Mist' Starks

The cast of Their Eyes Were Watching God has been steadily growing as we get deeper into the book.  One character in particular has me feeling conflicted: Joe Starks.

When we first see Joe he's a "cityfied, stylish dressed man" with three hundred dollars in his pocket and big dreams. He promises to treat Janie like a lady, and when she throws off her apron to run away and marry him, I was cheering for her (at the very least, Joe seems like a big step up from Logan Killicks).

But soon it becomes clear that Joe is extremely patronizing/sexist. According to him, "a woman's place is in de home," when a woman speaks they are getting "too moufy," and even a game like checkers is "too heavy fuh de brains" of a female. It seems as though his vision of a woman is one who remains silent and sits pretty for the men to stare at ("she was there in the store for him to look at"). To make it worse, he hits Janie when she insults his pride, or when she cooks a dinner he doesn't like.

Yet when we get a little bit of insight into Joe's own thoughts, we can see that he acts the way he does for good reasons. He wants to "make a big woman outa" Janie. He believes that by making "a pretty doll-baby like Janie sit on de front porch and eat p'taters dat other folks plant just special for her," he will make her happy. In his eyes Janie is above the "gum-grease" of society and he does his best to keep her out of unfavorable social events.

I think it's important to note that he also performs a lot of good deeds for the town: saving a mule from its misery, giving free food to the poorer people of the town, etc. Here Joe's actions are generous but it's possible that the motivation behind them was just to gain more status in society. In fact, Joe could be trying to put Janie on a pedestal just to make himself look better.

Good guy, bad guy, it's kind of hard to tell, but maybe the switch from Logan to Joe wasn't so glorious after all.

Bear With Me

I know we've moved on to another novel, but I feel like there's still so much more to talk about from Invisible Man, especially African American culture and how it ties into the narrator's character.

Early on in the novel (the sixth page to be exact) the Invisible Man identifies himself as Jack the Bear. After that the images of Jack the Bear and Jack the Rabbit are brought up time and time again. My question: "Who was Brer Rabbit?" and seeing as the 'doctors' in the paint factory asked the narrator that exact question, the answer may be worth looking into.

Brer Rabbit dates back to trickster characters in African folklore (ex. the hare) and in the stories, he has always won against his opposition by being quicker, both mentally and physically. When brought into the context of African American history, some scholars believe that Brer Rabbit represents slaves who used their wits to escape their masters. In Invisible Man, it could be that the narrator himself represents Brer Rabbit, in that he's able to escape society by becoming invisible. But the narrator never calls himself a rabbit, rather he says that he's like Jack the Bear. This could be a reference to the dim-witted character Brer Bear, of the Brer Rabbit stories, who ends up tricked by Brer Rabbit at the end of tale.

I especially like this comparison because it is the narrator who's constantly being outwitted for the entirety of the novel. Looking back on it, the narrator sees how blind he was to his invisibility and how he was moved from place to place by the Brer Rabbits of his world who have a more realistic world view than he does in the beginning of the novel (ex. Brother Jack)

**A Side Note: Brer is a variation on the word 'brother' and Brer Rabbit is sometimes, even in this book, referred to as Jack the Rabbit. Put it together and you get Brother Jack...**

While the narrator could be calling himself Jack the Bear to depict himself as one who was mentally slow in realizing his position in society, it could also be a reference to Jack/John the Conqueror who was an almost mythical character who was supposedly unseen by the white world and would come help African Americans escape from slavery by using his magical powers. Perhaps by looking at the narrator in this light, it means that after he finishes his time underground, he plans to come up and help his people escape from their limited mindsets/segregation/etc.

Still more, Jack the Bear could be a reference to a Harlem bass-player/pianist/drug addict/gambler known as John Wilson (someone who sounds a lot like Rinehart to me). Jack the Bear is also the name of one of Duke Ellington's songs and while this may seem irrelevant, Ellison was quite influenced by the jazz of his time.

What do you guys think? Is the narrator one interpretation of Jack the Bear, all of these things, or none?