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Chapter 5 Summary
Jody and Janie are surprised to find that Eatonville, the black town near Maitland, is nothing but a little hole on a hundred acres with no mayor and nothing but a few rough houses in the sand. Jody complains it is just as he thought—a lot of talk and nothing being done. He quickly rents a house and buys two hundred more acres from Mr. Eaton, the man in Maitland who donated the first hundred. Then he rallies the men of the town, buying lumber and charging them to build roads. He hires two to build him a store, which he fills with goods and uses to hold town meetings, and soon the men unanimously elect him to be mayor. He adds a post office to the store and buys a street lamp to drive away the dark, inviting people from all over the county to a town barbecue celebrating the first lighting. Soon, families move in and buy Jody's land, and Jody is able to build a nice two-story house filled with fine things like a flowered spittoon for Janie. He buys a gold one for himself, which he keeps on his store-bought desk in the post office.
Busy with his mayoral duties, Jody leaves Janie in charge of the store. However, he will not allow her to make speeches when the others ask, and he keeps a kerchief on her pretty, long hair. Janie does not like not having a choice about things, and often feels like she is doing nothing but passing the time. She finds that sleeping with authority keeps her removed from everyone else, while many in the town begin to resent the way Jody lords over them all. While some people believe Jody has earned what he has, most start feeling like he built the town on the backs of everyone else, showing little charity for those unable or unwilling to work as hard. That he dresses and acts as a white man disconcerts those who cannot help but feel like he is as much a master to them as the white man was.
Chapter 5 Analysis
Although Janie does not see Jody Starks as the fulfillment of her youthful romantic fantasies, she commits to him once she marries him, taking his dreams as her own. However, the more successful Jody becomes, the more Janie seems to disappear from his life. Jody is a powerful presence whose voice and corroborating actions dominate the chapter as they do Janie and the town. Forbidden from voicing her own thoughts in public, Janie finds that her role as Mrs. Mayor Starks keeps her removed from the rest of the town. Rather than experiencing all that life has to offer, as she had hoped to do, Janie finds that she has traded one form of drudgery for another.
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