Favorite Books from March 2022
Reviews of Their Eyes Were Watching God and You Don’t Know Us Negroes by Zora Neale Hurston
I ended March 2022 by reading two great books. Check out my reviews of each below.
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Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
This was my fourth time reading Their Eyes Were Watching God, my first time not for a class. I enjoyed it a lot, I had déjà vu reading it at times and at other times I felt like I was reading it for the first time, especially as it relates to certain plot points that I had forgotten. The book is about one Black woman’s journey to find love and herself. Janie experiences three different marriages, a loveless one, a constricting and lonely one, and finally a loving marriage with some speed bumps along the way. Janie progressively meets better men over time but none of them are perfect. Tea Cake, Janie’s third husband was probably the most ideal partner for her.
Hurston’s language is beautiful, whether its the characters’ dialect or her description of scenes, Hurston knows how to tell an engaging story. All of this is amazing, especially since Hurston wrote the book in seven weeks. If you read this book before, I highly recommend you give it another read, you may find that you enjoy it even more.
You Don’t Know Us Negroes is an excellent collection of essays by Zora Neale Hurston that spans across 35+ years (1922–1958). Seven of the essays were published in this book for the first time. In this collection you will see her anthropologist’s work in her essays on Black expression (language, dancing, etc.), the Black church experience, and culture. One of my favorite and unforgettable essays was “The Chick with One Hen”, in it Hurston writes a brutal critique of Dr. Alain Locke who had previously criticized her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. Hurston was adamant that Locke did not really know Black folks as well as she did, she even said that she would send her toenails to debate Locke on Black folks, that line made me laugh every time I read it.
My favorite section of the book was “On Politics”, where Hurston write on various political issues, foreign and domestic. Hurston’s views on race and civil rights were complex and in some cases more conservative than I believe most Black people were at the time. She was anti-Brown v. Board of Education not because she advocated for segregation but because she felt that all-Black schools were good as long as they were adequate or had the same resources as all-white schools. She was also an anticommunist and was not a fan of the NAACP. At times she shares opinions of the Reconstruction period that mirrors the racist Lost Cause and Dunning School’s view. I enjoyed her analysis and wit in these essays, although there were parts where I disagreed with her politics.
The final section of the book covers her reporting of the 1950s Ruby McCollum trial. Readers get a detailed account of the trial and Ruby McCollum’s life story. If you read closely enough you will even read some language that echoes language Hurston used in Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Overall, this was an excellent collection. In my opinion, some of the essays could have been left out and more context could have been given at the beginning of each essay, outside of the Introduction by Gates and West. When I finished this book, I came to the conclusion that I love Zora Neale Hurston as a writer and thinker and I can’t wait to dive into her other books that I haven’t read yet.
Thanks to NetGalley and Amistad Press for a free ARC copy in exchange for an honest review.
