“There is so much we don’t understand and so much unhappiness comes because of that.”

The Color Purple by Alice Walker REVIEW

“I hadn’t realized I was so ignorant, Celie. The little I knew about my own self wouldn’t have filled a thimble! And to think Miss Beasley always said I was the smartest child she ever taught! But one thing I do thank her for, for teaching me to learn for myself, by reading and studying and writing a clear hand. And for keeping alive in me somehow the desire to know.”

Last week one of my students was assigned the task of reading The Color Purple by his sending school so I thought it no better time to make my way through it. Among the issues covered in the book that will no doubt get it high ranking on the annual “most-likely to be banned by conservatives list” are the following: Vulgar language, explicit sexual references, incest, rape, wife-beating, adultery, lesbianism, drug use, alcoholism, murder, bad grammar, black dialects, domestic violence, controversial religious beliefs (i.e. disparagement of conventional church Christianity), racism, dysfunctional families, FGM, racial stereotypes, and mental illness. Have I forgotten anything?

I suspect that Robert Bork might refer to this sort of literature in the curriculum as “slouching towards Gomorrah” but there is nothing here that will not in some way be part of the lives of the people students today will someday know, work with, and maybe even marry. Maybe it is best to face life in its darker corners before life mugs you and drags you there? That’s the argument for this sort of literature anyway. I do think that it should be a parental decision for the most part (there is so much here to trigger-traumatize a kid with any of this stuff in their past) but that is neither here nor there.

So what might be the value of a book like The Color Purple? Perhaps the obvious answer is that its primary character starts out her life as unlikely to make it to a happy adulthood as one can possibly imagine. As she makes it, students reading the novel might be inclined to say “I can make it.” The curtain opens on her already deeply enmeshed in domestic violence and sexual abuse. If dirt had a self image lower or hope more blighted than Celie, it would go to therapy or kill itself. Her life she reflects is worse than being buried because if she was buried, she “wouldn’t have to work.” This is how she describes her step father.

“He look at me. It like he looking at the earth. ‘It need somethin’ his eyes say.”

Celie is so poor and neglected she “can’t remember being the first one in [her] own dress.” Sometimes, the only way she can survive the traumas of her young life is to dissociate (“I make myself wood. I say to myself, Celie, you a tree”). If love were light, Celie would live on the backside of Pluto. “One good thing bout the way he never do any work round the place,” she says of her step father, “us never miss him when he gone.” Imagine if your only caregiver brought home his mistress and upon meeting you, exclaimed that you were uglier than she had been told you were. (“You sure is ugly, she say, like she ain’t believed it.”) Imagine being beaten because you were not the person your primary caregiver loved. (“What he beat you for? she ast. For being me and not you.”). Imagine that the only female companionship you have is someone who has grown up with the same abuse you have.

"Good behavior ain’t good enough for them, say Sofia. Nothing less than sliding on your belly with your tongue on they boots can even git they attention. I dream of murder, she say, I dream of murder sleep or wake.”

Here is what Celie’s sister says about growing up in their abusive household as she reflects back on it from her new home in an African village as a missionary.

“There is a way that the men speak to women that reminds me too much of Pa. They listen just long enough to issue instructions. They don’t even look at women when women are speaking. They look at the ground and bend their heads toward the ground. The women also do not “look in a man’s face” as they say. To “look in a man’s face” is a brazen thing to do. They look instead at his feet or his knees. And what can I say to this? Again, it is our own behavior around Pa.”

In many ways, by introducing us to a character who comes from a life so devoid of nurture and so full of brutality, Alice Walker provides the reader with a roadmap out that others along that road may have to travel. The Color Purple tells us what a person needs to climb out of the hole their fates have put them in. Was your own family a hive of whack jobs? Here is your Alice Walker approved purple knapsack full of maps and compasses to get you out. Celie’s “salvation” comes from a slow but sure realization that with her hardships, she has been given assets and a series of “helpers” – her sister Nettie, her in-law Sophie, her idol, Shug, and her transformed idea of God.

“There is so much we don’t understand,” Celie’s sister Nettie says in one of her letters towards the end of the book, “And so much unhappiness comes because of that.” This may well be the theme of the book. Each of Celie’s “helpers” gives her some crucial bit of understanding in the course of the novel – understandings that prove crucial to her development as a character and to her liberation from the tyranny of her circumstances into what is never exactly a “Good House Keeping” life but certainly one that is lived with strength, affection, and dignity.

