The Okeechobee Hurricane
Their Eyes Were Watching God is absolutely full of detail. It has so much information about the places it discusses, and the cultures and people that they represent, which all ties back to Hurston's anthropological work. She is an expert in this exact kind of detail, and you can tell through her writing. She is specific and intentional in her presentation of people and the places that they live, as well as the things that happen there. In Chapter 18, Janie and Tea Cake experience an extremely strong and devastating hurricane. They ignore several signs that it could be damaging and end up having to go through the storm to get to safety when it eventually does get bad. It is a very intense incident, and the way that the storm is discussed is almost supernatural. The natural forces around Janie and Tea Cake are described as "cosmic," called "beast[s]" and "monster[s]." The lake and hurricane "roar" and "rag[e]." One sentence describes the storm as a "monstropolous beast had left his bed. The two hundred miles an hour wind had loosed his chains. He seized hold of his dikes and ran forward until he met the quarters; uprooted them like grass and rushed on after his supposed-to-be conquerors...The sea was walking the earth with a heavy wheel" (161-162). The way that this storm is described is almost mythological, not like a real storm at all but like a living, breathing monster.
However, despite this fantastical tone, chapter isn't just about some fictional hurricane that could have happened, it's about a real historical event. The Lake Okeechobee Hurricane of 1928 is the second deadliest hurricane in US history (US Dep). Though we will never know how many people died in this hurricane, estimates hover around at least 2,500 people, about 1.4x the death toll of Hurricane Katrina (Knabb 11). This is one of the most deadly natural disasters in American history, not even to mention the economic damage and following pressure wrought on the people living in this region. Not to focus too much on finances, but adjusting for inflation this did 16 billion dollars worth of damage. It is also extremely relevant to mention that the storm disproportionately affected non-white, agricultural workers living in the region, as they made up around 3/4 of the fatalities. This was not an equal opportunity disaster for everyone, its affects exaggerate pre-existing injustices in this region and the nation in general.
I think that Hurston's choice to focus on this particular historical event is important. Despite the supernatural way Hurstond describes the storm, its details are grounded in reality. The choice of this hurricane is intentional, and it highlights an issue that is clearly still a problem now. Housing and relief effort discrimination is just as relevant now, with hurricanes like Katrina in 2005 having a vast racial disparity in terms of damage and aid (Doherty). Furthermore, I think that the way that this hurricane is represented as sentient further highlights the way that it seems like targeted violence. Even though this hurricane is not actually choosing to disproportionately harm African-American residents of this area, the places that they were forced to live and work in still fostered it. This is just another one of the ways that Hurston shows the subtler ways that racism affects these characters's lives. They don't need to have interactions with violently racist people to be at risk of being harmed by it.
Citations:
Doherty, Carroll. "Remembering Katrina: Wide racial divide over government's response." Pew Research Center, 27 Aug. 2015, www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/08/27/remembering-katrina-wide- racial-divide-over-governments-response/. Accessed 8 Nov. 2021.Knabb, Richard D., et al. “Hurricane Karina - Nhc.woc.noaa.gov.” National Hurricane Center, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 20 Dec. 2005, https://www.nhc.woc.noaa.gov/data/tcr/EP112014_Karina.pdf.
US Department of Commerce, NOAA. “Okeechobee.” National Weather Service, NOAA's National Weather Service, 8 Sept. 2016, https://www.weather.gov/mfl/okeechobee.
I think this is a great post, and I especially like your last paragraph. I think your point about the severity of the effects of the hurricane being tied to racism is an important one, and one that I think is easy to overlook when reading the novel (as I know I personally did not assign that much meaning to the hurricane). I find it really interesting how TEWWG for the most part avoids explicit white-racism but still exemplifies how racism shapes the lives the characters, even without the presence of white people. Going back to Richard Wright's criticism that the novel does not speak about racial inequality enough, I think that though TEWWG is not a protest novel, it certainly is not without depictions of racism, even if they are subtle and demonstrated through more abstract examples like in the case of the hurricane.
ReplyDeleteI'm really glad that you wrote about this hurricane because I knew absolutely nothing about it. I think that that point exactly is one of the things that is so notable about it. As a society, we know nothing about it (perhaps part of that could just come down to disasters in recent memory, but that's besides the point), but we hear all about disasters that have affected predominantly white populations. I think that this erasure of people of color is really evident in TEWWG. After the storm when Tea Cake is helping with burials they are told that the people should be examined to determine if they are white or not. The white people get a casket and the others just get thrown into a burial pit, erasing body counts for the disaster. Just another example of how Hurston DOES address racism in her novel (@RichardWright).
