Their Eyes Were Watching God

Janie’s hair is long and somewhat straight; it symbolizes her sexuality and her femininity. It is also an important marker of the impact of colorism on Black beauty standards.

Janie’s hair is the first reason her three husbands find her attractive. Joe Stark’s impulse once he marries Janie is to force her to cover her hair in public and thus assert his control over her sexuality. One of Janie’s first acts after his death is to burn the scarves he forced her to wear and thus reclaim control over her own body and desires. Tea Cake seems to find her hair irresistible, so when Janie accepts his crossing of personal boundaries by grooming her hair while she sleeps, Janie is indicating that she will accept his love. Her long plait, when she returns to the town after the death of Tea Cake, is just one of many indications that she is still sexually potent.

The emphasis on the length and texture of Janie’s hair is a topic of frequent conversation throughout the novel. The fetishization of her hair partly reflects the fact that long, uncoiled hair more closely approximates the hair of prosperous white women. As the conflict between Tea Cake and the Turners makes clear, colorism is partly responsible for the perception that Janie is beautiful.

From the very beginning of the novel, Hurston uses the road and the horizon to symbolize Janie’s hunger for experience and freedom. At the start of the novel, Janie waits at the road for someone or something to happen to her. Her passive inability to see what is over the horizon shows her acceptance of societal norms, which dictate that women’s identities must be shaped by others. Once Janie steps out onto the road with Tea Cake, however, she assumes more control over her life and embraces a wider experience, even though she still follows a man to determine the course of her life.

At the end of the novel, Janie clears “road-dust out of her hair” (192) and “pull[s] the horizon” in and “drape[s] it over her shoulder” (193), metaphorical acts that symbolize her newfound self-sufficiency. She no longer needs the road or the horizon to understand who she is.

The muck is the Everglades of Florida, an important symbol of the diversity of the South and of Janie’s deep engagement with life once she sets out on the road with Tea Cake. In the muck, Janie encounters Seminoles and Bahamians who congregate seasonally to work in the fields. This mix of cultures is an accurate reflection of the fact that the South includes more diversity than just African Americans and white Americans.

Being in the muck is also a figure of speech that means getting muddied up. For Janie, who has spent her life from 16 through her forties trapped in a store and in her second husband’s big house, living in the muck puts her in close contact with working-class Black people. Her engagement with these neighbors is her first opportunity to participate fully in the life and culture of the South, making the muck an important precondition for her achievement of self at this stage in the novel.

The mule is a literal and metaphorical figure in the novel associated with labor and burdens. Nanny calls Black women “de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see. Ah been prayin’ fah it tuh be different” (14). Nanny uses the mule to speak to her experience as an enslaved woman who is forced to have her enslaver’s children and to labor in ways that ignore her desire for self-expression and freedom. Hurston uses the mule to express the multiple forms of oppression African American women face because of race, gender, and class.

There is also a literal mule in the story, the one who belongs to Matt Bonner and around whom a whole mythology springs up in Eatonville. The ways the community interacts with the mule—Joe buying the animal to put him out to pasture and its funeral—shows the importance of folk and storytelling culture in the novel.

Hurston uses the porch of Joe’s store in Eatonville as a symbol of community and of the centrality of storytelling to African Americans in the South. The porch dwellers serve as a chorus that articulates the values of the community as they both look down on and envy Janie’s violation of those values. The porch is also the scene of courtships, conflicts, and verbal contests that establish the social hierarchy in the town.

Logan Killicks is the owner of 60 acres—20 more acres than the 40 acres that African Americans believed would be the foundation of financial security after their emancipation from slavery. His 60 acres represent Black material prosperity, while the misery that exists between Logan and Janie, despite these 60 acres, shows that material prosperity will never be a replacement for happiness.

Janie is forced to fight for her life by testifying on her own behalf in a courtroom presided over by a white judge and a white jury. The courtroom is also a site where white individuals explicitly silence Tea Cake’s friends by reminding them that their race prevents them from having any standing. The court is one of the novel’s few overt symbols of white supremacy and its power over the lives of African Americans.