Yes, Their Eyes Were Watching God Is Banned!

Janie Crawford tells her story to her friend Pheoby, narrating three marriages and a life spent searching for something she calls “the horizon.” Her first husband is chosen for her. Her second gives her status but stifles her voice. Her third, Tea Cake, gives her joy and catastrophe in almost equal measure. Zora Neale Hurston published the novel in 1937, and it was largely forgotten until Alice Walker championed it in the 1970s. It’s now considered one of the most important American novels of the twentieth century.

Challenges have targeted the book’s language (Hurston wrote in Black Southern dialect), its sexual content, and its depiction of domestic violence. A parent at Stonewall Jackson High School in Brentsville, Virginia, complained in 1997 about “sexual explicitness.” In 2008, parents in Burke County, North Carolina cited “homosexuality, rape, and incest.” The book has also been challenged in Prince William County, Virginia, and Anne Arundel County, Maryland. Recent challenges in Florida in 2023 continued the pattern.

Why You Should Read This

Hurston’s prose moves like music. She wrote in the vernacular of the Black South, capturing rhythms and images that standard English can’t touch. “Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board” is the opening line, and from there the language doesn’t let up. The dialect isn’t decoration. It’s the soul of the book, the sound of a community talking to itself.

Janie’s story is about claiming your own voice after a lifetime of other people speaking for you. Each marriage teaches her something about power, love, and selfhood. By the end, she’s not triumphant in any simple way. She’s lost the man she loved and faced a courtroom of people judging her for it. But she’s whole. She’s figured out who she is. Hurston gave American literature a protagonist who grows not by winning but by surviving and choosing to keep wanting more.