The main character in this book, Janie Crawford, is a middle-aged black woman who has just returned to Florida after being gone for a while. The people in the town start to gossip about her and try to speculate what happened to her most recent husband, Tea Cake, after he's found dead, and the plot of the majority of the book is framed by the story as Janie relates it to her friend Pheoby ...Janie's life can be divided up into three time periods, during each of which she was married to three very different men. First: her marriage to Logan is unromantic and uninspired. She then runs away with Joe, who forbids her to associate with "common folk"; Joe's goal seems to be to shape Janie into what he considers to be the perfect wife through both physical and emotional abuse.
"He wanted her submission and he'd keep on fighting until he felt he had it. So gradually, [Janie] pressed her teeth together and learned to hush. The spirit of the marriage left the bedroom and took to living in the parlor. It was there to shake hands whenever company came to visit, but it never went back inside the bedroom again ... The bed was no longer a daisy-field for her and Joe to play in. It was a place where she went and laid down when she was sleepy and tired."
Joe eventually dies, and Janie seems quite relieved at finally achieving her freedom from him. She starts seeing a man who goes by the name of Tea Cake - a man twelve years younger than her. One part in the book that really shocked me is where Janie is discussing her relationship with a neighbor, Mrs. Turner. Mrs. Turner refuses to have a black doctor see her; she also refuses to go into black-owned business because "colored folks don't know nothin' 'bout not business." Even worse:
"Ah ain't got no flat nose and liver lips. Ah'm uh featured woman. Ah got white folks' features in mah face. Still and all Ah got tuh be lumped in wid all de rest. It ain't fair. Even if dey don't take us in wid de whites, dey oughta make us uh class tuh ourselves."
Apparently this extended exchange with Mrs. Turner received a lot of criticism from Harlem Renaissance writers: many said that it "favored" lighter-skinned African Americans, though I didn't see it as such (I agree with some other critics in that it more "exposed" the division between light-skinned and dark-skinned African Americans).
Anyway, at the end of the story, Tea Cake gets bitten by a rabid dog and gradually gets very sick and delusional. I won't spoil the ending, though I will share one of my mom's favorite passages:
"The day of the gun, and the bloody body, and the courthouse came and commenced to sing a sobbing sigh out of every corner in the room; out of each and every chair and thing. Commenced to sing, commenced to sob and sigh, singing and sobbing. Then Tea Cake came prancing around her where she was and the song of the sigh flew out of the window and lit in the top of the pine trees."
My mom pointed out the alliteration in that paragraph ... true, something that I likely would not have picked up on! I really enjoyed reading this book, though it was very hard for me to get into the phonetic spelling of the dialect spoken by all of the characters. I think I finally stopped having to re-read every page maybe a third of a way through the book. But this is definitely a classic piece of American literature that I wouldn't mind re-reading some other time to try to more fully enjoy all of its symbolism and literary devices.
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