Their Eyes Were Watching God

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Tea Cake or Vergible Woods comes into Eatonville hoping to watch a baseball game. Instead he meets the widowed Janie Starks tending to her store while everyone is at the game. Immediately, he attracts Janie with his happiness and is character. Although some years younger than Janie, she seems to take to Tea Cake easily. The people of the town are worried that he is after Janie’s money, but all he really wants is for Janie to love him. One of the actions that really won Janie over is when he taught her how to play checkers, something that Jody didn’t do. Woods admires Janie and treats her with class and she falls in love with him. Tea Cake leads Janie to discover things about herself she never knew in her years with Nanny, Logan, or Joe. He teaches her how to handle guns, and how to shoot. They go on picnics, much to the sadness of the porch sitters, who resent his intrusion on Janie's mandatory mourning period. After all the gossip Janie still has a special connection with Tea Cake that can’t be broken. He listens to Janie and helps her gain her youth and idea of marriage back. In the end, Vergible Woods makes a connection with Janie’s youth and the analogy of the peach tree in the beginning of the book. Also it correlates with Janie’s free spirit and adventurous side.

All of Janie’s husbands impacted her life and the first two eventually lead to the finding of her true love, Vergible Woods. In the end, Janie is at peace with all the decisions she made and is happy the way her life was. Janie is a strong woman that endured a lot throughout her life, but the readers of Hurston’s novel get the picture that she was strong enough to come out happy and at peace in the end when her true love dies.

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