"'... Ah said Ah'd save de text for you'": recontextualizing the sermon to tell (her)story in Zora Neale Hurston's 'Their Eyes Were Watching God.' (Black South Fiction, Art, Culture)

Zora Neale Hurston writes in Their Eyes Were Watching God (1973) from the interiority of black culture. The fact that she sees religion as a mode of making sense of the experiences of a black tradition makes Their Eyes Were Watching God a strong assertive statement. In contrast, many of the novels of the 1920s and '30s view blackness as a pathology. Van Vechten's Nigger Heaven and McKay's Home to Harlem, for example, emphasize the exotic primitive, while Fauset's There Is Confusion and Larsen's Passing emphasize assimilation. For this reason, Their Eyes Were Watching God, along with Hurston's work as an anthropologist and folklorist, bears witness to the desire of black people to argue, live, love, and die in a place of their own creation and to center themselves in a universe independent of the tyranny of manmade states of oppression. That she set her novel of romantic love in Eatonville, Florida, one of the first all-black towns in the United States, is itself a religious expression. Hurston, thus, challenges black writers to enter the mainstream of American society on their own terms, which means to accept and promote the integrity of black culture. To the extent that she externalizes through language the values of black culture, Hurston saves the text.

The power of Hurston in Their Eyes Were Watching God centers on her ability to, fix extant cultural values in language and in the work of art. Like the preacher, Hurston's artistic gift "consists in discovering the not-yet-discovered subsistent values and meanings that make up [her text's] object in the creative act which is the revelation of that object in and through the language" (Vivas 1073-74; Fontenot 38-41). In other words, Their Eyes Were Watching God brings the meanings and values of the culture to its participants' attention. The narrative performs a normative function, since the participants espouse the values and meanings which the narrative reveals.

The end product of Hurston's vision is to create a new black woman, through a critique of the past. In looking back, Janie also looks forward to the day when American women of African descent will no longer be the mules of the world. Using familiar Bible-based tropes and metaphors, Hurston drives to the heart of a series of related questions: What does it mean to be black and female in America? What are the terms of definition for women outside the traditional hierarchies? Is female status negated without a male defining principle? And she raises these questions to reveal to the black community the one face it can never see - its own.

Although Hurston's narrative focuses on the emergence of a female self in a male-dominated world, she tells her magnificent story of romantic love against the background of church and extrachurch modes of expression. Understanding this fact helps to explain those sections of the narrative that have been said to have no meaning beyond their entertainment value (Hemenway 218). Hurston knew that the religious life of Americans of African descent manifests itself in all spheres of this fife. The extrachurch modes of expression possess great critical and creative powers that have often touched deeper religious issues regarding the true situation of black communities than those of the institutional black church. These church and extrachurch modes of expressions may be seen in the novel's narrative structure, in the texture of Hurston's language and imagery, and in the manner in which her language itself is alive with history and historical struggle in order to convey the story of the emergence of a female self in a male-dominated world.

Divided into three sections that correspond roughly to modes of religious expression, Their Eyes Were Watching God celebrates the art of the community in such a manner that "the harsh edges of life in a Jim Crow South seldom come into view" (Hemenway 218). Section one has a spiritual orientation and covers the time of Janie's marriage to Logan Killicks (which sets in motion the initial tension in the novel - that between Janie and her grandmother over what a woman ought to be and do); section two focuses on the richness and diversity of the styles of life in the black community (black peoples' will to adorn and our sense of drama are daily put on display on Joe Starks's storefront porch); and section three, which focuses on the blues impulse, covers Janie's life with Tea Cake in the Everglades (and provides movement toward the resolution of the tension that has sent Janie to the horizon and back). Given Janie's history, an over-arching question that unifies these sections is: What rescues Janie from becoming a full-fledged blues figure - and is Hurston ambivalent about this?

Their Eyes Were Watching God is a story within a story, deeply influenced by the power of language and myth in and out of the homiletical mode. The received language "dictates" that Their Eyes Were Watching God, though set in Florida, must occur outside of a specific time and place. (This strategy receives its fullest deployment in James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain.) By placing her narrative in the context of the Christian journey, itself a romance, Hurston overrides reader expectation that the protagonist should marry her black prince charming and live happily ever after. Having returned from the horizon, Janie Crawford represents the mature voice of experience and wisdom as she retrospectively tells her story to one who is, from an experiential point of view, a novice. Janie intends to convert Pheoby and the reader/participant. Her first move in her conversion narrative is to revise the patriarchal vision of seeing the world through a male dialectic.

