Their Eyes Were Watching God

"She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun and the panting breath of the breeze when the inaudible voice of it all came to her" (11).

"Oh to be a pear tree--any tree in bloom! . . . Looking, waiting, breathing short with impatience.  Waiting for the world to be made" (11).

A noted intellectual, anthropologist, and writer whose career began during the Harlem Renaissance, Zora Neale Hurston wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God  in only seven weeks while in Haiti on a Guggenheim Fellowship.  The novel, filled African American folklore, dialect, and poetry, tells the story of a young African American woman's quest for self.  In the lines quoted above, Hurston uses the pear tree as a metaphor for the life her protagonist seeks.  What is it that Janie sees as she lays under the pear tree?  What is the voice that she hears? What connection do you see between Janie and the pear tree?   What passages can you identify that reflect this metaphor?

A Gathering of Old Men

In A Gathering of Old Men Ernest Gaines employs several narrators, each one providing readers with his/her version of the events that happen in a single day on the grounds of the Marshall Plantation in south Louisiana in the late 1970's.  Beau Bouton lays dead, and there are at least a dozen old black men and one white woman who claim responsibility for his killing.  As each narrator tells his/her story, we learn of the deep racial tension between whites, blacks, and Cajuns in a society in which the effects of the plantation system continue to linger long after slavery has ended.  

Why does everyone want to take credit for this killing?  Is it more than just a means of avoiding prosecution, or are these old men trying to make some kind of statement?  If so, what?  Why now?  And finally, describe how the racial dynamic described in Gaines' text reflects the plantation system.