Porches In Their Eyes Were Watching God

The porch built into the foremost structure of many homes in the Southern United States represented a free space to share current local and/or international news, recent happenings in the community, entertain local audiences both young and old with stories, and debate on a number of topics. This in mind, it is no coincidence that Their Eyes Were Watching God, the 1937 novel and best known work by Zora Neale Hurston, begins by describing the setting on a porch: “The sun was gone, but he had left his footprints in the sky. It was the time for sitting on porches beside the road. It was the time to hear things and talk. These sitters had been tongueless, earless, eyeless conveniences all day long. Mules brutes had occupied their skins. But now,
They passed nations through their mouths. They sat in judgment” (Hurston 1). Further, the porch was sometimes exemplary of the patriarchal, gendered expectations that were exacerbated by Southern traditions. At certain times, more women were found on porches than men, and vice versa. Called the stoop in Northern and Midwestern cities, it is pivotal to understand the porch as a sacred and unpoliced space where members of the community could express themselves and escape the stringent, racially prejudiced-based regulations that dominated their lives. In this way, those that congregated on the porch established themselves in an invisible middle ground between the outside world and the comforts of home and the familiarity of practices that defined Blackness on their own terms. On the porch, women, men, girls, and boys alike were allowed to relinquish the docile, but necessary behaviors that perpetuated their assumed subservience to white Southerners. Contrarily, porches somewhat served as an underpinning to criticize others, such as when the adult women of Eatonville condemn Janie, mainly for her slovenly attire and eventually for her financial
Along with raising points about how Janie is dressed and has decided to style her hair, conjunctures are presented about the reason for these things. Because none of the women would speak directly toward Janie this way, the contrived sense of strength in numbers on the porch creates an environment that encourages this discourse. Despite the negative criticism hurled in Janie’s direction from the women and the lascivious glances of the men, Janie shifts the entire paradigm as she approaches: “They scrambled a noisy “good evenin’” and left their mouths setting open and their ears full of hope. Her speech was pleasant enough, but she kept walking straight on to her gate. The porch couldn’t talk for looking” (Hurston 2). The porch can also be an environment that ostracizes the very individuals that sit on it, should they interrupt the series of linguistic patterns that have piqued the interest and captured the attention of the majority. This can elicit unpleasant, subtly offensive exchanges within the