Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God focuses on a beautiful mulatto woman named Janie Crawford. This piece of literature carves a tale of what was once an awful time to be an African American. It begins with a brief section of what was the end of the story, and the flash-forward quickly ends after the first chapter. Chapter 2 picks up at the story's true beginning.
             At the start of Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie, a sixteen year old black girl growing up in rural west Florida around 1920 to 1935, is raised by her grandmother. The Civil War had been over for 40-50 years; however, America, particularly amongst the southern most states, is not changed dramatically after Lincoln's Reconstruction. African-American racism, prejudice, and just plain uneducated bias heavily exists throughout most of the United States.
             Janie Crawford goes through major self discovery when the story starts. Janie's grandmother, her only caretaker at this time, grew up as a slave. Knowing how bad things could be if not properly taken care of – by a wealthy land owner – Janie's grandmother did only what she knew best. She had Janie marry at the tender age of sixteen. The depressing thing about this was that Janie had just started to wonder what was in store for her on this great planet. She wondered of the opportunities that might present themselves. She wondered of the people she would meet. She wondered if true love was out there. She wondered all these things and her life was all in front of her. She would pine amongst nature in full bloom, watching the bees fly by and smelling the exotic flowers. She sensed some sort of answer that sought out her own yearning. As Hurston wrote in chapter two of Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie daydreamed of becoming an element of nature: "Oh to be a pear tree – any tree in bloom!" (The Prentice Hall Anthology of African American ...