Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

21:40And that is not overtly political, but that's what we want to do. That's what art can do. That's a humanizing enterprise of and in itself. I think over time, it's been yes, and rather than this versus that. But when there was so few space, there's so, and this is true today for different kinds of identities and black people tells to not as much self space sort of metaphorically and physically for these identities the book that got to be the bestseller right it mattered because

22:08Jeff:of the replacement value right if you get a shot yes you should what do you do with your shot yes how you should use it what do you owe the particular group that you represent or what might you owe them and in Hurston herself I mean this goes to some of her political stuff she was Against the new deal, she thought it made people too dependent on the government, especially black people. She, I can't remember exactly the poker metaphor she used or the card metaphor. It's like, I can play the card game. I just know some of the people are cheating. But that I know they're cheating helps me. I can't fix the game, but that's all.

22:39I want to be dealt in. Like, I don't need, I don't want, I have to play the cards I'm dealt them. So I'm just going to play it. And anything that's not that, I really don't give a shit about. I'm going to, I believe in myself and my own individual experience enough. enough that I'm just going to play the cards at there and people can, I don't want to say whine, but, you know, make a case that black people need more assistance or different programs or things like this. Again, I'm not saying I believe these. I'm just saying this is where she was at the time and maybe would still be today. It's like if we really get the same treatment, then let the chips fall where they may.

23:14And each individual is going to need to take their own responsibility for their own outcomes in their own life. And again, things aren't that simple. I don't know that she would believe those things now. Maybe she would. I don't know. But I think this is one of those cases where we pigeonhole people because of their identity when they don't necessarily line up with it. And I think that's important to remember. And I think that's important to know that this happens.

23:38Jeff:I agree in general and especially for this writer and this story and the way that the story falls out of favor in the 30s and 40s and then gets revived in the 60s by black women writers. You call it the Hurston Renaissance. Alice Walker sort of unearths Zora Neale Hurston and writes this essay called Looking for Zora in 1975. But then Robert Hemenway, who you took classes from at the University of Kansas, he also was a Hurston scholar. And so let's talk a little bit about Zora Neale Hurston and sort of how this comes back and now it's remained on syllabi in the popular conversation about books, but how it was rescued.

24:20Jeff:And then we can get into a plot summary. So Their Eyes comes out in 1937. This is, you know, the Harlem Renaissance, to a first approximation, can be dated to like the stock market crashing 1929. Black writing becomes more overtly political. The Locust moves to like Chicago, Black Lives movement later, more and more political. And she doesn't follow that, right? The sales don't work out. She can't support herself directly with her novels, because that's just the market has moved. I think we could get into other things going on, especially the people who, you know, moved markets then weren't thinking about Hurston as much there.

24:57She tries a bunch of other stuff, has a stroke, finds herself living in a welfare home state, and dies in 1960, and is buried in essentially an unmarked grave and had been forgotten by the literary establishment such as it was even before that. But there'd been a little smoldering embers. You know, the books had been found by black women in bookstores and looking back and looking for a usable past as black women, you know, this is something Courtney Thorson talks about the group as these black women in the 60s and early 70s accumulating a power, accumulating some voice, accumulating some weight that they can throw around.

25:36And one of those includes becoming the editor at Ms. Magazine. One of these women commissions Alice Walker to write this essay about going to find Zora Neale Hurston's grave in 1975. And that's really the match that lights a spark. There's this famous MLA Sunday morning convention, a panel that's like packed to the gills. People ready to fight about what Hurston meant and didn't. I've been to these. What a scene. I once gave a paper at a regional PMLA that had four people in attendance.

26:03Jeff:MLA is Modern Language Association for folks. but English nerds. The principal academic group for literature professors and scholars. And that comes out, Hemingway's bio in 1977. And then there's a reissue. Harper and Rowe had the rights. They gave it to University of Illinois where Hemingway had written the book and it sold so well they got them back. The first reissue by Harper and Rowe sold out 75 ,000 copies in the first. I mean, just all of a sudden, Rebecca, like all of a sudden it was a thing. How many of these books that we talk about as classics were very nearly completely forgotten? We're two for two.

26:42I mean, essentially, we're two for two with Gatsby.

26:44Jeff:And with the books that are older like this, 75 years old, 100 years old, it's so common. Because this is what happens to most books. And this is probably a point that we'll make repeatedly on this show is that most books come out and if they get read at all within a few years, they are forgotten. And if something is going to stand the test of time, it either has a really big moment that propels it forward forever, or someone in a position of power and influence resurrects it and gives it a second life that then it ends up like many of these will have ended up on syllabi, not all of them. But how often it hinges on like some moment of this is still relevant, this book from 30 years ago, we can still talk about it.

27:26Jeff:And that it's that resurrection that carries the book into decades and decades of future conversation is really remarkable. And so we're going to get into plot here a little bit. And the plot will help us uncover like what is it about this book that these influential scholars in the 60s and even what we look for today really come to mind. And really what it is, is kind of the same reason it was forgotten is the wrong word, because it sort of wasn't even remembered at the moment. It was positively reviewed. It didn't sell very well in publication. And it's it's Janie, right? It's Janie's consciousness and her sensibility and her experience.

28:01So the story goes something like this. Rebecca, help me as I walk through this a little bit.

28:05Jeff:Yeah, I can start us off. So Janie is 16 when we meet her and is lounging around in the front yard. She lives with her granny. Parents are not in the picture. And granny looks out the window and sees that Janie is smooching a fella who has come by the yard. And this is the first time that Janie has ever let this no good guy kiss her. But granny does not know that. And granny is very concerned. It's also really important to know here that granny's background is that she was born into slavery. And that's a very present and active part of her identity and her memory. and Janie is free, but Granny wants something bigger for Janie.

28:44Jeff:So she sees this, that Janie is kissing a boy. She's worried about all of the paths that this might lead down. And how far down the path is Janie already? Granny doesn't know. Is she going to get pregnant? Is she going to ruin her future in some way? And Granny tells her that she's arranged for Janie to get married to a much older man named Logan Killicks. He's been coming around. he's interested in Janie Granny wasn't so sure what to do but now that she sees that Janie is maybe on her way to like being fast as they would put it she's going to go forward with this arranged marriage and Janie hates this idea she objects to it she wants to get married for love she's you know really enlivened by the world around her we see her like looking at this one particular tree and imagining the way that the light falls the pear tree Yeah.

