50 Fun Facts About Their Eyes Were Watching God

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, sixteen-year-old Janie has her awakening lying beneath which blossoming tree?

Pear blossom holds Janie in Nanny's back yard for three spring days as bees sink into the blooms. She decides the sight is what a marriage should be, and judges her husbands against it.

Rescuing Janie from the flood in Their Eyes Were Watching God, Tea Cake is bitten on the cheek by what animal?

A dog, stranded and snarling, bites Tea Cake high on the cheek-bone before he kills it. Weeks later a doctor recognises the signs of a mad animal's bite, too late for the shots that would have saved him.

As a delirious Tea Cake fires a pistol at her, Janie kills him with which weapon in Their Eyes Were Watching God?

A rifle shot from Janie lands an instant before Tea Cake's bullet buries itself in the joist over her head. He had taught her to shoot on the muck, where she became the better marksman.

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, what does a jealous Joe Starks order Janie to keep covered in the store?

Her hair goes under a head-rag after Joe sees a man named Walter secretly stroking the end of her braid. The night Joe is buried, Janie burns every one of the rags.

Which actress played Janie Crawford in the 2005 ABC television film of Their Eyes Were Watching God?

Halle Berry starred as Janie when the film aired in March 2005, with Ruby Dee as Nanny and Michael Ealy as Tea Cake.

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie says love is like what, taking 'its shape from de shore it meets'?

The sea is Janie's answer to the porch gossips: love is a moving thing, different with every shore, and no grindstone that does the same to everything it touches.

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Nanny tells Janie the Black woman is which animal 'of the world'?

The mule, in Nanny's telling, ends up with the load: the white man hands it to the Black man, who passes it to his womenfolk. She prays it will be different for Janie.

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Tea Cake wins Janie's attention at the store by teaching her which game?

Checkers was a game Joe Starks told Janie was too heavy for her brains. Tea Cake sets up the board and shows her how, and she glows that somebody thinks it natural for her to play.

Which novelist's 1975 essay 'In Search of Zora Neale Hurston' helped revive Their Eyes Were Watching God?

Alice Walker had found Hurston's unmarked grave in Florida two years earlier and paid for a marker calling her 'A Genius of the South'.

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, which Florida lake bursts its dikes in the hurricane and drowns the muck?

Okeechobee is the 'monster' Hurston has rolling in his bed until the wind looses his chains. The scene draws on the real 1928 hurricane that broke the lake's dikes near Belle Glade.

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Nanny says she wants Janie to marry Logan Killicks so that Janie will have what?

Protection is Nanny's whole argument: she feels her own end coming and wants Janie 'safe in life' on a farmer's sixty acres. Janie waits for love to follow the wedding, and it never does.

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Nanny catches Janie kissing which 'shiftless' boy over the gatepost?

Johnny Taylor, tall and lean, looks glorious to Janie through the pollen haze of that afternoon. The sight of the kiss decides Nanny to see Janie married at once.

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, which office do the men of Eatonville hand Joe Starks soon after he arrives?

Mayor is the title the town votes Joe on the night his new store opens. When the crowd calls for a few words from his wife, he says her place is in the home.

What does Joe Starks order from Sears, Roebuck and unveil at a town barbecue in Their Eyes Were Watching God?

A street lamp, which Joe calls the first in a colored town, is paid for from his own pocket and lit after a speech and a prayer. Some townsfolk had voted against it as a useless notion.

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, what nickname does young Janie get because people call her so many names?

Alphabet is what everyone calls Janie on the Washburn place, the white household in West Florida where Nanny works. She grows up in a house in their back yard, playing with the grandchildren.

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, what makes six-year-old Janie realise for the first time that she is Black?

A photograph of the children she plays with shows one little girl Janie cannot place, until she knows her own dress. Raised among white children, she had assumed she looked like them.

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie tells her whole life story to which best friend on the back porch?

