Crux: Skin Color

Their Eyes Were Watching God: 14

Janie talks with a prejudiced black woman named Mrs. Turner who thinks darker black people are inferior. She likes Janie, who is lighter than she is, and her thoughts are characterized by the summary “Anyone who looked more white folkish than herself was better than she was in her criteria.” This character can be compared to a light-skinned black person in Ernest Gaines’s novel A Lesson Before Dying who thinks the same way.

 

McFeely suggests that Douglass’s speculation about the race of his father was probably founded on gossip he heard in his grandmother’s cabin, “as people accounted for his difference in color from his brothers and sisters.” This talk related to the fact that Douglass was “‘yellow,'” and that he “had a muted, dull complexion” that was lighter than those of his relatives. (8)