Is Nanny a Villain?

 One of the things we discussed during the in-class discussion was whether or not Nanny in Their Eyes Were Watching God is a villain. She marries Janie off when she's 16 without really asking for Janie's consent - what's worse is that this man, Logan Killicks, isn't anywhere close to Janie's age. They're married in a hurry, and Janie is basically treated as a maid. Surely Nanny should've thought of a better match for her beloved Janie. On the surface level, one could argue that she is a villain, maybe even as far as to say that Nanny put Janie in a position to be raped by Logan Killicks. However, examining Nanny's upbringing, life experiences, and current situation, maybe we can be a little sympathetic towards her. 

Nanny was born as a slave in the South - she's raped by her slave master during the Civil War, and escapes to the woods after giving birth to her child at the brink of the Civil War as Sherman's army approaches. Nanny is free and seeks to give her daughter Leafy a better life. However, this doesn't quite work out as Leafy is raped at the age of 17 by her school teacher, again in the woods, almost repeating the story of Nanny. Janie is born and Leafy runs away, leaving Nanny to raise Janie. Two generations of Janie's family are conceived in the act of rape and considering that Janie herself is an African American growing up in the South, Nanny might fear the same thing happening to Janie.

Nanny's main reason for picking Logan Killicks to be Janie's husband is because he's honest, hard-working, and rich. He owns land, an impressive thing for an African American just a couple of decades after the Civil War. Leafy never knew her father and neither did Janie. They both grew up in single-mother (or grandmother) households. Nanny hopes that Logan will provide Janie with a comfortable home and a stable married life, something she never could have. Maybe Janie's kids will grow up with a father who's there for them, on a farm with stable income, in a two parent home. 

We see the world through Janie's eyes - after all, she's the one telling the story, not Nanny. This is why there's a conflict in the way Janie sees the world and the way Nanny sees the world. I remember someone in class saying that Janie sees the world through rose-colored glasses and I definitely agree - she seeks eternal love in which both her and her partner resemble a relationship similar to those found in nature. She won't have to force herself to love whoever she marries - everything will just fall into place naturally. However, Nanny sees the world through her years of experience. She knows the harsh reality of being a black woman in the South and she has Janie's best interests in mind. As an older woman, I can see how she would dismiss Janie's wants as ignorant youthful desires. She sees the match with Logan as a blessing for Janie - certainly, she couldn't have imagined a match like that for herself. So while we can call Nanny a villain who has no sort of respect for Janie's feelings and desires, we have to remember that we are seeing the story unfold not only through Janie's eyes but through our upbringings as well. We're raised in the twenty-first century and no matter how hard we try, it will be impossible to fully understand Nanny's perspective, considering her circumstances were so harsh. So is Nanny really a villain?

Finally, A Woman: Initial Impressions of Janie Crawford

     The first two books we read this semester, Richard Wright's Native Son and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, both lack any sort of wholesome portrayal of women. In Native Son, every woman is portrayed either as a thorn in Bigger's path, a sexual object that he can manipulate and treat as he wants, or a motherly figure who he feels ashamed of. Invisible Man suffers the same condition - again, women are either sexual objects meant to get men excited, motherly figures whose conditions and dreams are not given any thought, or submissive wives and daughters who have to quietly suffer the conditions that society imposes upon them. However, reading the first few chapters of Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, feels like taking a fresh new breath. Finally, we have a woman character who isn't portrayed through the eyes of men who don't care about them. 

    The opening scene of Their Eyes Were Watching God starts out with the main character, Janie, coming back to her hometown without her husband. People speculate that something must have happened between them and he probably left her for another woman. However, one of Janie's friends tells her to ignore other people's gossip and Janie starts to tell her own story. 

    There are so many things about Janie that we see described in a positive way that are lacking in Native Son and Invisible Man. First of all, she's beautiful! And Zora Neale Hurston does her beauty true justice - unlike Ellison, she simply doesn't focus on Janie's breasts and sexualize her. She describes her beautiful hair and the way she walks - and that she's beautiful even in overalls. I love the way Janie is described because Hurston showed that women have both outer and inner beauty - and that beauty isn't defined by how much women's physical features can excite men around them. 

