Few 20th-century American novels are more widely celebrated than Zora Neale Hurston’s 1937 classic, Their Eyes Were Watching God. The work, which traces a Southern black woman’s odyssey through poverty and difficult marriages toward self-understanding, has been praised by countless scholars and writers, was adapted into a television film starring Halle Berry and produced by Oprah Winfrey and Quincy Jones, and, as of 2023, was assigned in more college courses than any other novel written by an American woman.
The book’s popularity is remarkable for two reasons. Firstly, when Hurston died in 1960, she was poor and obscure. Her reputation only began ascending in the 1970s, thanks largely to the advocacy of the novelist Alice Walker, who was a great admirer of Hurston. Hurston’s present popularity is also remarkable because she was one of the most unappreciated types of Americans: a black conservative. Especially in her essays, Hurston expresses an abiding love for the United States and a disdain for communism. She felt a strong pride in her race and rejected victimhood: “I am not tragically colored,” she writes, “There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes.” Although she saw the injustice of Jim Crow, she thought Brown v. Board of Education was wrongly decided because it implied black students could only learn if white students were around them.
Elements of Hurston’s conservatism are also evident, but often overlooked, in her best-known work. Their Eyes Were Watching God traces the tumultuous life of Janie Crawford. At the age of 16, Janie’s mother marries her off to a much older man she does not love. Janie soon runs away with another man to begin a life in the all-black community of Eatonville, Florida. Her second husband, though impressive in many ways, treats her poorly in their two decades of marriage. Soon after he dies, Janie falls in love with a younger man who treats her better (though far from perfectly). She and this man, nicknamed Tea Cake, move to the Everglades and farm there until his tragic death.
An element of Their Eyes Were Watching God that may have particular appeal to conservatives is how Hurston addresses black progress. The most compelling example of this occurs when Hurston uses a bigoted character’s disapproval of Booker T. Washington to endorse Washington’s lessons of education and self-reliance ironically. While living in the Everglades, Janie converses with a neighbor named Mrs. Turner. A light-skinned black woman, Mrs. Turner looks down on her neighbors because of their darker skin and different features. “You got mo’ nerve than me,” she tells Janie. “Ah jus’ couldn’t see mahself married to no black man. It’s too many black folks already. … Ah can’t stand black n****s.” Because she has “white folks’ features in mah face,” she resents that she’s “lumped in wid all de rest. It ain’t fair.” She resents their black neighbors’ behavior: “Always singin’ ol’ n**** songs! Always cuttin’ de monkey for white folks.” And through the narrator, we learn that Mrs. Turner does not like Janie for who she is as an individual. Instead, “she paid homage to Janie’s Caucasian characteristics as such.” That attitude captures Mrs. Turner’s obsession with race: she’s more concerned with a racial category than individual people. She’s the novel’s most racist character.
We gain deeper insights into Mrs. Turner’s attitudes about race when she brings up Washington. Trying to persuade Janie to consider courting her brother (even though Janie is already married), Mrs. Turner boasts that he’s so smart, he wrote about “Booker T. Washington and tore him tuh pieces!” Janie holds Washington, founder of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and advocate of black entrepreneurship, among many other accomplishments, in high esteem. So she asks, “Booker T.? He wuz a great big man, wusn’t he?!” Mrs. Turner rejects the premise: “All he ever done was cut de monkey for white folks. So dey pomped him up. … He wuz uh enemy tuh us, dat’s whut. He wuz uh white folk’s n****.” To use a term that is regularly applied today to prominent black conservatives, Mrs. Turner thinks Washington was an Uncle Tom — a black person more interested in winning the favor of powerful whites than helping other black people.
Perhaps what upset Mrs. Turner (and her brother) was Washington’s belief that Southern blacks should develop practical skills before focusing on political power. “It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours,” Washington said in 1895, “but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercise of these privileges.” For Washington, work was closely related to education and character. As he writes in his autobiography, Up From Slavery, “While the Negro should not be deprived by unfair means of the franchise, political agitation alone would not save him, and … back of the ballot he must have property, industry, skill, economy, intelligence, and character.” Washington’s point was not that politics don’t matter, but that they matter less than personal habits and virtues.
Washington and his message were popular. According to John McWhorter, “Thousands of boys were named after him. His name still brands public schools across America. Black people once had pictures of him in their homes in the same way they later had pictures of Martin Luther King Jr., and [would later] have pictures of Barack Obama.” But Washington’s pragmatism had its share of critics. W. E. B. Du Bois, the most prominent, expressed his disagreements more eloquently than Mrs. Turner. As economist and author Glenn C. Loury describes the differences between the two men, “Washington was a conservative advocate of a philosophy of self-help; Du Bois was a radical exponent of a strategy of protest and agitation for reform.” Although their differences are sometimes exaggerated, Du Bois charged that “Mr. Washington’s programme practically accepts the alleged inferiority of the Negro races” and let white Americans wash their hands of any obligation to help blacks rise by “shifting the burden of the Negro problem to the Negro’s shoulders and standing aside as critical and rather pessimistic spectators.”
Hurston, by putting this argument in the bigoted mouth of Mrs. Turner, poisons it. Rather than mount a systematic defense of Washington’s ideas, which would come across as didactic and incongruous with the rest of the novel’s form and tone, Hurston simply undermines the message through its unreliable messenger. Mrs. Turner’s remarks make the reader wonder, “If someone like her despises Washington, he must not be so bad.”
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The passage is all the more remarkable because what Mrs. Turner says about Washington foreshadows early reviews of Their Eyes Were Watching God — reviews by major figures in African American literature. Ralph Ellison, 18 years before he published Invisible Man, complained that Their Eyes Were Watching God “was not addressed to Negro readers, but to a white audience that had recently ‘discovered’ the Negro in its quest to make spiritual readjustments to a world in transition.” And Richard Wright, author of Native Son, said Hurston resorts to stereotypical depictions of black people, using a “minstrel technique that makes the ‘white folks’ laugh. … In the main, her novel is not addressed to the Negro, but to a white audience whose chauvinistic tastes she knows how to satisfy.”
Yet that novel is now widely considered one of the best American novels ever written. This remarkable turn in Hurston’s reputation is a familiar one for black conservatives: disparaged for their perceived heterodoxies, but vindicated by time.
Christopher J. Scalia is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of the new book 13 Novels Conservatives Will Love (but Probably Haven’t Read), from which this piece is adapted.