Janie's story, as sermon and testimony, merges the material with the spiritual world. This constitutes the "unsaid" in the novel's arrestingly powerful opening scene:

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 mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.

Now, women forget all those things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.(1)

Hurston presents us with the classical Biblical picture of the looker standing before the horizon and wondering if she and the horizon shall ever meet. The looker sees a picture that is both in time and timeless, finite and infinite. The ships on the horizon are emblematic of the dreams of the person standing on shore. This timeless picture speaks of a person's desire to be related to God, the ultimate Other - "a need in the moment of existence to belong to be related to a beginning and to an end" (Kermode 4).

As her story unfolds, we come to that the naive, sixteen-year-old Janie, as the Looker, stands before the horizon (the pear tree in bloom) as one whose spiritual loyalties are "completely divided, as [i]s, without question, her mind" (Walker 236). Her spiritual loyalties are divided because she has not yet earned the unspeakable intimacy that binds the community of faith. In contrast to her grandmother, Janie lacks the faith-knowledge that comes from a firsthand experience with the Holy Spirit.

Faith-knowledge does not rely on the evidence of the senses but is, in the scriptural phrase, "the evidence of things not seen" - that is, not presented to sense-perception - and it would lose its essential nature and be transformed into a mere sorry empirical knowledge if it relied on any other evidence than "the witness of the Holy Spirit" (Otto 228), which is not that of sense-experience .

Sustained by her faith-knowledge born in the midnight of despair of the slave experience, Nanny, a recognizable figure in the black community, breaks the pervasive silence of her sixteen-year "silent worship," as she passionately tells Janie of her dream. Her sermonic monologue, one of the most moving scenes in all of black American literature, serves to order experience. Janie's life is the sermon, as Nanny makes clear.

"Ah wanted to preach a great sermon about colored women sittin' on high, but they wasn't no pulpit for me. Freedom found me wid a baby daughter in mah arms, so [on my knees] Ah said [to my God] Ah'd take a broom and a cook-pot and throw up a highway through de wilderness for her. She would expound what Ah felt. But somehow she got lost offa de highway and next thing Ah knowed here you was in de world. So whilst Ah was tendin' you of nights Ah said Ah'd save de text for you." (15-16)

The text that Nanny saves is the cultural genealogy of black America in general and the black woman in particular. This believable, manageable fiction centers on an interpretation of history that is consistent with a Judeo-Christian view that emphasizes patience, humility, and good nature. Created by blacks in the face of limited options, this interpretation of history makes it possible for many in the oppressed corporate community to interpret their behavior as being Christ-like. In fact, the posture adopted by Nanny is necessary for the maintenance of self-esteem, rather than as the realization of the Christian ideal. With each of her three marriages, Janie challenges this externally imposed stereotype, which served in slave days as the ideal self-image for the corporate community (Fullinwider 27-28).

Janie's application of the text, her reinterpretation of history, provides her with the impetus to break free of gendered silence and inferior status. In her movement from passive looker to active participant, Janie discovers that, to change one's way of thinking, the individual must change her perceptions of the world. Whereas Nanny and Janie share the same mythic belief system, each differs in her choice of an end to reach the goal, he dream.

In many respects, the tension to be resolved in the Nanny-Janie argument involves the route to freedom and respectability for the black woman. This tension is presented in the novel as two competing perspectives on reality: Janie's romantic vision, and her grandmother's pragmatic grounding in reality. They, however, have different interpretations and applications of the dream of "|whut a woman oughta be and to do'" (15), which is to say, they have different interpretations of history. Whereas Nanny, whose brooding presence dominates the narrative, sees the dream as protection and security, Janie sees Nanny's dream as restrictive; it circumscribed existence. The grandmother's dream has no room for an idyllic view of nature. For Nanny the pressure of history is a pressure in favor of remembering and not forgetting whereas for Janie the pressure of history is in favor of forgetting and against remembering (Fish 6).

The tension between Nanny and Janie as presented in the opening paragraphs centers on the highly charged word truth, meaning |to be free from other people's fictions.' What is the truth as socially constructed: (1) security and respect (Logan Killicks); (2) excessive competition and overcompensation as a result of marginalization (Joe Starks); or (3) the sensualization of pain and pleasure (Tea Cake and life on the Everglades)? These versions of the truth, presented from the perspective of black males, confront the female Looker as she stands before the horizon: "Now women forget all those things they don't want to remember and remember everything they don't want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly."

