ds when her mind is freed from mistaken reality.Failing to recognize herself as the one black child in a photograph, Janie begins her story without a name or color (Meese 62). “Dey all uster call me Alaphabet’ cause so many people had done named me different names” (Hurston 9). The revelation doesn’t devastate Janie, rather it stands as both a symbol of Nanny’s unrealistic attempts to shield the girl from life and a metaphor for Janie’s lack of self-knowledge (Williams 100). Nanny raised Janie through her own dreams “of what a woman oughta be and do” (Hurston 100). Nanny projects a stereotypical identity and a secure future for Janie based on what she knows, which is limited by the historical constraints of what she has seen of the white man’s power over blacks (Meese 62). She tries to control Janie under her own rules and unfair authority. Nanny tells Janie,Honey, de white man is de ruler of everything as far as Ah been able to find out. Maybe it’s someplace off in the ocean where the black man is in power, but we don’t know nothi’n about what we see. So de white man throw down the load and tell de nigger man tu pick it up…The nigger woman is de mule uh de world so far as Ah can see. (Hurston 14)She wants Janie to have the life that her and her daughter did not have; though Nanny is unaware of the emotions that must follow. As a child, raised by Nanny, Janie was guided by the unreal allusion of what life is made up of. When Janie was about sixteen, she spent a spring afternoon under a blossoming tree in Nanny’s yard. Here she comes to the realization that something is missing in her life… sexual ecstasy. The blooms, the new leaves and the virgin- like spring came to life all around her. She wondered when and where she might find such an ecstasy herself. According to Hurston, Nanny finds Janie kissing a boy named Johnny Taylor and her &...
