Janie’s Tea Cake: Sinner, Saint, or Merely Mortal?
Much has been written about Janie and Tea Cake’s relationship and not very much of it has
been neutral. Critics see Tea Cake, the third husband of Janie Crawford in Zora Neale Hurston’s
Their Eyes Were Watching God, as either the embodiment of the perfect man, the prize worth
winning at the end of a long quest, or as just another man who subjugates Janie, as abusive and
confused as the other men in the novel. So, it would seem, Tea Cake has been relegated to the
status of either sinner or saint. Somewhere between those two divergent views lives the actual
Vergible “Tea Cake” Woods. Tea Cake the saint exists to those who presuppose that Their Eyes
Were Watching God is a quest novel. Scholars who see the book this way note that at the end of
Janie’s quest she gets Tea Cake, a man who makes her happy after two other men have failed to do
so. Janice Knudsen, in her discussion of the book as a quest for positive self-identity, asserts that
“Janie’s ultimate evolution of self is only possible because of the strong, healthy relationship she
shares with Tea Cake,” which “fosters the self-worth necessary for full self-realization” (215).
In her article about the elements of the text that make Their Eyes an archetypal quest
novel, Missy Kubitscheck notes that Janie’s relationship to Tea Cake “contrasts with her
subordination to Jody” (112). There is much in the text to support the view of Tea Cake as saint. He
does come into Janie’s life after two failed marriages—the first to Logan, whowanted to use Janie
as if she were just another mule on his farm, and the next to Jody, who put her on so high a
pedestal that she could not interact with her own community. Tea Cake, on the other hand, pays
attention to the details of Janie that others have missed. He teaches her how to play checkers,
how to fish, and how to shoot. He brushes her hair for her, a sign that he respects her sensuality,
and a contrast to Jody, who tried to repress her sensuality by forcing her to keep her hair
covered. Finally, it is Janie herself who realizes that Tea Cake is “a bee to her blossom” (106). In
this view, Tea Cake’s sainthood isbased not only on the happiness he brings Janie, but the
satisfaction he brings her relative to the unhappiness of her first two marriages.
The second view is a more sinister one that sees Tea Cake as fatally flawed sinner. This view
centers around three things: Tea Cake’s irresponsible lifestyle, his choice to live on “the muck” (the
fertile swamp of the Florida Everglades where he takes Janie so he can make money as a migrant
farm worker), and, perhaps most important, his sometimes violent relationship with Janie. Tea Cake
demonstrates his lack of responsibility when he essentially steals Janie’s $200 when she first
arrives in Jacksonville. He not only gambles, but also stays out partying with the winnings. When he
comes back to Janie, he strolls up to the front door, singing, “Ring de bells of mercy. Call de sinner
man home” (120).
Another point of contention with Tea Cake is his decision to live on the muck rather than
take up regular work. Tea Cake romanticizes the muck as a place where “people don’t do nothing but
make money and fun and foolishness” (128), and Hurston treats the muck as an ideal, pastoral place
where Tea Cake and Janie can wander through the fields, singing, flirting, and, in general, being in
love. However, as William Gleason points out in his article about leisure and play in the novel, the
communities on the muck are in fact nothing more than “squalid labor camps” (341). Interestingly,
Hurston alludes to this squalor when she describes the other people on the muck as “people ugly
from ignorance and broken from being poor” (131). That context makes it more clear that by
staying on the muck, Tea Cake kept himself and his wife poor—living in a dirt-floor cabin and picking
green beans during the day—gambling and carousing at night.
Tea Cake’s greatest offense is his violence toward Janie. When another character brings
her brother to meet Janie with the hope that Janie will take up with him, Tea Cake “gets a
brainstorm” and “before the week was out he had whipped Janie” (147). Tea Cake beats her to
relieve his own insecurities and because “being able to whip her reassured him in possession” (147).
