A Revelation 
 I am very glad to have finally read this masterpiece. I admit to having avoided Zora Neale Hurston for years, for all the wrong reasons. I react badly to appeals to political correctness, diversity, and white male guilt. But these prejudices were completely blown out of the water by actually reading this radiant book. For Hurston simply writes about people--people of a particular race, gender, time, and place, yes--but people whose human identity flourishes from these circumstances without being in any way confined by them. I don't think I have read any work of African-American literature that is so little concerned with race tensions, poverty, or the legacy of slavery. As Henry Louis Gates Jr. quotes in his fine afterword to the Harper Perennial edition, Hurston wanted to write about "racial health--a sense of black people as complete, complex, undiminished human beings, a sense that is lacking in so much black writing and literature" [emphasis hers]. 
 For all that, Their Eyes Were Watching God is a difficult book to begin. At first, Hurston seems to be writing in two languages, likely to be equally foreign to many readers. One is the phonetically rendered dialect of her characters, which her contemporaries criticized as making them sound ignorant, but is in fact part and parcel of their vigorous life. The other is the free-form poetry of her descriptions, ordinary words strung together in unexpected ways so that they become quite new. But soon the two voices become as one: the voice of thought unfettered by academic rules. And the power of unfettered thought, the possibility of being oneself without regard to rules or roles, is the enduring theme of the book. 
 The story is a simple one. Janie Crawford, fortyish, independent, returns to her community in 1920s Florida, which she had left two years before to marry a much younger man, nicknamed Tea Cake. While most of the women gossip disapprovingly, assuming the worst, she starts to tell her friend Pheoby not only about her life with Tea Cake, but also about the two marriages that preceded it. The first, when she was only a teenager, offered her protection. The second brought a measure of material prosperity. But it is only in the hand-to-mouth existence of the third that she has been able to discover her true self. Janie's story, which began in defiance, ends in quiet luminosity--and there are many years of her life still ahead of her. 
 Zora Neale Hurston was also a folklorist, and her writing is illuminated not only by the gossip, traded insults, and tall stories of the Florida blacks, but also by a country mythology that brings in animals and even plants as characters in the story. There are wonderful set pieces, such as the funeral of a mule that begins as a holiday for the entire community and ends with a humorous description of a group of buzzards waiting on permission from their leader before stripping the bones. Other sequences build detail upon detail to terrifying effect, as the South Florida hurricane of 1928 that forms the climax of the book, and precipitates its concluding events. 
 The Harper Perennial paperback is a joy to read, with a cover design by Robin Bilardello that calls to mind a drawing by Leonardo da Vinci, an excellent foreword by Edwige Danticat, and the Henry Louis Gates afterword. One piece of advice though: read the afterword first, if you like, but save the foreword to the end, as it gives away many details of the plot that you will enjoy discovering for yourself, surrendering to Hurston's magnificent narrative rhythm.