Their Eyes Were Watching God

My reading life is half intentional, half providential. Take Zora Neale Hurston, for example—I only picked up Their Eyes Were Watching God because we happen to own a deck of playing cards featuring women authors. Out of that serendipity, my family invented a variation of “Go Fish” called “Go to the Library,” where instead of suits, we collect authors. Some I’ve read, some I’ve barely heard of, and some remain total mysteries. But Hurston’s name kept surfacing, and eventually I felt prompted—providentially, I think—to read her most famous novel.

It’s a good book. Hurston captures the struggle of early 20th-century Black life in Florida with a realism that neither glamorizes nor condemns. Life is hard. Racism persists. Poverty is expensive for everyone.

One scene in particular stayed with me. In Janie’s final marriage, she encounters Mrs. Turner, a local Black woman who idolizes whiteness. Mrs. Turner’s worldview is disturbing—she speaks with open disdain for her own neighbors—and Hurston, through the narrator’s voice, offers a chilling reflection on idolatry and suffering:

“Once having set up her idols and built altars to them it was inevitable that she would worship there. It was inevitable that she should accept any inconsistency and cruelty from her deity as all good worshippers do from theirs. All gods who receive homage are cruel. All gods dispense suffering without reason, otherwise they would not be worshipped. Through indiscriminate suffering men know fear, and fear is the most divine emotion. It is the stones for altars and the beginning in wisdom. Half gods are worshipped in wine and flowers. Real gods require blood.”

That paragraph stopped me cold.

Gil Bailie has often said (or maybe I’ve just listened to the same lecture enough times) that there are only two ways to resolve violence: through self-sacrifice or blood sacrifice. The way of Christ or the way of Satan. Hurston, who was no friend of Christianity, nevertheless seems to glimpse something essential about worship and violence. Her language calls to mind T.S. Eliot’s “strong brown god,” and the disturbing clarity with which she describes how idols demand victims.

Mrs. Turner is willing—eager even—to sacrifice her neighbors on the altar of her idol. And that mechanism hasn’t gone away. Today, in our own cultural crises (whether natural or manufactured), we often see the same process at work. A new idol arises—an ideology, a leader, a scapegoat—and we justify cruelty or exclusion as if it were purification. We may dismiss Hurston’s reflection as literary flourish, but she comes dangerously close to naming something ancient and enduring: the human default to violence sanctified as worship.

In this way, Hurston’s insight becomes more than sociological or psychological. It becomes anthropological—maybe even theological. And it’s worth returning to, especially when the blood sacrifice is still so often demanded.