26:38)

That are older like this, 75 years old, 100 years old. It's so, so common because this is what happens to most books, and this is probably a point that we'll make repeatedly on this show, is that most books come out and if they get read at all within a few years, they are forgotten. And if something is going to stand the test of time, it either has a really big moment that propels it forward forever, or someone in a position of power and influence resurrects it and gives it a second life that then it ends up like. Many of these will have ended up on syllabi, not all of them, but how often it hinges on, like some moment of this is still relevant. This book from 30 years ago, we can still talk about it. And that it's that resurrection that carries the book into decades and decades of future conversation is really remarkable.

A (27:26)

And so we're going to get into plot here a little bit, and the plot will help us uncover, like, what is it about this book that these influential scholars and 60s and even what we look for today really come to mind. And really what it is is kind of the same reason it was. Forgotten is the wrong word because it sort of wasn't even remembered at the moment. It was positively reviewed. It didn't sell very well, on publication. And it's. It's Janie, right? It's Janie's consciousness and her sensibility and her experience. So the story goes something like this. Rebecca, help me as I walk through this a little bit. Yeah.

B (27:57)

I can start us off. So Janie is 16 when we meet her and is lounging around in the front yard. She lives with her granny. Parents are not in the picture. And Granny looks out the window and sees that Janie is smooching a fella who has come by the yard. And this is the first time that Janie has ever let this no good guy.

A (28:17)

Yes.

B (28:18)

Kiss her. But Granny does not know that. And Granny is very concerned. It's also really important to them to know here that Granny's background is that she was born into slavery. And that's a very present and active part of her identity and her memory. And Janie is free. But Granny wants, like, something bigger for Janie. So she sees this, that Janie is kissing a boy. She's worried about all of the paths that this might lead down. And, like, how far down the path is Janie already? Granny doesn't know. Like, is she going to get pregnant? Is she going to, you know, ruin her future in some way? And Granny tells her that she's arranged for Janie to get married to a much older man named Logan Killiks. He's been coming around. He's interested in Janie. Granny wasn't so sure what to do, but now that she sees that Janie is maybe on her way to, like, being fast, as they would put it, she's. She's going to go forward with this arranged marriage. And Janie hates this idea. She objects to it. She wants to get married for. For love. She's, you know, really enlivened by the world around her. We see her, like, looking at this one particular tree and imagining the way that the light.

A (29:28)

The pear tree.

B (29:29)

Yeah. And imagining what it would feel like to be in love. And, like, she just got her first kiss an hour ago, and her grandma is telling her, you're gonna go marry this old man and it's for your own good. And she says, I want you to have protection. It's not like, love, and it's not him that I want you to have, but I want you to have protection. And that's our, really, our first sign that Janie is after something different in life than what Granny wants for her and is asking different questions of her life than what previous generations of black people were able to ask. Because so many of them were enslaved. Janie marries Logan Killix. It is not good. He basically wants her as a farmhand, not a great husband. He just sees her functionally as an indentured servant. And she meets a man who's walking down the road one day who starts flirting with her. His name is Joe Starks. And they run away together. And when Janie leaves with Joe she says I done lived grandma's way now, now I means to live mine. So then she and Joe, they move off to this town that he's heard of that's founding being they're founding themselves an all black town.

A (30:39)

Joe has a bunch of money that we don't really ever know where it comes with, which is one of the great mysteries of this.

B (30:43)

Yes, yeah, yeah. So they go on down the road and they go to Eatonville, Jeff.

A (30:47)

They do and Eatonville's great for a while. It's, it doesn't yet have a lamp, it doesn't have a store, it doesn't have houses. So Captain Eaton, who had given 50 acres to my memory, this is pretty accurate to how Eatonville was actually started to have a black community grow and they could self govern there. Joe walks in, thinks it's a bigger deal than it is. Kind of a classic American story of like I was told all these things and it's not as great as is. He buys 200 acres, starts selling off lots, people start coming in, he's elected mayor and becomes a muck. He becomes the muckity muck of the town.

B (31:21)

The town needs a store so he's going to build the store. The town needs a mayor so he'll be the mayor. And we don't know that he set off for this place with the intention to like run the show. But as soon as he gets there and realizes, as you were saying, that there's not anything there and he's got a bunch of money in his pocket that nobody else has. It's an opportunity that he can build this town but also he can be the one who runs the town.

A (31:43)

Yeah. And each stage, I mean this is hard to remember now you can read the date and see that Hurston was born in 1901. It's harder to grok that she, her parents and their parents were, a lot of them were slaves. Like these are people who hadn't been out multiple generations. Like these people knew directly. Granny knows of what she speaks here. The being married to Logan Killix compared to being a slave is not even comparable. Right. Whereas Janie hasn't had that experience of Slavery. So I think one of the things the novel is suggesting that you could dream. You can dream, Dream bigger.

B (32:21)

Yes.

A (32:21)

When you have different kinds of experience. Like there's a beautiful naiveness to her vision of a bee pollinating a flowering pear tree as the central metaphor for, like, hetero, sexual, romantic love. Like, it's very natural, it's very beautiful, it's very, shall we say, peaceful. It's interdependent. Like they both get something like you can't say the flower or the beginning has the upper hand or gets to rule the house. It's a very symbiotic kind of relationship.

B (32:53)

And it's a beautiful dream because as Joe builds the store, someone has to work in the store. And it's gonna be Janie. Because Joe is busy. He has to go off and do all the things.

A (33:04)

Smoke cigars with the guys on the porch and get the deals done right.

B (33:07)

That a mayor's got to do. But the people of the town do flock to the porch. The porch of the store becomes like a gathering place. And they hang out and they tease each other and tell stories and tell tall tales and just sort of mess around. And it's this real community center. We're given to understand that Janie is very light skinned and so is perceived as very beautiful among this community of black people.

A (33:33)

And a lot of talk about her hair. Her hair is a very important feature.

B (33:36)

A lot of talk and about, like, how sleek and long her hair is. And that Joe wants her to cover it up because these, the other men in the town are talking about how beautiful she is. And he's like, protective of that. But this, this second marriage, this also turns sour that over decades, they're together for quite a while. Janie feels trapped again and again, like an indentured servant to him. She's dreaming of actual love. Their relationship is no longer accepted. Exciting. He's not the like, flashy young man who seduced her and flirted with her and made her feel beautiful. And they have this sort of final showdown where they have a big fight in the store. And Janie insults him in such a way that, like, he feels like his manhood has been taken.

A (34:23)

She cuts his head off. I mean, she, she, she insults what he looks like with his pants down. And it gets a big laugh. And some of that is Joe has been playing, you know, the dozens get played. Like, I think Hurston is happiest when she has a couple of characters playing the dozens. Like, I think that she really is like, that's what she's doing it for in a lot of ways the dozens being a trading of insults or one liners or you know, tall tales back and forth. And Joe has so underestimated her throughout that he is taken aback and he's. He doesn't even know that this is a possibility because he hasn't paid her any mind.

C (34:57)

Yeah.

A (34:58)

To use a phrase they might use.

B (34:59)

That's one of the gender dynamics that feel so relevant still today. Like Hurston had her finger right on how fragile like masculinity and male egos can be. And this is like the big shot guy of the town and he's been that way for 20 years. And everybody knows that he has power. Somebody says like he has a throne in the seat of his pants. He doesn't need like to build a throne. He just walks around knowing that he owns the place. But he has so underestimated her and she knows it. Like she comes to the realization that he has underestimated her and that this love she thought was going to happen when she left Logan Killigs like this relationship was better than the first marriage, but it is not the way that she's going to spend her life. And this the whole story is like really in pursuit of Janie's self realization of what does she want and how far can she go to get it? How close can she come to get it? So around this time as things are souring, another young man appears. Janie's 40 and tea cake is 25 or so.

A (36:05)

Well Joe is dead at this point so I don't. It's not directly said but like she hurts him so bad that he like has a heart attack.

B (36:12)

Right.

A (36:13)

Dies essentially. He's like, he falls out. The rest the of of the town is turned against him. Like he cannot ever regain the statue once had and it leads to his metaphorical figurative literal demise. She's been in mourning. She's had a bunch of suitors from the town. She's like, I'm not getting fallen in any of these lot that want to have an instrumental relationship. And that's where Tea Cake comes one day who just sort of shows up the wrong. He thought the game was that town and it's in this town. And I guess I better hang out and show you how to play checkers.

B (36:40)

Yeah. So he takes her seriously. He teaches her how to play checkers. He treats her as an evil.

A (36:45)

Beautiful scene, them learning checkers. I had forgotten this is it really.

B (36:49)

There's not an adaptation of this really to speak of. There was an Oprah produced TV movie 20 years ago.

A (36:55)

We're not talking about it.

B (36:56)

We're not going to talk about that one. You can't stream it. You shouldn't try. But that scene where Tea Cake walks into the store and they have just wonderful banter, I think would be such a great moment to watch on screen. And she's, she kind of is like, you know what, I know that like she's functionally a cougar here. Like it's a real May December situation. People are judging her. There's a lot of gossip about it. But he's young and he takes her seriously and this feels like actual connection. This feels like actual love to her. So she's going, she's going to run off again and she's going to marry Tea Cake and they go to the Everglades.

A (37:33)

Yeah. So they spend some time in cities for a little while. But eventually Tea Cake tells her about this part of the Everglades called the muck. It's away from the things of man. Kind of like they're seasonal workers living in this really fertile soil. Kansas takes astray because like this, this, all of this, like one handful could fertilize all of Kansas. The Sunflower State took note. Hurst and we put it in our ledger for you. But like it, it's presented as sort of an agrarian utopia for black people in this regard where they were allowed to work with a degree of independence and fair pay and that's all they wanted. You know, she's wearing overalls and happy about it. They're sleeping in, you know, not the nicest quarters in the world. They're picking beans all day, but they're having a good time and they're feeling like they get a certain amount of freedom, a certain self expression and joy, community in those places. And I think this, at this point, a modern version of this, this part still feels, I don't want to say revolutionary, but the denouement here is not whiteness coming to ruin everything. It's a natural disaster. We get a flood in the, in the Everglades, which just have. This is a, a literal act of God at this point. They escape together, this horrible situation. In the course of it, they encounter a dog. TK Holds the dog in abeyance and kills it so it doesn't kill them both. He gets bitten on the cheek, develops a case of rabies and goes nuts. And you know, in the way that one does. And then Janie shoots him in self defense. I didn't do a vibe. I didn't do a Fact check on this. But a trial in a single day. Rebecca, did you. What is ha. And she shoots him in the morning, is acquitted by a trial by jury at night. What is that?

B (39:22)

Slightly surreal elements of this story and the fact that that's the way that that's what happens that Janie shoots Tea Cake. The police show up. She's got to explain that it was in self defense there. And then they're gonna try her the same day. They take her off to the courthouse. She's in jail.

A (39:40)

They get the witnesses around. I mean, yeah, I can't get to the. I can't get to Trader Joe's in back with all my list in a single day. So I don't know that was. But it doesn't really matter.

B (39:50)

It doesn't really matter. She's old. Like, people are suspicious at first about why she would have killed him. But as the doctor gets up and confirms that he did have rabies, she's like, she's got to kill him in self defense because he's trying to attack her. He has a gun. He's out of his mind. And it's not the thing that she wants to do. She loves this man, but that's what she has to do. And she. She is acquitted. And after his death, she makes her way back to her hometown where the whole story starts. The story, the book begins with Janie walking back into town. She's wearing her overalls, people are gossiping about her, they're hanging out on the porches. And her best friend Phoebe makes her way over to Janie's house to hear the story. And the entire. The. The entire book here happens in the. Inside that frame. But we never pop back out of the frame until the very end.

C (40:46)

Today's episode is brought to you by Hachette Audio, publishers of the audiobook the Isle and the Silver Sea by Tasha Suri. From world Fantasy award winning author Tasha Suri comes the Isle and the Silver Sea. A heart shattering standalone romantasy of sapphic longing, medieval folklore and a love that spans centuries. In an England fueled by stories, the knight and the witch are fated to fall in love and doom each other over and over. The same tale retold over hundreds of lifetimes. Now we have Simran, a witch of the woods and Vina, a knight of the queen's court. When the two women begin to fall for each other, how can they surrender to their desires when to give in is to destroy each other. As they seek a way to break the cycle, a mysterious assassin begins targeting tales like theirs. To survive, the two will need to write a story stronger than the one that fate has given to them. But what tale is stronger than the night and the witch? Make sure to pick up the Isle in the Silver Sea by Tasha Suri. And thanks again to Hachette Audio for sponsoring this episode.

A (41:49)

So that's the story from here. Rebecca, let's talk about our own experience of the book initially and then what it was like to return to Eatonville and the muck and Hurston's world. Where did you start? How did you. What was your memory of first encountering?