This enigmatic paragraph begins to make sense in the wake of Jody's death, when Janie allows her suppressed emotions to surface: "She had an inside and an outside now and suddenly she knew how not to mix them" (68). Janie has come to an awareness that her grandmother had pointed her in the wrong direction - the realization that her grandmother's best of intentions had contributed to her divided self:

She had been getting ready for her great journey to the horizons in search of people; it was important to all the world that she should find them and they find her But she had been whipped like a cur dog, and run off down a back road after things. It was all according to the way you see things. Some people could look at a mud-puddle and see an ocean with ships. But Nanny belonged to that other kind that loved to deal in scraps. Here Nanny had taken the biggest thing God ever made, the horizon - for no matter how far a person can go the horizon is still way beyond you - and pinched it in to such a little bit of a thing that she could tie it about her granddaughter's neck tight enough to choke her. (85)

In the wake of this realization, Janie begins earnestly the process of her search for self and form, the process of finding a voice and creating a woman. The process of healing her divided mind includes the rejection of protection and security, which Nanny, Logan and Jody sought to provide, and entering into a relationship with a man regarded as her social inferior. Coming to see her grandmother's well-intended actions as a fiction, Janie, in her search for self and form, turns her world upside down in order to make it rightside up. The break from gendered silence - exemplified by the negative community of gossiping women who sit on the front porch - involves the reconnection of subject (Janie) and object (pear tree) on the same imaginative plum, that is, Janie, in her quest, unknowingly sets out to smash a fiction that has outlived its usefulness - black women as the mules of the world.

The polarities represented by Nanny and Janie in her movement toward the horizon stem from Janie's desire to seek an authentic place for an expression of the autonomy and independence of her consciousness:

The desire for an authentic place for the expression of this reality is the source of the revolutionary tendencies in [black religion]. But on the level of human consciousness, religions of the oppressed create in another manner. The hegemony of the oppressors is understood as a myth - a myth in the two major senses, as true and as fictive. It is true as a structure with which one must deal in a day-to-day manner if one is to persevere, but it is fictive as far as any ontological significance is concerned. (Long 169-70)

It is in their day-to-day existence as laborers that members of the oppressed community challenge the oppressors' definition of them. Their autonomy arises from their labor, but paradoxically their autonomy takes on a fictive character. The principal figures in Janie's life respond to the contradictory nature of myth as true in a variety of ways. Nanny's intimate knowledge of the violence perpetuated upon the corporate community dictates her determination to have Janie many in order to protect her granddaughter from such a history. Joe Starks's response to history is to overcompensate by lording his accomplishments over those of his fellow citizens. Tea Cake's response is to seek freedom and release through his music and style of life; the perpetual mobility of this blues figure is indicative of his not becoming "institutionally" dependent on a system over which he exercises no control. Tea Cake remains outside the system. Though the blues as a "religious" counterstatement against the fictive character of the autonomy of the corporate community stands outside the sway of the institutional church, the community of faith (Nanny) understands its anarchic personality. In her movement toward the horizon, the sheltered Janie will come to understand the fugitive element that makes the music swing, jump, and cry.

Crayon Enlargements

In the Eatonville section of the novel, Hurston focuses on the style of life in a vibrant and dynamic community. From her perspective, best-foot forward presentations of the folk represent the triumph of the human spirit over oppression, meaning that black enjoyment of life "is not solely a product of defensive reactions" to the dominant white culture.(1) Hurston believes that the distinguishing feature, the corporate signature, of the African imagination to America is creativity - the ability to invest the Other's linguistic structure with new meanings. In "Characteristics of Negro Expression," she refers to thus irrespressible quality as "the will to adorn" (50). That which permeates the soul of the black community is drama. Hurston comments:

Every phase of Negro life is highly dramatized. No matter how joyful or how sad the case there is sufficient poise for drama. Everything is acted out. Unconsciously for the most part of course. There is an impromptu ceremony always ready for every hour of life. No little moment passes unadorned. ("Characteristics" 49)

Hurston implicitly presents blacks as offering an image of vitality to a civilization dimly aware of its lack of both vitality and color (Bennett 149).

