The beginning chapters of Their Eye Were Watching God by Zora Hurston were over all, very well done. I was captivated by Janie’s background. Her grandmother raised her by herself while working as a nanny for a white family. She grew up thinking of herself as an equal to the white children. She was actually at a point where she thought herself to be no different from her white friends,
“So when we looked at de picture and everybody got pointed out there wasn’t nobody left except a real dark little girl with long hair standing by Eleanor. Dat’s where Ah wuz s’posed to be, but Ah couldn’t recognize dat dark chile as me. So Ah ast, ‘where is me? Ah don’t see me.’
This gives her a huge advantage in life. She has a better head on her shoulders because she knows white people who are not racist, so she can associate herself with better people than the ones making fun of her at school. One can tell that she is a better person because she grew up not having to look down when a white person passes by.
I also believe that the way the author wrote the book by giving the African Americans that accent was well thought out. I think that it would have given the book less meaning if the white spoke the same way they did. It shows a little more of the tone that was down in the south. By this different accent one can tell that blacks did not go to school. I think that if all the speech was the same it would have been harder to see the blacks not being able to go to school because they sound like they have had a good background. With the different accent it shows what African Americans were fighting for in this time period, which is equality.