B (42:02)

I first read this in high school in a very white suburb of Kansas City, and I remember my teacher introducing it and doing the before we get started kind of lecture that teachers tend to do.

A (42:16)

That we just did.

B (42:16)

That we just did. Who is Zora Neale Hurston? Why does this book matter? And one of the things that she spent a lot of time on was that the book is largely written in dialect. And I feel so torn about. About how that was presented to me now because it is true that just most of the books that we read are not like most of the books that are published are not written in any kind of dialect. So it is an unusual reading experience. But once you get into the rhythm of Hurston and if you can hear the language in your head, it's not complicated at all. It's, to me, the language, like the orality of the language, makes it very readable. On going back, that was a big surprise because I was, I think, 16 the last time that I read this. And so I wondered, like, what will. What will it be like to go back? But I found that I was able to, like, to really sink right into it. And there were times where how oral the language is really created kind of a transcendent experience where I forgot for a minute that I was reading a book and felt like I was sitting there on the porch, like somebody was telling the story to me. When did you first read it? Have you read it since?

A (43:26)

I've read it four times, I believe. Let me do Jeff's quick tips for reading dialect. I got two pieces of suggestion for reading dialect. The first is to whatever you're hearing in your head about how variant it might be from your own accent, dial it down a little. Like, don't let that. Like is spelled lakh. Like, just lighten it. Yeah, lighten it a little bit. It's like doing a good accent. I remember someone saying, the key to doing good Boston accent is to make it less than you think it is. Do have it. Rather than have it right, just lighten it up a little bit. And also, it's okay to treat it a little bit like Shakespeare, where you're not getting every single word, but go a little slower, but let your eyes flow over it. If you don't know exactly the phonetic representation of what Hurston is doing or what they're saying, it could be that it's language out of style. It could be that you're thinking it's something else, but just kind of let it flow. Don't worry about getting every single word. So those two things, I think, can make it a lot more palatable because there is. There's big chunks of it. There's long, long passages.

B (44:29)

Her style is consistent and repetitive. So like I, when a character's talking about I, it's always ah. Like, ah. Like, you know, an ah. And if you know a Southern person, person who has a Southern accent, they. They. It does sound like that sometimes. Like, I went down to the Walmart. You can. You can hear that well.

C (44:47)

And.

A (44:47)

And there's a way in which it's more accurate, right, because you're actually transmitting the sound of what someone might be saying, and you're. You're not privileging the sound over the meaning, but you're not letting just the meaning be the only thing being transmitted. Because some of the orality, some of just the sound of it is what Hurston is interested in as an authentic. Anthropologists remember, too, we don't have a billion MP3s. We don't have the Internet. We can just go hear people talk like, this anthropological work is real in these senses, and she reveled in them at the same time. I don't remember the first time reading it. I read in high school, I read in college, I read in grad school. And then I read it once, since I really don't. I really don't have. I feel like I've always have read this as a person who cares about feeling. So it's sort of built in there. I think on this reading, the thing that really jumped out to me was not just the dialect, but the. The switching between these beautiful, epic feelings, free indirect discourse, to these long pans of conversations. So free indirect discourse, you'll know is that's when, like, the book is just sort of talking to the universe. Like, it's not directed in.

B (45:50)

It's just. The narrator is just like, here is this.

A (45:53)

Or is there even a narrator? Like, where is this even coming from? Yeah, yeah. So. And it is, I think, even for me, I will admit this, a little jarring to switch between the dialect and this really like almost classical feeling prose, like the beginning of Dickens or Dostoevsky or some of these and these like metaphorical pronouncements about life and how things are and then descriptions of nature and people, people and dynamics and internal feelings. Then to talk about like cutting the tobacco plug and getting that right using dialect at the same time. And I think that side by sideness is absolutely the center of Hurston's. Yeah. In my point of view, it's like both of them are valuable, cherished and value and worth preserving and celebrating. There's one is not better than the other. They do different things for different reasons. And to see it side by side, even today, you don't see stuff. You don't see it done like this.

B (46:51)

And like to do one of these well could be the work of a lifetime. But the Kirsten does both of them well and puts them side by side and that they are in such conversation with each other that we go from people hanging out on the porch and telling jokes about each other and like, really razzing each other into a pretty like high minded philosophical statement about what's happening here and who these people are and that she can weave back and forth like, it's just so, so masterful.

A (47:19)

Because we start. I mean, I'll just do that. We're gonna do this in the end. But I think it's a good deal, the text here, this is just the very beginning, Right. Chapter one. Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some, they come in with the tide. For others, they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing. Until the watcher turns his eyes away in resignation. His dreams mock to death by time. That is the life of men. Like, it's like. It's like Homer. I mean, I don't know, like, what is that?

B (47:45)

I mean, it's like it's in the same zone as. So we beat on boats against the shore.

A (47:51)

Yeah, you're right. I mean, it's very. It. It feels like there is, yeah, a homology there in this sort of writing that goes on. And I'm not going to do it because I don't want to. And you know, you can read it for yourself, but like. And then you get these long patches of people talking about their lives in very down home kind of.

B (48:07)

Rebecca's tips for reading dialect are that the audiobook of this has really high excellent ratings.

A (48:13)

So if you're did you look at it? I should have.

B (48:15)

I didn't. I haven't listened. But Ruby Dee narrates it. She also narrates the Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. Really high, consistently great reviews. And if you're concerned at all, like when you said, treat this like Shakespeare, that's one of the ways that we learn Shakespeare in school is to listen or to see it performed. And if it will bring the language more alive for you to listen to someone do it. I think the audiobook here would be like an excellent option. Or to do audio while you're looking at the print.

A (48:41)

Yeah. Other things I noticed, like I didn't remember this sort of fable like structure. Right. It has these three princes, right. This is a classic fable structure. We get Logan, we get Joe, we get Tea Cake as the main character sort of figuring out how to be in the world. There's even a flood. Like, what's more fabulistic and sort of biblical than a flood the same time. Yeah. The. The two things that really jumped out to me are a moment with Logan and a moment with Joe where she has sort of a critical consciousness and it's like something fell off the shelf inside of her. Like she has this moment around Logan of realizing basically this. I don't want this. I don't need this. I don't feel like this is the way it has to be. And she doesn't have a. She can't really do anything yet. Right. About that. But having this realization then sort of primes her for when a moment comes. Right. When, when Joe then walks down the road, she's like something else. Something. There's something else.

B (49:37)

She's ready to go.

