Is the Tea really that sweet?

Ok, I’m going to be honest, I was skeptic of Tea Cake from the beginning. When he first walks into the store, I was nervous. Simply because of the fact that Janie thinks he looks familiar, and he knows her, but she doesn’t know him. Then, the way he talks is extremely flirty. My first impression was that Tea Cake is just a player. A sweet talker who goes out with many women. Given Janie’s previous romances, I thought that Tea Cake was the last thing she needed. He would have a good time, and then dump her. She would then have a third failed attempt at true love.

As we move beyond the store scene, I started to like Tea Cake more and more. I realized that Janie was happy for one of the very few times in her life. In class, someone brought up the fact that Janie is getting to experience the life of a teenage girl, a life that she was cheated out of. They would go off, have fun, and get into “trouble” (if you count fishing at night trouble).

Then, come page 103, my skepticism was back. I didn’t like how comfortable he was getting in her home. The fact that he invites himself over to her house and then just starts playing her piano as if he lives there made me uncomfortable. However, the worst part of that scene was how he combs her hair while she sleeps. He starts to play the piano and she falls asleep. When she wakes up, he is combing her hair (which oddly makes her more comfortable despite the distance of their relationship). When she asks where he got the comb, he says that he brought it and had planned to comb her hair. This made me very uncomfortable. 1) He never asked for consent, 2) I personally didn’t think their relationship had progressed this far, and 3) he continues to flirt in an uncomfortable manner. In class, we talked a lot about this scene. Are we uncomfortable because we’re in 2018, are we fine with it, or is it actually not OK? I think that we came to a mixed consensus. On the one hand, yes, it is creepy. Yet, if Janie was uncomfortable and told him to stop, we thought that he would have obeyed her. Also, in 2018, there has been a much larger discussion on consent. Whereas “back then” consent was less of an issue. I still have mixed feelings about this scene but given how comfortable the narrator and Janie are with it, I am willing to see in what way Tea Cake’s character further plays out.

After this scene, I was back to liking Tea Cake and his inclusiveness towards Janie. I again became skeptical when he took her money but appreciated when he got it back. I thought that they had a healthy relationship in the Muck but that quickly changed after he whipped her even though she didn’t do anything. This honestly reminded me of every other husband she had. I thought it was weird how we never got Janie’s feelings but instead the feelings of the narrator (who seemed to be fine with it). This completely boggled my mind until our class discussion when someone proposed that Janie was trying to be more positive and defend Tea Cake. She wanted to justify him to Pheoby. I still don’t think that whipping her was OK, but that is the way the narrator is portraying it.

Excluding this scene (once again), I liked Tea Cake. When he died, I was actually sad despite these occasional uncomfortable scenes. I felt sympathy for Janie because I think that she may have succeeded in finding her love and then she was forced to kill him. What were your thoughts?