In terms of narrative tension Hurston contrasts this vitality with the increasingly withdrawn Janie, who is excluded from participating in the storytelling sessions, the "crayon enlargements of life" (48) on the store front porch. She has become a prisoner of the pretty picture of "|whut a woman oughta be and to do'" as outlined by Joe when he courted her: "|A pretty doll-baby lak you is made to sit on de front porch and rock and fan yo'self and eat p'taters dat other folks plant just special for you'" (28).

The imaginative freedom that the big-picture talkers have on the front porch contrasts with Janie's despair inside the store, where she silently listens with the dumb obedience of a mule. Forced to become a passive observer, Janie longs to participate in these spirited storytelling sessions, the male community in unison enjoying release from the day's work. "Janie loved the conversation and sometimes she thought up good stories on the mule, but Joe had forbidden her to indulge" (50). The restricted space gnaws away at her soul. Squeezed out of the big picture, an appendage that derives her identity through her husband, Mrs. Mayor Starks finds herself ensnared in a choking kind of love; this is not what she envisioned under the pear tree.

Reserved for the big-picture talkers, the porch of Joe Starks's store is treated as a sacred space wherein secular performances take place. Within this space, the storytellers exhibit the creative capacities of black people defining themselves in the order of things. Like their preacher counterparts, the personae the storytellers employ in performance sanction these men as guardians of the word, of the text - of the aesthetic values of the community. The performance, with its dynamic give-and-take that one associates with the black church, runs through all segments of black life.

Matt Bonner's decrepit mule is the focal point of the daily drama played out in the ritual space of Joe's store-front porch. Sam and Lige and Walter take the lead in creating the "pictures" the male members pass around, which an envious Janie rightly divines as "crayon enlargements of life" (48):

"Dat mule uh yourn, Matt. You better go see 'bout him. He's bad off."

"Where 'bouts? Did he wade in de lake and uh alligator ketch him?" "Worser'n dat. De womenfolks got yo' mule. When Ah come round de lake 'bout noontime mah wife and some others had 'im flat on de ground usin' his sides fuh uh wash board."

The great clap of laughter that they have been holding in, bursts out. Sam never cracks a smile. "Yeah Matt, dat mule so skinny till de women is usin! his rib bones fuh uh rub-board, and hangin' things out on his hock-bones tuh dry." (49)

As a mode of religious expression, these good-natured stories show that the creative capacities of blacks are not dependent on living in trembling and fear of the white man - nor do the tales use white oppression as a point of departure. Coexisting with the laughter, banter, and humor of the jokes about Matt Bonner's mule are references to poverty and marginality, as well as the life-and-death struggle for survival especially when the buzzards swoop down to eat the dead mule. The humor, however, takes the edge off the tale tellers' poverty and marginality (the sides of the mule are so flat as to be used as wash boards).

The stories told on Joe Starks's porch appear to have significance beyond their immediate entertainment value. The people who make fun of Matt Bonner's tired mule can identify with this beast of burden, that works in dumb obedience and silence much as they have been trained - and more, pronounced - to do, and as Joe has trained Janie to do. But unlike the mule, Janie rebels rather than going silently to her grave.

Imagistically, the humor inherent in the mock funeral for the mule may be read on two levels. First, the parody of mule heaven crystallizes the people's desire for a better world - plenty of food and no work Second, it echoes Nanny's desire not to have Janie work with little or no tangible reward for self. The frustrated Janie is isolated from the imaginative life of the community, where" . . . the people [specifically, the men] sat around on the porch and passed around the pictures of their thoughts for the others to look at and see . . ." (48).

Overall the stories in this section are not so much documents for understanding black life as they are representations of Hurston's attempt to capture the vibrancy and drama that are part of the creative soul of black America. As Hemenway notes, Hurston's efforts "are intended to show rather than tell the assumption being that both behavior and art will become self-evident as the tale texts (performance events) accrued during the reading" (168).