Nettie helps her to believe that she is not who she has thought she was and that her children are alive and well and that she does not come from a doomed union.  Nettie informs her that her children are not dead and that her step father is not her biological father. Nettie tells her in her letters that it okay for her to stop internalizing the abuse.

(“The world is changing, I said. It is no longer a world just for boys and men.”)

Sophia helps her to understand that it is possible not only to stop letting men control one’s own thoughts but also to stand up to their bullying. Sophia models what it might be like to stand up to men, though she is not terribly successful at it. Sophia, with a little help from “squeak” is the one that convinces Celie that women can be powerful personalities in their own right and that they have voices and can have boundaries.

(“She say, All my life I had to fight. I had to fight my daddy. I had to fight my brothers. I had to fight my cousins and my uncles. A girl child ain’t safe in a family of men. But I never thought I’d have to fight in my own house. She let out her breath. I loves Harpo, she say. God knows I do. But I’ll kill him dead before I let him beat me. . . .

You got to fight them, Celie, she say. I can’t do it for you. You got to fight them for yourself.”)

Shug provides her with an understanding of herself as a woman - As a person of value and not simply a doormat (“First time somebody made something and name it after me.”). Shug helps her to understand that bad things in life do not have to be permanent (“That dog of a stepdaddy just a bad odor passing through.”) Shugs informs her of what it means to be in one’s own skin and to own one’s own body. Shug helps her to understand that she has skills that will allow her to move out from the protection/abuse of her abusive marriage. Shug is also the one that helps Celie to understand that God may not be who she has been raised to think He is, a transformation that becomes crucial to her ability to rise above the self-imposed racism of her childhood faith. “It is the pictures in the bible that fool you,” Shug informs Celie,

“The pictures that illustrate the words. All of the people are white and so you just think all the people from the bible were white too. But really white white people lived somewhere else during those times.”

When Celie finally stands up to the tyranny and tyrants in her life, she does it with style and in the presence of her “helpers”

“Until you do right by me, everything you touch will crumble” she says to her husband.

 “He laugh. Who you think you is? he say. You can’t curse nobody. Look at you. You black, you pore, you ugly, you a woman. Goddam, he say, you nothing at all.”

“Until you do right by me, I say, [Celie continues] everything you even dream about will fail. I give it to him straight, just like it come to me. And it seem to come to me from the trees.”

No doubt evangelicals will object to the fact that Celie moves away from a faith that looks like theirs and towards a faith that looks a lot like Buddhism. But everyone can celebrate the idea that a person has a right to come to their own understanding of how they relate to the divine in the universe and how they will understand God as they define God. For Celie (and for Alice Walker) the right to articulate a view of the universe that does not enslave you may be the fundamental right of all the rights (there may be a reason why it is listed first in the American Bill of Rights). This subject, Walker writes in the preface, is the principle theme of the novel. “WHATEVER ELSE The Color Purple has been taken for during the years since its publication,” she writes there,

“it remains for me the theological work examining the journey from the religious back to the spiritual that I spent much of my adult life, prior to writing it, seeking to avoid. Having recognized myself as a worshiper of Nature by the age of eleven, because my spirit resolutely wandered out the window to find trees and wind during Sunday sermons, I saw no reason why, once free, I should bother with religious matters at all.”

“This is the book in which I was able to express a new spiritual awareness, a rebirth into strong feelings of Oneness I realized I had experienced and taken for granted as a child; a chance for me as well as the main character, Celie, to encounter That Which Is Beyond Understanding But Not Beyond Loving and to say: I see and hear you clearly, Great Mystery, now that I expect to see and hear you everywhere I am, which is the right place.”