ReplyDeleteThis was a very eye-opening and excellent blog post. Thank you so much for sharing what you found and all of the further, deeper, and more complex aspects of this natural phenomenon, particularly how it comes into interaction with racism in America. As you mention, these “subtler” (but still major and completely devastating) effects that racism has makes Hurston’s points, I feel, even more powerful in a way because it illustrates that there is absolutely no escape. Even with these “natural” occurrences that (if they do have to affect anyone at all) should never disproportionately target a particular group of people. But it always does. Showing this extreme effect of racism with this giant historical hurricane, while not explicitly mentioning and bringing the discussion of race specifically into the spotlight (e.g. in the last book of Native Son), illustrates the deeper impacts of racism and how there is no escape for African-American communities. It’s there and Hurston lays it right in front of us within Janie’s larger narrative, and thus it feels realistic to the reader, making her point even more impactful. (@RichardWright again!)
ReplyDeleteI thought that Hurston’s writing technically, as well as the historical accuracy and personal/intimate details included which make up the anthropological aspects of this novel, were all spectacular. I loved reading this book.
Awesome blog post again!!
Wow, I didn't even think that this hurricane might have been a real historical event (which I really should have, seeing how much this novel is rooted in real places and events). It's really cool that you did some research into it, thank you for presenting your findings in this post! I really like the point you make about how the hurricane being made to feel like a living thing furthers the idea of targeted violence. I think Hurston also shows some of the more blatant racism and inequality during these scenes of the lead-up and aftermath of the hurricane - how the rich white people have "castles" to keep themselves safe vs. the cabins of the agricultural workers, and the scene where white people are gathering up the poor, mostly non-white workers that were just displaced by the hurricane and making them bury the dead, only allowing white bodies to be given coffins while the rest are throw into pits.
ReplyDeleteThis is a great blog post, it definitely made me think more deeply about the hurricane and its significance in the novel - while I has probably noticed the personification of the hurricane somewhat, I kind of overlooked it and attributed it to the characters emotional responses to such a harmful event, but since the book is not written from Janie or Tea Cake's point of view, you're right that the language is more likely to reflect the author's opinions on the hurricane and its societal impact. The hurricane as a metaphor and amplifier of racism and classism is a really clever and powerful usage in the book, and an example of more subtle ways race and racism are addressed despite the majority black setting of the novel.
ReplyDeleteI had never even heard of this hurricane, and I think it's significant that this hurricane is rarely talked about in educational settings. It disproportionally affected lower income POC, so the mainstream white media didn't care, and neither did the people writing our history books. I think your post does a really good job of including significant details and shows just how terrible and prominent this hurricane was.
ReplyDeleteI've never even heard of this hurricane but it's really interesting to see it as a depiction of the pervasiveness of environmental racism. The personification of the hurricane almost makes it seem like the hurricane itself is victimizing Janie and Teacake, although as you said, we know the hurricane isn't actively choosing to only victimize certain people. I wonder if there's another reason for its personification besides describing its intensity. In any case, this is definitely an interesting and somewhat subtle example of a way Hurston addresses racism through this book.
ReplyDeleteI'm so glad you wrote about this topic! It's really interesting. This event is really only used in the book to further the plot and create a certain situation for the characters and we don't see much of the historical significance. Like much of Hurston's work this is grounded in reality and tradition.
ReplyDeleteWhen I first taught this novel at Uni, in the fall of 2008, Katrina was only three years earlier: the analogy was on everyone's mind, with images of desperate and displaced poor black people as refugees in their own communities, in New Orleans and beyond. The way that the "muck" community is particularly vulnerable, on low ground with a giant lake rising to flood it, particularly reminded us of New Orleans and its vulnerability to flooding, especially when the government-maintained levees failed so spectacularly. Kanye West summed up the 2005 situation with his famous improvised line at a live televised fundraiser, "George Bush doesn't care about black people." An observer of the Okechobee hurricane in this novel might conclude the same about government officials at the time, and we certainly see these racial disparities during the cleanup, as black men like Tea Cake are conscripted off the streets for unpaid harsh labor, and the conversations about segregating the corpses of the dead so only the white ones get coffins.
ReplyDeleteI always respect when a person does additional research for their posts, and I think this one is really cool. I think hurricanes and natural disasters in general often disproportionately affect the lower class, and I agree that the choice to include it was intentional and powerful. I love the metaphor of the storm being a monster of sorts, since it's sort of like the monstrous nature of the racial and classist state of America, both in that time period and now.
ReplyDeleteThis is really interesting and I'm glad you wrote about it! I had no idea it was based on a real hurricane, but it makes a lot of sense considering the way Hurston writes her novels. I also didn't think about this as another way she portrays inequality in her novel. The book is full of examples like this, where instead of explicitly stating how a person or system is racist then spending pages talking about it like Wright did, Hurston incorporates it into the lives of her characters - which again ties back into her work that you mentioned - she knows how to accurately write her characters because she has real people and experiences in mind.
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