To know how people view the world around them is to understand how they evaluate life; and people's temporal and nontemporal evaluations of life provide them with a "charter" of action, a guide to behavior. In this regard, Hurston makes it explicit that Christian explanations have never proved fully adequate for blacks, whose sensibilities are deeply rooted in folk traditions. In chapter 8, for example, the reader/spectator is more inclined to rejoice in Janie's confronting Joe on his deathbed about the woman she has become - declaring her independence - than to note the extent in which the extrachurch (remnants of African traditional religion) informs this pivotal scene. Hurston, in a statement radical for its time, brings to the surf,ace these submerged values, beliefs, and practices in the mot doctor and Janie's description of Joe's death. Though Hurston does not give an exegetical explanation of the religious values which underlie Joe's calling on the root doctor, she makes it clear that his apparent act of desperation is interrelated with Janie's description of her husband's death. in making these extrachurch forms of expressions central to our under-standing of Joe and Janie Starks, the town's most venerated citizens Hurston perceptively reveals the epic complexity of black life.

As he nears death, the status-conscious Joe engages the assistance of a conjure man to ward off the spell he believes Janie, his wife of twenty years, has had put on him. Hurston suggests that, though African traditional religion and medicine, which the root doctor represents, have been forced underground, these once-viable traditional values and outlooks continue to exist and to exercise an influence among segments of the corporate community, as Pheoby indicates in her all-knowing, sympathetic response to the shocked Janie: "|Janie, Ah thought maybe de thing would die down and you never would know nothin' 'bout it, but it's been singin' round here ever since de big fuss in de store dat Joe was |fixed' and you wuz de one dat did it'" (78).

As a representative of a once-proud living tradition, the root doctor has been forced underground and divested of an essential dimension of his raison d'etre. Known in Africa as medicine men, herbalists, traditional doctors, or wagangas, knowledgeable in religious matters, these influential African men and women are expected "to be trustworthy, upright morally, friendly, willing and ready to serve, able to discern people's needs and not be exorbitant in their charges" (Mbiti 218). But in the face of an uncompromising and indifferent Christianity, Hurston's root doctor, as a remnant of African traditional religion and medicine on the North American continent, is forced to stand outside the dominant Christian culture as something foreign and alien (Shorter 1-2). The root doctor in America, as the public face of a submerged religion, is reduced to a caricature of his or her former self. Operating at the edge of American society, the root doctor is more likely to be a charlatan or hustler than "the friend of the community [who] comes into the picture at many points in individual and community life" (Mbiti 218).

Hurston demonstrates her understanding of the complexity of the black experience with its discontinuity-within-continuity in the stressful departure scene between Joe and Janie. That this scene is filled with subtle juxtaposition of thought and idea becomes apparent when Janie begins think of Death,

that strange being with the huge square toes who lived way in the West. The great one who lived in the straighthouse like a platform without sides to it, and without a roof. What need has Death for a cover, and what winds can blow against him? He stands in his high house that overlooks the world. Stands watchful and motionless all day with his sword drawn back, waiting for the messenger to bid him come. Been standing there before there was a where or a when or a then. (79-80)

Janie's conception of death reveals the manner in which language itself is alive with history and the historical to tell of the emergence of a black ethos in an Eurocentric world. Like her African American ancestors before her, Janie uses the language and imagery of the Christian Bible because it was readily available. Nevertheless, her aesthetic orientation differed from those in the dominant community, as is evident in her conceptualization of death. Hurston presents a well-developed religious consciousness that has penetrated the universe in ways the dominant culture has not. The attitude toward death and dying Janie expresses displays a certain intimacy. Her conceptualization is not predicated on fear and stands in sharp contrast to the conventional Western attitude toward death. Death is not final, God has not died in Africa. Physical death is a passage from one realm of existence to another. As long as there is God, man or woman will never be a finite being.

In conjoining the root doctor and death, Hurston is not attempting to depict one woman's knee-jerk rejection based on submerged religious belief. While one might argue that, as a matter of historical genesis, the association might have been awakened in Janie's mind during a moment of stress, the inward and lasting character of these interlocking passages is to make the connection that, in the United States, the root doctor has become separated from his divine calling. Hurston would have us understand that African traditional medicine is a part of African traditional religion (Mbiti 217-52; Shorter 1-19).(2)

What Hurston, in effect, is evoking is the historical genesis of the blues - the reconstitution of self out of a religion that has come to be viewed as foreign and alien. She is talking about black people's ability to squeeze out a son& story, or sermon from the near-lyric, near-tragic situation of their lives as a result of their inability to texturize the world. Ultimately, the text for Hurston is not a fixed object, but a dialectical process in which contradictory elements coexist, in which parts and wholes depend upon each other, and in which negation and affirmation are closely joined. It is in this sense that we can speak of Hurston as showing how an African continuum is maintained. In spite of the fragmentation that has occurred, the corporate community maintain continuity in the face of discontinuity, and discontinuity in the face of continuity.