A (49:38)

And then when Joe dies and she's getting this, she's getting courted again. She's like, I've done this, I've seen it. I. I don't want to do this again. I'd rather do, you know, I'm ready for. There's something else out there for me. And Janie's patience, her lack of fear about the future that puts her in these positions where once she has even the little bit of agency gets, which is to go with Jo or Than to go with Tea Cake. She's ready to act on it and she does.

B (50:03)

Yeah. Edwin Jadontica wrote the intro to my 75th anniversary edition. And she talks about Janie's journey to self conceived liberation, which I think is such a perfect way to put that. That to Janie. She knows that. That these are risks that she's taking every time she takes it. But the risk of moving into this unknown future, of going off with this new man to set up life in a place that she's never seen or heard of before, is not as scary as the risk of staying in a place that she knows is not going to give her the things that she wants in life. It's not going to give her a path towards happiness and love and expression. And like, that was radical then and it remains radical today, especially for women.

A (50:46)

And you can see why. I mean, American racism is here. Like, it's embedded here. It's not ignored. Like it gets mentioned several times. It's more baked in than served on a platter. I guess I'm mixing some culinary metaphors here. And there's. I think, one of the effects of how Hurston represents that is then Jamie has. She has at least enough sense that her life isn't determined so that she can take a risk. She will go along. She will jump in the car, walk down the road. Whereas a different model of, you know, a sort of a racial determinism would not allow her even the space to have that kind of interiority and that kind of intellectual freedom. Or it's not even a lynch. It's like kind of a soul. Like there's a soul at the center. And she says at one time, at that moment is where my inside no longer matched my outside because she had to perform all these things, even though something was going on differently at the. At the same time. So again, it's accounted for. They're not many white people, those that are in positions of power. The men are certainly subject to it. The women are certainly subject to it. There's a. You know, Janie's mom, or Janie herself, was a product of a rape early in the book. So, like, it's there. But what Hurston is trying to do is even within all that, how can she have sort of Janie have a thought and a feeling of her own and then do something with it that's within. Around the truth of the overwhelming power. But it's not. Hurston doesn't see it as so overwhelming as to be immobilizing. That's not her vantage point.

B (52:11)

I think, like, real product of the time that it's told in that it is a man in each stage who has to be. She has to have a man as the vehicle for the next moment of liberation. Because it is 1937. Like, there are not a lot of opportunities, especially for black woman to try to strike out on her own. And this is this is a path that no generation of black women have walked before because, as you were saying, her parents and her grandparents can remember being enslaved like that. It's so present. So that's, I think, an interesting way to read the gender politics. Like, I can imagine a 2025, you know, like, English lit major being like, but there's. But all of her liberation comes through a man. And it's like, yes. And all also know that these. These men are necessary tools along the way for Janie to get to different places, to try to find love, to seek different forms of liberation. But when that tool is no longer useful to her, she will move on to another one. And she ultimately does end up by herself. She comes. She comes back down that road into town alone. And it's. I think we can imagine that from that point on, she will be. You know, she'll have solitude. She'll be solitary and be independent. That the frame story of this, I think, just sets up such a wonderful reading experience that we know from the beginning that Janie is. Janie's sitting on a porch telling Phoebe.

A (53:33)

Like, that she survives. Like, matters, right? That's something else I forgot. Like, it matters that she's, like, not gonna die or be in jail or.

B (53:39)

Something of the storm. Like, there was. I forgot in reading this like, that we know that Janie's gonna make it till the end because Janie shows up at the beginning of the book to tell this story to Phoebe. It's so absorbing and so palpable. And the movement between, like, the porch scenes are just, I think, my favorite parts of the book. When Janie is working at the store and we're listening to people hang out on the porch, and sometimes she goes out there and she gets a line or two in, and then the narrator comes in and tells us things. Like the other big picture talkers were using a side of the work for a canvas. It was a contest in hyperbole and carried on for no other reason. And that, like, that's illustrated directly through the dialect and these people in community in conversation with each other. But then Hurston really wants us to know how important this dynamic is that these people come together and talk and like porch sitting culture in the south, like, it is. It's still a thing. But before the Internet, it was a really a thing that this was how the news got passed. It was how gossip happened. If somebody walked into town because her husband died in the hurricane and maybe she had run off with a much younger man, like, everybody would be moving porch to Porch to tell the story. And that Hurston captures that is I just thought so wonderful.

A (54:55)

Yeah. And in the beginning too, like she comes back, we get that really beautiful opening and then we get sort of a Greek chorus of the town, sort of wondering, judging her, you know, going through the whole like, you know, the kinds of talk that Mel Robbins is telling you to let them do. I guess at this point is what we'd say. And the ending one is why don't she stay in her class? Right. Why? And that, I mean Hurston hates nothing more is like you are this, which means you have to do. You should be doing X, Y and Z. And it's foretold and if you vary from it, then you've done something wrong and we're going to ostracize you in that particular way.

B (55:28)

I mean, really, a book about defining love and defining life and success on your own terms. Janie's definitions of those things are really in stark contrast to what her grandmother would have wanted or, or even had access to the idea of. But Janie comes to this realization that she deserves respect, that she wants freedom, that she deserves freedom, that she wants support from a partner and that she deserves that. And the book is called in some ways a love story. I think it's also an adventure story. And it doesn't have to be either. It's both. And it's complicated. Like Tea Cake is the partner who comes closest to freeing Janie so that she can pursue her own ideals. He wants to see a fully realized version of this woman. And there's also sexism and there's also abuse. Like he is not a perfect partner, but that it's movement towards that, as Danticat calls it, that self conceived liberation for Janie makes that worth it to her. And it is still. So it's not, it doesn't justify it. Like it doesn't justify the abuse, that it's so much better than what the previous generations had access to or could have hoped for. But it also informs Janie's responses in a way that we can't separate those things.

A (56:47)

Yeah. And the book is not interested and I don't know, I don't remember if this is something Hurston wrote about separately. I don't know that a lot of this stuff would have mattered. But like. Or mattered that was. That exists, that there was discussion even about at the time. Like the book is not interested in judging Tea Cake for that abuse. Like it's, there's, it's, there's a certain quietude that takes the book over for a few pages at that moment.

B (57:09)

Yeah.