29:37Jeff:And imagining what it would feel like to be in love. And like she just got her first kiss an hour ago and her grandma is telling her, you're going to go marry this old man and it's for your own good. And she says, I want you to have protection. It's not love and it's not him that I want you to have, but I want you to have protection. And that's really our first sign that Janie is after something different in life than what Granny wants for her and is asking different questions of her life than what previous generations of Black people were able to ask because so many of them were enslaved. Janie marries Logan Killicks.

30:14Jeff:It is not good. He basically wants her as a farmhand. Not a great husband. He just sees her functionally as an indentured servant. and she meets a man who's walking down the road one day who starts flirting with her. His name is Joe Starks and they run away together. And when Janie leaves with Joe, she says, I done lived grandma's way now. Now I means to live mine. So then she and Joe, they move off to this town that he's heard of. That's founding being they're founding themselves and all black town. Joe has a bunch of money that we don't really ever know where it comes with, which is one of the great mysteries of this.

30:50Yes. Yeah.

30:51Jeff:Yeah. So they go on down the road and they go to Eatonville, Jeff. They do. And Eatonville's great for a while. It doesn't yet have a lamp. It doesn't have a store. It doesn't have houses. So Captain Eaton, who had given 50 acres, to my memory, this is pretty accurate to how Eatonville was actually started, to have a black community grow and they could self-govern there. Joe walks in, thinks it's a bigger deal than it is. Kind of a classic American story of like, I was told all these things and it's not as great as it is. He buys 200 acres, starts selling off lots. People start coming in. He's elected mayor and becomes a muckety.

31:25He becomes the muckety muck of the town.

31:28Jeff:The town needs a store. So he's going to build the store. The town needs a mayor. So he'll be the mayor. And we don't know that he set off for this place with the intention to run the show. But as soon as he gets there and realizes, as you were saying, that there's not anything there and he's got a bunch of money in his pocket that nobody else has, it's an opportunity that he can build this town, but also he can be the one who runs the town. Yeah. And in each stage, I mean, this is hard to remember now. You can read the date and see that Hurston was born in 1901. It's harder to grok that she, her parents and their parents were, a lot of them were slaves.

32:07Like these are people who hadn't been out multiple generations. Like these people knew directly. Granny knows of what she speaks here. The being married to Logan Killicks compared to being a slave is not even comparable, right? Whereas Janie hasn't had that experience of slavery. So I think one of the things the novel is suggesting that you could dream, you can dream bigger when you have different kinds of experience. It's like there's a beautiful naiveness to her vision of a bee pollinating a flowering pear tree as the central metaphor for like heterosexual romantic love. Like it's very natural.

32:44It's very beautiful. It's very, shall we say, peaceful. It's interdependent. Like they both get something like you can't say the flower or the bee has the upper hand or is like gets to rule the house. There's a very symbiotic kind of relationship.

33:00Jeff:And it's a beautiful dream because as Joe builds the store, someone has to work in the store. And it's going to be Janie because Joe is busy. He has to go off and do all the things. Smoke cigars with the guys on the porch and get the deals done. Right, that a mayor's got to do. But the people of the town do flock to the porch. The porch of the store becomes like a gathering place. And they hang out and they tease each other and tell stories and tell tall tales and just sort of mess around. And it's this real community center. We're given to understand that Janie is very light skinned and so is perceived as very beautiful among this community of black people.

33:41Jeff:A lot of talk about her hair. Her hair is a very important feature. A lot of talk about how sleek and long her hair is. And that Joe wants her to cover it up because the other men in the town are talking about how beautiful she is. And he's protective of that. But this second marriage, this also turns sour. That over decades, they're together for quite a while. Janie feels trapped again. And again, like an indentured servant to him. She's dreaming of actual love. Their relationship is no longer exciting. He's not the flashy young man who seduced her and flirted with her and made her feel beautiful.

34:19Jeff:And they have this sort of final showdown where they have a big fight in the store. and Janie insults him in such a way that like he feels like his manhood has been taken from him. She cuts his head off. I mean, she insults what he looks like with his pants down and it gets a big laugh. And some of that is Joe has been playing, you know, the dozens get played. Like I think Hurston is happiest when she has a couple of characters playing the dozens. Like I think that she really is like that's what she's doing it for in a lot of ways. the dozens being a trading of insults or one-liners or tall tales back and forth.

34:56And Joe has so underestimated her throughout that he is taken aback. And he doesn't even know that this is a possibility because he hasn't paid her any mind, to use a phrase they might use.

35:07Jeff:That's one of the gender dynamics that feels so relevant still today. Like, Hurston had her finger right on how fragile masculinity and male egos can be. And this This is like the big shot guy of the town. And he's been that way for 20 years. And everybody knows that he has power. Somebody says like he has a throne in the seat of his pants. He doesn't need to build a throne. He just walks around knowing that he owns the place. But he has so underestimated her. And she knows it. She comes to the realization that he has underestimated her. And that this love she thought was going to happen when she left Logan Killings.

35:46Jeff:This relationship was better than the first marriage. but it is not the way that she's going to spend her life. And this, the whole story is like really in pursuit of Janie's self-realization of what does she want and how far can she go to get it? How close can she come to get it? So around this time, as things are souring, another young man appears. Janie's 40 and Tea Cake is 25 or so. Well, Joe is dead at this point. So I don't, it's not directly said, but like she hurts him so badly like has a heart attack right dies essentially he's like he falls out the rest of the town is turned against him like he cannot ever regain the statuary once had and it leads to his metaphorical figurative literal demise she's been in mourning she's had a bunch of suitors from the town she's like i'm not getting falling in any of these lot that want to have an instrumental relationship and that's where tk comes one day who just sort of shows up the wrong he thought the game was that town and it's in this town and i guess i better hang out and show you how to play checkers.

36:47Jeff:Yeah, so he takes her seriously. He teaches her how to play checkers. He treats her as an equal. Beautiful scene. Yeah. Them learning to checkers. I had forgotten. Is it really? There's not an adaptation of this really to speak of. There was an Oprah produced TV movie 20 years ago. We're not talking. We're not going to talk about that one. You can't stream it. You shouldn't try. But that scene where Tea Cake walks into the store and they have just wonderful banter, I think would be such a great moment to watch on screen. And she's she kind of is like, you know what? I know that she's functionally a cougar here.