Because of its importance, I feel it appropriate to quote the novel at length: “I don’t write to God no more. I write to you,” Celie writes to her missionary sister in Africa at one pivotal point in the novel,

“What happen to God? ast Shug. Who that? I say. She look at me serious. Big a devil as you is, I say, you not worried bout no God, surely. She say, Wait a minute. Hold on just a minute here. Just because I don’t harass it like some peoples us know don’t mean I ain’t got religion. What God do for me? I ast. She say, Celie! Like she shock. He gave you life, good health, and a good woman that love you to death. ‘Yeah,’ I say, ‘and he give me a lynched daddy, a crazy mama, a lowdown dog of a step pa and a sister I probably won’t ever see again.’ Anyhow, I say, the God I been praying and writing to is a man. And act just like all the other mens I know. Trifling, forgitful and lowdown. She say, Miss Celie, You better hush. God might hear you. Let ’im hear me, I say. If he ever listened to poor colored women the world would be a different place, I can tell you. She talk and she talk, trying to budge me way from blasphemy. But I blaspheme much as I want to. All my life I never care what people thought bout nothing I did, I say. But deep in my heart I care about God. What he going to think. And come to find out, he don’t think. Just sit up there glorying in being deef, I reckon. But it ain’t easy, trying to do without God. Even if you know he ain’t there, trying to do without him is a strain.

“You telling me God love you, and you ain’t never done nothing for him? I mean, not go to church, sing in the choir, feed the preacher and all like that? But if God love me, Celie, I don’t have to do all that. Unless I want to. There’s a lot of other things I can do that I speck God likes. Like what? I ast. Oh, she say. I can lay back and just admire stuff. Be happy. Have a good time. Well, this sound like blasphemy sure nuff. She say, Celie, tell the truth, have you ever found God in church? I never did. I just found a bunch of folks hoping for him to show. Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me. And I think all the other folks did too. They come to church to share God, not find God. Some folks didn’t have him to share, I said.”

“They the ones didn’t speak to me while I was there struggling with my big belly and Mr.   children. Right, she say. Then she say: Tell me what your God look like, Celie. Aw naw, I say. I’m too shame. Nobody ever ast me this before, so I’m sort of took by surprise. Besides, when I think about it, it don’t seem quite right. But it all I got. I decide to stick up for him, just to see what Shug say. Okay, I say. He big and old and tall and graybearded and white. He wear white robes and go barefooted. Blue eyes? she ast. Sort of bluish-gray. Cool. Big though. White lashes. I say. She laugh. Why you laugh? I ast. I don’t think it so funny. What you expect him to look like, Mr. _____ ? That wouldn’t be no improvement, she say. Then she tell me this old white man is the same God she used to see when she prayed. If you wait to find God in church, Celie, she say, that’s who is bound to show up, cause that’s where he live. How come? I ast. Cause that’s the one that’s in the white folks’ white bible. Shug! I say. God wrote the bible, white folks had nothing to do with it. How come he look just like them, then? she say. Only bigger? And a heap more hair. How come the bible just like everything else they make, all about them doing”

“Here’s the thing, say Shug. The thing I believe. God is inside you and inside everybody else. You come into the world with God. But only them that search for it inside find it.”

“She say, My first step from the old white man was trees. Then air. Then birds. Then other people. But one day when I was sitting quiet and feeling like a motherless child, which I was, it come to me: that feeling of being part of everything, not separate at all. I knew that if I cut a tree, my arm would bleed. And I laughed and I cried and I run all around the house. I knew just what it was.”

“I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it." [Ergo the title “The Color Purple”]

I suspect that the critics of the Color Purple would prefer that Celie find her salvation in a good church and not in Buddhism; That she find her orientation in heterosexuality and not homosexuality; That she find stability in a traditional family not in separation and divorce and a common-law marriage – slash – civil union with a woman that runs off with 19 year olds. And I suspect that they would prefer that Celie be somewhat of a less defiant heroine. But ultimately this is not and never was intended to be a story about a woman who becomes heroic by conforming to a cultural ideal (in her culture, that would have made her a pair of dirty boots.)

This is a story about someone whose “little whistle sound like it lost way down in a jar, and the jar in the bottom of the creek.” (“Mr. _____ feelings hurt, I say. I don’t mention mine.”) This is a story about a woman who begins to make her journey towards belief in herself as being worthy of love. And there are many rest areas on that highway as I suspect that we all know. “There is so much we don’t understand. And so much unhappiness comes because of that.”

To those who would argue that Celie has not come far enough towards healing by the end of the story, I would only say, miracles sometimes take a lifetime. I am not sure that Alice Walker ever insinuates that Celie has arrived. Se mearly asserts that to arrive, we must all set out. 

Question for Comment: Have you ever been “set free” in your life? When did it happen? Who were your helpers?