Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (1937)

Beneath a pear tree in bloom, a girl watches bees sink into the blossoms and feels the world snap into meaning: the tree married to the wind, every calyx arching to meet the love embrace. That vision becomes the standard Janie Crawford measures every marriage against ever after. She chases it through three husbands. Logan Killicks wants a worker and a mule; Joe Starks, the big-voiced mayor who wills Eatonville out of swamp, wants her silenced on a pedestal inside his store; Tea Cake, younger and broke, takes her down to the Everglades muck to pick beans and dance after dark. Hurston had spent years gathering the folk speech of the Black South as Franz Boas's student, and the vernacular here is the harvest, no quaint dialect but a full instrument, warm and exact, able to carry a woman's interior weather through the hurricane that breaks the book open. When Janie pulls her horizon in at last like a great fish-net, you have read one of the few novels to let a Black woman want joy and call it enough.