[Their Eyes Were Watching God] is not a great novel, or anything like that, but it is one of those books about which it can be said that if it had not been written, there would be something that most of us would not know; it belongs on Randall Jarrell's wonderful list of books that are very good and unimportant. Its chief problem is a language problem, one easily illustrated by a passage like this:

"'Taint no use in you cryin', Janie. Grandma done been long uh few roads herself. But folks is meant to cry 'bout something' or other. Better leave things de way dey is. Youse young yet. No tellin' whut mout happen befo' you die. Wait awhile, baby. Yo' mind will change."

Nanny sent Janie along with a stern mien, but she dwindled all the rest of the day as she worked.

The black talk itself takes some getting used to, since few black writers use it so unabashedly, so it sounds more like Joel Chandler Harris than Richard Wright. One not only gets used to it, though, but comes to love it as Hurston herself did, as its own kind of English. The real difficulty is the shift from "Youse young yet" to "stern mien," and Hurston's standard English never quite loses its literariness, even when it is being used to say something interesting or important. (p. 153)

The one standard English paragraph the book unquestionably needs is the second, on the first page: "Now, women forget all those things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly." So Janie, the child of a rape, is told in the passage above by her grandmother that she'll be best off marrying a responsible older man with sixty acres; she does, but reluctantly, and the marriage never takes, and Janie soon runs off with Joe Starks, an ambitious young man who has heard of Eatonville and is going there to make his fortune. He succeeds, too, by opening the town's general store, then by getting himself elected mayor, but he also succeeds in drying up Janie's affection for him by insisting she become Miz Mayor, a pretty object, who can help with the business only by obeying his orders and who is to stay out of men folks' business. After almost twenty years together, Joe dies, leaving Janie reasonably well off, and then Tea Cake, a man in every respect as terrific as his terrific name, enters. Tea Cake is the perfect image of a shiftless nigger, a gambler and a migrant farm hand, but he wins Janie the night they meet by asking her to play checkers, and, when she says she doesn't know how because her husband would never let her learn, he teaches her, and insists they play by the rules. A feminist man, really, or at least the perfect lover. (pp. 153-54)

[Tea Cake is] marvelous, good on every page; no man written about by a woman, this side of [Jane Austen's Darcy in Pride and Prejudice and George Eliot's Lydgate in Middlemarch] maybe, seems to ring as true as he does. Alice Walker says there is no book more important to her than Their Eyes Were Watching God because of the ways it allows her to identify with Janie; not caring to do that, I can only conclude there is much here for anyone, and I hope lots of people find this novel…. [It shows] that Zora Hurston was that kind of person which my students claim almost anyone is—but which few truly are—unique. (p. 154)