37:21Jeff:Like it's a real May, December situation. People are judging her. There's a lot of gossip about it. But he's young and he takes her seriously. And this feels like actual connection. This feels like actual love to her. So she's going she's going to run off again and she's going to marry Tea Cake and they go to the Everglades. Yeah. So they spend some time in cities for a little while, but eventually Tea Cake tells her about this part of the Everglades called the muck. It's away from the things of man, kind of like they're seasonal workers living in this really fertile soil. Kansas takes a stray because like this, this, all of this, like one handful could fertilize all of Kansas.

38:01The sunflower state took note, Hurston, we put it in our ledger for you. but like it's presented as sort of an agrarian utopia for black people in this regard where they were allowed to work with a degree of independence and fair pay and that's all they wanted yeah you know she's wearing overalls and happy about it um they're sleeping in you know not the nicest quarters in the world they're picking beans all day but they're having a good time and they're feeling like they get a certain amount of freedom a certain self-expression and joy community in those places and i think this at this point a modern version of this this part still feels i don't want to say revolutionary but the denouement here is not whiteness coming to ruin everything it's a natural disaster we get a flood in the in everglades which just have it this is a literal act of god at this point they escape together this horrible situation in the course of it they encounter a dog tk holds the dog in abeyance and kills it so it doesn't kill them both he gets bitten on the cheek develops a case of rabies and goes nuts and you know in the way that one does and then janey shoots him in self-defense i didn't do a vibe i didn't do a fact check on this but a trial in a single day rebecca did you what is happening and she shoots him in the morning is acquitted by a trial by jury at night there are some slightly

39:30Jeff:surreal elements of this story and the fact that that's the way that that's what happens that jamie shoots tea cake the police show up she's got to explain that it was in self-defense there and then they're gonna try her the same day they take her off to the courthouse she's in jail they get the witnesses i mean yeah i can't get to the i can't get the trader joe's and back it with all my list in a single day so i don't know that was but it doesn't really matter It doesn't really matter. People are suspicious at first about why she would have killed him. But as the doctor gets up and confirms that he did have rabies, she's got to kill him in self-defense because he's trying to attack her.

40:11Jeff:He has a gun. He's out of his mind. And it's not the thing that she wants to do. She loves this man. But that's what she has to do. And she is acquitted. And after his death, she makes her way back to her hometown where the whole story starts. The book begins with Janie walking back into town. She's wearing her overalls. People are gossiping about her. They're hanging out on the porches. And her best friend Phoebe makes her way over to Janie's house to hear the story. And the entire book here happens inside that frame, but we never pop back out of the frame until the very end. This episode is brought to you by Starbucks.

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41:43So that's the story from here, Rebecca. Let's talk about our own experience of the book initially and then what it was like to return to Eatonville and the muck and Hurston's world. Where did you start? What was your memory of first encountering?

41:56Jeff:I first read this in high school in a very white suburb of Kansas City. and uh my i remember my teacher introducing it and doing you know the before we get started kind of lecture that teachers tend to do that we just did that we just did who is zora neale hurston why does this book matter and one of the things that she spent a lot of time on was that the book is largely written in dialect and i feel so torn about how that was presented to me now because it is true that just most of the books that we read are not like most of the books that are published are not written in any kind of dialect.

42:32Jeff:So it is an unusual reading experience. But once you get into the rhythm of Hurston, and if you can hear the language in your head, it's not complicated at all. To me, the language, like the orality of the language makes it very readable. On going back, that was a big surprise because I was, I think, 16 the last time that I read this. And so I wondered like, what will it be like to go back? But I found that I was able to like to really sink right into it. And there were times where how oral the language is really created kind of a transcendent experience where I forgot for a minute that I was reading a book.

43:13Jeff:And felt like I was sitting there on the porch like somebody was telling the story to me. When did you first read it? Have you read it since? I've read it four times, I believe. Let me do Jeff's quick tips for reading dialect. I got two pieces of reading dialect. the first is to whatever you're hearing in your head about how variants it might be from your own accent, dial it down a little. Like don't let that like is spelled L-A-K, like just lighten it. Lighten it a little bit. It's like doing a good accent. I remember someone saying the key to doing a good Boston accent is to make it less than you think it is.

43:52Do have it rather than have it, right? Just lighten it up a little bit. And also, it's okay to treat it a little bit like Shakespeare, where you're not getting every single word. But go a little slower. But let your eyes flow over it. If you don't know exactly the phonetic representation of what Hurston is doing or what they're saying, it could be that it's language out of style. It could be that you're thinking it's something else. But just kind of let it flow. Don't worry about getting every single word. So those two things, I think, can make it a lot more palatable. Because there's big chunks of it.

44:22There's long passages.

44:23Jeff:Her style is consistent and repetitive. So like I, when a character is talking about I, it's always A-H, like ah, like, you know, an ah. And if you know a Southern person who has a Southern accent, it does sound like that. Sometimes like I went down to the Walmart. You can hear that. Well, and there's a way in which it's more accurate, right? Because you're actually transmitting the sound of what someone might be saying. And you're not privileging the sound over the meaning, but you're not letting just the meaning be the only thing being transmitted. Because some of the orality, some of just the sound of it is what Hurston is interested in.

44:58As an anthropologist, remember, too, we don't have a billion MP3s. We don't have the internet where you can just go hear people talk. This anthropological work is real in these senses. And she reveled in them at the same time. I don't remember the first time reading it. I read it in high school, I read it in college, I read it in grad school, and then I read it once since. I really don't. I really don't have, I feel like I've always have read this as a person who cared about books. So it's sort of built in there. I think on this read, the thing that really jumped out to me was not just the dialect, but the switching between these beautiful, epic feelings, free indirect discourse to these long pages of conversations.

45:39So free indirect discourse, you don't know, that's when the book is just sort of talking to the universe. It's not directed in these things. The narrator is just like, here is this. Or is there even a narrator? Where is this even coming from? Yeah. So, and it is, I think, even for me, I will admit this, a little jarling to switch between the dialect and this really like almost classical feeling prose like the beginning of dickens or dostoevsky or some of these and these like metaphorical pronouncements about life and how things are and then descriptions of nature and people and dynamics and internal feelings then to talk about like cutting the tobacco plug and getting that right using dialect at the same time and i think that side-by-sideness is absolutely the center of hurston's yeah in my point of view it's like both of them are valuable cherished and value and worth preserving and celebrating there's one is not better than the other they do different things for different reasons and to see it side by side even today you don't see stuff you don't see it

46:44Jeff:done like this and like to do one of these well could be the work of a lifetime but then does and does both of them well and puts them side by side and that they are in such conversation with each other that we go from people hanging out on the porch and telling jokes about each other and like really razzing each other into a pretty like high-minded philosophical statement about what's happening here and who these people are and that she can weave back and forth. Like it's just so, so masterful. Because we start, I mean, I'll just do this in the end, but I think it's a good deal of the text here.