A (57:09)

Like, it's not as raucous, like, Janie's voice goes away from for a little while. We don't get a lot of her direct discourse for a while. So it's clearly recognizing that it was of import, but it wasn't determinative. Right. It did not. It did not cause a closure in their relationship. They could get back to each other in some kind of ways that certainly no one should have to deal with that. But the book itself is more interested in what Tea Cake's relationship unlocks for Jane then saying, well, you did this thing, and then it's over. She's maybe. Maybe some other version. Maybe the. The. Maybe the Janie we get at the end. Right. Because I think about that a lot. And this is in my Hot Takes. I think a sequel to this would have ruled. Because Janie at the end, as she's 41, she's had all this experience. She's kind of gone on her heroes journey. She's brought back not sort of the flame of the gods like Prometheus, but what she's brought back is like, a way to be in the world. And, like, what's she gonna do with the next 30 years? Like, imagine, like, what. What a resource she would be to other women in her life, other people in life. What she's going to do. She's gonna have some money because they sewed it up in the oil cloth, that the money stayed dry is a. You know, it's up there with, like, you know, Joan and the whale miracle surreal elements. Yeah. But, like, she's come back, like the hero does, to bring some new information, knowledge, or prize back in her situation is there's a lot of ways to be. And you don't have to. You don't have to do those. The way those things. And I'm not going to. In a very kind of fascinating way at that point.

B (58:37)

I think that's a nice intro into the conversation about how to tell if this is a book for you.

A (58:42)

Yeah.

B (58:43)

I think if you can. If you can hang. If you like to hang in the morally gray areas, morally complicated areas with writers. It's a good book for you. If you're interested in a foundational text of black American writing. Like Toni Morrison talking talks about this as being an important influence for her. We'll get to Toni Morrison later.

A (59:02)

I mean, you can see it in the Color Purple. You can see it in Morrison. Like, there's so much.

B (59:06)

There's so much there that's a foundational thing. If you're interested in dialect or you like to see how different aspects of different writers from different cultures play with language. That's a yes.

A (59:18)

Yeah, I think if you do, if you know that you struggle with dialect, there's going to be large parts.

B (59:23)

Do it on audio.

A (59:24)

There's really tough to get through. And like we say, the gender politics are extremely progressive for the day. But Teekake, who again, is not presented as perfect, Right. He's not perfected as a paragon, but he is. Neither is he imprisoned or taken to task within the text for, you know, beating Janie. Bad enough that people can see it, right? I think that's what they describes. Like you could see.

B (59:46)

Yeah, people can see her bruises.

A (59:47)

People can see it here. I'm adding a new section here.

B (59:50)

Let's do it.

A (59:51)

This is something I used to use when I was teaching 18 year olds. But what's good enough for an 18 year old? What are the immortal questions that art asks? Right. I'm not going to go through all these, but which of these are primary here, I'll give you a few. You can tell me what you think. Maybe we could spend a minute on. Okay. One is what is the good life?

C (60:05)

Right?

A (60:05)

What do we want? How do we want to do this? What do I owe my neighbor? Ethics, interpersonal, Humans living together. How do I know what I know? Epistemology, the nature of truth. Is this all there is? So that like, are there gods? Are there other things that are written about philosophy? Metaphysical questions? How do we deal with the certainty of death? What else might there be? Both spiritually, but like other ways of being in the world, other possibilities for human life. And then what's. What's the deal with good and evil? I would listen to Seinfeld's what's the deal with good and evil? I think that would be kind of funny. So which of those are the. There are one or two of those you think are especially germane here.

B (60:44)

What is the good life? And is this all there is? Are the central questions of this book that Janie, over time is developing a clearer and clearer idea of what a good life is for her and that it's one where she has real love with a partner, where she feels respected. She's not just used as, you know, household help, where she has freedom and autonomy and she can know her own mind and she can express her own mind. And as she develops that understanding of what the good life is for her, it spawns the. Is this all there is? That and those questions feed each other that, like the Logan Killick's first marriage, it's immediately a very bad situation for her. One of the quotes is, Janie's first dream was dead, so she became a woman. Oh, just like, come on. But that. That first dream is dead. Is this all there is? I can't just be with this man for the rest of my life. So let's go off with Joe Starks and see what that. Like, could that be a good life? And she's going to try. It's not like Goldilocks, but she's sort of trying on different versions of what a good life might be with each of these men and getting successively close to closer.

A (62:01)

Right? Yeah. She didn't want to be a de facto mule in the first. Her first relationship, nor did she want to be a trophy wife in her second. Right. And it's interesting, I think, you know, these aren't real people. So there's no, like, let's go back and get in the DeLorean and jump back and flip a bit and see if things turn out differently. But if either Logan or a Joe had turned toward her, like, you know, in a fundamental way, I think she was ready to entertain, like, could I be happy with this? Like, she. It wasn't like a specific vision that if you don't, you don't live up to this, I'm out of here. It's very much like, I don't know that either of them had the capacity to do it, but if they did, sort of like, she was willing to try with both of them, even though the first one was arranged.

B (62:39)

She just wants to be seen. It's that, like, I'm not afraid of death. I'm afraid of being misunderstood. Like, she just wants to be seen and heard and celebrated as she is. And Tea Cake comes closer to than anybody else to that. And they do have some moments, like, genuine lightness and genuine joy and delight in each other. Like, you can sort of hear the giggling coming out of their windows. You know, like, this is the couple that everybody's like, would you please just get a room?

A (63:09)

Right. Yeah. And even would you get a room a couple floors above me? Because literally this is happening. All right, one more question to ask about all these things. Are we sure this isn't about art in writing? I added this one today. I thought you would appreciate it.

B (63:21)

I mean, is the answer to this ever?

A (63:23)

No. No. I don't know that it is ever. No. But tell me why it's not known.

B (63:26)

This one in this particular case, I think this. There's a way of reading this entire book that takes Janie's pursuit of these answers to life as an act of artistic creation. That ultimately Janie understands that the thing she's doing in life is making her life.

A (63:43)

Right.

B (63:43)

And that that itself is an act of artistic creation that Hurston is reflecting on. Like, they don't have a traditional family life with her. And none of these men, they don't have kids. They don't, you know, pursue the nuclear family as it might have looked in 1937. But she's after making something, and it's not a business. It's making the life that she wants. That is her work of art.

A (64:09)

Yeah, I agree. Can't say any better myself. Let's do some quotes. Where do you want to go? You kick off.

B (64:14)

Oh, man, there's just. There's so many great quotes in here, and you captured a lot of them. But there are years that ask questions and years that answer.

A (64:23)

People may have heard some of these, like, that you didn't even know where they came from. Like, they get thrown around.

B (64:27)

And that one just. It gets quoted as Zora Neale Hurston, like, she. Which like. Like she was just, you know, philosophizing one day. But it's the introduction to one of the chapters. And, like, it gets. This shows up a lot around, like, New year's resolutions happening January 1st. I am guilty of this one before I read the book and. Or, like, reread it and really understood the context. But that's a famous one. There's a.

