Characters and Characterization

Throughout chapter 5, Hurston makes a point of using indirect characterization to develop Joe Starks. From the outset, it is seen that Joe is a man who is willing to lead and take charge of a situation: "'Just like Ah thought,' Joe said. 'A whole heap uh talk and nobody doin' nothin'. [...]Ah want tuh speak wid de Mayor'"(34). Upon seeing the lack of organization and development in the colored town, he quickly moves to see if he can better the town; he is confident in his abilities as a leader to fix the problem. One resident made the statement that "Us talks about de white man keepin' us down! Shucks! He don't have tuh. Us keeps our own selves down."(39). He keenly observes that it isn't the whites who are subjugating the blacks and placing them in the haphazard town, it is themselves. They stagnate and keep themselves down, genuinely believing their intellectual inferiority. The fact that Joe moves quickly to expand and develop the town shows that he does not subscribe to such beliefs; he sees himself as the equal of whites and wholly capable of bettering the town without their help.
On pages 47-48, Hurston creates an entire section dedicated to indirectly characterizing Joe. She first talks about his "big house"(47) and mentions how the surrounding houses were like servants quarters. This suggests a kind of power-hungryness about Joe, how in his attempt to lead his residents, he had inadvertantly subjugated them under his power. Then Hurston goes on to talk about his spitting pot, and how he bought a flowery spitting pot for Janie. The people were apparently caught off-guard by this move, thinking "how could they know up-to-date folks was spitting in flowery little things like that? It sort of made the rest of them feel like they had been taken advantage of. [...]Maybe more things in the world besides spitting pots had been hid from them"(48). These lavish indulgments by Joe set him apart from the general population; he has become an outsider administering their governement. This echoes the earlier statement of blacks keeping themselves down; Joe keeps apart from the people and keeps them in ignorance, thus keeping them down. Hurston's analogy to the alligator is apt: "It was like seeing your sister turn into a 'gator. A familiar strangeness"(48). Joe has become a monster of sorts, feeding on the power of controlling a town and the people in it. Far from the sweet man seen in earlier chapters, Joe has started to act like the white man believed to be keeping blacks down.