47:18This is just the very beginning, right? Chapter one. Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some, they come in with the tide. For others, they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by time. That is the life of men. Like, it's like, it's like Homer. I mean, I don't know. Like, what is that?

47:39Jeff:I mean, it's like, it's in the same zone as, um, so we beat on boats against the shore. Yeah, you're right. I mean, it's very it feels like there is yeah a homology there in this sort of writing that goes on and I'm not going to do it because I don't want to and you know you can read it for yourself but like and then you get these long patches of people talking about their lives in very down home kinds of ways. Rebecca's tips for reading dialect are that the audiobook of this has really high excellent ratings. So if you're - Did you look at it? I should have. I didn't I haven't listened but Ruby Dee narrates it.

48:12Jeff:She also narrates The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. Really high, consistently great reviews. And if you're concerned at all, like when you said treat this like Shakespeare, that's one of the ways that we learn Shakespeare in school is to listen or to see it performed. And if it will bring the language more alive for you to listen to someone do it, I think the audiobook here would be like an excellent option or to do audio while you're looking at the print. Yeah. Other things I noticed, like I didn't remember the sort of fable-like structure, right? It has these three princes, right? This is a classic fable structure.

48:43we get Logan, we get Joe, we get Tea Cake as the main character sort of figuring out how to be in the world. There's even a flood. Like what's more fabilistic and sort of biblical than a flood at the same time? Yeah. The two things that really jumped out to me are a moment with Logan and a moment with Joe where she has sort of a critical consciousness and it's like something fell off the shelf inside of her. Like she has this moment around Logan of realizing basically this, I don't want this i don't need this i don't feel like this is the way it has to be and she doesn't have a she can't really do anything yet right about that but having this realization then sort of primes her for when a moment comes right um when when joe then walks down the road she's like something else something there's something else out there for me and then when joe dies and she's getting this she's getting courted again she's like i've done this i've seen it i i don't want to do this again.

49:40I'd rather do, you know, I'm ready for, there's something else out there for me. And Janie's patience, her lack of fear about the future that puts her in these positions where once she has even the little bit of agency gets, which is to go with Joe or then to go with Tea Cake, she's ready to act on it. And she does.

49:57Jeff:Yeah. Edward Jodontica wrote the intro to my 75th anniversary edition. And she talks about Janie's journey to self-conceived liberation, which I think is such a perfect way to put that. To Janie, she knows that these are risks that she's taking every time she takes it but the risk of moving into this unknown future of going off with this new man to set up life in a place that she's never seen or heard of before is not as scary as the risk of staying in a place that she knows is not going to give her the things that she wants in life. It's not going to give her a path towards happiness and love and expression.

50:33Jeff:And like that was radical then and it remains radical today, especially for women. And you can see why. I mean, American racism is here. Like it's embedded here. It's not ignored. Like it gets mentioned several times. It's more baked in than served on a platter, I guess. I'm mixing some culinary metaphors here. And there's I think one of the effects of how Hurston represents that is then Jamie has. she has at least enough sense that her life isn't determined so that she can take a risk. She will go along. She will jump in the car, walk down the road. Whereas a different model of, you know, a sort of a racial determinism would not allow her even the space to have that kind of interiority and that kind of intellectual freedom.

51:17Or it's not even a literal, it's like kind of a soul, like there's a soul at the center. And she says at one time, at that moment is where my inside no longer matched my outside because she had to perform all these things, even though something was going on differently at the same time. So again, it's accounted for. They're not many white people, those that are in positions of power. The men are certainly subject to it. The women are certainly subject to it. There's a, you know, um, Janie's mom or Janie herself was a product of a rape early in the book. So like it's there, but what Hurston is trying to do is even within all that, how can she have sort of Janie have a thought and a feeling of her own and then do something with it.

51:55That's within, around the truth of the overwhelming power. But it's not, Hurston doesn't see it as so overwhelming as to be immobilizing. That's not her vantage point.

52:05Jeff:I think like real product of the time that it's told in, that it is a man in each stage who has to be, she has to have a man as the vehicle for the next moment of liberation because it is 1937. Like there are not a lot of opportunities, especially for a black woman to try to strike out on her own. And this is a path that no generation of black women have walked before, because as you were saying, her parents and her grandparents can remember being enslaved, that it's so present. So that's, I think, an interesting way to read the gender politics. I can imagine a 2025 English lit major being like, but all of her liberation comes through a man.

52:46Jeff:And it's like, yes, and also no, that these men are necessary tools along the way for Jamie to get to different places, to try to find love, to seek different forms of liberation. But when that tool is no longer useful to her, she will move on to another one. And she ultimately does end up by herself. She comes back down that road into town alone. And I think we can imagine that from that point on, she will be, you know, she'll have solitude. She'll be solitary and be independent. that the frame story of this, I think it just sets up such a wonderful reading experience that we know from the beginning that Janie is, Janie's sitting on a porch telling Phoebe.

53:27Like that she survives, like matters, right? That's something else I forgot. Like it matters that she's like not going to die or be in jail or something.

53:33Jeff:The peril of the storm. Like there, I forgot in reading this, like that we know that Janie's going to make it till the end because Janie shows up at the beginning of the book to tell this story to Phoebe. It's so absorbing and so palpable. And the movement between, like the porch scenes are just, I think my favorite parts of the book. When Janie is working at the store and we're listening to people hang out on the porch and sometimes she goes out there and she gets a line or two in. And then the narrator comes in and tells us things like the other big picture talkers were using a side of the world for a canvas.

54:06Jeff:It was a contest in hyperbole and carried on for no other reason. And that's illustrated directly through the dialect. and these people in community in conversation with each other. But then Hurston really wants us to know how important this dynamic is, that these people come together and talk. And porch-sitting culture in the South, it's still a thing. But before the internet, it was really a thing. This was how the news got passed. It was how gossip happened. If somebody walked into town because her husband died in the hurricane and maybe she had run off with a much younger man, everybody would be moving porch to porch to tell the story.

