The Color Purple

The brilliance of enslaving the spirit is that it is an invisible prison from which the inmate appears to derive some comfort. For African Americans even that small comfort had to be fought for. I can imagine some wily ancestor pointing out to his master or overseer that, if the God of the Bible had created slaves as well as everybody else, surely He would want them to know how to read about it for themselves. I’m sure this was a conversation—master astride his horse, slave on his knees or surely with face downcast and hat in hand—that took at least a century. Finally, a handpicked slave, perhaps the master’s son by an enslaved woman he’d raped, was permitted to read an edited version of the Good Book. Interpreted by the master, of course. A recurring sentence was bound to be “slaves obey your masters.”

In Putnam County, Georgia, where I was born, the mistress of the plantation during my great-great-grandfather’s time loaned the black community a small plot of land on which to build a church; though badly neglected, it is still there. Recently the grave of my great-grandmother, Sallie Montgomery Walker, was found not far away. She was born in 1861, enslaved. She died in 1900 and was buried with four of her children. What had happened to her? We will never know. That she might have had status in the Montgomery household could account for her having a headstone (most slaves did not) and for the fact that her father, who outlived her, is buried nearby. It is also probable she and her father were related to their owners by blood. In fact, Miss May Montgomery, for whom my father worked, having nearly been turned off her large estate for asking to be paid twelve dollars a month for unending service as field-hand, dairyman and driver, made a comment that has been passed down in our family of Montgomerys and Walkers. On hearing that one of my siblings abhorred the eating of chicken skin, she exclaimed: that’s a Montgomery all right. You can never get a Montgomery to eat chicken skin!

This is the means by which descendents of slaves have tried to piece together our identities, on the European side, from scraps thrown by relatives who, out of hypocrisy and cowardice, have failed to honor connection to their own kin. I know this to be true, and yet it remains difficult to imagine.

I came into the world loving “God.” By which I mean the All Present and All Magical. It was so apparent that this was the case that my parents and siblings entered me in numerous baby contests because I never seemed to encounter an expression of the Divine, in human form, that I did not appreciate. It is because of this love that racism as evidenced by belief in superior and inferior looks and mentalities failed to impress me. I could not understand it. It seemed blind. I accepted people in my community joyfully, whatever they looked like, whatever their peculiarities, savoring the wonder of them. They responded to my delight in them by helping me win every contest I was ever in, thereby raising funds to build benches for the church or a roof for our school. By then, for most people, “God” as the All Present and All Magical had disappeared into the “God image” (as Carl Jung would call it) that they worshiped every Sunday at church. This was the God image they’d first glimpsed, after being captured, beaten and starved, shackled and branded, the day they left their homeland of Africa. A God image that, in fact, was someone else’s image of God, and not a reflection of the people forced to worship it. It is possible to visit black churches in the South, even now, and find the object of devotion to be a very pale Jesus Christ, blue eyes raised toward his adored (assumed bigger and whiter) father in heaven. This was the same adoration of himself that the slave master drilled into his slaves. I was born at a time that permitted me to see remnants of this baffling and soul murdering behavior, and to join the Movement of Black people in the Sixties whose goal was to eliminate it.

When I began thinking, in the late Seventies, about writing the novel that would become The Color Purple, I felt the greatest need to do so surrounded by Nature. I was living in New York City. After many changes—a divorce, selling my house, and leaving my editorial job at Ms. Magazine—I set out for San Francisco. From there, I traveled North until I came to a tiny settlement called Boonville where I rented a one room cottage that faced a meadow and whose backyard was an apple orchard. A towering linden tree offered shade. Seeking guidance, I spent days at the river and among the redwoods. Nights looking at the stars. This was the experience of Heaven in Nature I had so missed while living in New York, the ever present magical All to which my soul and my creativity aspired.

More than thirty years later, it still puzzles me that The Color Purple is so infrequently discussed as a book about God. About “God” versus “the God image.” After all, the protagonist Celie’s first words are “Dear God.” Everything that happens during her life, spanning decades, is in relation to her growth in understanding this force. I remember attempting to explain the necessity of her trials and tribulations to a skeptical fan. We grow in our understanding of what “God/Goddess” means and is by the intensity of our suffering, and what we are able to make of it, I said. As far as I can tell, I added. Fortunately we had just finished discussing two natural disasters (a devastating tsunami and hurricane) that had recently afflicted Southeast Asia and the Gulf Coast of the United States: Think of “Pa” as Celie’s Tsunami, I said, and “Mister” as her hurricane.

