The Kiss of His Memory Made Pictures of Love and Light

Tea Cake: Well...reckon you never 'spected tuh come tuh dis when you took up wid me, didja?
Janie: Once upon uh time, Ah never 'spected nothin', Tea Cake, but bein' dead from the standin' still and tryin' tuh laugh. But you come 'long and made somethin' outa me. So Ah'm thankful fuh anything we come through together.

She closed in and sat down. Combing road-dust out of her hair. Thinking.... Then Tea Cake came prancing around her where she was and the song of the sigh flew out of the window and lit in the top of the pine trees. Tea Cake, with the sun for a shawl. Of course he wasn't dead. He could never be dead until she herself had finished feeling and thinking. The kiss of his memory made pictures of love and light against the wall. Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.

Asking Lonesomeness Some Questions

"...At night she was there in the big house and sometimes it creaked and cried all night under the weight of lonesomeness. Then she'd lie awake in bed asking lonesomeness some questions....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" (Hurston 90).

Impatience at the Gate

“Oh to be a pear tree—any tree in bloom! With kissing bees singing of the beginning of the world! She had glossy leaves and bursting buds and she wanted to struggle with life but it seemed to elude her. Where were the singing bees for her? Nothing on the place nor in the house answered her. She searched as much of the world as she could from the top of the front steps and then went on down to the front gate and leaned over to gaze up and down the road. Looking, waiting, breathing short with impatience. Waiting for the world to be made” (11).

Dreams of Tea Cake

"Janie saw her life like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and doom was in the branches."

I'm reading Their Eyes Were Watching God for the first time since I met my own Tea Cake, and I find myself shaking as I begin. I had to face that my Tea Cake was dead, too, only in a different way than Janie's died, recently. Again. Because I finally faced that he was done being my Tea Cake long ago. But I'm still haunted by Tea Cake's ghost.

I was reading Yellow Raft in Blue Water earlier today, and there's a beautiful scene where Aunt Ida tells Willard Pretty Dog about her sadness in an effort to let him know that she understands his pain. "So, without planning it or thinking, I told him. I laid my life on the table—Clara and Papa and Mama and Pauline; Christine, the lies, the loneliness—for Willard to examine and see if it was bad enough to suit him. As I listened to my own story, I lost the control of its interpretation. I heard it as a tale on the radio, so sad it deserved applause and a trip to Florida. Unhappiness was the only thing that Willard valued, and as I admitted mine, I put myself in his broken hands. When I was done, I raised my palms to my face and breathed into them. My skin was cool and smelled of onion. The wood of Willard's chair crackled as he leaned toward me. His fingers tugged at mine, left my face exposed. I waited, hardly breathing, my eyes closed. Then I felt his touch, light as fog, upon my cheek.”

And I remembered that night during my first visit when he got me talking about Chris and I started crying from a well deep within that I didn't know existed and that has since re-submerged. Sometimes I think I could use another gut-wrenching cry or throat-gurgling laugh like the ones I shared with him, but I know I need to save them to share with someone who loves me in the same way. It will be worth the wait. But I do miss it.