Biblical trees, biblical deliverance: literary landscapes of Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison

African American Review, Spring-Summer, 2005 by Glenda B. Weathers

Despite her hatred of it, however, Nanny complies with the social hierarchy that places black women beneath black men who, in turn, occupy menial positions beneath white men. Seized by the same fears of domination that later will stir a subjugated community to action, Nanny tries to control the loose woman she now fears Janie has become. (7) When Nanny awakens to see that pear-tree-influenced lacerating kiss, she calls her granddaughter's name. And "that," says Janie, reflecting on her acquisition of knowledge, "was the end of her childhood" (12). Sensing the loss of Janie's innocence and seeing through masculinist lenses, Nanny determines Janie's fate in collusion with the male-authored way of controlling a woman's life: marry her (off) to secure male domination or safety.

Replete with the promise of fecundity, the pear tree argues against the tyranny of control that Nanny unwisely, perhaps unwittingly, chooses. In biblical allusion to a promised land that Nanny has hoped but failed to provide, she tells Janie that she had intended to "throw up a highway through de wilderness" (15). Her grandmother has also wanted Janie "to know" things, but sexual knowledge outside the constraints of marriage is not part of the plan. Hurston subtly alludes to the tree of knowledge when she has Nanny confess that because of the offending kiss, the plan for Janie "to school out and pick from a higher bush and a sweeter berry" has gone awry. Thus, Nanny marries Janie off to Logan Killicks, theoretically to "protect" her (13-14). But from Janie's perspective, "protection" signifies a prophylactic that prevents life--her own. Her first vision as she imagines life with Killicks is of the pear tree "desecrated"; then to her, Killicks's house seems "a lonesome place like a stump in the middle of the woods where nobody had ever been" (20). Thus, like God in the Garden of Eden, Nanny authoritatively imposes a death-like sentence on Janie when she insists on her marriage to a man with the chilling name of Killicks.

As Janie re-gathers the images constituting the life journey she is relating to Pheoby, trees provide the markers of her life. Janie describes her loveless, first marriage, then her meetings with Joe Starks in the "scrub oaks" across the road from Killicks' house. Janie's outer landscape details serve as emotional shorthand for her interior reality. Infused with personal psychology, the scrub oaks of Janie's narrative anticipate the bleak emotional landscape of Janie's second marriage. In fact, she confesses to Pheoby that Joe Starks did not "represent sun-up and pollen and blooming trees, but he [did] speak for far horizon ... for change and [for] chance" (28). When Starks suggests marriage, therefore, Janie takes a chance, flings her constraining apron "on a low bush," makes herself a bouquet of flowers, and marries Starks with the naive hope that "from now on until death" she will have a "bee for her bloom" (33).

In recounting this marriage, Janie demonstrates her faith that it would meet her needs. "A big live oak tree" presides over much of the activity when Joe and Janie arrive in Maitland, Florida (33). But that organic tree belies what the marriage proves to be. Hungering for power and authority, Starks booms his entrance into the town: "I god, ... where's de Mayor?" (32). That is, Hurston's spelling transforms his expletive into declaration: I god. Joe Starks's "god" with its lowercase g and "Mayor" with a capital M essentially reduces god while raising the Mayor wannabe to new dominance. Declaring Maitland's need for authority, Starks covets the mayoral position, forges his authority from the subjection, fear, and awe of the citizens, and perpetuates his stronghold by parading his successes, one of which is Janie--ornament-wife, a notch on his sword. (8)