This is an interesting question. There is no specific
evidence in Their Eyes Were Watching God which points to this
incident as being an obvious allegory of racism. After rereading the passage, I can
make a few observations which might help you make this case; however, the evidence that
this is somehow a clear picture of racism is not particularly
strong.
Obviously Janie and Tea Cake are black, so anything
that happens to them could be seen as an act against all blacks. There is little to
support this interpretation throughout the novel, though, as all kinds of things happen
to all kinds of blacks. The hurricane does not just displace one group of people, of
course, though the migrant blacks are the people we see who have to
move.
The rabid dog is standing on the back of the cow,
elevated above the pair in the water. Allegorically, this could represent their status
as well as the supremacy of the "animal" called racism.
Tea
Cake is determined to save Janie and attacks the dog to save her life. He seized the
powerful dog around the neck in an attempt to kill it; however, he was weary and could
not "kill it with one stroke as he had intended."
Neither
man nor animal could defeat the other, so they battled on until the dog managed to bite
Tea Cake one last time. Apparently that was enough, for Tea Cake
then
finished
him and sent him to the bottom to stay
there.
If this incident
depicts racism as the dog, we understand that to mean that racism is a disease, that it
bites (harms) people, that a battle must be fought to win it--all of which might work as
an allegory. The final statement, where the dog is dead, condemned to a watery grave,
never to return, is where the analogy or allegory falls apart the most. Racism--while
certainly not as horrible, prevalent, and tolerated as it once was--is not
dead.
There is a kind of allegory in this episode, though
it is clearly not an exact analogy to racism.
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