A (64:51)

Well, let's dwell on that for maybe a minute longer. Right. Because I don't want to be the person who just like, says the quote and blows on past it. So, like, that quote is. Okay. There aren't literal years that start on January 1st, and end of some, there's the ask questions. But I think this is about. At some points of life, you are in different modes of understanding what's going on. Like, you can have seeking elements and you can have at rest or, like, complacent or at, you know, kind of peace or stasis element, but it doesn't mean it's not going to be that way all the time. At the very least, it's not going to stay that way.

B (65:23)

Yeah. And you don't usually get to decide.

A (65:26)

Yeah. It doesn't say you get. In some years, you get to ask questions. In some years you get the answers. Some years. And they're not saying they're one for one either. Right. They're just some and some.

B (65:34)

Yeah, but the years, actually. And the years answer the questions here. There's a wonderful moment in a scene where I think it's Janie and Tea Cake are having an interaction and, like, something really sparks for her. And Hurston, or the narrator describes it as for the space of a thought. She was lit up like a transfiguration and just like. I mean, come on. So beautiful. And then one of my faves at the point where she's describing Tea Cake to. I believe it's to Phoebe. She says he can take most any little thing and make summertime out of it. When times is dull then we lives off of that happiness he made Till some more happiness comes along. Just he can take most any little thing and make summertime out of it.

A (66:19)

It's pretty good. Yeah, it's like, pretty good.

B (66:21)

What else do you want?

A (66:23)

There's a couple, like I mentioned, those moments where Janie is. Has her sort of small internal epiphanies of like, this ain't it.

B (66:32)

Yeah.

A (66:33)

But Hurston is really interested in articulating felt ness. Like how something feels like an existential way. So there is a basin in the mind where words float around on thought and thought on sound in sight. Then there is a depth of thought untouched by words. And deeper still, a gulf of formless feeling. Things untouched by thought. So like this, almost Dante's Infernos are, like, getting down to it. Getting down and like, there's. There's up here. And you go down and go down and you go down and like, after all of that is stripped away, there is still something down there that is you. That there's life, that there is meaning. That there's the universe and all the things go into it. And things that are not that are expressions of that. There are avenues to that, but there is something within it all the way down. I thought that was tremendous. At the same time, again, I'm doing some more classics references. So there's this little parable. When God had made the man, he made him out of the stuff that sung all the time and glittered all over. Some angels got jealous and chopped into millions of pieces. But still he glittered and hummed. So they beat him down to nothing but sparks. But each little spark had a shine and a song. So they covered each one over with mud and the lonesomeness and the sparks make them hunt for one another. And that, I think if it's not overt, it's over. It refers to Aristophanes speech in the symposium about how Zeus and the gods, like they said originally, we had two faces and two hearts and we were one body. But we were too happy, the gods were. And they split us in two.

B (68:01)

Yeah, that's.

A (68:02)

And then us, we're always trying to go find the origin of love. It's in references in Hedwig and the Angry Inch.

B (68:07)

I was just about to say, you might also know this from Hedwig at the Angry Edge.

A (68:11)

Yeah, let's see, what else? And then. And then, you know, love is like the sea. This is not free to indirect discourse. I'm not doing the dialect. This is what. This is what Janie has come back to teach Phoebe and. And frankly, herself. It's a moving thing, but still in all it takes the form of the shore it meets. And it's different with every shore. I think that is unbelievably awesome.

C (68:33)

It is.

B (68:33)

And one that you had in the notes that was also in mine. Again, this is in the dialect in the book. But I'll just read it as two things everybody's got to do for themselves. They've got to go to God and they've got to find out about living for themselves. And I think that is like, if you want a thesis for the book, that's what it is that you have to find out about living for yourself. And Janie does it with variable success, taking all kinds of risks with variable amounts of happiness. She does it while making mistakes. She does it while doing great things. But that, that is the like. That's the whole game.

A (69:09)

Yep. Let's end with one of the great endings of all time, frankly. This is Janie at peace. This is free indirect discourse. So it's not Janie herself, but something's going on in her. Here was peace. She pulled in horizon like a great fishnet, pulled it in from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. Older. So much of life in its meshes. She called in her soul to come and see. I mean, I don't know what you want. If you don't want that, I don't know what you want.

B (69:39)

It's such a great reading experience.

A (69:41)

It's a really terrific one. All right, let's move on to trivia adaptations and other things that we can't get out of here without telling people. Let's see. We mentioned a couple of these before. Hurston interviewed later in her life. The last person brought to America as a slave brought over on a ship to illegal in 1880. So we're this to the point earlier, like, this was extremely Slavery. It was extremely present. Many of her papers were saved from being burnt. She had died in her. You know, basically the. The gardener or housekeeper was charged with cleaning out that her room or house. I can't remember what it was. And one of her friends was walking by and saw a fire and pulled a bunch of papers out of the fire. So we have all this posthumous stuff because of her. I did take classes from Robert Hemenway, who wrote the Hearst and Definitive Biography. And that biography came out March of 1978. That's when I came out. What a go.

B (70:32)

What a great month for us.

A (70:34)

March of 1978. Hot takes. I love. I've got a couple.

B (70:39)

I love your hot take here that it sort of makes Sinners feel less interesting.

A (70:43)

Well, did you get that or do you need me to say something about that?

B (70:45)

I mean, I got it, but I think you should say it for the people.

A (70:49)

Well, my first one is that a sequel would rule.

B (70:51)

Yeah.

A (70:51)

I think, like, what does Janie do with the last 40 years of her life?

B (70:54)

Yeah, I think you. The sequel picks up when Janie's like 80 and we see what she's doing.

A (70:59)

Yeah, we get another. Yeah, she get another. Or something else happens there. So I. It reminds. So my favorite part of Sinners is everything until the spoiler alert for Sinners. Like, it's a vampire show.

B (71:09)

Yeah.

A (71:10)

I like them together. I like them getting. Putting the band together and trying to find a way to be in charge, communing with each other and all the mess of it. And then the vampires come and like, I like the movie. I don't want to say that. But what Janie is after is something other than what they're after.

B (71:26)

Yeah.

A (71:27)

I mean, and I just find it more interesting. I just find this more interesting.