The Blues Impluse

If Hurston's intent in the first two sections of Their Eyes Were Watching God is to screen out white antipathy, then the last section shows the response of the community to this oppression and to black society's assigned marginality. Hurston does not view the blues so much as the failure of religion as it is the intensification of religious expression m the absence of fundamental checks and balances of the strong against the weak. While the perpetrators of the oppression remain essentially in the background, the effects of their oppression manifest themselves in the hedonistic lifestyle of many in the black community. Not surprisingly, Janie discovers her voice among the socially downcast segment of society, who sensualize pain and pleasure. After twenty years of marriage, Jody dies and Janie falls in love with Vergible "Tea Cake" Woods, a man twelve years younger than she and, by most people's estimations, her social inferior. In a reversal of the romantic moment that we associate with fairy tales such as the Cinderella story, Janie and Tea Cake go to live in the Everglades, rejecting the finery and status of the mayor's house because of their desire to know and love each other.

Janie's life with Tea Cake, a cultural archetype, represents the third and final movement in her march toward the horizon, toward self-definition. Tea Cake, as the blues-made-flesh, is the objectification of Janie's desire. In spite of his sexism, Tea Cake, a rounder, drifter, and day laborer, is the embodiment of the freedom which Janie's divided mind has long sought. And unlike the traditional bluesman, Tea Cake does not love Janie and then leave her.

Tea Cake's life style expresses a practical existential response to the world, and stands in direct opposition to the values Nanny had attempted to instill in Janie. A hedonistic howl replaces silent worship, a desire for security and stability yields to comfort with flux. Whereas Nanny's life is dedicated to the patient forbearance of Protestant Christian worship, Tea Cake's life - with its roots in the slave seculars - represents another dimension of the day-to-day secular expression of the community. Tea Cake's irrepressible laughter embodies the tough-minded spirit of the blues. It stands as a reminder that there is more to the everyday than the struggle for material subsistence.

The tradition which Tea Cake embodies recognizes no dichotomy between a spiritual and a blues mystique. The blues are the spirituals, good is bad, God is the devil and every day is Saturday. The essence of the tradition is the extraordinary tension between the poles of pain and joy, agony and ecstasy, good and bad, Sunday and Saturday (Bennett 50). Unlike the spiritual vision, the blues vision "deals with a world where the inability to solve a problem does not necessarily mean that one can, or ought, to transcend it" (Williams 74-75). Tea Cake, who stands outside the influence of the institutional church responds to his circumscribed existence by squeezing as much pleasure out of the moment as possible. Needless to say, his life style, in contrast to Nanny's patient forbearance, is tantamount to paganism.

Tea Cake, who appears to five only for the moment, comes from "an environment filled with heroic violence, flashing knives, Saturday night liquor fights, and the magnificent turbulence of a blues-filled weekend of pleasure and joy" (Barksdale 110-11). This child of the morning star makes Janie feel alive, vital needed, loved, unlimited - and she gives of herself freely. Janie's blissful "marriage" with Tea Cake lasts for about two years; then a storm hits the Everglades, and God takes His glance away.

During the raging storm, God seems to be speaking. Janie and Tea Cake wait for God to make His move, and when destruction appears imminent, Janie and Tea Cake strike out for the high ground. In a heroic struggle against the raw power of nature, they make it, but not before Tea Cake is bitten by a rabid dog in an effort to save Janie. Several weeks later, Janie is forced to kill the man she loves. As "a glance from God "(102), Tea Cake has been temporary. "The Lord glveth, and the Lord taketh away' (Howard 105-06).

Janie's response to the flood is not simply intellectual; it is experiential and total. It is a religious response born out of her having come to terms with the impenetrable majesty of the divine. For Janie, the experience of mysterium tremendum is brought to bear when she is suspended between life and death:

"If you kin see de light at daybreak, you don't keer if you die at dusk. It's so many people never seen de light at all. Ah wuz fumblin' round and God opened de door."...

