Their Eyes Were Watching God
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50 free Their Eyes Were Watching God trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Zora Neale Hurston's 1937 novel follows Janie Crawford from a girlhood in West Florida through three marriages to a hard-won sense of who she is. Some of Hurston's peers dismissed it, and it was largely forgotten before a revival in the 1970s turned it into one of the most widely taught American novels. This quiz covers the whole book: the early chapters with Nanny and Logan Killicks, the Eatonville years with Joe Starks, and Janie's time with Tea Cake on the muck, through the hurricane and the trial. There are questions on who is who, on what happens and why, and on the lines readers quote most, along with a few on Hurston herself and the 2005 television film. It works as a reading check for chapters 1 to 5, a halfway test, or a full self-quiz before an exam or a book-club night. Every answer comes with a short explanation tied to the text, so a wrong guess still teaches you something.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In Their Eyes Were Watching God, sixteen-year-old Janie has her awakening lying beneath which blossoming tree?
Pear
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.
Q 02Rescuing Janie from the flood in Their Eyes Were Watching God, Tea Cake is bitten on the cheek by what animal?
A dog
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.
Q 03As a delirious Tea Cake fires a pistol at her, Janie kills him with which weapon in Their Eyes Were Watching God?
A rifle
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.
Q 04In Their Eyes Were Watching God, what does a jealous Joe Starks order Janie to keep covered in the store?
Her hair
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.
Q 05Which actress played Janie Crawford in the 2005 ABC television film of Their Eyes Were Watching God?
Halle Berry
Halle Berry starred as Janie when the film aired in March 2005, with Ruby Dee as Nanny and Michael Ealy as Tea Cake.
Q 06In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie says love is like what, taking 'its shape from de shore it meets'?
The sea
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.
Q 07In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Nanny tells Janie the Black woman is which animal 'of the world'?
The mule
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.
Q 08In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Tea Cake wins Janie's attention at the store by teaching her which game?
Checkers
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.
Q 09Which novelist's 1975 essay 'In Search of Zora Neale Hurston' helped revive Their Eyes Were Watching God?
Alice Walker
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'.
Q 10In Their Eyes Were Watching God, which Florida lake bursts its dikes in the hurricane and drowns the muck?
Okeechobee
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.
Q 11In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Nanny says she wants Janie to marry Logan Killicks so that Janie will have what?
Protection
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.
Q 12In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Nanny catches Janie kissing which 'shiftless' boy over the gatepost?
Johnny Taylor
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.
Q 13In Their Eyes Were Watching God, which office do the men of Eatonville hand Joe Starks soon after he arrives?
Mayor
Q 21In Their Eyes Were Watching God, which mock ceremony for Matt Bonner's old work animal is Janie forbidden to attend?
A funeral
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.
Q 22In Their Eyes Were Watching God, a doctor from Orlando says Joe Starks is dying because what has stopped working?
His kidneys
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.
Q 23In Their Eyes Were Watching God, what does Hurston picture as a 'strange being with the huge square toes'?
Death
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.
Q 14What does Joe Starks order from Sears, Roebuck and unveil at a town barbecue in Their Eyes Were Watching God?
A street lamp
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.
Q 15In Their Eyes Were Watching God, what nickname does young Janie get because people call her so many names?
Alphabet
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.
Q 16In Their Eyes Were Watching God, what makes six-year-old Janie realise for the first time that she is Black?
A photograph
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.
Q 17In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie tells her whole life story to which best friend on the back porch?
Pheoby Watson
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.
Q 18In Their Eyes Were Watching God, what is Janie wearing when she walks back into Eatonville past the porch gossips?
Overalls
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.
Q 19Their Eyes Were Watching God opens by saying what 'at a distance have every man's wish on board'?
Ships
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.
Q 20In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Joe Starks tells Janie he has always wanted to be a 'big' what?
Voice
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.
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.
Q 24After Janie mocks his ageing body before the store crowd in Their Eyes Were Watching God, how does Joe Starks react?
He strikes her
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.
Q 25In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Tea Cake's surname is Woods; what is the unusual first name his mother gave him?
Vergible
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.
Q 26In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie buries Tea Cake with a brand new what placed in his hands?
A guitar
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.
Q 27In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie takes a train from Eatonville to marry Tea Cake in which Florida city?
Jacksonville
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.
Q 28In Their Eyes Were Watching God, what does Tea Cake spend the $200 hidden in Janie's shirt on?
A big supper party
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.
Q 29In Their Eyes Were Watching God, which eating-house owner on the muck wants Janie to leave Tea Cake for her brother?
Mrs. Turner
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.
Q 30In Their Eyes Were Watching God, which people file past the muck toward high ground before the hurricane hits?
Seminoles
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.