Mules and other brutes

I just started reading “Their Eyes Were Watching God” by Zora Neale Hurston. The first page blew me away. Man, this lady could WRITE! In a few lines on this one page I found some of the most incredible literary description I have ever read. I just had to share a few lines. It opens:

“Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time.”

We all carry dreams within us, which are ever present in our subconscious mind, but often just out of reach. I love how she describes the dreams as being “mocked to death by Time” as if time was some bully that was constantly teasing them, dangling their realization in front of them like a set of keys then snatching it away before it can be seized.

Then she goes on to describe the local townspeople gossiping on their front porches in the setting sun:

“These sitters had been tongueless, earless, eyeless conveniences all day long. Mules and other brutes had occupied their skins. But now, the sun and the bossman were gone, so the skins felt powerful and human.”

The story is set in the black south in the early 20th century, and these are apparently servants and laborers who, while performing their duties like dumb, deaf and blind animals during the day, relish in employing their tongues, as well as their ears and eyes when the job is done, mulling over any bit of gossip that passes their way and become “lords of sounds and lesser things.”

The way Hurston describes these people simply as “skins” that are filled either with an animal or a human being, depending on the position of the sun is simply stunning in my opinion. It also dehumanizes them and creates a distance between them and the reader, as they sit “in judgement” of the protagonist, Janie Crawford.

All dialog in the book is written phonetically in dialect, which Hurston was criticized for as being condescending and portraying blacks of the era as ignorant. However, as Edwidge Danticat writes in her foreword to the book, perhaps Hurston “simply listened to them more closely than others” and strove for authenticity. I have to admit the dialect is slowing down my reading a bit, yet promises a fascinating reading experience. I look forward to immersing myself in the rest of the story!