It seems to me there’s a turning point in the relationship when Joe forces Janie to stay home during the community’s big mock funeral for Matt Bonner’s mule. Joe and the other men return to the store excited and ready to talk big and swap stories, but Janie was "sullen and [Joe] resented that. . . . She wasn’t even appreciative of his efforts . . . . Here he was . . . building a high chair for her to sit in and overlook the world and she here pouting over it!" (Hurston 58). Later, when Joe and Janie fight (in public) over a misplaced bill, Janie speaks up against Joe for the first time: "You sho loves to tell me whut to do, but Ah can’t tell you nothin’ Ah see!" (Hurston 66). Joe responds that "Somebody got to think for women and chillun and chickens and cows" (Hurston 67). How would you feel if your intelligence were compared with a cow’s? No wonder Janie felt that "the spirit of the marriage left the bedroom and took to living in the parlor" (Hurston 67). And Janie was just a young woman of twenty-four at this point, seven years into her marriage with Joe. Not only does her husband regularly insult her intelligence, but he has now taken to slapping "Janie until she had a ringing sound in her ears . . . ." (Hurston 67). Not surprisingly, her idealized image of her husband is gone: "She stood there until something fell off the shelf inside her . . . . her image of Jody tumbled down and shattered. But looking at it she saw that it never was the flesh and blood figure of her dreams. Just something she had grabbed up to drape her dreams over" (Hurston 67-68). Though she realizes that Joe is not the man who will satisfy her dreams of love, the dream that had set her on a journey, she stays by his side, "saving up feelings for some man she had never seen" (Hurston 68).

Where is she to find love in a society in which she and other women occupy such a low position that even their lives are not sacrosanct? She hears the men in the store discussing the behavior of Mrs. Tony Robbins, who has begged Joe for sympathy and a larger slice of meet because, she laments loudly, her husband doesn’t feed her. One man claims, "Ah could break her if she wuz mine. Ah’d break her or kill her. Makin’ uh fool outa me in front of everybody" (Hurston 70). Angered, Janie jumps into the conversation, telling the men ironically, ". . . [H]ow surprised y’all is goin’ tuh be if you ever find out you don’t know half as much ‘bout us as you think you do. It’s so easy to make yo’self out God Almighty when you ain’t got nothin’ tuh strain against but women and chickens" (Hurston 71).

Janie’s final verbal battle with Joe ends with her making a derisive comment about his genitals and thus "[robbing] him of his illusion of irresistible maleness that all men cherish . . . ." (Hurston 75). Wordlessly, Joe "struck Janie with all his might and drove her from the store" (Hurston 76). So much for bees and blossoms! Janie’s comment seems to have taken the life out of Joe, and he never recovers.

After Joe’s death, Janie meets a man who laughs with her and teaches her how to play checkers. His playful spirit touches something long-buried in Janie. Although she half believes what Joe has told her about her lack of intelligence—"Jody useter tell me Ah never would learn. It wuz too heavy fuh mah brains" (Hurston 92)—she starts to bloom in the presence of this stranger, Vergible Woods, or "Tea Cake for short" (Hurston 93). At the end of their first evening together, she looks up and watches "the moon rise. Soon its amber fluid was drenching the earth, and quenching the thirst of the day" (Hurston 95). Will he be a bee for her blossom?

Work Cited

Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. New York: Harper & Row, 1990.