54:45Jeff:and that Hurston captures that is I just thought so wonderful. Yeah. And in the beginning to like she comes back, we get that really beautiful opening and then we get sort of a Greek chorus of the town sort of wondering, judging her, you know, going through the whole like, you know, the kinds of talk that Mel Robbins is telling you to let them do, I guess, at this point is what we'd say. And the ending one is why don't she stay in her class? Right. Why? And that I mean, Hurston hates nothing more. It's like you are this, which means you have to do you should be doing x y and z and it's foretold and if you vary from it then you've done something wrong and we're going to ostracize you in that particular way i mean really a book about defining love and defining life and success on your own terms janie's definitions of those things are really in stark contrast to what her grandmother would have wanted or or even had access to the idea of but janie comes to this realization that she deserves respect that she wants freedom, that she deserves freedom, that she wants support from a partner and that she deserves that.

55:48Jeff:And the book is called, in some ways, a love story. I think it's also an adventure story. And it doesn't have to be either. It's both. And it's complicated. Like, Tea Cake is the partner who comes closest to freeing Janie so that she can pursue her own ideals. He wants to see a fully realized version of this woman. and there's also sexism and there's also abuse like he is not a perfect partner but that it's movement towards that as dante calls it that self-conceived liberation for janie makes that worth it to her and it is still so it's not it doesn't justify it like it doesn't justify the abuse that it's so much better than what the previous generations had access to or could have hoped for but it also informs Janie's responses in a way that like we can't separate those things yeah and the book is not interested and I don't know I don't remember if this is something Hurston wrote about separately I don't know that a lot of this stuff would have mattered but like or mattered that was that exists that there was discussion even about at the time like the book is not interested in judging tea cake for that abuse like it's there's it's there's a certain quietude that takes the book over for a few pages at that moment.

57:03Like it's not as raucous, like Janie's voice goes away for a little while. We don't get a lot of her direct discourse for a while. So it's clearly recognizing that it was of import, but it wasn't determinative, right? It did not cause a closure in their relationship. They could get back to each other in some kind of ways that certainly no one should have to deal with that. But the book itself is more interested in what tea cakes relationship unlocks for Janie than saying, well, you did this thing and then it's over. She's maybe, maybe some other version, maybe the, the, maybe the Janie we get at the end, right?

57:40Cause I think about that a lot. And this is in my hot takes. I think a sequel to this would have ruled because Janie at the end is she's 41. She's had all this experience. She's kind of gone on her heroes. Jenny, she's brought back, not sort of the flame of the gods like Prometheus, But what she's brought back is like a way to be in the world. And like, what's she going to do with the next 30 years? Like, imagine like what, what a resource she would be to other women in her life, other people in life, what she's going to do. She's going to have some money because they sewed it up in the oil cloth that the money stayed dry as a, as a, you know, it's up there with like, you know, Joan and the whale miracle.

58:13Jeff:Surreal elements. Yeah. But like, she's come back like the hero does to bring some new information, knowledge or prize back in her situation is there's a lot of ways to be and you don't have to you don't have to do the the way those things and i'm not going to yeah in a very it's kind of a fascinating way at that point i think that's a nice intro into the conversation about how to tell if this is a book for you yeah i think if you can if you can hang if you like to hang in the morally gray areas morally complicated areas with writers it's a good book for you if you're interested in a foundational text of black American writing like Toni Morrison talks about this as being an important influence for her we'll get to Toni Morrison later I mean you can see it in the color purple you can see it in Morrison like there's so much there's so much there that's a foundational thing if you're interested in dialect or you like to see how different aspects of different writers from different cultures play with language that's a yes yeah I think if you do if you know that you struggle with dialect, there's going to be large parts.

59:17Jeff:Do it on audio. There's really tough to get through. And like we say, the gender politics are extremely progressive for the day. But TK, who again, is not presented as perfect, right? He's not prevented as a paragon. But he is neither is he imprisoned or taken to task within the text for, you know, beating Janie bad enough that people can see it, right? I think that's what they describes like you could see. Yeah, people can see her bruises. People can see it here. I'm adding a new section here. Let's do it. This is something I used to use when I was teaching 18 year olds. But what's good enough for an 18 year old?

59:49What are the immortal questions that art asks, right? I'm not going to go through all these, but which of these are primary here? I'll give you a few. You can tell me what you think maybe we could spend a minute on. Okay. One is what is the good life, right? What would we want? How do we want to do this? What do I owe my neighbor? Ethics, interpersonal, humans living together. How do I know what I know. Episemiology, the nature of truth. Is this all there is? So that like, are there gods? Are there other things that are written about in your philosophy? Metaphysical questions. How do we deal with the certainty of death?

1:00:21What else might there be both spiritually, but like other ways of being in the world, other possibilities for human life? And then what's, what's the deal with good and evil? I would listen to Seinfeld's, what's the deal with good and evil? I think that would be kind of funny. So which of those are there are one or two of those you think? are especially germane here.

1:00:38Jeff:What is the good life? And is this all there is? Are the central questions of this book that Janie over time is developing a clearer and clearer idea of what a good life is for her. And that it's one where she has real love with a partner, where she feels respected. She's not just used as household help, where she has freedom and autonomy and she can know her own mind and she can express her own mind. And as she develops that understanding of what the good life is for her, it spawns the is this all there is that and those questions feed each other that like the Logan Killick's first marriage. It's immediately a very bad situation for her.

1:01:24Jeff:One of the quotes is Janie's first dream was dead. So she became a woman. Just like, come on. But that that first dream is dead. Is this all there is? I can't just be with this man for the rest of my life. So let's go off with Joe Starks and see what that, like, could that be a good life? And she's got to try, it's not like Goldilocks, but she's sort of trying on different versions of what a good life might be with each of these men and getting successively closer. Right. Yeah. She didn't want to be a de facto mule in the first, her first relationship, nor did she want to be a trophy wife in her second.

1:02:02Right. And it's interesting. I think, you know, these aren't real people. So there's no like, let's go back and get in the DeLorean and jump back and flip a bit and see if things turn out differently. But if Ida Logan or Joe had turned toward her, like in a fundamental way, I think she was ready to entertain. Like, could I be happy with this? Like, it wasn't like a specific vision that if you don't live up to this, I'm out of here. It's very much like, I don't know that either of them have the capacity to do it. But if they did, sort of like she was willing to try with both of them, even though the first one was arranged.

