The Color Purple
Walker, Alice
THE COLOR PURPLE Alice Walker / Harcourt Brace Jovanovich / $11.95 Reid Buckley It swept the field this past year: the Pulitzer Prize, the American Book Award. Alice Walker's third novel, The...
...Nettie, Celie's beloved younger sister, escapes both Mr-and her "Pa" by running away, attaching herself to Negro missionaries who are bound for England and Africa...
...He took my other little baby, a boy this time...
...Sometimes he still be looking at Nettie, but I always get in his light...
...It happens also to be by a black Southern woman who may be taking her place alongside Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor...
...the terrible death of Celie's mother, who goes to meet her Maker burning with hatred for the daughter whom she sees bloated with the second incestuous bastard of her husband...
...Shug is everything that a woman could aspire to and everything desirable, an object of male lust yet triumphant over it...
...I don't bleed no more...
...To the degree that perversion is portrayed with skill, entrapping the reader's sympathies, is not the moral content of the book corrupt, and, for some, may it not be corrupting...
...Alice Walker's third novel, The Color Purple, may or may not have been the best published in 1982, but it is undeniably a work of human understanding, a work of the heart, a deeply felt exploration of goodness in adversity, and a hymn to the power of love...
...The opening vignettes are savage: the rape of 14-year-old Celie by the man she addresses as "Pa," which is described in the bluntest (and most horrifying) manner...
...I don't bleed no more...
...Miss Walker sorrows for them...
...By this means, Miss Walker charts and contrasts the two lives...
...We palefaces are the vain, silly, thoughtless, unconsciously cruel, and sometimes intentionally brutal, Oppressor...
...I happen to hold that homosexuality is a vice and an abomination...
...Together-thanks to their lesbian relationship-they grow as human beings and in our affections . . . which is when the reader raises his head from the novel and releases a gasp of surprise...
...They hunger (the men also, in the last analysis) for the redemption of human love, which Miss Walker shows can be expressed in forms that are outlawed...
...as he is known throughout the novel, under whom she becomes the drudge of another loveless and broken household...
...I see him looking at my little sister...
...I look at women, tho, cause I'm not scared of them...
...And this is the nourishment that the blackfolk of Miss Walker's The Color Purple Reid Buckley is a novelist...
...Yes, they become lovers...
...The irony of that bald statement, when she will hemorrhage forever...
...What a lot we know about Celie...
...Miss Walker and her novel are a Southern triumph.er and her novel are a Southern triumph...
...In her language, Miss Walker is often crudely anatomical- it is the idiom of the people she writes about-but she is never prurient...
...It isn't axiomatic that the deprived become depraved, but wretchedness sure does conduce to sucking the hind tit of civilization...
...I think he sold it to a man an his wife over Monticello...
...A girl at church say you git big if you bleed every month...
...I felt sorry for mama...
...When a people-most of them-is condemned to squalor, hopeless and sans relief, it is not exceptional that they should live like animals and in like degree become bestial...
...She devotes as much attention to the labors of Nettie and her benefactors in their African mission, whose dis-illusionments are accepted with the same humble resignation that shines in Celie, as to the sordid sociological realities...
...I say, Marry him, Nettie, an try to have one good year out your life...
...It is one more tribute to Miss Walker's skill (but also to her understanding of the human heart, and to Celie's invincible spirit) that the story never bogs down in the blues...
...Will it shock that I celebrate a novel in which sexual abuse and promiscuity are presented as the norm, and whose heroine, moreover, contracts a lesbian relationship that for a very long period is her one solace...
...But me, never again...
...The two infants, a girl and a boy, are snatched from Celie and sold, while she is reduced to being the slavey of the half-orphaned family, "Pa's" pleasure-object when the compulsion to rut seizes him...
...Trying to believe his story [that Celie is pregnant by some nameless youth] kilt her...
...Celie and Nettie indulge in amateur theologizing: God diminishes from a personal (and powerfully sustaining) presence in their lives to a kind of indifferent Force, which is a pity, and which more the pity I fear is probably Miss Walker's position...
...Now I tell her to marry Mr I don't tell her why...
...and though their men may be vile, the strategy of Lysistrata has always been available to black women (as they say in Old Spain, Una huelga en amor es depiernas cruzadas), they need not willingly participate, as in fact most do, in the promiscuity that debases them and so often condemns them to the concubinage of despair...
...the self-givingness) of the relationship she depicts...
...We learn that Mr.-, though bred by a buzzard and hatched by the sun, is capable of a great and true love in Shug Avery, a popular black torch-singer of sultry pride who parks at Celie's house (and in Mr...
...One wishes Miss Walker had demonstrated the generosity to represent at least one white in his complexity...
...She scared...
...These are good people, loving people-all of them...
...Shug (for Sugar) is mean and nasty when she flounces into the novel, but she is eventually humanized by Celie's goodness...
...Maybe cause my mama cuss me you think I kept mad at her...