In fact, a “Pa” and/or a “Mister” are likely to turn up in anybody’s life. They might be wearing the mask of war, the mask of famine, the mask of physical affliction. The mask of caste, race, class, sex, mental illness, or disease. Their meaning to us, often, is that they are simply an offering, a challenge, provided by “God” i.e., the All Present and All Magical, that requires us to grow. And though we may be confused, even traumatized, as Celie is, by their historical, social, and psychological configuration, if we persevere we may, like her, eventually settle into amazement: that by some unfathomable kindness we have received just the right keys we need to unlock the deepest, darkest dungeons of our emotional and spiritual bondage, and to experience our much longed for liberation and peace.

The core teaching of the novel appears on page 176, and is delivered by Shug Avery, who is not only Celie’s beloved but also her spiritual mentor:

I believe God is everything, say Shug. Everything that is or ever was or ever will be. And when you can feel that, and be happy to feel that, you’ve found it.

Shug also shares her understanding that the God in whom she delights, a God she feels delights as well in her, is far too all-encompassing to have a gender. This is why, at the very end of the novel, Celie’s definition of “God” has changed radically. When she addresses “God” toward the sunset of her life, her “Dear God” includes not only people and sky and trees and stars, but “Dear Everything.”

Three years after publication, The Color Purple, which won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, was made into an internationally popular film by Steven Spielberg. Five years after publication it had sold over six million copies worldwide. Ten years later that number had doubled, as The Color Purple became one of the five most re-read books in America. In 2005, The Color Purple became a phenomenally successful Broadway musical, playing to packed houses every night for over a year. In the process it transformed the “Great White Way” into a place where people of all colors, orientations and identities gathered to experience the show and to celebrate “God” as Life and Love, Perseverance, Hope, Creativity and Joy.

Alice Walker is the author of more than thirty books and was inducted, along with Amelia Earhart, Cesar Chavez, John Muir, Sally Ride, Billie Jean King and Clint Eastwood into the California Hall of Fame.

Alice Walker

30 December 2006

Casa Madre

Costa Careyes, Mexico

Preface

WHATEVER ELSE The Color Purple has been taken for during the years since its publication, 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.

I would have thought that a book that begins “Dear God” would immediately have been identified as a book about the desire to encounter, to hear from, the Ultimate Ancestor. Perhaps it is a sign of our times that this was infrequently the case. Or perhaps it is the pagan transformation of God from patriarchal male supremacist into trees, stars, wind, and everything else, that camouflaged for many readers the book’s intent: to explore the difficult path of someone who starts out in life already a spiritual captive, but who, through her own courage and the help of others, breaks free into the realization that she, like Nature itself, is a radiant expression of the heretofore perceived as quite distant Divine.

If it is true that it is what we run from that chases us, then The Color Purple (this color that is always a surprise but is everywhere in nature) is the book that ran me down while I sat with my back to it in a field. Without the Great Mystery’s word coming from any Sunday sermon or through any human mouth, there I heard and saw it moving in beauty across the grassy hills.

No one is exempt from the possibility of a conscious connection to All That Is. Not the poor. Not the suffering. Not the writer sitting in the open field. 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.

You better not never tell nobody but God. It’d kill your mammy.

DEAR GOD,

I am fourteen years old. I am I have always been a good girl. Maybe you can give me a sign letting me know what is happening to me.

Last spring after little Lucious come I heard them fussing. He was pulling on her arm. She say It too soon, Fonso, I ain’t well. Finally he leave her alone. A week go by, he pulling on her arm again. She say Naw, I ain’t gonna. Can’t you see I’m already half dead, an all of these chilren.

She went to visit her sister doctor over Macon. Left me to see after the others. He never had a kine word to say to me. Just say You gonna do what your mammy wouldn’t. First he put his thing up gainst my hip and sort of wiggle it around. Then he grab hold my titties. Then he push his thing inside my pussy. When that hurt, I cry. He start to choke me, saying You better shut up and git used to it.

But I don’t never git used to it. And now I feels sick every time I be the one to cook. My mama she fuss at me an look at me. She happy, cause he good to her now. But too sick to last long.

DEAR GOD,

My mama dead. She die screaming and cussing. She scream at me. She cuss at me. I’m big. I can’t move fast enough. By time I git back from the well, the water be warm. By time I git the tray ready the food be cold. By time I git all the children ready for school it be dinner time. He don’t say nothing. He set there by the bed holding her hand an cryin, talking bout don’t leave me, don’t go.