1:02:34Jeff:She just wants to be seen. It's that like, I'm not afraid of death. I'm afraid of being misunderstood. Like she just wants to be seen and heard and celebrated as she is. And Tea Cake comes closer than anybody else to that. And they do have some moments like genuine lightness and genuine joy and delight in each other. Like you can sort of hear the giggling coming out of their windows. you know, like this is the couple that everybody's like, would you please just get a room? Right. Yeah. And even would you get a room a couple floors above me? Because literally this is happening. All right. One more question to ask about all these things.

1:03:11Are we sure this isn't about art and writing? I added this one today. I thought you would appreciate this.

1:03:15Jeff:I mean, is the answer to this ever? No. No, I don't know that it is ever. No. But tell me why it's not no in this one, in this particular. I mean, I think this there's a way of reading this entire book that takes Janie's pursuit of these answers to life as an act of artistic creation that ultimately Janie understands that the thing she's doing in life is making her life right and that that itself is an act of artistic creation that Hurston is reflecting on like they don't have a traditional family life with her and none of these men they don't have kids they don't you know pursue the nuclear family as it might have looked in 1937.

1:03:53Jeff:But she's after making something and it's not a business. It's making the life that she wants. That is her work of art. Yeah, I agree. Can't say any better myself. Let's do some quotes. Where do you want to go? You kick off. Oh, man. There's just there's so many great quotes in here and you captured a lot of them. But there are years that ask questions and years that answer. people may have heard some of these like that you didn't even know where they came from like they get thrown around and that one just it gets quoted as zora neale hurston like she which like like she was just you know philosophizing one day but it's the introduction to one of the chapters and like it gets this shows up a lot around uh like new year's resolutions yeah in january 1st i am guilty of this one before i read the book and or like reread it and really understood the context, but that's a famous one.

1:04:45Jeff:There's a moment. Let's dwell on that for maybe a minute longer, right? Because I don't want to be the person who just like says the quote and blows on past it. So like that quote is okay. There aren't literally years that start on January 1st and end December, Thursday, ask questions. But I think this is about at some points of life, you are in different modes of understanding what's going on. Like you can have seeking elements and you can have at rest or like complacent or at, you know, kind of peace or stasis element, but it doesn't mean it's not going to be that way all the time. At the very least, it's not going to stay that way.

1:05:17Jeff:Yeah. And you don't usually get to decide. Yeah. It doesn't say you get in some years, you get to ask questions in some years, you get the answers some years. And they're not saying they're one for one either. They're just some and some. Yeah. But the years ask the questions and the years answer the questions here. There's a wonderful moment in a scene where I think it's Janie and Tea Cake or having an interaction and like something really sparks for her and Hurston or the narrator describes it as for the space of a thought she was lit up like a transfiguration and just like I mean come on so beautiful and and then one of my faves at the point where she's describing tea cake to I believe it's to Phoebe she says he can take most any little thing and make summertime out of it when times is dull then we lives off of that happiness he made till some more happiness comes along just he can take most any little thing and make summertime out of it shit it's pretty good yeah it's pretty good what else do you want there's a couple of like i mentioned those moments where janie is has her sort of small internal epiphanies of like this ain't it yeah um but hurston is really interested in articulating feltness like how something feels like an existential way.

1:06:35So there is a basin in the mind where words float around on thought and thought on sound in sight. Then there is a depth of thought untouched by words and deeper still a gulf of formless feelings untouched by thought. So like this, almost Dante's Infernos are like getting down to it, getting down. And like there's up here and you go down and go down and you go down. And like after all of that is stripped away, there is still something down there that is you, that there's life, that there is meaning, that there's the universe, and all the things go into it. And things that are not that are expressions of that.

1:07:09There are avenues to that, but there is something within it all the way down. I thought that was tremendous at the same time. Again, I'm doing some more classics references. So there's this little parable. When God had made the man, he made him out of the stuff that sung all the time and glittered all over. Some angels got jealous and chopped into millions of pieces, but still he glittered and hummed. so they beat him down to nothing but sparks but each little spark had a shine and a song so they covered each one over with mud and the lonesomeness and the sparks make them hunt for one another and that i think if it's not overt it's overt it refers to aristophanes speech in the symposium about how zeus and the gods like this originally we had two faces and two hearts and we were one body but we were too happy the gods were and they split us in two yeah that's And then us, we're always trying to go find the origin of love.

1:07:59It's in references in Hedwig and the Angry Inch. I was just about to say, you might also know this from Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Yeah. Let's see what else. And then, you know, love is like the sea. This is not free direct discourse. I'm not doing the dialect. This is what Janie has come back to teach Phoebe and frankly herself. It's a moving thing. But still in all, it takes the form of the shore it meets. And it's different with every shore. I think that is unbelievably awesome.

1:08:27Jeff:It is. And one that you had in the notes that was also in mine, again, this is in the dialect in the book, but I'll just read it as two things everybody's got to do for themselves. They've got to go to God and they've got to find out about living for themselves. And I think that is like, if you want a thesis for the book, that's what it is that you have to find out about living for yourself. And Janie does it with variable success, taking all kinds of risks with variable amounts of happiness. She does it while making mistakes. She does it while doing great things. But that is like that's the whole game.

1:09:03Yeah. Let's end with one of the great endings of all time. Frankly, this is Janie at peace. This is free and indirect discourse. So it's not Janie herself, but something's going on in her. Here was peace. she pulled in her horizon like a great fishnet, pulled it in from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes, she called in her soul to come and see. I mean, I don't know what you want. If you don't want that, I don't know what you want.

1:09:33Jeff:It's such a great reading experience. It's a really terrific one. All right, let's move on to trivia adaptations and other things that we can't get out of here without doubting people. Let's see. We mentioned a couple of these before. Hurston interviewed later in her life the last person brought to America as a slave, brought over on a ship illegal in 1880. So this to the point earlier, like this was extremely slavery. It was extremely present. Many of her papers were saved from being burnt. She had died and basically the gardener or housekeeper was charged with cleaning out her room or house.

