Their-Eyes-Were-Watching-God-rmrju9

Foreword WO, xipoetry and its female hero was its investment in black folk traditions.Here, finally, was a woman on a quest for her own identityand, unlike so many other questing figures in black literature, herjourney would take her, not away from, but deeper and deeperinto blackness, the descent into the Everglades with its rich blacksoil, wild cane, and communal life representing immersion intoblack traditions. But for most black women readers discoveringTheir Eyes for the first time, what was most compelling was thefigure of Janie Crawford—powerful, articulate, self-reliant, andradically different from any woman character they had everbefore encountered in literature. Andrea Rushing, then aninstructor in the Afro-American Studies Department at Harvard,remembers reading Their Eyes in a women's study group withNellie McKay, Barbara Smith, and Gail Pemberton. "I loved thelanguage of this book," Rushing says, "but mostly I loved itbecause it was about a woman who wasn't pathetic, wasn't atragic mulatto, who defied everything that was expected of her,who went off with a man without bothering to divorce the oneshe left and wasn't broken, crushed, and run down."The reaction of women all across the country who foundthemselves so powerfully represented in a literary text was oftendirect and personal. Janie and Tea Cake were talked about asthough they were people the readers knew intimately. SherleyAnne Williams remembers going down to a conference in LosAngeles in 1969 where the main speaker, Toni Cade Bambara,asked the women in the audience, "Are the sisters here ready forTea Cake?" And Williams, remembering that even Tea Cake hadhis flaws, responded, "Are the Tea Cakes of the world ready forus?" Williams taught Their Eyes for the first time at Cal StateFresno, in a migrant farming area where the students, like the charactersin Their Eyes, were used to making their living from the land."For the first time," Williams says, "they saw themselves in these