Chapter Fourteen opens in the Everglades on Lake Okechobee, where Tea Cake has found a hotel room for he and Janie to live in. Tea Cake quickly finds a job picking beans, and soon requests Janie to pick with him on the muck. It is a communal area around the swampland, with many people working together all day and playing, gambling, and loving together late into the night. After Tea Cake teaches her how to shoot a gun - foreshadowing later developments in the novel - Janie reflects on how much her life has changed since she left Eatonville. For Janie, the most important difference is that on the muck she can "listen and laugh and even talk some herself if she wanted to" (128).
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