She ast me bout the first one Whose it is? I say God’s. I don’t know no other man or what else to say. When I start to hurt and then my stomach start moving and then that little baby come out my pussy chewing on it fist you could have knock me over with a feather.

Don’t nobody come see us.

She got sicker an sicker.

Finally she ast Where it is?

I say God took it.

He took it. He took it while I was sleeping. Kilt it out there in the woods. Kill this one too, if he can.

DEAR GOD,

He act like he can’t stand me no more. Say I’m evil an always up to no good. He took my other little baby, a boy this time. But I don’t think he kilt it. I think he sold it to a man an his wife over Monticello. I got breasts full of milk running down myself. He say Why don’t you look decent? Put on something. But what I’m sposed to put on? I don’t have nothing.

I keep hoping he fine somebody to marry. I see him looking at my little sister. She scared. But I say I’ll take care of you. With God help.

DEAR GOD,

He come home with a girl from round Gray. She be my age but they married. He be on her all the time. She walk round like she don’t know what hit her. I think she thought she love him. But he got so many of us. All needing somethin.

My little sister Nettie is got a boyfriend in the same shape almost as Pa. His wife died. She was kilt by her boyfriend coming home from church. He got only three children though. He seen Nettie in church and now every Sunday evening here come Mr. _____. I tell Nettie to keep at her books. It be more then a notion taking care of children ain’t even yourn. And look what happen to Ma.

DEAR GOD,

He beat me today cause he say I winked at a boy in church. I may have got somethin in my eye but I didn’t wink. I don’t even look at mens. That’s the truth. I look at women, tho, cause I’m not scared of them. Maybe cause my mama cuss me you think I kept mad at her. But I ain’t. I felt sorry for mama. Trying to believe his story kilt her.

Sometime he still be looking at Nettie, but I always git in his light. Now I tell her to marry Mr. _____. I don’t tell her why.

I say Marry him, Nettie, an try to have one good year out your life. After that, I know she be big.

But me, never again. A girl at church say you git big if you bleed every month. I don’t bleed no more.

DEAR GOD,

Mr. _____ finally come right out an ast for Nettie hand in marriage. But He won’t let her go. He say she too young, no experience. Say Mr. _____ got too many children already. Plus What about the scandal his wife cause when somebody kill her? And what about all this stuff he hear bout Shug Avery? What bout that?

I ast our new mammy bout Shug Avery. What it is? I ast. She don’t know but she say she gon fine out.

She do more then that. She git a picture. The first one of a real person I ever seen. She say Mr. _____ was taking somethin out his billfold to show Pa an it fell out an slid under the table. Shug Avery was a woman. The most beautiful woman I ever saw. She more pretty then my mama. She bout ten thousand times more prettier then me. I see her there in furs. Her face rouge. Her hair like somethin tail. She grinning with her foot up on somebody motocar. Her eyes serious tho. Sad some.

I ast her to give me the picture. An all night long I stare at it. An now when I dream, I dream of Shug Avery. She be dress to kill, whirling and laughing.

DEAR GOD,

I ast him to take me instead of Nettie while our new mammy sick. But he just ast me what I’m talking bout. I tell him I can fix myself up for him. I duck into my room and come out wearing horsehair, feathers, and a pair of our new mammy high heel shoes. He beat me for dressing trampy but he do it to me anyway.

Mr. _____ come that evening. I’m in the bed crying. Nettie she finally see the light of day, clear. Our new mammy she see it too. She in her room crying. Nettie tend to first one, then the other. She so scared she go out doors and vomit. But not out front where the two mens is.

Mr. _____ say, Well Sir, I sure hope you done change your mind.

He say, Naw, Can’t say I is.

Mr. _____ say, Well, you know, my poor little ones sure could use a mother.

Well, He say, real slow, I can’t let you have Nettie. She too young. Don’t know nothing but what you tell her. Sides, I want her to git some more schooling. Make a schoolteacher out of her. But I can let you have Celie. She the oldest anyway. She ought to marry first. She ain’t fresh tho, but I spect you know that. She spoiled. Twice. But you don’t need a fresh woman no how. I got a fresh one in there myself and she sick all the time. He spit, over the railing. The children git on her nerve, she not much of a cook. And she big already.

Mr. _____ he don’t say nothing. I stop crying I’m so surprise.

She ugly. He say. But she ain’t no stranger to hard work. And she clean. And God done fixed her. You can do everything just like you want to and she ain’t gonna make you feed it or clothe it.

Mr. _____ still don’t say nothing. I take out the picture of Shug Avery. I look into her eyes. Her eyes say Yeah, it bees that way sometime.

