In Their Eyes Were Watching God, who are the sitters referred to in this following quotation? "These sitters had been tongueless, earless,...

These lines come from the opening of Zora Neale
Hurston's seminal work, Their Eyes Were Watching God in which she
often examines the repression of the blacks who live in bitterness, fear, or foolish
dreams.  With the lines quoted, Hurston depicts the residents of Janie Crawford's home
town who have spent lives working for someone else, whose hope has died in bitterness or
desperation.  Working during the day at jobs that are back-breaking, unfulfilling,
servile, and trivial, their spirits have been reduced to that of "mules and
brutes."

When they come out onto their porches in the
evening, a time which belongs to them alone rather than to their bosses, the residents
of the town "become lords of sounds and lesser things."  Yet, at the same time, there
are subject to their brute bitterness as Janie Crawford walks into town after years of
having been away.Then "they made burning statements with questions and killing tools out
of laughs" from their revived jealousy of the beautiful Janie.