“Let Them Call It Jazz” presents a type of Rhy’s Woman* who has characteristics that make her an “outcast”, “misfit”, or “other.” Together, Selina’s gender, race, sexuality, and nationality places her as different from the mainstream group of people who inhabit England. She is confronted by situations that target her differences and make life for her in England more alienating and difficult. Her next door neighbor continually complains about Selina, disapproving of everything that makes Selina different to the neighbor. Selina uses singing as a means of self expression despite her hardships. The singing also acts as a type of rebellion to the people who try to criminalize her, chase her away and make her assimilate. When Selina is put in jail it seems as if she has lost all hope, she becomes numb. She also no longer sings. When Selina does not have her singing then she has essentially lost herself. Selina eventually regains her affection toward singing when she hears the Holloway song (though she does not sing herself) and then it is again taken away. Finally she realizes that the Holloway song can never be taken fully away because she knows its true significance. I would think this last thought comforts Selina because it assures her that hope is still alive. But considering the predicted course her tumultuous life will take her, the thought of hope can seem fruitless. Rhys provides this last inclination to show that good things come only momentarily.**

*Learned in class that Selina is not a Rhys woman

**Now considering the Selina is not a Rhys woman, this ending is a lot more uplifting than the endings for the Rhys characters. This could have implications for how Rhys (the author) sees black women dealing with their hardships.

Hurston ramps up her discussion of the politics of race in the last few chapters of Their Eyes Were Watching God. As we discussed earlier, she does, in previous chapters, expound ideas about race relations through Janie’s grandmother and through Mrs. Turner; however, each of those instances are, more or less, figures simply talking about racism/colorism while the events of chapters 18-20 display racism in action, with whites and blacks interacting directly with one another in a clearly politically charged dynamic. We see this when white people commandeer the bridge in the middle of the flood, turning desperate black people away to continue searching for safety (164); when the white men bully Tea Cake and other black men into burying the dead (169); in the disturbing fact that the corpses of black people are dumped into a hole while the bodies of white folks are treated dignifiedly to coffins (171); and in the all-white jury at Janie’s trial (185). Yet Hurston’s depiction of race relations is anything but simple– she does not pit blacks against whites in a battle of “good” vs. “evil” but rather complicates the picture through sympathetic white figures like Dr. Simmons (“The white doctor who had been around so long that he was part of the muck” (175)) and unsympathetic black figures like Mrs. Turner and the pack of colored people who attend Janie’s trial with “their tongues cocked and loaded” (185), ready to pull down a member of their own race. It seems, then, that Hurston is not trying to speak politically or to manufacture a narrative that will further some agenda for her race. Her priority is instead to document relations between humans, with issues of race being undeniably present in her chosen setting.

Even with this surge of racial politics at the end, the novel remains largely a story about Janie and the trials of her heart. In this sense, Hurston places the big (racism) side by side with the small (love) in a rather Woolfian maneuver. Zadie Smith, in a beautiful essay about the novel, denounces the idea that Hurston wrote just another simple romantic tale. She writes,

It’s about a girl who takes some time to find the man she really loves. It is about the discovery of self in and through another. It implies that even the dark and terrible banality of racism can recede to a vanishing point when you understand, and are understood by, another human being. Goddammit if it doesn’t claim that love sets you free.

I absolutely love Zadie Smith’s reading of Janie’s love as a sort of transcendental, liberating force. I think Hurston, though writing as a black female, wanted to write about something larger than issues of race, so she wrote about love. She presents Janie not simply as a black female but as a human. I think we might all identify with Janie to some extent, regardless of our race, gender, class, or education. Her experiences of “self-crushing love” (128), of Death with his “huge square toes” (84), and of Doubt, the “fiend from hell” (108), resonate across the entire human condition. Thus, by centering her novel around Janie and her escapades with love, Hurston makes her story universal, refusing to be pigeonholed by the constraints of racial politics.

It is almost cruelly ironic how Janie and Tea Cake’s relationship comes to an end. Out of all of here husbands and relationships, Tea Cake was the only one who really loved Janie through and through. In regards to her previous husbands, she ran away from Logan, had to basically wait patiently for Jody to die as their relationship deteriorated, but with Tea Cake, she had to commit an act of violence, though that is the last thing she wanted to do, in order to protect herself. She was actually truly happy with Tea Cake and he with her, and that can be seen in the last scene that Tea Cake is coherent and not mad from the rabies. The fact that she has to plan out a “just-in-case” plan of having the 3 empty cartridges go off before Tea Cake can actually shoot her is almost desperately sad, as she tells herself that he would not actually harm her or try to shoot her, just scare her.

How are the reader supposed to feel about Tea Cake’s death and how it happened, along with the aftermath? Janie had to kill him, and, because of that, her love for him is put into question by the town and is only redeemed by his lavish funeral procession. But she actually goes to trial and during that time the whole town questions her love for him. When the funeral does happen, she is noted to not be dressed mournfully, because “she was too busy feeling grief to dress like grief” (pg. 189). The violence involved in Tea Cake’s death, Janie’s part in it, and her trial and grief afterwards, really throws into perspective all the feelings and emotions that she and the reader experience throughout the novel. With her other husbands, Janie feels undervalued, unappreciated, and unfulfilled, but with Tea Cake, she is whole, and yet he ends up acts violently and “ferociously” (pg. 182) towards her because of his sickness and she also must be violent towards him in order to live. The sad irony is that she and Tea Cake had true passion and love for each other and it ended up manifesting into “violence”, and that is how Janie’s story ends; she “survives” the death of her first dream (Logan), the death of a husband who had “rescued” her (Jody), but has to kill the one person that really loved her and made her happy (Tea Cake actually fulfills her “dream”). It is almost as if Janie gets the opposite of a happy ending; however she is content, as she has been to the “horizon and back” (pg. 191). According to what Janie says, the reader too should feel as peace as Janie does.

