Answer: Hurston's works concerned both the African-American experience and her struggles as an African-American woman. Her novels went relatively unrecognized by the literary world for decades.
Explanation: As the sun sets in a southern town, a mysterious woman trudges down the main road. The local residents, gathered on Phoebe Watson’s porch, know her, and they note her muddy overalls with satisfaction. Clearly resentful, they talk about how she had previously left the town with a younger man and gleefully speculate that he took her money and left her for a younger woman. They envy her physical beauty, particularly her long, straight hair. She doesn’t stop to talk to them, and they interpret her passing by as aloofness. Her name, it is revealed, is Janie Starks, and the fellow with whom she ran off is named Tea Cake.
T]he thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace . . . the ecstatic shiver of the tree . . . So this was a marriage!Janie is raised by her grandmother, Nanny. She never meets her mother or her father. Janie and Nanny inhabit a house in the backyard of a white couple, Mr. and Mrs. Washburn. She plays with the Wash burns’ children and thinks that she herself is white until she sees a photograph of herself. The children at the black school mock Janie for living in a white couple’s backyard and tease her about her derelict parents. They often remind her that Mr. Washburn’s dogs hunted her father down after he got her mother pregnant, though they neglect to mention that he actually wanted to marry her. Nanny eventually buys some land and a house because she thinks that having their own place will be better for Janie.