the color purple

Reviewed by Paula Ross 1983

I was the kind of child who, as my mother put it, always had my head "stuck in a book." I didn't just read alot, I inhaled books, devoured them. But almost without exception, the books I lugged home from the library in my bicycle basket were just longer and slightly more sophisticated versions of the Dick and Jane, "Look, Sally, look. See Spot run, versions of white suburbia that bored me silly in my school readers. One enduring memory from my book-filled childhood: I whizzed through volume after volume of a series called "The Bobbsey Twins," by Laura L. Hope. There were two sets of these twins, a boy and a girl in each. Their frolics ranged from the seashore to the mountains. They had ponies and puppies. They had perfect parents. And they were looked after by perfectly stereotyped black (excuse me, "coloured") servants--Dinah and Sam.

The

Dinah and Sam grinned an awful lot. Pictures of them consisted mainly of large white teeth flashing in very black faces. And, of course, Dinah and Sam just naturally adored their little white charges. I detested Dinah and Sam. white author, in a condescending, pathetic and horrifically racist attempt to reproduce black dialect, rendered their speech virtually unintelligible. Painstakingly, I would go through any books in which they appeared and I would "correct" their grammar. In pencil. In my child-sized block printing. I must have been seven or eight at the time. But I knew perfectly well what white people thought of black people who talked like Dinah and Sam. (I was too young to know that white people thought pretty much the same things of black people regardless of the quality of their speech. But that's another story.)

More than twenty years later, writer Alice Walker has redeemed for me all the Dinahs and Sams from the clumsy hands of white (and some black) authors who for so long have kept alive non-dimensional, false images of black people. She has worked that transformation through the use of what she calls black folk english (a term she prefers to "dialect"). And her miracle infuses the pages of her most recent, and 1983 Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Color Purple.

The Color Purple gives me back those pieces of myself I lost to the Bobbsey Twins. And in two of its main characters, Celie and Shug, The Color Purple has also given me two black women who are lovers. With each other. In the American rural South. In the early half of the Twentieth Century. Walker's work is a precious treasure, a rare gift.

But that gift is not simply her creation of a believable, tender, and tough lesbian relationship. It is all the connections, to family, to community, to black culture, that flow through Celie, the book's spiritual center.

"You better not never tell nobody but God. It'd kill your Mammy.

In the hands of a less talented writer, in the hands of a writer less committed to confronting the truth, no matter if it challenges fiercely believed myths, The Color Purple could have tallen into the abyss of melodrama. All the elements for a soap opera are contained between its covers. As a child, Celie is raped, twice, by the man she thinks is her father. Each time, she gets pregnant. Her children are stolen trom her. She's married off to a man she despises and becomes his household drudge and caretaker of his children. dearly loved sister, Nettie, leaves for thirty years, she and Celie determined that Nettie won't repeat Celie's tragedies. But with Nettie gone, and with the warning of her rapist ringing in her ears, Celie has no one to talk to except God. To whom she writes letters. And through which much of the story of The Color Purple is told.

Her

While Celie writes God, Nettie writes Celie. And it is these sections I found disappointing. Whatever inspiration gave Celie such vivid life is missing in Nettie. Most of Nettie's letters come from Africa. And although she describes in some detail her life there, as a Christian missionary, I never really felt I knew who she was or what her experience in Africa as a Black American woman was really like. Her love for Celie, and the pain she feels when her letters go unanswered, year after year, are, however, very real. It is Celie's husband, Albert, who intercepts Nettie's letters, allowing Celie to believe that one in the world, with the exception of Shug, loves her. When Celie discovers this, almost thirty years later, she wants to kill him.

Walker, like Audre Lorde, Ntozake Shange and other black women writers, has been royally trashed by black critics for her portrayals of black men. The Color Purple is not likely to change that. The men here are no prizes. They are guilty of inflicting incredible cruelties on the women who love them, bear their children, cook their food and keep their houses clean and their beds warm. But it is a mark of Walker's refusal to take the easy way out, that she does not allow Celie, who has endured 80 much of those cruelties, to comfort herself with simple hatred. Instead, Celie continues to

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