The Color Purple book review
by Margie Taylor
“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.”
This is what Alice Walker calls “folk speech”, the language of the
oppressed – in particular, the oppressed African-Americans of rural Georgia.
Much of The Color Purple is written in this particular dialect. It’s
strong, effective, and at times quite beautiful. It is the voice of Celie, who
narrates the story through her letters to God, letters she begins writing when
she’s 14 and pregnant:
“Dear God,” she writes, “I have always been a good girl. Maybe you can give
me a sign letting me know what is happening to me.”
What is happening is that she is pregnant, once again, thanks to her
father, Alfonso. After raping her he warns her to keep it a secret. “You better
not never tell nobody but God,” he says. “It’d kill your mammy.”
She gives birth to a son and a daughter, both of whom are taken away and,
presumably, killed. Her ailing mother blames her for the pregnancies; she dies,
cursing her on her deathbed. Alfonso then forces her into a loveless marriage
to a widower looking for someone to take care of his children. Albert, whom
Celie refers to as Mister, is still in love with his old sweetheart, Shug
Avery, a sexy lounge singer. Shug and Albert were lovers once, but when he
refused to marry her because of her dubious reputation, she left him. Not being
in love with her husband, Celie bears no ill will toward Shug and, in fact,
having seen her photograph, she feels a strong connection with this woman she’s
never met.
Albert treats Celie as every other man in her life has treated her: he
beats her, uses her for sex when he has to, makes her life a misery. As does
his son, Harpo. When Celie’s pretty younger sister, Nettie, runs away from home
she takes refuge with Celie and her husband. While there, she urges Celie to fight,
to stand up for herself. But, “I don’t know how to fight,” Celie says. “All I
know how to do is stay alive.”
In order to protect Nettie from Albert’s amorous advances, Celie arranges
for her to be taken in by Samuel and Corinne, a local missionary couple. They
leave for Africa taking Nettie with them, unaware that their adopted son and
daughter are actually Celie’s children. In time, Nettie works this out, but the
letters she writes to Celie are hidden from her and she eventually believes her
sister may be dead.
Celie’s life slowly begins to change for the better when Shug Avery comes
back to town to sing at a local bar. A sensuous, larger-than-life figure, Shug
is pretty much the polar opposite of Celie. Where Celie is plain, submissive,
and compliant, Shug is glamorous, assertive and outspoken. When she falls ill,
Albert takes her into his house and Celie becomes her nurse. Although Albert
and Shug are still in love, she and Celie become friends, then lovers. Through
Shug, Celie learns to feel real sexual pleasure, and Shug becomes a strongly
nurturing mentor to the younger woman. She encourages Celie to use her sewing
skills to start a successful business, and intercedes with Albert to treat
Celie more kindly. With Shug as her role model, Celie begins to assert her
independence.
Shug Avery isn’t the only strong female character in the story: Albert’s
son, Harpo, marries a feisty young woman named Sofia who will never back down
from a fight. When she gets into a physical fight with the Mayor, she’s beaten
by the police, leaving her with broken ribs, a cracked skull, and blind in one
eye. She is sentenced to 12 years in jail where the conditions are so harsh she
almost dies. Eventually, she’s allowed to serve the rest of her sentence as the
Mayor’s servant, doing all the housework and caring for the children. Her own
children, meanwhile, are raised by Harpo’s new woman, Mary Agnes, whom he calls
Squeak.
It’s Shug who discovers the cache of letters written to Celie by Nettie
over the years. The women steam the letters open and read them, and Nettie’s
letters dominate the second half of the book. Although the information in these
letters are interesting for their historical and social detail we miss the
strength and cadence of Celie’s voice. Nettie and the missionaries are living
in a small village somewhere in Liberia with a tribe of Africans called the
Olinkas. Before you waste time searching for the Olinkas on the internet, you
should know the name is fictitious; Walker has used the Olinkas to shed light on
customs and traditions prevalent in Africa at the time, and to compare and
contrast them with life in the States. The Olinkas don’t believe girls should
be educated, and are shocked that the missionary group includes women. While
they generally treat their children with love and respect, girls are expected
to stay home and help with the housework, and are subject to ritual
scarification and genital mutilation.
None of this is surprising, and to my mind it lessens the impact of the
book. It was a mistake, I think, to abandon Celie halfway through the
narrative. Although Walker comes back to her and wraps things up in a
satisfactory manner at the end, Nettie’s letters are, in the words of another
reviewer, “lackluster and intrusive”.
When Walker began writing The Color Purple, she was working at Ms.
Magazine as an editor. She had published several books of poetry and two
collections of short stories, but in this book she wanted to write about her
immediate ancestors: her parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. Born in
a rural farming town in Georgia, she was the daughter of poor sharecroppers,
themselves the children and grandchildren of slaves. She wanted to tell their
stories:
“In most literature, the lives of people I knew did not exist. My mother,
for instance, was nowhere in the literature, and she was all over my heart, so
why shouldn’t she be in the literature? . . . If you deny people a voice, their
own voice, there’s no way you’ll ever find out who they were. And so they are
erased.”
The Color Purple won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the first for a
black woman; it has sold 5 million copies, been translated into 25 languages
and was made into a movie that grossed almost $150 million. For Walker, the
rewards have been mixed: she’s been accused of betraying her race, and of
feeding stereotypical images of violent black men. The book was kept off school
reading lists not just because of the violence but also because of the sexual
relationship between Shug and Celie, and several black writers have criticised
the “overemphasis” on black male brutality.
In a video posted on the Huffington Post website, Alice Walker
revealed what she hopes readers will take away from the book:
“What I would like people to understand when they read The Color
Purple is that there are all these terrible things that can actually
happen to us and yet life is so incredibly magical and abundant and present
that we can still be very happy”.
In this, I feel, Walker has been successful. You come away from The
Color Purple feeling uplifted, if not, in my case, wholly satisfied.
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