Janie's story begins in the backyard of her grandmother's white employers, where she realizes she is darker-skinned than the white children she has always lived around. Janie has lived a conservative childhood, for she is being raised by her protective and traditional grandmother. When her grandmother sees her kissing a local boy over the garden fence, she grows worried about Janie's future and marries her off to an older neighbor, Logan Killicks, a man with property who can "protect" her. The marriage is not happy for Janie.

Her grandmother dies, and after a short time, Janie escapes from Logan. She marries Joe Starks, and they go to live at a new black settlement called Eatonville. Joe is an ambi

When Tea Cake is better, he heads to the muck with Janie, as promised. The Everglades, Lake Okechobee, the beans, and the sugar cane are all huge to her. She has never seen such fertile, deep black, rich soil. Since they arrive before planting season, they get a house near one of Okechobee's dikes, and Tea Cake gets a good position. Other people come, Indians wander through, and the planting is done. Janie and Tea Cake leisurely pass their time, going fishing and waiting for picking season. Tea Cake decides they should go hunting. When he teaches Janie to use a gun, she becomes an excellent shot. Janie and Tea Cake bring in lots of game and sell alligator parts in Palm Beach.

Sitting on her porch with Pheoby, Janie takes her tired feet from a warm pan of water and tells her friend that she has her permission to tell her story to all the curious folks in town. Janie feels she has nothing to hide; she has loved, been loved, and dared to really live life. Pheoby is impressed by the story and admires Janie's determination. After Pheoby leaves, Janie shuts up her house and goes to bed, thinking about Tea Cake. Her life is peaceful.

When he found all Janie's money, Tea Cake got "excited and felt like letting folks know who he was." He ran into some friends and wanted to spend some money on them, to feel like a millionaire. He decided to give a big feast, free to his friends, with chicken, biscuits, macaroni, and music. He tells how one man came and made trouble, being picky about the free food, and how another two men nearly started a fight; Tea Cake successfully settled the problems. When Tea Cake realized that the guitar player only knew a few songs, he bought the guitar and had fun playing himself. Janie wonders why he did not come and get her for all the fun. Tea Cake claims that he wanted to, several times, but he did not believe that a high-brow like her would like such goings on and that he did not want her to leave him when she saw his low-class friends. He had made a vow to himself when they married that he would not drag her down.

noon, she discovers that her two-hundred dollars are missing. All day and all night go by without a word from Tea Cake, and the next morning Janie thinks about Mrs. Tyler. A widow in her fifties with a house and insurance money, Mrs. Tyler developed a liking for younger men. After she spent her money on them, they always left her. The last one persuaded her to sell her house and follow him to Tampa, where he stole all her money and abandoned her. She had left Eatonville crammed into sexy clothes and sure of herself; she returned a broken and pathetic old fool, hanging and hungry. A grown daughter took her in to die. The images of Mrs. Tyler haunt Janie. She prays to God that Tea Cake still loves her, for she has waited a long, lonely time for him in her life.

After surviving the storm, Janie and Tea Cake stay in Palm Beach so he can recover. Before he is well, he decides they should go back to the muck. There he gets progressively sicker. Janie calls in a doctor, who gives her the bad news: Tea Cake has rabies and will probably not survive. She tells the doctor that money is no object, and he says he will try to locate some medicine and bring it soon. The next day, however, Tea Cake grows progressively more pa

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Approximate Word count = 2206
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page double spaced)