“It was inevitable that she should accept any inconsistency and cruelty from her
deity as all good worshippers do from theirs. All gods who receive homage are
cruel. All gods dispense suffering without reason. Otherwise, they would not be
worshipped. Through indiscriminate suffering men know fear and fear is the most
divine emotion. It is the stones for altars and the beginning of wisdom. Half
gods are worshipped in wine and flowers. Real gods require blood.”
In this passage from Chapter 16, Hurston shapes out an exception to the gender dichotomy that she presents in the opening sentences of the novel. Mrs. Tuner is introduced. She has deep-seated beliefs about the superiority of the Caucasian race. She and Janie had seen one another throughout the season, but they have not come to know one another until the season ended. For the first time Janie faces prejudice and racism. Mrs. Turner only pursues a friendship with Janie because she has lighter skin than the rest of the migrant workers. She shares her strong beliefs with Janie as she tells her “Ah can’t stand black niggers . . . . Ah hates tuh see folks lak me and you mixed up wid ’em.” Ironically, Mrs. Turner’s life depends on black migrant workers support.
Mrs. Turner's worship of qualities that she will never possess groups her with the men whose ships “sail forever on the horizon.” What is most strange about the passage, though, is the understood comparison between Mrs. Turner and Janie. The “indiscriminate suffering” and “real blood” that may lead to wisdom could equally well belong to Janie. Janie's trip to the horizon requires her to suffer at the hands of two husbands, shoot her third, and brave a ferocious hurricane. Yet for Janie, suffering is not an end in itself. She endures it so that she may experience the fullness of life and the good that comes with the bad. Mrs. Turner, however, worships her false gods because they give her a sense of superiority over her peers and because, something of a masochist, she enjoys the pain that these gods dole out. When others mock her for her views, she feels like a victim and a martyr, a feeling she finds pleasurable. The narrator's stylized description, in the paragraph just below the above quote, of her wish for “an army, terrible with banners and swords,” illustrates the fantastic vengefulness and inflated sense of self-importance that Mrs. Turner's ostracism gives her. It is this pleasure in pain that motivates her to worship “gods who dispense suffering without reason.” Through “worship,” she hopes to “attain her paradise, a heaven of straight-haired, thin-lipped, high nose boned white seraphs.” Hurston uses Mrs. Turner as an example of intolerance in the novel.