The wind came back with triple fury, and put out the light for the last time. They sat in company with the others in other shanties, their eyes straining against crude walls and their souls asking if He meant to measure their puny might against His. They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God. (151)

The storm in this, Janie's last movement toward the horizon, symbolizes the struggle the corporate black community has to come to terms with in the oppressor's negation of its image. Out of this negation, the mythic consciousness seeks a new beginning in the future by imagining an original beginning. The social implications of this religious experience enable the oppressed community to dehistoricize the oppressor's hegemonic dominance. Metaphorically, the phrase their eyes were watching God means the creation of a new form of humanity - one that is no longer based on the master-slave dialectic. The utopian and eschatological dimensions of the religions of the oppressed stem from this modality - which Hurston arrests by concluding her moving story of romantic love with a flourish of Christian iconography (Long 158-72).

With the spellbound Pheoby at her side, Janie struggles to find her voice and, equally important, an audience that will give assent to her testimony. Janie taps into the responsive mythology of the black sermon as she assigns meaning to her experience. She exercises autonomy in making her world through language. However, while the language of the black church provides her one means of translating her experience into a medium which can be comprehended easily by a member of her aesthetic community, Hurston keeps before us the inescapable fact that the community acts upon Janie, and Janie upon the community. She differs from her community in that her action represents a break from gendered silence.

The logical conclusion to Janie's female-centered discourse occurs when Pheoby, who aspires" 'to sit on de front porch'" (28), undergoes a transformation. With the exhilaration that only the newly converted can know, Pheoby enthusiastically becomes Janie's disciple:

"Lawd!" Pheoby breathed out heavily, "Ah done growed ten feet higher from jug, listenin' tuh you, Janie. Ah ain't satisfied wid mahself no mo'. Ah means tuh make Sam take me fishin' wid him after this. Nobody and the negative community of women and the signifying men] better not criticize yuh in mah hearin'." (182-83)

Pheoby responds excitedly to Janie's call to break with hierarchies of representation and to stop seeing herself as a silent subject It is significant that Janie comes to Pheoby, religiously speaking, from a point of strength, not coping. She knows who her God is. She does not seek confirmation for her actions, but affirmation of her voice. The religious imagination of the community enters into Janie's verbal consciousness and shapes her response to historical pressures.

The language of the black church is a communal language invested with authority. Not only does thls communal language give Janie voice and legitimacy, but it also sustains her. Through it, she can prevent the memory of Tea Cake from dying. The connection to romance - a vertical language - becomes apparent to the mesmerized Pheoby, as well as the reader/spectator. Janie's ritual retelling of her journey toward the horizon enables her to suspend the rules of time and space as she moves toward the climatic moment in her sermon - the tragic death of her beloved Tea Cake. Each time Janie tells of their short but intense life together, she relives the experience, much as Christians do when they participate in the Eucharist In fact Their Eyes Were Watching God may be viewed as a series of revelations leading toward ultimate revelation - Janie's being reunited in the spirit with Tea Cake.

The novel ends where it began, with the perceptual field of the narrator, who releases it from the temporal world. In this way, Janie and Tea Cake achieve a greater freedom in the world tomorrow, and Janie triumphs over her critics, the negative community of gossiping women to whom the reader is introduced in the book's opening sequence. With her spiritual loyalties no longer divided, Janie, in a picture at least as arresting as the novel's opening scene, draws the various strands of her sermon together:

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. (184)

In pulling the fish net around her shoulders, Janie arrests the "eschablogical despair' she has experienced (Kermode 9). An optimist and romantic, Janie seeks a larger space for herself and her life's story; her quest involves woman's timeless search for freedom and wholeness. Her charge to her new convert is" ' ... you got to go there tuh know there'" (183). Janie, in her movement toward the horizon (i.e., in the successful execution of her performance via the sermon), is transformed from blues figure to prophet. In so doing, she both achieves personal fulfillment and assumes a communal role traditionally reserved for males. She appropriates tropes of creation "She had given away everything in their little house except a package of garden seed that Tea Cake had bought to plant" [182]) and reunion ("She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net") in order to insert her voice into history.(3)

In the end, Janie's sermon becomes a poetry of affirmation - with self, community, and loved ones. Janie and Pheoby are uplifted through the preached word. Operating from a position of strength within the ethos of her community, Janie achieves an unspeakable intimacy that bonds her community of faith.

Notes

(1) My comments in this section are informed by the observations of Hurston's biographer Robert Hemenway (221). Part of Hazel Carby's project is to demystify the idealization of the folk. (2) I have written at greater length about voodoo as a submerged religion in "Society and Self." (3) For a critique of the "prophetic moment" as a distinctly male enterprise, see Krasner 113.

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