This violence has led many scholars, such as Clarence Tweedy, to lump Tea Cake in with her other
two husbands as “violently flawed due to their internalization of self-hatred that is perpetually
projected out as a weapon of control against the female protagonist” (118). Nina Bannet takes a
similar view of the same scene when she notes that the whipping is an attempt to “establish
dominance in front of the other men” (144). The point, as scholars like Bannet and Tweedy argue, is
that Tea Cake cannot be considered a hero of the novel because of his violence toward Janie.
Whether Tea Cake is sinner or saint depends largely on the view one takes of the text as a
whole. If one takes the novel as a fulfilled quest, then Tea Cake must, by definition, be a hero. If
one takes the novel as a feminist work, a text about violence, or a text about the myriad ways
women are repressed by society at large and men in particular, then Tea Cake must emerge as a
sinner. However, there is another view. We could embrace the text as a whole, rather than merely
focusing on one aspect of it; similarly, we could assess Tea Cake as a whole—noting both his
strengths and his flaws—and not focus on only one of the many parts of his personality. When we
do so, we see Tea Cake in his full complexity. Janie thinks Tea Cake is handsome as she looks him
over “and got little thrills from every one of his good points” (96). He makes her happy by
expecting her to interact with the world with the same passion that he does. But he also makes her
jealous when he flirts with Nunkie. Compared to Logan’s and Jody’s oppression Tea Cake is a relief;
compared to a man who can live with a woman without raising his hand in violence, Tea Cake leaves
something to be desired. The man who lovingly brushes her hair is the same man who takes her
$200 in Jacksonville and uses it to gamble. The man who takes Janie down to the muck to live
steeped in poverty is the same man who promises to support her financially, saying “Ah no need no
assistance to feed my woman. From now on, you gointuh eat whutever mah money can buy yah and
wear de same” (128). The man who rescues Janie from a rabid dog—and is bit himself as a result—is
the same man who will try to kill her when he descends into the insanity that the rabies later
induces. Finally, the man who teaches Janie to shoot—in self-defense—is the same man Janie will
shoot when he attacks her.
When we consider the text as more than its literary parts we are empowered to see Tea
Cake as three-dimensional. Like the rest of us, Tea Cake must live somewhere on the continuum
between hero and villain, between sinner and saint. This article is neither an endorsement nor a
rebuttal to any conclusions reached about Tea Cake’s character. Rather, this is a reconsideration of
Tea Cake the man. In refusing to pigeonhole Tea Cake as purely this or that, Hurston has created a
character that comes alive; we find in Tea Cake a person like one of us—both a product of and a
rebel from society, sometimes rising above society’s ills and sometimes falling short of the ideals of
good character. It is precisely because we can relate to Tea Cake’s humanity that, whether we view
him as sinner, saint, or somewhere in between, we will continue to find him compelling.
—YVONNE MESA-EL ASHMAWI, Northern Arizona University
Copyright © 2009 Heldref Publications
KEYWORDS
Zora Neale Hurston, Janie, Tea Cake, Their Eyes Were Watching God
WORKS CITED
Bannet, Nina S. “The Novel of Awakening in American Women’s Fiction, 1860–1940.” Diss. City U of
New York, 2002. Print.
Gleason, William A. The Leisure Ethic: Work and Play in American Literature, 1840–1940. Stanford:
Stanford UP, 1999. Print.
Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. 1937. New York: Harper, 2006. Print.
Knudsen, Janice. “The Tapestry of Living: A Journey of Self-Discovery in Hurston’s Their Eyes
Were Watching God.” College Language Association
Journal 40.2 (1996): 214–29. Gale. Web. 25
Oct. 2008.
Kubitscheck, Missy D. “‘Tuh de Horizon and Back’: The Female Quest in Their Eyes Were Watching
God.” Black American Forum 17.3 (1983): 109–15.
JSTOR. Web. 5 Oct. 2008.
Tweedy, Clarence, III. “Trauma and Self-Narration: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Identity in
African American Literature, 1840–1940.” Diss. U of
Kentucky, 2007. Print.