Their Eyes Were Watching God 10-16

She dwindled down on the floor with her head in a rocking chair.

“Ah just had one,” Janie temporized with her conscience.

Janie seethed.

Insensate cruelty to those you can whip, and groveling submission to those you can’t.

This was a new sensation for her, but no less excruciating.

Mrs. Turner, like all other believers had built an altar to the unattainable—Caucasian characteristics for all.

Through indiscriminate suffering men know fear and fear is the most divine emotion.

Crushing aromatic herbs with every step he took.

Janie acted glad to see her and after a while Pheoby broached her with, “Janie, everybody’s talkin’ ’bout how dat Tea Cake is draggin’ you round tuh places you ain’t used tuh.

Permanent transients with no attachments and tired looking men with their families and dogs in flivvers.

It was inevitable that she should accept any inconsistency and cruelty from her deity as all good worshippers do from theirs.

So Ah got up on de high stool lak she told me, but Pheoby, Ah done nearly languished tuh death up dere.

Once having set up her idols and built altars to them it was inevitable that she would worship there.

She always had some kind of dessert too, as Tea Cake said it give a man something to taper off on.

All night now the jooks clanged and clamored.

He did not return that night nor the next and so she plunged into the abyss and descended to the ninth darkness where light has never been.

Then when her ready cash was gone, had come Who Flung to denounce his predecessor as a scoundrel and took up around the house himself.

“Dat’s jealousy and malice.

Janie knew what she was up to—luring him away from the crowd.

Insensate cruelty to those you can whip, and groveling submission to those you can’t.

Her god would smite her, would hurl her from pinnacles and lose her in deserts, but she would not forsake his altars.

“Ah guess standin’ in uh store do make uh person git tuh be known in de vicinity.