Zora Neale Hurston's work provides the African-American community with a one of the first literary symbols of racial health - a sense of black people as complete, complex, undiminished human beings. Appropriately, Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937, provides an enlightening look at the journey of one of these undiminished human beings, Janie Crawford. Janie's story - based on principles of self-exploration, self-empowerment, and self-liberation - details her loss and subsequent attainment of her independence of her own reality, as she constantly learns and grows from her difficult experiences with gender issues and racism in Their Eyes Were Watching God.
             Hurston's grasp on the reader's imagination is demonstrated with her masterful use of imagery and phrasing. Janie's dialogue and vernacular carry the reader along with seemingly innocuous pieces of vivid perception. In reality Hurston has put the reader in such a position that they hardly realize they are ingesting something deep and true. Their Eyes Were Watching God recognizes that there are problems to the human condition, such as the need to possess the fear of the unknown and the result of stagnation. Hurston does not leave us with the hopelessness; rather, she extends a recognition and understanding of humanity's need to escape emptiness. The truth of life, as with death that it is done alone and at the end of it all there should be a sense of self with a positive resolve.
             Janie's search begins in her Nanny's yard, as Janie lies beneath the pear tree when; "the inaudible voice of it all came to her. She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight. So this was a marriage! She had been summoned to behold a revelation" (11). Janie's youthful i...