1:10:08I can't remember what it was. and one of her friends was walking by and saw a fire and pulled a bunch of papers out of the fire. So we have all this posthumous stuff because of her. I did take classes from Robert Hemingway, who wrote the Hurston Definitive Biography, and that biography came out March of 1978. That's where I came out. What a great month for us. March of 1978. Hot takes. I've got a couple.

1:10:33Jeff:I love your hot take here that it sort of makes sinners feel less interesting. Well, did you get that or do you need me to say something about that? I mean, I got it, but I think you should say it for the people. Well, my first one is that a sequel would rule. Yeah. I think like, what does Janie do with the last 40 years of her life? Yeah, I think you, the sequel picks up when Janie's like 80 and we see what she's getting to. Yeah, we get another, yeah, she'd get another or something else happens there. So I, it reminds, so my favorite part of Sinners is everything until the, spoiler alert for Sinners, like it's a vampire show.

1:11:04Yeah. I like them together. I like them getting like putting the band together and trying to find a way to be in communion with each other and all the mess of it and then the vampires come and like I like the movie I don't want to say that but What Janie is after is something other than what they're after Yeah, I mean and I just find it more interesting I think just find this more interesting

1:11:24Jeff:Maybe that's another way of talking about like how to know if this is for you or not Like if the first act of Sinners was the part of Sinners that lit you up and you wanted more just in this black community around the same time, like with what life could have been like, what people are talking about, what the issues are and how relationships are forming. Go to Their Eyes Were Watching God. Also, if Ryan Coogler is looking for a next screenplay, a Ryan Coogler adaptation of Their Eyes Were Watching God. I don't know. I wonder. I mean, I wonder. One of my hot takes could have been that I don't know that an adaptation does a lot.

1:12:00like fine do it but like this is such a language document and a document of interiority and the prose itself like what do i get i'm not sure i guess the flood scene would be awesome you would get some wonderful like performances but you also get that i mean yeah you would get like oscar worthy performances if but you get like it's delroy lindo parts you would get a lot of that stuff from sinners and i would watch that but i don't know i think it's doing what it wants to do in the medium in which it was meant to be to be made uh this is not a hot take except i have never had a good take on this title.

1:12:30Their eyes were watching God. It appears about people thought they were looking in the darkness, but actually they were watching God. Hurston's a noted atheist. She didn't have any stock in organized religion. It's not about spirituality and any meaningful. I mean, it's an evocative title, but I don't know what it means. I've never understood it.

1:12:49Jeff:My only stab at this is that it's in the context of the storm coming and that they're all gathering. and the full quote is they sat in company with others in other shanties their eyes straining against cruel walls and their souls asking if he meant to measure their puny might against his they seem to be staring at the dark but their eyes were watching god and like i mean a hurricane is an act of god this storm is an act of or or an act of nature it's something bigger than them it's something out of their control and i this like they seemed to be staring at the dark like you seem to be looking at the end at something unfathomable but what you're actually looking at is connection to something bigger and more powerful than you can ever conceive of and like it might end you it didn't really matter to me that Hurston is an atheist because it's clear through the book that the characters are not that like faith is a part of this community at least around the edges but it's not it's not a source of meaning or solace like it's there but it's almost there like you need to get soda crackers out of the barrel but like that's the two things you have to do in life that Janie says.

1:13:50Jeff:You have to go to God and you have to figure out how to live for yourself. Yeah, I think Hurst would be happy to cut off that first part of that phrase. That's my other hot take. But also the like, you have to go to God, is that a way of talking around you have to die? I don't, yeah, I think that might be a euphemism for just dying. I guess my hot take would be if we do a close reading of their eyes were watching God, you can break it down a little bit. Like, okay, their eyes were watching God. It could be they were watching God, but the eyes were watching God suggests they weren't doing with their whole self, right?

1:14:17It's just a part of them. Right. So their interiority in hearts and souls were somewhere else. And I think in this case, it's Janie and TK towards each other on earth. And they were watching. They weren't praising. They were like, God is a source of terror. This is a defensive mode to be watching God. This isn't something else. So maybe that's my take. But again, it's a smaller point. But it's one where if people ask me, so what are the titles about? I don't have an amazing answer for it.

1:14:46Jeff:like eye-catching title though. Oh, it's wonderful and memorable. I mean, she's got, she does not have a lumberjack problem at all. Zora, their eyes were watching God. I mean, you just don't forget who these, Rita likes. I mean, Morrison, you know, Beloved is a child of Hurston and this evolved and different. There are some scenes in their eyes were watching God. There's a scene where like a donkey dies. Like this poor donkey. We get a lot of mule talk in their eyes were watching God. This poor mule has been mistreated, but not really intentionally. Just his owner is very poor and can't afford to feed him.

1:15:21Jeff:And the donkey kind of wanders the town. And when the donkey finally dies, the whole town throws the donkey a funeral. Everybody takes the day off and it's a whole thing. And it felt to me like that's a seed of a repeating scene that we get in Sula by Toni Morrison about what they call the Suicide Day Parade. Like there's a this relationship between Tea Cake and Janie really feels like the seed of Setha and Paul D's relationship and beloved. Like there's a lot. And even just early in the book, when Janie is talking about not realizing that she is a black person until she sees like a photograph and recognizes that her skin is darker than the white people's skin.

1:16:00Jeff:And that sort of internalized racism, internalized colorism is all over the bluest eye. So I think if you're interested in those elements, and if you like this language, Morrison is the place to go. And then Morrison ratchets up the difficulty level later in the books. But the bluest eye and Sula, certainly. And we'll be talking about the bluest eye later in this season. I mean, the easiest one for me, and it's cheating because it's Hurston too, but Dust Tracks on the Road, which is her memoir, is terrific. Even if it's not true. Do I care? Who cares? Who cares? I'm going to give you a passage here.

1:16:34This is really for you, Rebecca, because I was like, you're going to like this passage. This is her thinking about the end of her life. Like, you know, is this all there is? Like, this is her answer. The springing of the yellow line of morning out of the misty deep of dawn is glory enough for me. I know nothing is in this. I know nothing. I know that nothing is destructible. Things merely change forms. when the consciousness that we know as life ceases, I know I shall still be part and partial of the world. I was part of the sun before it rolled into shape and burst forth in the glory of change.