Fact is, he say, I got to git rid of her. She too old to be living here at home. And she a bad influence on my other girls. She’d come with her own linen. She can take that cow she raise down there back of the crib. But Nettie you flat out can’t have. Not now. Not never.

Mr. _____ finally speak. Clearing his throat. I ain’t never really look at that one, he say.

Well, next time you come you can look at her. She ugly. Don’t even look like she kin to Nettie. But she’ll make the better wife. She ain’t smart either, and I’ll just be fair, you have to watch her or she’ll give away everything you own. But she can work like a man.

Mr. _____ say How old she is?

He say, She near twenty. And another thing—She tell lies.

DEAR GOD,

It took him the whole spring, from March to June, to make up his mind to take me. All I thought about was Nettie. How she could come to me if I marry him and he be so love struck with her I could figure out a way for us to run away. Us both be hitting Nettie’s schoolbooks pretty hard, cause us know we got to be smart to git away. I know I’m not as pretty or as smart as Nettie, but she say I ain’t dumb.

The way you know who discover America, Nettie say, is think bout cucumbers. That what Columbus sound like. I learned all about Columbus in first grade, but look like he the first thing I forgot. She say Columbus come here in boats call the Neater, the Peter, and the Santomareater. Indians so nice to him he force a bunch of ’em back home with him to wait on the queen.

But it hard to think with gitting married to Mr. _____ hanging over my head.

The first time I got big Pa took me out of school. He never care that I love it. Nettie stood there at the gate holding tight to my hand. I was all dress for first day. You too dumb to keep going to school, Pa say. Nettie the clever one in this bunch.

But Pa, Nettie say, crying, Celie smart too. Even Miss Beasley say so. Nettie dote on Miss Beasley. Think nobody like her in the world.

Pa say, Whoever listen to anything Addie Beasley have to say. She run off at the mouth so much no man would have her. That how come she have to teach school. He never look up from cleaning his gun. Pretty soon a bunch of white mens come walking cross the yard. They have guns too.

Pa git up and follow ’em. The rest of the week I vomit and dress wild game.

But Nettie never give up. Next thing I know Miss Beasley at our house trying to talk to Pa. She say long as she been a teacher she never know nobody want to learn bad as Nettie and me. But when Pa call me out and she see how tight my dress is, she stop talking and go.

Nettie still don’t understand. I don’t neither. All us notice is I’m all the time sick and fat.

I feel bad sometime Nettie done pass me in learnin. But look like nothing she say can git in my brain and stay. She try to tell me something bout the ground not being flat. I just say, Yeah, like I know it. I never tell her how flat it look to me.

Mr. _____ come finally one day looking all drug out.

The woman he had helping him done quit. His mammy done said No More.

He say, Let me see her again.

Pa call me. Celie, he say. Like it wasn’t nothing. Mr. _____ want another look at you.

I go stand in the door. The sun shine in my eyes. He’s still up on his horse. He look me up and down.

Pa rattle his newspaper. Move up, he won’t bite, he say.

I go closer to the steps, but not too close cause I’m a little scared of his horse.

Turn round, Pa say.

I turn round. One of my little brothers come up. I think it was Lucious. He fat and playful, all the time munching on something.

He say, What you doing that for?

Pa say, Your sister thinking bout marriage.

Didn’t mean nothing to him. He pull my dresstail and ast can he have some blackberry jam out the safe.

I say, Yeah.

She good with children, Pa say, rattling his paper open more. Never heard her say a hard word to nary one of them. Just give ’em everything they ast for, is the only problem.

Mr. _____ say, That cow still coming?

He say, Her cow.

DEAR GOD,

I spend my wedding day running from the oldest boy. He twelve. His mama died in his arms and he don’t want to hear nothing bout no new one. He pick up a rock and laid my head open. The blood run all down tween my breasts. His daddy say Don’t do that! But that’s all he say. He got four children, instead of three, two boys and two girls. The girls hair ain’t been comb since their mammy died. I tell him I’ll just have to shave it off. Start fresh. He say bad luck to cut a woman hair. So after I bandage my head best I can and cook dinner—they have a spring, not a well, and a wood stove look like a truck—I start trying to untangle hair. They only six and eight and they cry. They scream. They cuse me of murder. By ten o’clock I’m done. They cry theirselves to sleep. But I don’t cry. I lay there thinking bout Nettie while he on top of me, wonder if she safe. And then I think bout Shug Avery. I know what he doing to me he done to Shug Avery and maybe she like it. I put my arm around him.