Their Eyes Were Watching God Synthesis Essay

Throughout American history, black culture has been treated inferior to the white race. Because Africans were brought to the United States against their will, forced into slavery, then eventually freed as American citizens, they wish to be treated equally while maintaining their unique and indigenous cultural values. Whether it is through music, art, or literature, black Americans express their way of life in order to gain authenticity for their community. However, in the case of literature, readers are unable to see color, therefore, writers must reveal cultural identity differences creatively. One style that became very popular after the Civil War is called local color: fiction that features the peculiarities of a particular community. An

In her novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, she uses the protagonist Janie Crawford, a young African American woman who through her three marriages was able to come to peace with herself and the social norms around her, to separate the traits of the black Americans from their white counterparts. Most notably, Hurston’s ironic explanatory critique of religion and use of local color in Their Eyes Were Watching God not only authentically represented the Black American culture of the 1900s, but also captures its values and styles of today.

Religion

One of the ways Hurston portrayed the black community as equal while maintaining their cultural values is through religion. When the Africans were captured and enslaved, their interactions with Christian missionaries spread quickly. However, they faced restrictions by their masters who forbade them from attending church. To get around these issues, enslaved people held secret services with unique styles of praying, singing and worship, which made it become a central identity for their culture. As the title of the novel points out, Hurston emphasizes the important role religion had in the black community, especially during the Florida hurricane in which Janie

In the South, porches are associated as a place where conversation can take place and adults can relax at the end of a hard working day. In Hurston’s novel, “porch talk” is portrayed as gossip time for the neighbors, as the text states, “It was the time for sitting on porches beside the road. It was the time to hear things and talk…They sat in judgment” (pg. 1). The town in which the story takes place in is a small African American community, and here it can be shown that it follows the norm of a typical Southern town at the time. Hurston used porch talk in this context to represent a place where all black people can get together and chat/gossip, without feeling entangled or shut down by the whites, giving evidence of the racial divide during the time in which the novel was written. Again, the text gives evidence of of the importance of porch talk in the black culture, stating, “their excuse to be on the store porch may be to play checkers or to watch a game of checkers being played. The real reason, of course, is to talk and tease” (pg. ). Here it is backed up that the purpose of the porch talk is to “talk and tease”, giving the sense of community among the blacks. Also, the idea of playing checkers on the porch gives off a very traditional mood that the black culture have maintained and while Porch talk