1:17:06I was when the earth was hurled from its fiery rim. I shall return with the earth to father son and still exist in substance when the sun has lost its fire and disintegrated into infinity to perhaps become a part of the whirling rubble of space. Why fear? The stuff of my being is matter, ever-changing, ever-moving, but never lost. So what need of denominations and creeds to deny myself the comfort of all my fellow men? The wide belt of the universe has no need for fingerings. I am one with the infinite and need no other assurance. Oh, man. Holy crap almighty. I feel like, should I just... Thank you, Yoda.

1:17:42Jeff:Like, throw my Mary Oliver into the sea? Well, I mean, I don't know, right? That's incredible shit. It's unbelievable stuff. And then my next short stories are good, too. Sweat, Gilded Six Bits. They're terrific. Gilded six fits. I mean, away with words, truly. Away with words. Three to five takeaways. If that was too much and you needed to distill our distillation down. Not actually a Harlem Renaissance book. Say two sentences about that, Jeff. Well, I mean, it's just later. It's not set in New York. It's not like jazz clubs and gin and all that stuff. Like she made her bones there. But at the Harlem Renaissance, if you think of it as a coherent literary moment, just because Hurston was there in black in this book, I mean, she was definitely a part of it but this book doesn't really trade in a lot of the stuff i mean it's related to home to harlem by claude mckay and some other things but i don't i think this is a post-harlem renaissance book i think she's doing something different here hurston is not who you think she is you know it's not someone just on a t-shirt that like i don't know i think people i think people who haven't read the book or know anything about hurston kind of think it's more like the color purple which is kind of get lumped in with 70s black writers but she's different like meaningfully different in a lot of different ways.

1:18:51Jeff:I think you can talk about how it's both an adventure story and a love story. And there's a way of reading it where the adventure is about finding your true self and learning to love your true self. And like that, Jamie ends up alone from at the end of these adventures with these men, because the real point is that self liberation. Yeah. And then the most famous and really is Alice Walker's essay about going to Hurston's, literally going to her unmarked grave and finding it and re-etching it there. Okay, we added one last piece here. I don't know that we'll keep doing this, but like one thing we're trying to do is cover books that, you know, would go into your always already project of becoming well-read.

1:19:32Like you're never going to get there, but you can go on the road. So where does this one factor in? How do you do it? So I've got five factors and we can give you one. This is just not determinative. but it's just for fun. Sure. This is just what it is. Each one's the score from one to 10 with 10 being the highest across five factors. So I guess technically possible there's a high score of 50. I've got five categories. I welcome feedback from you and from others. I didn't get any Rebecca feedback other than here, look at this. One is historical importance. That could be actual history, literary history, whatever, art history.

1:20:01Readability now, like is it a good read now? Can you get through it? Current relevance of central questions. Like does it feel like it's about something that still matters to you in the world at large? book nerd read cred. Like if someone says, have you read that? Like, yes. Like, oh, wow. Like that's, you know, that's a well read. That's a book that matters. And the fifth is sort of a wild card. Like the oh, damn fact. Like, are you gonna have some moments like, oh, damn, that's great. Or oh, damn, I didn't know you could do that. Oh, damn, that's a wonderful scene. And I really care about. Yeah.

1:20:26So it's a bit of a cheat on historical importance. Any sense? I for this one, maybe it's easy to say like what a 10 would be. 10 is Shakespeare. Yeah, okay. Shakespeare is getting a 10 here. so 10 is Shakespeare and like the Odyssey yeah Homer Shakespeare I think Hurston is not a world historical figure yeah like it hasn't been that long so I don't think you I'm thinking seven I

1:20:51Jeff:was thinking the six seven range six or seven yeah let's do a 6.5 we're just having fun great don't hold us to this okay readability this one's a tricky one because this is gonna vary I think considerably this category and this book in specific who i mean i actually found it more readable than i expected going in because i had that old english teacher's voice short matters for readability 200 187 pages without forward and afterward i think it's also in the like six seven zone it doesn't go down easy but it's not a lot of work well what would be 10 the the fairy queen by edmund spencer or like beowulf in middle english oh wait it's 10 the hardest one one one one would that'd be one yeah what's 10 for readability of something that we'd actually cover what's a 10 twilight well but it also sucks though i mean whatever like there's send like agatha christie yeah agatha christie would be a 10 because that's a 10 because he just flies super easy okay so i think more like a seven a seven yeah if that's close current relevance of central questions i mean this is an eight i think it's an eight or a nine yeah eight or nine i mean There's a like, what is life about?

1:21:57Jeff:How do you find a connection? Even down to like the, was it self-defense or a mercy killing? What do we do with like complicated relationships, moral questions in relationships, maintaining your own identity? Yeah. Book, nerd, read, cred. So it's not a 10. I think it's up there though. Like if you haven't read this, like it's a pretty big hole for an American, I'd say especially. So it can't be a 10 because it's - I'd say seven. Seven. Yeah. O-damn factor? Eight? Oh, it's interesting. Like, there aren't a lot of O-damn moments in this, but the ones that you get are really O-damn. Concentrated, yeah.

1:22:37Yeah.

1:22:39Jeff:So I don't know. Seven and a half? Sure. Okay. So we're looking at 13, 20, 27, 35.5. All right. Out of 50. That feels about right. That feels in 100 years, we'll see. you know because like on the historical stuff you're competing with stuff it's never going to catch Shakespeare just because of time right right and the same and I think one in four will bleed into each other historical importance and the read cred yeah yeah yeah um I think weirdly read cred is inverse to read I was just about to say that that like the harder something is to read the higher the read cred is on it um so there's we can mess with yeah and it's not necessarily that like getting a high score out of 50 is an indication of like an equality.

1:23:27Jeff:No. For like helping you understand what the reading experience will be like, or if you want to go into this book, which is. Well, that's what I'm saying. Like if you really care about the oh damn factor, you're going to, I mean, we could provide you with like, here's the ones, or the ones that are like actually really hard, or maybe you care about the current relevance of central questions, so on and so forth. So it's not really an aggregate score, but just kind of going them along. Rebecca, this was terrific. Any final thoughts here? Man, I just feel like I'm going to be spoiled by this project and how great the language in these old books.

1:23:57Well, we get to pick the winners.

1:23:59Jeff:We do. We do. At this point, show notes are available at bookriot.com. Listen, you can shoot us an email for now at podcast at bookriot.com. Zero to Well Read is a proud member of the Airwave Podcast Network. Rebecca, thank you so much. Thank you. Enjoy us all. A good time.