Pheoby Watson brings a plate of mulatto rice and stays to listen until the night has grown old. By the end she says she has 'growed ten feet higher' just from hearing it.

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, what is Janie wearing when she walks back into Eatonville past the porch gossips?

Overalls, muddy ones, are what the watching women store away 'for remembrance' as a weapon against her. They want to know what became of the blue satin dress she left town in.

Their Eyes Were Watching God opens by saying what 'at a distance have every man's wish on board'?

Ships stand for men's dreams in the first lines: some come in with the tide, others sail forever on the horizon. Women, Hurston goes on, forget whatever they don't want to remember.

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Joe Starks tells Janie he has always wanted to be a 'big' what?

Voice is Joe's word for power: back in Georgia the white folks had all the say-so, so he heads for a town Black people are building for themselves. Years later Janie throws the phrase back at him.

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, which mock ceremony for Matt Bonner's old work animal is Janie forbidden to attend?

A funeral, the 'dragging-out', has the town mocking human grief in the swamp while Joe gives a eulogy from on top of the carcass. He tells Janie his wife cannot mix in such commonness.

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, a doctor from Orlando says Joe Starks is dying because what has stopped working?

His kidneys needed medical attention two years earlier, the doctor says, and now it is too late. Joe had put his faith in a root-doctor instead, sure that something had been buried against him.

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, what does Hurston picture as a 'strange being with the huge square toes'?

Death lives 'way in the West' in a straight house with no sides and no roof, sword drawn back, waiting to be sent for. Janie starts to picture him as Joe Starks sickens in the room downstairs.

After Janie mocks his ageing body before the store crowd in Their Eyes Were Watching God, how does Joe Starks react?

He strikes her with all his might and drives her out, robbed, as he sees it, of his illusion of manhood in front of other men. From that night he sleeps in a separate room.

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Tea Cake's surname is Woods; what is the unusual first name his mother gave him?

Vergible is the name Tea Cake gives Janie the day they meet, adding that folks call him Tea Cake for short. She asks whether he is really as sweet as all that.

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie buries Tea Cake with a brand new what placed in his hands?

A guitar goes into the vault at West Palm Beach so that Tea Cake can be thinking up new songs to play to her. On his second visit to the store he had stood in the door miming the tuning of one.

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie takes a train from Eatonville to marry Tea Cake in which Florida city?

Jacksonville is where Tea Cake once worked in the railroad shops. His letter tells Janie to wear her new blue dress, because he means to marry her straight from the train.

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, what does Tea Cake spend the $200 hidden in Janie's shirt on?

A big supper party, free to all the railroad hands, swallows the money: fried chicken, macaroni and dancing. Tea Cake wins it back that Saturday and comes home with two cuts in his back from a sore loser.

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, which eating-house owner on the muck wants Janie to leave Tea Cake for her brother?

Mrs. Turner prizes her own pointed nose and thin lips and cannot forgive Janie for marrying a man of Tea Cake's colour. Her eating house ends up knee-deep in broken dishes after a brawl.

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, which people file past the muck toward high ground before the hurricane hits?

Seminoles pass in band after band, telling Janie the saw-grass is in bloom and a hurricane is coming. The pickers stay put: beans are paying seven and eight dollars a day.

Which talk-show host was executive producer of the 2005 television film of Their Eyes Were Watching God?

Oprah Winfrey backed the adaptation through her company Harpo Productions, with Darnell Martin directing.

Zora Neale Hurston wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God in seven weeks while doing fieldwork in which Caribbean country?

Haiti was where a Guggenheim Fellowship had sent Hurston to research folk religion. She wrote 'under internal pressure' and later wished she could write the book again.

Their Eyes Were Watching God is considered a classic of which Black cultural movement?

Harlem Renaissance writers were far from kind to the novel at first: several of the movement's leading authors objected to its politics, and its standing only recovered decades later.

At Janie's trial for shooting Tea Cake in Their Eyes Were Watching God, what does the all-white jury deliver?