B (71:30)

Maybe that's another way of talking about, like, how to know if this is for you or not. Like, if the first act of Sinners was the part of Sinners lit you up and you wanted more. Just in this black community around the same time, like, with what life could have been like, what people are talking about, what the issues are and how relationships are forming. Go to their eyes. We're watching. God. Also, if Ryan Coogler is looking for a next screenplay, a Ryan Coogler adaptation of their.

A (72:00)

I don't know. I wonder. I mean, I wonder. One of my hot takes could have been that. I don't know that an adaptation does a lot like, fine, do it, but like, this is such a language document and a document of interiority in the prose itself. Like, what do I get? I'm not sure. I guess the flood scene would be awesome. You would get some wonderful like, performances. But you also get that.

B (72:19)

I mean, yeah, you would get like Oscar worthy performances if.

A (72:21)

But you get like, it's Delroy Lindo parts. You would get a lot of that stuff from sinners and I would watch that. But I don't know. I think it's doing what it wants to do in the medium in which it was meant to be to be made. This is not a hot take, except I have never had a good take on this type. Their eyes were watching God. It appears about. People thought they were looking in the darkness, but actually they were watching God. Hurston's a noted atheist. Like, she didn't have any stock in organized religion. It's not about spirituality in any meaningful. I mean, it's a. It's a evocative title, but I don't know what it means. I never understood it.

C (72:54)

I.

B (72:55)

My only stab at this is that it's in the context of the storm coming and that they're all gathering and the full quotation. As they sat in company with 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. And like, I mean, a hurricane is an act of God. This storm is an act of or. Or an act of nature. It's something bigger than them. It's something out of their control. And I this, like they seemed to be staring at the dark. Like you seem to be looking at. At something unfathomable, but what you're actually looking at is connection to something bigger and more powerful than you can ever conceive of. And like, it might end you. It didn't really matter to me that Hurston is an atheist because it's clear through the book that the characters are not that like, faith is a part of this community, at least around the.

A (73:47)

Edges, but it's not. It's not a source of meaning or solace. Like, it's there, but it's almost there. Like you need to get soda crackers out the of the barrels.

B (73:54)

But like, that's the two things you have to do in life that Janie says you have to go to God and you have to figure out how to live for yourself.

A (73:59)

Yeah, I think. I think Hurston be happy to cut off that first part of that phrase. That's my other.

B (74:03)

Like, you have to go to God. Is that a way of talking around. You have to die. Like, I don't.

A (74:08)

Yeah, I think. I think that might be a euphemism for just dying. I guess my hot take would be if we do a close reading of Their Eyes Were Watching God, you can break it down a little bit. Like, okay, their eyes were watching God. It could be they were watching God, but the eyes were watching God suggest they weren't doing what they're hold whole self. Right. Just a part of them. Right. So their interior and hearts and souls were somewhere else. And I think in this case it's Janie and TK Each other unearthed. And like, they were watching. They weren't praising. They were like, God is a source of terror. Like, this is a defensive mode. Right. To be watching God, not. This isn't something else. So I. Maybe that's my take. But again, it's a smaller point, but it's one where if people ask me, so what are the titles about? I like. I don't have an amazing. It's an answer.

B (74:52)

It's a great, like, eye catching title, though.

A (74:54)

Oh, it's wonderful and memorable. I mean, she's got. She does not have a lumberjack problem at all. Zora. Their Eyes Were Watching God. I mean, you just don't forget. Yeah. Who these. Rita likes. I mean, Morrison, you know, Beloved is a child of Hurston and this. And it evolved and different.

B (75:11)

There are some scenes in Their Eyes Are Watching God. There's a scene where like, a donkey dies. Like, this poor donkey.

A (75:17)

A lot of mu. A lot of mule talk in Their Eyes Are Watching God.

B (75:20)

This poor mule has been like, mistreated, but not really intentionally. Just his owner is very poor and can't afford to feed him. And the donkey kind of wanders the town. And when the donkey finally dies, like, the whole town throws the donkey a funeral. Everybody takes the day off and it's a whole thing. And it felt to me like that that's a seed of a repeating scene that we get in the SULA by Toni Morrison, what they call the Suicide Day Parade. Like, there's this relationship between Tea Cake and Janie really feels like the seed of Sethe and Paul D's relationship. And Beloved, like, there's a lot. And even just early in the book when Janie is talking about not realizing that she is a black person until she sees like a photograph and recognizes that her skin is darker than the white people's skin, that sort of internalized racism, internalized colorism is all over the bluest eye. So I think if you if you're interested in those elements, if you're. And if you like this language, Morrison is the place to go. And then Morrison ratchets up the difficulty level later in the books. But the Bluest Eye and Sula, certainly. And we'll be talking about the Bluest Eye later in this season.

A (76:27)

I mean, the easiest one for me. And it's cheating because it's Hurston, too. But Dust Tracks on the Road, which is her memoir, is. Is terrific, even if it's not true. Do I care?

B (76:37)

Who cares?

A (76:38)

Who cares? I'm gonna give you a passage here. This is really for you, Rebecca, because I was like, you're gonna like this message. This is her thinking about the end of her life. Like, you know, is this all there is? Like, this is her answer. The springing of the yellow line of morning out of the misty deep of dawn is glory enough for me. I know nothing is in this. I know nothing. I know that nothing is destructive. Things merely change forms when the consciousness we know as life ceases, I know I shall still be part and parcel of the world. I was part of the sun before it rolled into shape and burst forth in the glory of change. I was when the earth was hurled from its fiery rim. I shall return with the earth to Father, Son and still exist in substance. When the sun has lost its fire and disintegrated into infinity to perhaps become a part of. Of the whirling rubble of space, why fear? The stuff of my being is matter ever changing, ever moving, but never lost. So what need of denominations and creeds to deny myself the comfort of all my fellow men? The wide belt of the universe has no need for finger rings. I am one with the infinite and need no other assurance. Holy crap Almighty, should I just thank you, Yoda?

B (77:48)

Throw my Mary Oliver into the sea.

A (77:51)

Well, I mean, I don't know, right?

B (77:53)

That's incredible shit.

A (77:54)

It's unbelievable stuff. And then my next note. Short stories are good, too. Sweat, gilded six bits.

C (77:58)

Okay?

B (77:59)

Gilded six bits. I mean, away with words.

A (78:01)

Truly, away with words. Three to five takeaways. If that was too much. And you need to distill our distillation down.

B (78:09)

Not actually a Harlem Renaissance book. Say two sentences about that, Jeff.