    Hurston also gives Janie a chance to tell her story from her point of view - her story's not being narrated by a fatherly figure or by another other person. She's given the agency to tell her own story on her terms through how she's seen it. Janie was conceived when her mother, just a teenager at the time, was raped by her teacher. Janie's raised by her grandmother (who also happened to be raped by her master during the Civil War, and had Janie's mother as a result), who initially raises her in the yard of a white couple and for the first couple of years, Janie doesn't even know that she's black until she sees a picture of herself. Her grandmother eventually moves them out of their yard and moves them onto some land she had bought so Janie can have a better upbringing. I'm going to pause and say that for a old, black woman at this time who was raised as a slave and witnessed the Civil War, buying land to raise her granddaughter also shows the amazing amount of agency she has over her life (obviously, this is limited because a couple of pages later, Janie's married off to an older man for financial security and so the grandmother can die in peace). So although Janie and her mother are products of rape which symbolizes taking away the autonomy of women to make decisions about their life and who they want to mate with, Janie's raised to be independent. 

    The defining scene of the first three chapters is probably when Janie's sitting under the pair tree, a teenager who's experiencing her budding sexuality in the spring. A boy comes and kisses her and her grandmother notices them, and isn't pleased to say the least. She decides to marry Janie off to an older man, which Janie is definitely not excited about. While marrying Janie off to a man she's never met is depriving her of the right to make her own choices, I still think this is a big step from the past couple of books. Firstly, Janie experiences her own sexuality - it's not defined by anyone else. In previous books, every single intimate scene is motivated by some sort of political or practical reason - Bessie is raped by Bigger because she's an inconvenience in his path, not because he truly feels any sort of love for her. That's the same with the narrator and Sybil in Invisible Man - the narrator rapes Sybil because he wants to get information out of her and not because he feels attraction or love towards her. After Janie's married, she expressed her discontent with her new husband - he doesn't wash his feet and is old. Furthermore, he expressed no love towards her. The grandmother tells Janie she should be grateful because she's probably set for life is she stays with him, but we see Janie asking for more. And she's not just asking for intimate relations, she wants more. She wants excitement in her life, something that will make her happy and fulfill her. In the books we've read in the class, this is the first time I've seen a woman character asking for more, refusing to stay content with what she's given. In a world where women aren't encouraged to express their opinion, even today when women who talk too much are told to stay quiet and not do too much, Janie yearns for more in her life. The crossroads are stacked against her - she's black and a woman. But she refuses to back down. A thought I had while reading this is that in order to truly protest oppressive norms or society, these battles don't have to be fought in court with an eloquent lawyer against a jury. One doesn't have to sacrifice their feelings and emotions and join a macho organization in order to protest. Janie doesn't even mean to protest - she's just asking for a better life; she wants to have fun and not work on a farm all day with her old, musty husband. But in asking for this, she's challenging what society has always told her what she can be. 

    These are my initial impressions of Janie and how Hurston portrays her. Compared to the past two male-dominated novels we've read so far, Their Eyes Were Watching God feels so much more wholesome. It's the story of a woman who just wants to fulfill her desires and what she wants in her life - but this truly brings out the ugliness of society. Janie asserts herself and Hurston uses this to portray the true beauty of a woman. Finally, we have a character who is not defined by men, but by herself. 

Why Does the Narrator Live in the Basement?

