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

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

As in the recounting of the buzzard's mule funeral, Hurston uses the techniques of the blues performer when she describes Daisy Blunt approaching the store porch. In this passage, which connects episodes of porch talk in the novel, Hurston and Janie display their own skill at creating "big pictures." Using the blues idiom, teller and author capture the powerful image which Daisy herself projects, and articulate a Black female standard of beauty. Hurston describes Daisy's beauty in terms of the ways in which the white of the moon and the white in her features and clothes highlight her blackness. This image stands in stark contrast to the standard literary image of the mulatta, which highlights whiteness (Christian 22-23). Through her blues use of contrast, Hurston critiques and revises the mulatta stereotype:

. . . Daisy Blunt comes walking down the street in the moonlight. Daisy is walking a drum tune. You can almost hear it by looking at the way she walks. She is black and she knows that white clothes look good on her, so she wears them for dress up. She's got those big black eyes with plenty shiny white in them that makes them shine like brand new money and she knows what God gave women eyelashes for, too. Her hair is not what you might call straight. It's negro hair, but it's got a kind of white flavor. Like the piece of string out of a ham. It's not ham at all, but it's been around ham and got the flavor. It was spread down thick and heavy over her shoulders and looked just right under a big white hat. (105-06)

Hurston celebrates Daisy's sensuality and sex appeal using blues imagery which stimulates all the senses. Her juxtaposition of contrasting sensory realms - sight, sound, touch, and taste - serves to reinforce the black-white contrasts she describes and to heighten the intensity of the "performance" which is simultaneously Daisy's, Janie's, and Hurston's. As Daisy's movement suggests music, Hurston's word picture evokes the sounds, tastes, and textures behind the visual image she projects. Describing Daisy's hair, Hurston uses a very sensual and sexually suggestive food metaphor which is reminiscent of the jelly roll image found in blues like the following:

Jellyroll, jellyroll, ain't so hard to find Ain't a baker shop in town bake 'em brown like mine I got a sweet jelly, a loving sweet jelly roll If you taste my jelly it'll satisfy your worried soul. (Peg Leg Howell, "New Jelly Roll Blues" [1927], qtd. in Oliver 109)

In Their Eyes, Hurston utilizes linguistic devices such as objectification,(6) personification, hyperbole, and inversion like the blues singer - to embody opposition and contrast. By externalizing emotions, objectification, personification, and related processes articulate an opposition between an inner world of feelings and an outer world of objects. This is literally illustrated in Their Eyes when Nanny's "voice began snagging on the prongs of her feelings" (27). By externalizing Nanny's feelings and objectifying her voice, Hurston "paints" the conflict between Nanny's advice to Janie and her true feelings. Similarly, in "Empty Bed Blues," Bessie Smith externalizes, objectifies, and embodies feelings of loneliness and abandonment in the image of an empty bed: