55 pages • 1 hour read
Zora Neale HurstonTheir Eyes Were Watching God
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1937A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 14-17Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 14 Summary
Tea Cake knows how to navigate the seasonal work rhythm of the Everglades, so he insists that the couple head down to Lake Okeechobee before the crowds of poor workers arrive. His foresight allows them to secure a good worker’s house, with plumbing. Before the season begins, Tea Cake teaches Janie to shoot; she has a knack for it and hunts to put food on their table. Once the bean picking season begins, Tea Cake works in the fields all day and gambles most of the night while Janie keeps house.
Eventually, Janie joins him in the fields after he tells her that he misses her too much during the day. Janie’s appearance in the fields convinces the other workers that she does not see herself as better than them, and the Woods household quickly becomes the center of social life out on the muck. For the first time, Janie participates in verbal play and jokes, fully part of the community around her.
Chapter 15 Summary
Janie notices that Nunkie, another woman who works alongside them, flirts with Tea Cake, who does little to discourage Nunkie’s interest. Things come to a head one day when Janie comes across Nunkie and Tea Cake tussling on the ground away from the fields. Janie does not believe Tea Cake when he tells her that he was attempting to get his work tickets from Nunkie, who stole them. Unable to catch up with Nunkie because the woman runs away, Janie heads home.
Janie and Tea Cake have a physical fight over Tea Cake’s infidelity. He calms her down by piling on top of her, and the two make love. Janie feels reassured the next morning when Tea Cake tells her that he has no interest in Nunkie.
Chapter 16 Summary
Janie and Tea Cake decide to spend the off season on the muck. Mrs. Turner, a light-skinned restaurant owner, has internalized racist ideas about the superiority of white skin and the inferiority of African Americans. Her constant criticism of Black physical features and her efforts to get Janie to leave Tea Cake, with his dark complexion, to marry Mrs. Turner’s brother, who has lighter skin, infuriates Tea Cake. Tea Cake tells Janie to snub Mrs. Turner, but Mrs. Turner idolizes Janie’s appearance—light skin and straight hair—so much that she accepts the snub as her due.
Chapter 17 Summary
Weary of Mrs. Turner’s interference in his marriage, Tea Cake slaps Janie repeatedly, leaving visible bruises on her face to show the Turners that he controls the relationship. His coworkers in the fields admire his actions and feel envious that he has “ownership” over a woman light enough to show bruises.
After Tea Cake finally gets his revenge on Mrs. Turner by colluding with several friends to trash her restaurant during a brawl, Mrs. Turner decides to return to Miami. Her son and brother leave as well, after several of Tea Cake’s friends threaten them.
Chapters 14-17 Analysis
Hurston was a keen observer of colorism—discrimination against people with darker skin, often within the same racial or ethnic group—in the African American community. She uses Mrs. Turner to represent this form of self-hatred and portrays Janie as a person who rejects the premises of colorism. Mrs. Turner assumes herself superior to her poorer neighbors who have dark skin because of her light complexion. Her attempt to break up Tea Cake and Janie, so Janie can marry her brother, shows how Mrs. Turner polices race and class lines as part of her supposed morality. Mrs. Turner’s hypocrisy becomes clear when other characters note her willingness to take money from the people she despises.
The racialized hierarchy of a society that prizes approximated whiteness valorizes Janie, a fair-skinned Black woman with long, somewhat straight hair—these qualities made Joe display her like a valued possession. Janie rejects those values, marrying the dark-skinned Tea Cake, and refuses to adopt the classist assumptions that intersect with this internalized racism, repeatedly refuting Mrs. Turner’s racist and classist pronouncements about her neighbors. As the novel holds up the aesthetic beauty of Blackness, it shows Janie participating in the storytelling rituals on the muck, fully part of the community in a way she’d never been at Eatonville.
One of the more dramatic episodes in the novel is how Tea Cake resolves his sense of insecurity and anger over Mrs. Turner’s colorism: He beats Janie to assert his masculinity and to send a message to the Turners. The affirmation he receives from his peers illustrates that resentment of colorism was widespread among the Black working classes; however, Tea Cake’s misogynistic solution reveals the deep reach of patriarchal strictures in this community. Hurston chooses not to represent Janie’s reaction to this beating; in fact, Janie, the protagonist, is entirely absent from Chapter 17. This episode, presented with a mixture of wry humor and candid exposition, shows that working-class African American identity down on the muck is quite distinct from the respectable middle-class Black identity advanced by many writers of during the Harlem Renaissance.
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By Zora Neale Hurston
