Naw, she say. Not vain, just wanting to share a good thing. I think it pisses god off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.
What do it do when it pissed off? I ast.
Oh, it make something else. People think pleasing God is all God care about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.
Yeah? I say.
Yeah? she say. It always making little surprises and springing them on us when us least expect.
Celie grows up learning to be used: raped and impregnated over and over by the man she believes to be her father, then married off to a man who really desires her sister, her sister who thinks better of the whole situation and runs off so as to not end up like Celie. Her new husband, called only Mr. ____, beats her regularly, and the unassuming Celie more or less assumes that this is the way of the world until Shug Avery appears in the house. Shug is a jazz singer, beautiful and fierce, who is the real object of Mr. ____'s affections. But when Shug falls ill, it's Celie that takes care of her, and soon the pair fall in love, and lust, with each other. It's Shug that teaches Celie to enjoy the pleasures her body demands, and to stick up for herself against the whims of men.
Famously, The Color Purple is written as a series of letters, some penned by Celie, and others by her sister Nettie, who has traveled with a pair of missionaries to Africa along with, for convoluted reasons, some of Celie's own children. The letters penned by Celie are written in a voice that is colloquial and spirited, full of rich vernacular that makes The Color Purple a pleasure to read. The Color Purple is perhaps the most prominent of a handful of books, like those by Toni Cade Bambara and J. California Cooper that came out in the 1980s that found in Black American dialect a rich voice worth exploring. Celie has such a powerful voice, but it takes the influence of Shug for her to realize it's worth using, and much of what I enjoyed most about the book was listening to Celie expand that voice with humor and withering judgment. The scene where she tells an incredulous Mr. ____ that she's leaving Georgia to travel with Shug to Memphis is one of the book's small masterpieces.
On the other hand, I felt that the narrative stops cold when it gets to Nettie's letters from Africa. In a way, Walker grasps at something sort of like the story of Homegoing, which explores the invisible links between Black American life and contemporary Africa. But I just couldn't make myself care about the made-up "tribe" that Nettie finds herself among, or their trials at the hands of roadbuilding, crop-destroying capitalists. And worse, Nettie--slightly more educated, more polished than her sister--has nothing like Celie's voice to make these sections more interesting. The whole Africa plotline seemed indicative of a messy convolutedness that can make the novel, at times, a chore.
Celie begins by addressing her "letters" to God; later, after she has learned of her sister's whereabouts, she addresses them to Nettie. This tracks with Shug's expression of a pantheism that takes in all of creation: if God won't reply, why not write to the God in Nettie? Shug's insistence that God wants us to stop and marvel at "the color purple in a field" verges on the sentimental and the faux-spiritual, but it works because we recognize the way that many women, like Celie, have been conditioned by a masculine world to believe that duty always comes before joy. Shug, who seems to be horny for everyone and everything, is a representation of this pantheist and pansexual principle. But Celie doesn't need to become like Shug: she only needs to learn, as Shug teaches her, to enjoy her own body, her own life, her own self.
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