Janie buried Tea Cake in Palm Beach. She knew he loved the ’Glades but it was too low for him to lie with water maybe washing over him with every heavy rain. Anyway, the ’Glades and its waters had killed him. She wanted him out of the way of storms, so she had a strong vault built in the cemetery at West Palm Beach. Janie had wired to Orlando for money to put him away.
I don’t think Janie will ever love another man how she loved Tea Cake.
He wanted to plunge in after her but dreaded the water, somehow. Tea Cake rose out of the water at the cow’s rump and seized the dog by the neck. But he was a powerful dog and Tea Cake was over-tired. So he didn’t kill the dog with one stroke as he had intended. But the dog couldn’t free himself either. They fought and somehow he managed to bite Tea Cake high up on his cheek-bone once.
The dog most likely had rabies. Now that Tea Cake got bitten, he probably won’t make it.
Uh person can see every place you hit her. Ah bet she never raised her hand tuh hit yuh back, neither.
Tea Cake resorts to violence against Janie because of his insecurity and jealousy. No one bats an eye at the abuse and they even support it.
So Mrs. Turner frowned most of the time. She had so much to disapprove of. It didn’t affect Tea Cake and Janie too much. It just gave them something to talk about in the summertime when everything was dull on the muck.
Janie and Tea Cake’s love doesn’t get affected by Mrs. turners hate and attempts to separate the two.
Janie learned what it felt like to be jealous. A little chunky girl took to picking a play out of Tea Cake in the fields and in the quarters.
Janie wasn’t jealous before when she was with Joe or Logan. Tea Cake is important to her in a way no one else is and she loves him greatly.
What if Eatonville could see her now in her blue denim overalls and heavy shoes? The crowd of people around her and a dice game on her floor! She was sorry for her friends back there and scornful of the others. The men held big arguments here like they used to do on the store porch. Only here, she could listen and laugh and even talk some herself if she wanted to. She got so she could tell big stories herself from listening to the rest.
Janie gets along well with the workers in the Everglades compared to the people back in Eatonville
He drifted off into sleep and Janie looked down on him and felt a self-crushing love. So her soul crawled out from its hiding place.
Despite Janie’s past experiences with men, she loves and trusts Tea Cake with all of her heart.
But anyhow, Janie, you be keerful ’bout dis sellin’ out and goin’ off wid strange men. Look whut happened tuh Ahnie Tyler. Took whut little she had and went off tuh Tampa wid dat boy dey call Who Flung.
Phoebe shows a lot of care for Janie and trusts her judgement.
“Me scramble ’round tuh git de money tuh take yuh—been workin’ lak uh dawg for two whole weeks—and she come astin’ me if Ah want her tuh go! Puttin’ mahself tuh uh whole heap uh trouble tuh git dis car so you kin go over tuh Winter Park or Orlandah tuh buy de things you might need and dis woman set dere and ast me if Ah want her tuh go!”
Tea Cake worked hart to get enough money to take Janie with him to the Sunday School picnic. He looks like he enjoys doing its of things for Janie to make her happy.
Then in a moment it was gone. Tea Cake wasn’t strange. Seemed as if she had known him all her life
Janie has a good impression of Tea cake so far and they get along well.
Joe returned to the store full of pleasure and good humor but he didn’t want Janie to notice it because he saw that she was sullen and he resented that. She had no right to be, the way he thought things out
Joe thinks that Janie is poised and that she has no right to be at all upset when he has done so much for her.
The years took all the fight out of Janie’s face. For a while she thought it was gone from her soul. No matter what Jody did, she said nothing. She had learned how to talk some and leave some. She was a rut in the road. Plenty of life beneath the surface but it was kept beaten down by the wheels. Sometimes she stuck out into the future, imagining her life different from what it was.
Years of rough and falling marriage has worn Angie out. She takes the verbal abuse and does nothing about it.
Janie laughed at all these well-wishers because she knew that they knew plenty of women alone; that she was not the first one they had ever seen. But most of the others were poor. Besides she liked being lonesome for a change. This freedom feeling was fine. These men didn’t represent a thing she wanted to know about. She had already experienced them through Logan and Joe. She felt like slapping some of them for sitting around grinning at her like a pack of chessy cats, trying to make out they looked like love.
Janie knows that these men have no actual interest in her, but her money and property. She prefers being independent and isn’t focused on marriage or romantic relationships right now.
She tore off the kerchief from her head and let down her plentiful hair. The weight, the length, the glory was there. She took careful stock of herself, then combed her hair and tied it back up again. Then she starched and ironed her face, forming it into just what people wanted to see, and opened up the window and cried, “Come heah people! Jody is dead. Mah husband is gone from me.”
With Joe’s death, Janie is now free from the abuse and can be more like herself.
“Thank yuh fuh yo’ compliments, but mah wife don’t know nothin’ ’bout no speech-makin’. Ah never married her for nothin’ lak dat. She’s uh woman and her place is in de home.”
Joe doesn’t even give Janie a chance to speak for herself and tells her where he thinks she belongs.