Deborah Clarke (Essay Date Winter 2001)

SOURCE: Clarke, Deborah. "'The Porch Couldn't Talk for Looking': Voice and Vision in Their Eyes Were Watching God." African American Review 35, no. 4 (winter 2001): 599-613.

In the following essay, Clarke asserts that in Hurston's novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, "her concern goes beyond presenting an individual woman's journey to self-awareness" and contends that Hurston's accomplishment is a redefining of African American rhetoric.

"So 'tain't no use in me telling you somethin' unless Ah give you de understandin' to go 'long wid it. Unless you see de fur, a mink skin ain't no different from a coon hide."

(Hurston, Their Eyes 7)

When Janie [in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God] explains to her friend Pheoby the reason that simply telling her story will not suffice, why she needs to provide the "'understandin' to go 'long wid it,'" she employs...