An acquittal takes the jury five minutes, with a finding that the shooting was 'entirely accidental and justifiable'. The white women watching cry and stand round Janie like a wall.

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Tea Cake takes Janie to pick beans on 'the muck' in which region of Florida?

The Everglades, Tea Cake promises, is where folks do nothing but make money and fun and foolishness. Janie finds soil so rich that weeds stand eight and ten feet tall.

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie Crawford never knows her parents and is raised by whom?

Her grandmother is called Nanny by everybody on the place, so Janie never calls her anything else. Born in slavery, the old woman works for a white family in West Florida.

The title line of Their Eyes Were Watching God says the storm-bound pickers 'seemed to be staring at' what?

The dark fills the shanty once the wind has put out the light for the last time, 'but their eyes were watching God'. They sit asking whether He means to measure their puny might against His.

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie says everybody must go to God and 'find out about' what for themselves?

Living is the second of the two things Janie says everybody has to do for themselves. Nobody's papa or mama can tell them, she adds: 'you got tuh go there tuh know there.'

At the end of Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie pulls in her horizon and drapes it over her shoulder like what?

A fish-net is the closing image: Janie pulls the horizon 'from around the waist of the world', with so much of life in its meshes, and calls in her soul to come and see.

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, guards overseeing the storm burials order that only white victims receive what?

Coffins of cheap pine go to the white victims, while Black bodies are sprinkled with quick-lime in a ditch. Tea Cake is among the men forced by armed guards to do the digging.

Which Black novelist condemned Their Eyes Were Watching God in a 1937 review for the magazine New Masses?

Richard Wright wrote that Hurston seemed to have 'no desire whatsoever to move in the direction of serious fiction'. He complained that her characters swing only 'between laughter and tears'.

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, what 'gold-looking' office item does Joe Starks buy, copying a banker he worked for?

A spittoon like his old boss's in an Atlanta bank sits by Joe's desk, a vase anybody else would have put on the front-room table. He buys Janie a little flower-painted one of her own.

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, which friend refuses to flee and sleeps through the flood in an abandoned house?

Motor Boat insists he has to have his sleep, so Janie and Tea Cake run on, and the lake carries the whole house off with him inside. He knows nothing about it until the storm is nearly over.

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, which 'little chunky girl' on the muck makes Janie jealous by flirting with Tea Cake?

Nunkie keeps hitting and shoving Tea Cake so that he will chase her, and one day both vanish into the cane field. It is the first time Janie learns what jealousy feels like.

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, what is the name of Janie's mother, who vanishes soon after Janie is born?

Leafy was wrapped in moss and hidden in a tree as a baby on the day word came that the slaves were free. As a girl she was sent to school in the hope of making a teacher of her.

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, which widow, robbed and dumped by young Who Flung, does Janie fear she has become?

Annie Tyler, widowed at fifty-two with a good home and insurance money, sold up and limped off to Tampa with her young man. The tale haunts Janie the morning Tea Cake and her $200 go missing.

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, the muck workers nicknamed 'Saws' and known for fire dances come from where?

The Bahamas sent the 'Saws', who hid away to hold their dances until they saw that Janie and Tea Cake would not laugh at them. Soon many of the Americans were learning to jump as well.

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Logan Killicks threatens to kill Janie with what when she refuses to move manure?

An ax is what Logan swears he will take hold of, in an outburst that ends half a sob and half a cry. Janie walks out that same morning to meet Joe Starks down the road.

Zora Neale Hurston drew the love story in Their Eyes Were Watching God partly from her affair with which man?

Percival Punter was the former lover who was studying at Columbia when Hurston fell for him. Like Janie, Hurston was a good deal older than her lover, and she called falling for him 'a parachute jump'.

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, which Black leader does a snobbish neighbour say only 'cut de monkey for white folks'?

Booker T. Washington was 'a great big man' as far as Janie knows, but her neighbour boasts that a brother tore him to pieces in a paper read to the Sunday School Convention.