A (78:12)

Well, I mean, it's just later. It's not set in New York. It's not like jazz clubs and gin and all that stuff, like she made her bones there, but at the Harlem Renaissance. If you think of it as a coherent literary moment. Just because Hurston was there in black. And this book. I mean, she was definitely a part of it. But this book doesn't really trade in a lot of the stuff. I mean, it's related to Home to Harlem by Claude McKay and some other things, but I don't. I think of this as a post Harlem Renaissance book. I think she's doing something different here. Hurston is not who you think she is. You know, it's not someone just on a T shirt that like, I don't know. I think people. I think people who haven't read the book or know anything about Hurston kind of think it's more like the Color Purple, which is kind of get lumped in with 70s black writers. But she's different, like meaningfully different in a lot of different ways.

C (78:57)

Yeah.

B (78:57)

I think you can talk about how it's both an adventure story and a love story. And there's a way of reading it where the adventure is about finding your true self and learning to love your true self. And like that Jamie ends up alone from. At the end of these adventures with these men. Because the, the real point is that self liberation.

A (79:15)

Yeah. And then the most famous anode really is Alice Walker's essay about going to Hurston's. Literally going to her unmarked grave and finding it and. And re. Etching it there. Okay, we added one last piece here. I don't know that we'll keep doing this, but like one thing we're trying to do is cover books that, you know, would. Would go into your always already project of becoming well read. Like you're never going to get there, but you can go on the road. So where does this one factor in? How do you do it? So I've got five factors and we can give you ones. This is just not determined. It's just for fun.

B (79:47)

Sure.

A (79:48)

This is just what it is. Each one's going to score from 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest across five factors. So I guess technically possible there's a high score of 50. I've got five categories. I welcome feedback from you and from others. I didn't get any Rebecca feedback. Other than here. Look at this one is historical importance. That's could be actual history, literary history, whatever. Art history, readability. Now like, is it a good readout? Can you get through it? Current relevance of central questions. Like, does it feel like it's about something that still matters to you in the world at large? Book nerd read cred. Like if someone says have you read that? Like, yes, like, oh wow. Like that's, you know, that's a well read. That's A book that matters. And the fifth is sort of a wild card. Like the oh damn fact. Like are you gonna have some moments like oh damn, that's great or oh damn, I didn't know you could do that. Oh damn, that's a wonderful scene and I really care about it. Yeah. So it's a bit of a cheat on historical importance. Any sense I for this one? Maybe it's easy to say like what a 10 would be. 10 is Shakespeare.

B (80:41)

Yeah. Okay.

A (80:42)

Shakespeare is getting a 10 here.

B (80:43)

So 10 is Shakespeare. And like the Odyssey.

A (80:46)

Yeah, Homer Shakespeare. I think Hurston is not a world historical figure. Yeah, like it hasn't been that long. So I don't think you could. I'm thinking seven.

B (80:57)

I was thinking the six. Seven range.

A (80:59)

Six or seven? Yeah, let's do a 6.5. We're just having fun.

B (81:01)

Great.

A (81:02)

Don't hold us to this. Okay. Readability. This one's a tricky one because this is gonna vary, I think considerably.

B (81:08)

I think it really.

A (81:08)

This category and this book in specific. Who.

B (81:11)

I mean I actually found it more readable than I expected going in because I had English teacher's voice.

A (81:17)

Short matters for readability, ability. 200187 pages without forward and afterward.

B (81:21)

I think it's also in the like 6, 7 zone. It doesn't go down easy, but it's not a lot of work.

A (81:26)

Well, what would be 10? The. The fairy Queen by Edmund Spencer or like Beowulf in Middle English?

B (81:31)

Oh wait, it's 10.

A (81:32)

The hardest one. One. One would. That'd be one.

B (81:34)

Yeah.

A (81:35)

What's 10 for readability of something that we'd actually cover. What's it, 10?

B (81:40)

Twilight.

A (81:41)

Well, but it also sucks the though. I mean whatever. Like they're send like Agatha Christie.

B (81:46)

Yeah, Agatha Christie would be a 10.

A (81:48)

Because that's a 10 because he just flies super easy.

B (81:50)

Okay.

A (81:51)

So I think more like a seven. A seven.

B (81:53)

Yeah.

A (81:53)

If that's close. Current relevance of central questions. I mean this is an eight.

B (81:58)

I think it's an eight or a nine.

A (81:59)

Yeah, eight or nine.

B (82:00)

I mean there's a. Like what is life about? How do you find a connection even down to like the. Was it self defense or a mercy killing? What do we do with like. Like complicated relationships, moral questions in relationships, maintaining your own identity. Yeah.

A (82:17)

Book nerd read cred. So it's not a 10. I think it's up there though. Like if you haven't read this, like it's a pretty big hole for. For an American, I'd say especially so it can't be a 10 because it's seven. Seven. Yeah. Oh, damn. Factor eight.

B (82:35)

Oh, I. It's interesting. Like, there aren't a lot of oh, damn moments in this, but the ones that you get are really.

A (82:41)

Oh, damn concentrated. Yeah.

C (82:43)

Yeah.

B (82:44)

So I don't know. Sure.

A (82:47)

Okay, so we're looking at 13, 20, 27, 35.5.

B (82:55)

All right.

A (82:56)

That feels about right. That feels in a hundred years we'll see. You know, because like on the historical stuff, you're competing with stuff that it's never going to catch. Shakespeare just because of time.

B (83:06)

Right, right.

A (83:07)

And the same. And I think one in four bleed into each other.

B (83:11)

Historical importance in the read cred.

A (83:13)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think weirdly, read cred is inverse to read.

B (83:17)

I was just about to say that. That like, the harder something is to read, the higher the read cred is on it. So there's.

A (83:24)

We can mess with it.

B (83:25)

Yeah. And it's not necessarily that, like getting a high score out of 50 is an indication of like an equality, but for like helping you understand what the reading experience will be like. Or if you want to go into this book, which is.

A (83:38)

Well, that's what I'm saying. Like, if you really care about the O dam factor, you're gonna. I mean, we could provide you with like a little here's the ones or the ones that are like actually really hard, or maybe you care about the current relevance of central questions, so on and so forth. So it's not really an aggregate score, but just kind of going them along. Rebecca, this was terrific. Any final thoughts here?

B (83:56)

Man, I just feel like I'm gonna be spoiled by this project and how great the language in these old books.

A (84:03)

Well, we get to pick the winners.

C (84:05)

We do.

A (84:05)

We do at this point. Show notes are available@bookriot.com Listen, you can shoot us an email for now@podcast bookrad.com 0to well, Read is a proud member of the Airwave Podcast Network. Rebecca, thank you so much.

B (84:18)

Good to time.