By Angela Ritter

Janie Crawford’s journey in Their Eyes Were Watching God, is one fraught with pain, danger, joy, and sorrow. It is a journey that she must take to answer the questions burning in her very soul. She must know if the secrets spoken to her by the pear tree are truly attainable. They must be, for she can feel them in her very being. These secrets are the gauge by which she will measure all of her relationships, weighing each one to see if it is of the correct weight and measure. Hurston alludes to a woman’s feelings, “The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly” (Hurston 1). In Janie’s heart, no matter how long the road, nothing less than the dream will do.

Janie’s ideal of marriage is spoken to her spirit while she watches the pear tree in bloom. This is knowledge that could only be passed to her from a higher being. She has nothing in her immediate life to corroborate such a vision. She had been raised by her grandmother, who has never been married. Janie herself is a product of rape and not love. The ideal marriage of the time is centered on possession and security as the defining mechanism of love. If a woman has a roof over her head and she has a husband who keeps her secure, then she should be happy and content with that life. Janie wants a man who speaks to her in the poetry of the pear tree, one who understands the dance of the bee and the bloom.

Janie’s first relationship does not fit the dream from the start. Logan Killicks is the ideal man in the eyes of Janie’s grandmother. He will provide Janie with a home and land and, most important to Nanny, security. Janie does not want to marry Logan from the very beginning. He does not look like her dream and he definitely does not speak in the poetry of her dream. The only catalyst that propels Janie into this relationship is her feeling of duty to Nanny. “Did marriage compel love like the sun the day?” (21). Surely if this is all that marriage is supposed to be, she will begin to feel the dream in Logan. As time passes, she realizes he does not measure up to even a granule on her scale.

Soon her eyes begin to search the road for the dream that her heart still longs for. The dust of the road conjures up a vision for Janie in Joe Starks. He begins to woo her with the dream of change. She is at first skeptical because he still is not tipping the scale in the right direction. Hurston opines that, “Janie pulled back a long time because he did not represent sun-up and pollen and blooming trees, but he spoke for a far horizon” (29). If Joe Starks was not to become the ideal, then perhaps she could see the ideal from the far horizon he would take her to. Janie’s dream spoke to her of a partnership that would be equal in all things: a partnership that would share in passions and intellect. This was not to be with Joe Starks, for his dream spoke to him of being the “Big Voice.” This left Janie no room for equality with Joe Starks. In fact, she became so buried by Joe that she could no longer see the road let alone the far horizon! “The years took all the fight out of Janie’s face. For a while she thought it was gone from her soul” (76). After Joe’s death, Janie is able to look upon the road of her heart again and dream of the far horizon.

The day that the dream becomes a reality and the scales finally find their balance, is the day that a vision named Tea Cake walks into her life. She has searched for the dream for so long and with such disappointing results, that she is afraid to believe that Tea Cake could be that dream. He is young and vibrant and so alive and Janie no longer feels such things about herself. The more time she spends with Tea Cake, the more she hears of the secrets revealed by the pear tree. She has finally found that equality of spirit that she has longed for. Tea Cake is her equal in deed, in voice, and in passion.

Life with Tea Cake would not be a picture of perfection. Life by definition cannot hold such a promise. Janie’s feelings for Tea Cake could be summed up in the old adage ‘Love is blind.’ Janie gives a peek into the mind of a woman in the very beginning. She recounts that, “…women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget” (1). Yes, life with Tea Cake would have its ups and downs, but he had spoken to her the secret of the pear tree. This was a secret that only the dream fulfilled would know. Even the pain of Tea Cake’s death could not take that dream from Janie.

Janie’s journey would take her through many ups and downs. In he forty years she would experience many things: dealing with the reality of her being, losing her Nanny, two loveless marriages, physical abuse, the rapture of great and powerful love, and the loss of that love. This was a journey that Janie had to take in order to find absolution in her life. She had to know if this love that was spoken to her at the pear tree truly existed. Her life could not be complete until she had realized this dream. Even though her time with Tea Cake would be short-lived, it would hold the key to the peace of her soul. The very memory of the love that she had experienced with Tea Cake would be her sustaining force. She would wear it like a blanket to protect her from the elements. “Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder” (193). She no longer had to search for that far off horizon. She had been there and brought it back with her in her heart.

Works Cited Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. 1937. New York: Perennial, 1990.