There have been overlapping themes between the three books we have read that had main character who were women of color, and the way it was handled says a lot about the authors. For one thing, Janie is a mixed-race woman as is Helga Crane. While in Quicksand, Helga’s issues with identity stemmed partially from her bi-racial identity and her inability to truly belong to either community, there were times when I completely forgot that Janie was mixed. With the exception of the constant mention of Janie’s hair, there weren’t a lot of indications of her skin tone. Helga Crane also had more pride in her beauty than Janie. They were both considered beautiful because of their abundance of while features, but only Helga Crane’s narrator constantly mentioned her beauty in such detail and frequency. The only time Janie’s resemblance to white people is mentioned is when she is with Mrs. Turner.

Mrs. Turner is basically Emma Lou. They both believe that lighter is better. The more white characteristics a black person has the better of a person they are. Mrs. Turner even tolerates rude behavior from Janie because she believes “anyone who looked more white folkish than herself was better than she was in her criteria, therefore it was right that they should be cruel to her at times.” Janie on the other hand has absolutely no prejudices when it comes to skin tone. She doesn’t even realize that sort of prejudice exists until she meets Mrs. Turner.

The discussion on gender is also treated differently with every book. With every book we have read the mention of the different ways black women are treated from black men has become more frequent. In Quicksand Helga’s gender is not mentioned often. Although the reader clearly understands that the way Helga is treated has a connection to her gender, especially considering her appearances are mentioned so much, it is never outright mentioned. The Blacker the Berry, has a lot of mentions of race and gender. Emma Lou and her family constantly wish that she had been born a man because dark men are treated much better than dark women. When Emma Lou is in college, the narrator makes a claim that it is in fact the men who have the prejudice because they know that all “important” men have light-skinned wives and so they only look for light-skinned women. The women in actuality have no reason to be skin-prejudice except to make sure they have husbands. In Their Eyes were Watching God, the treatment Janie receives from the men around her, especially Joe Stark and Tea Cake, is closely scrutinized as being gender specific by both the narrator and even Janie herself. When Jody and the men are making fun of women, Janie breaks her silence and states that they don’t understand women.

As I was reading the section about Mrs. Turner’s ideology, I was comparing her ideas to those of Emma Lou in The Blacker the Berry. Mrs. Turner and Emma Lou share the belief that those with lighter skin are better than those with darker skin, but Mrs. Turner seems to have a more pessimistic view of her own position within this hierarchy. Though Mrs. Turner is proud of those physical characteristics that she considers “set her aside from Negroes” (Hurston 134), she eagerly accepts a position of subservience to Janie because she admires her “Caucasian characteristics” (Hurston 139), and Emma Lou is never able to accept anything less than closeness to the “right kind of people.” Emma Lou experiences repeated moments of frustration when others consider her less desirable than women with lighter skin because she does not accept until the end of the novel that the system of racial hierarchy in which she believes places her in a lower position than she thinks she deserves to hold. On the other hand, Mrs. Turner very clearly defines her position within this racial hierarchy and acts accordingly: she believes that she must be subservient to people with Caucasian characteristics, like Janie, but that she ought to be “cruel to those more negroid than herself in direct ratio to their negroness” (Hurston 138). Emma Lou views herself as a victim of this colorist hierarchy, whereas Mrs. Turner actively alternates between subservience and cruelty to uphold the system she so firmly believes in, even though she understands that her physical characteristics prevent her from attaining the ideal that she worships. In her role as an active promoter of this colorist system, Mrs. Turner more closely resembled Emma Lou’s mother than Emma Lou. However, though Emma Lou believes, and rightly, that she is a victim of colorist prejudice, her own scorn of dark-skinned people and admiration for the “right kind of people” promote this system in the same way that Mrs. Turner’s alternately subservient and cruel behavior does.

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, when Janie runs away with Joe, she has a fresh start in life. However the sun does not rise on the horizons of her newfound dreams, instead she watches “the sun plunge into the same crack in the earth from which the night emerged” (33). One reading of this can be  negative: foreshadowing her future days with Joe.

However, earlier passages night’s have more positive associations. Twilight’s coming actually brings people to life: “The sun was gone, but he had left his footprints in the sky. It was time for sitting on porches beside the road. It was time to hear things and talk” (1). During the day they were animals, “mules and other brutes…But now, the sun and the bossman were gone, so the skins felt powerful and human” (1). Nights are often thought to be an end of something, but in Their Eyes Were Watching God, it seems nights are figured in as the beginning. After all, it is during nights when dreams are most vivid.

Maybe this is stretching the metaphor a little too far, but I remember that the sun is traditionally gendered male, while the moon is seen as female. I wonder if this somehow ties into the fact that the book opens with the statement of men of having no control over their dreams, while for women, “the dream is the truth” (1). Anyways, it’s interesting to keep these different binaries (man and woman, sun and moon, day and night) in mind while reading the book.