In the prologue of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, we're told by the narrator that he lives in a basement. And it's not an ordinary basement - it's his manhole which happens to be covered with 1,369 light bulbs and possibly more in the future. How he got here seems pretty straightforward - he just happens to fall into a hole in the ground during the riots happening in the city in Chapter 24. Obviously, you go down when you fall into something - you don't go up. But is there something more that Ellison is saying, by situating this reflection that the narrator has inside this basement with his light stolen from the power company. Why couldn't this period of reflection take place in a New York skyscraper or at a boarding house? Throughout the novel, Ellison seems to be telling us to look beneath the surface. He gives us plenty of opportunities to do this. Compared to Richard Wright's Native Son where everything seems to be happening on the surface level and Bigger Thomas barely has a developed conscience, Ellison does the exact opposite with Invisible Man - we have no clue where in the South the first bit of the novel takes place, we're not told anything about the narrator's family, and we don't even know his name. One's name is something that you're given from birth; when you introduce yourself, it's the first thing you say - "My name is [...]". In contrast, Wright tells us everything about Bigger Thomas - we know that he lives in Chicago, we even know where he lives in Chicago, we know he has a brother and a sister, and that he didn't go to school past the 8th grade. Irving Howe in his essay 'Black Boys and Native Sons' points this out - "... but with a book so rich in talk and drama it would be a shame to neglect the fascinating surface for the mere depths." (Howe) However, by eliminating specific things such as the Invisible Man's name or biographical details, Ellison gives so much in return - we're able to put ourselves in the body of the narrator, understand everything he thinks about, and at the end, we're prompted to ask ourselves a question - does the narrator speak for us? Ellison prompts us to go to our own figurative basement and tell us to introspect - are we blind like the Reverend Barbee? Do we keep running, without questioning the system through which we run? Are we invisible to others? Are others invisible to us? This brings me to the basement. The narrator spends the first few pages describing his invisibility and then says '"My hole is warm and full of light. Yes, full of light. I doubt if there is a brighter spot in all New York than this hole of mine, and I do not exclude Broadway." (Ellison, 6) Ok, so he has 1,369 light bulbs and his dark hole underground shines brighter than anything above. However, the narrator speaks of more than just the electromagnetic radiation that is light. He goes on to say, “I know; I have been boomeranged across my head so much that I now can see the darkness of lightness. And I love light. Perhaps you’ll think it strange that an invisible man should need light, desire light, love light. But maybe exactly because I am invisible. Light confirms my reality, gives birth to my form “ (Ellison, 6) The narrator says that he can “see the darkness of light”. What does this mean? How can light still be darkness? Again, the narrator asks us to look beneath the surface. During the novel, we see the narrator explore the world outside the basement - he explores those shiny spaces in New York, like Broadway and Times Square. However, it’s in this basement where he realizes that there is still darkness and ignorance in all that light - no number of jumbotrons are going to make him visible; to others, he will always be a black man. However, he has to go down to the dark to see the light. And this light is only visible to him - no one can see it because they refuse to go underneath while the narrator feels almost stuffy due to all this light and illumination around him. This light represents truth and knowledge, the truth he has finally found in the lightness of the dark of the basement and no one down here can stop or manipulate him. As Ellison puts it, “Nothing, storm or flood, must get in the way of our need for light and ever more and brighter light. The truth is the light and the light is the truth.”

A Letter to the Brotherhood

Dear Brother Jack,

From your first meeting with the narrator over that piece of cheesecake, I was already quite skeptical over your interests in getting your organization involved in the issues surrounding the African-American community in Harlem. But your conduct in the recent chapters (21 and 22, sorry for any spoilers!) has shown the true shades of your organization and your need to protect yourself from the true realities of race in America. I have a few grievances to address, so here we go. 

1. Your need to ignore the experience of individuals by bottling them up into groups and questions. I don't even think you care that much about the struggles of African-Americans and women; quite frankly, I think working with African Americans and women helps you check off a box and say that your organization has addressed an issue. However, the struggles of every individual is so distinct from another - even if they're the same race or gender! Although discrimination is a common experience for a lot of people during the 30s, these problems cannot be solved just by addressing the 'Race Question' or the 'Woman Question'. This brings me to my second point. 

2. Your 'scientific' approach to everything. Why can we not arouse the emotions of people and address wrongs committed to members of our community, no matter what era they're from or whether or not they're 'proper'? This is related to your need to categorize people - applying one scientific method to an entire community, without ever experiencing what it even means to be part of their experience. You want to insert your organization to get clout in all the issues happening around town without attempting to understand what you're getting yourself into.

3. "You're riding 'race' again." (469) Yeah, why does everyone have to talk about race? Why can't we just acknowledge it and move on? Why can't everything be simple like that?😱😱😱No, it can't. This is related to the Brotherhood's need to ignore history and this is because of their privilege as mostly white men - they have the luxury of ignoring history and moving past it. In order to move beyond history, you have to acknowledge it and try to undo wrongs done. This quote by James Baldwin sums it up pretty well - 'People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them.' If we want to break free of something, we have to learn from it or else we're bound to repeat it. The Brotherhood is blinded to the reality of race and class and gender in the United States but they try to dictate what the discourse around it should be. 

Sincerely, 
A Reader