Teaching with Dialects: The Presence of AAVE in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God

Hurston’s novel is full of these conventions, as well as other dominant features of African American culture. Omission or absence of the copula in conversations, consonant clusters reduced at the ends of words, r and l deletion, signifying, playing the dozens, braggadocio (Smitherman), and free indirect discourse, or quasi-direct discourse (Pateman). A favorite passage exploring the entertainment of verbal play, or signifying, occurs in Chapter Seven when Janie finally stands up to Jody, her second husband, after all the times he had put her down in front of others:

“Stop mixin’ up mah doings wid mah looks, Jody. When you git through tell’ me how tuh cut uh plug uh tobacco, then you kin tell me whether mah behind is on straight or not…Naw, Ah ain’t no young gal no mo’ but den Ah ain’t no old woman neither. Ah reckon Ah looks mah age too. But Ah’m uh woman every inch of me, and Ah know it. Dat’s a whole lot more’n you kin say. You big-bellies round here and put out a lot of brag, but ’tain’t nothin’ to it but yo’ big voice…Talkin’ ’bout me lookin’ old! When you pull down yo’ britches, you look lak de change uh life.” (79)

An example of indirect discourse can be seen in Chapter Nineteen when the narrator reports some of the thoughts of Tea Cake, Janie’s third husband, after he has taken ill with rabies and is not thinking clearly:

Tea Cake didn’t say anything against it and Janie herself hurried off. This sickness to her was worse than the storm. As soon as she was well out of sight, Tea Cake got up and dumped the water bucket and washed it clean…He was not accusing Janie of malice and design. He was accusing her of carelessness. She ought to realize that water buckets needed washing like everything else. He’d tell her about i...

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...how she and Tea Cake had been with one another so they could see she never shoot Tea Cake out of malice.

She tried to make them see how terrible it was that things were so fixed that Tea Cake couldn’t come back to himself until he had got rid of that mad dog that was in him and he couldn’t get rid of that dog and live…But she hadn’t wanted to kill him….She made them see how she couldn’t ever want to be rid of him. She didn’t plead to anybody. She just sat there and told and when she was through she hushed. (187)

These passages not only provide excellent examples of the distinctive features of AAVE mentioned earlier in this paper, such as using done for resultatives, consonant clusters, and substituting the /d/ for the /th/ sound, but they also demonstrate how, no matter what the social occasion, Janie does not alter her speech patterns or dialectic utterances.