55 pages • 1 hour read
Zora Neale HurstonA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Janie arranges a lavish funeral for Joe, and important people come from all over South Florida to see him off. Janie publicly presents as a grieving widow dressed in expensive black mourning clothes, but internally, she celebrates being free of restraints for the first time in her life. As she thinks of Nanny’s decisions, Janie realizes that she hated her grandmother for foreclosing the possibilities in her life, and she blames Nanny for choosing material security over happiness for her granddaughter.
After the funeral, Janie carries on with her normal routine of minding the store with the help of Hezekiah, Joe’s assistant. Free of Joe, Janie burns all her head rags, wears her hair uncovered, and occasionally sits on the porch. When suitors begin showing up just a month after Joe’s death, she ignores them, telling Pheoby that love for her newfound freedom, not grief, leads her to deny these men. Pheoby tells her to keep that subversive thought to herself.
One day, when Janie is tending the store by herself, a young man named Vergible Woods, who goes by the name “Tea Cake,” walks in to buy some cigarettes. With most of the town away at a baseball game, Janie agrees to sit with Tea Cake and play a game of checkers; she finds him instantly charming.
By Zora Neale Hurston
Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo"
Zora Neale Hurston
Drenched in Light
Zora Neale Hurston
Dust Tracks on a Road
Zora Neale Hurston
Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick
Zora Neale Hurston
How It Feels To Be Colored Me
Zora Neale Hurston
Jonah's Gourd Vine
Zora Neale Hurston
Moses, Man of the Mountain
Zora Neale Hurston
Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life
Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston
Mules and Men
Zora Neale Hurston
Seraph on the Suwanee
Zora Neale Hurston
Spunk
Zora Neale Hurston
Sweat
Zora Neale Hurston
Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica
Zora Neale Hurston
The Eatonville Anthology
Zora Neale Hurston
The Gilded Six-Bits
Zora Neale Hurston