"The world in a jug and the stopper in hand": 'Their Eyes' as blues performance

African American Review, Fall, 1998 by Maria V. Johnson

When Janie responds, demanding that Jody stop mixing her "doings" with her "looks," it threatens the foundation of his lie. He pushes to maintain his lie about her looking old in order to maintain his illusion of omnipotence. And Janie is pushed to defend herself and to articulate the truth of her own image. The strength of Janie's presentation comes from the fact that she first truthfully assesses and expresses her own condition (redrawing the image he has presented of her), then takes what he has said about her age and looks (his lie) and mirrors it back to reflect the truth about his age and looks. Like Joe's attack, Janie's counterattack culminates in signifyin(g):

"Naw, Ah ain't no young gal no mo' but den Ah ain't no old woman neither. Ah reckon Ah looks mah age too. But Ah'm uh woman every inch of me, and Ah know it. Dat's uh whole lot more'n you kin say. You big-bellies round here and put out a lot of brag, but 'tain't nothin' to it but yo' big voice. Humph! Talkin"bout me lookin' old! When you pull down yo' britches, you look lak de change uh life." (122-23)

In her response, Janie systematically separates (1) her looks from her doings, (2) her looks and age from Jody's looks and age, and (3) Jody's "talk" from the truth, appearance and lie from reality. In so doing, she exposes Jody's physical impotence, the reality behind the appearance of his material power. As Johnson and Gates point out, Janie's signifyin(g) not only robs him of the illusion that he is God, but also of the illusion that he is a powerful man (74). Janie uses the humor of signifyin(g) and the dozens to expose the discrepancy between lie and reality.

This scene is the culmination of a series of scenes in which Janie articulates her ability to separate her own voice from that of others. Barbara Johnson has demonstrated how, in the passages leading up to this scene, Hurston utilizes linguistic processes of objectification and inversion and juxtaposes variations on the inside/outside opposition to convey in the narrator's voice Janie's process of separating true from false images, reality from appearance ("Metaphor" 164). By juxtaposing an externalization of inner space with an internalization of outer space, Hurston signals a reversal of the power structure. From this point on, Janie's power and resistance grow as Jody's body and public image deteriorate (Their Eyes 111-12). In terms of blues strategies, what is crucial in this climactic signifyin(g) scene is the way in which Hurston extends her series of variations on the inner/outer opposition with a dramatic shift to direct address which functions, as in a blues performance, to move the "piece" to an expressive peak. It is especially fitting that signifyin(g), one of the most powerful vehicles of direct address, provides the stage for Janie's debut of her verbal competence and, by extension, of her individual voice.

To illustrate the relationship between Hurston's use of direct address and that of the blues performer I bring back Bessie Smith for a full reprise of her first issued recording, "Downhearted Blues":