Their Eyes Were Watching God. I've heard about this book for years, and idly wondered about it. The title sounded one hair short of pretentious.

I know better now. But it wasn't easy for this white boy to get there.

Zora Neale Hurston's 1937 novel, by far her most famous work, has become an intimidating icon of black feminism and scholarship. Alice Walker is quoted on the cover of the paperback: "There is no book more important to me than this one."

Initially I found the book exasperating to read. Hurston faithfully recreates the language and tone of poor, undereducated blacks in the deep south. This results in sentences that read, "Who Ah'm goin' tuh marry off-hand lak dat? Ah don't know nobody."

It would be outrageous for anyone to write that kind of prose now, it is so non-p.c. and out of fashion. Hurston set out to portray the life she knew and the language she heard. She avoided the literate, proletarian prose of her contemporaries in favor of an old-fashioned and startlingly effective portrayal.

Hurston is a sophisticated writer divided between the love of black soil and the people who dig their toes in it, and a wild, exotic love of language for its own sake.

Take two contrasting passages. This one was written by the author who graduated from Howard University and Barnard College:

"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 passage was written by the pure poet:

"This singing she heard that had nothing to do with her ears. The rose of the world was breathing out smell. It followed her through all her waking moments and caressed her in her sleep. It connected itself with other vaguely felt matters that had struck her outside observation and buried themselves in her flesh... Through pollinated air she saw a glorious being coming up the road. In her former blindness she had known him as shiftless Johnny Taylor, tall and lean. That was before the golden dust of pollen had beglamored his rags and her eyes."

Pity the fool who stumbles into THAT beehive of fertility!

Janie Crawford lives at least three lifetimes in this novel. She returns home, sits down to a hot meal delivered by her best friend, and sets out to describe her inner life. The story that follows traces Janie's life picking beans on the Florida muck, her loves, confrontation with survival and death in flood and hurricane, and her growing self-awareness and confidence.

A well-read friend of mine described her love for this book. She suggested that as soon as I finished it I should start over from the beginning. All of a sudden the structure popped out at me, the story made more sense, and I realized how absorbed I had become in this work.

I can see why Alice Walker and other feminists fell in love with this long out-of-fashion author and this novel. It's truly a heroic tale, published in a time when negroes rarely were heroes, rediscovered in the 1960s when black people badly needed new ones.

Yes, Their Eyes Were Watching God is iconic, an unimpeachable social document, and yes, it's a damn good read, too.

Aired Sunday May 6, 2007 at 10:55 am and Wednesday May 9, 2007 at 1:00 pm

Orders/Information:

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neal Hurston. Harper Perennial Modern Classics paperback $13.95. ISBN 0060838671.

Web site co-authored by the Hurston estate and publisher HarperCollins: http://www.zoranealehurston.com/index.html

Welcome to Eatonville, Florida, "the nation's oldest incorporated African-American muncipality" and Zora Neal Hurston's home town in which much of her fiction is set: http://www.zoranealehurstonfestival.com/

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zora_Neale_Hurston

Here's the paragraph containing the title phrase: "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."

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