...touchi, I suppose, for the stereotyping by whites that Negroes have had to endure...
...But what I'm sposed to put on...
...Miss Walker isn't a thousand words into her novel, yet the reader is swept into the vortex of her characters' lives...
...1 think so...
...The reader sympathizes with this liaison because one's heart has been broken by gallant Celie, who never complains, who patiently goes about the drudgery of her existence, accepting as her lot the humiliations that are heaped on her...
...There is such a thing as soul-blight...
...Hair-raising though the content, this is music in language...
...But I don't think he kilt it...
...Put on something...
...The bond between the two sisters is exquisitely rendered, and the novel's denouement, which I won't spoil by recounting, stops just short of pitching into sentimentality...
...until one day, repulsed by Celie's physical unattractiveness, he uses her no more...
...And again: Dear God, He beat me today cause he say I winked at a boy in church...
...I don't even look at mens...
...Listen to the packed, dramatic euphony of Miss Walker's prose: Dear God, He act like he can't stand me no more...
...It's a bit complicated, this cuckolding of a man by his mistress with his wife (or by his wife with his mistress...
...and one would ordinarily resist believing in the nexus of such different women were it not for Miss Walker's careful preparation, which began way, way back ("I look at women, tho, cause I'm not scared of them"-remember...
...When a people has been deracinated, physically enslaved a century or more, and then socially and economically suppressed and exploited, it is not surprising that bourgeois manners and morals suffer...
...s bed) when she pleases, treating Celie like chicken-dung...
...He say Why don't you look decent...
...That's novelistic coincidence, but o.k...
...Celie's femininity has been outraged and all but destroyed...
...Please do not blame the courier for the bad news...
...But I say I'll take care of you...
...Well, many of us were, as was the structure of Southern society during the blackest days of Jim Crow...
...These stark opening histories, covering a tremendous matter of human suffering, are told with the most wonderful economy in brief epistles from Celie to God...
...Her person is respected, her womanhood treated with loving tenderness...
...Nettie, from Africa, writes to her sister, whom she also believes to be dead, because her letters are never answered (in a particularly hateful act of spite, Mr.-hides them from Celie...
...But in defense of my sex, black or white, I think it's only fair to point out that it takes two to tango...
...Her harshness, however, she reserves for the black male...
...The structure of the narrative is quickly established: Celie writes to God out of a sense of deepest loneliness, sin, and violation, and later also to the Nettie who, she assumes, is dead, pouring out her grief and her yearning for human love...
...It concerns itself with a sociological context that indisputably existed, though Celie's resolution of it in lesbianism will strike most Southerners as eccentric...
...and her deft invention in having Shug first fall ill to discover how in need she is of Celie's kindness...
...In their poverty of means and spirit, however, these people did walk the Southern landscape...
...There are faults...
...With God help...
...White folk are stereotyped...
...He, not honky, is the villain of her book...
...Her youth has been despoiled, and her gender, taken psychologically as well as physically, so damaged that never again will she bear fruit...
...After that, I know she be big...
...Nettie, who is educated by her foster parents, becomes steadily more literate and assured, whereas Celie remains an ignorant, untutored, grindingly poor cornfield Negress who is half worked to death and who keeps despair at bay by sheer grit...
...The reader is left with a problem by Miss Walker...
...how our sympathies are engaged, and what forbidding augeries are buried in the lines...
...In turn, Celie transforms the tough and shallow Shug into a compassionate woman...
...Say I'm evil an always up to no good...
...It is this couple, who, being childless, have adopted Celie's offspring...
...but even to my 88-year-old, saintly mother, New Orleans born, I would not hesitate to praise The Color Purple for its rare literary excellence...
...That's the truth...
...Yet under the power of Miss Walker's prose I suspend my disapproval, surrendering myself to the purity (the unselfishness...
...I keep hoping he fine somebody to marry...
...I would not recommend her book to the immature, or to the easily shocked...
...Is The Color Purple an evil book in its celebration of a lesbian love...
...She is finally bartered away to Mr...
...I don't have nothing...
...She, who has known from men nothing other than brutality, now with the semi-professional Shug experiences conjugal joy...
...almost without exception get in her 1930s Deep South setting...
...I got breasts full of milk running down myself...
...It is superior writing, bare and most beautiful...
...The more one reads of contemporary black female literature the more despicable emerges the character of the black man, who is portrayed as lazy, corrupt, lecherous, violent, despotic, and the chief exploiter of the black woman...
...The Color Purple is not by intention bad...
...Don't get me wrong...
...I may have got something in my eye but I didn't wink...
...But I ain't...
...Check on Chekhov-Peasants & Other Stories-if you have the bad manners to doubt that...
...An unlikely attachment develops between the two women, who, in the beginning, share little more than their scorn for black men, epitomized in Mr.------, whom they delight in deceiving...
...the licentiousness of the American female, white or black, is today's international scandal...
...To Celie, Shug represents Romance...
Vol. 16 • November 1983 • No. 11
