Review: A Woman Speaks

Reviewed Work(s): The Color Purple. by Alice Walker

Review by: Marcellus Blount
Source: Callaloo, No. 18 (Spring - Summer, 1983), pp. 118-122
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2930534
Accessed: 21-09-2017 07:04 UTC

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118

BOOK REVIEWS

A WOMAN SPEAKS by Marcellus Blount

Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. New York: Harcourt Brace

Jovanovich, 1982. $11.95.

Alice Walker's award-winning novel, The Color Purple, takes its ti-
tle from one of the most powerful lines in contemporary American fic-
tion. The words are her own, and she gives them to Shug Avery; this
mythical blues singer teaches Celie, the novel's unlikely narrator, what
it means to be alive. During one of the many moments in the novel
when Shug nurtures Celie's sense of self, she shares her notions of moral
responsibility, allowing us a glimpse of the novel's aesthetic center: "I
think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field
somewhere and don't notice it." Although ignorance, poverty and moral
fallibility litter the various landscapes of the world Alice Walker creates,
Shug's unerring faith in God's sense of beauty reveals both how the
novel's characters manage to survive and why.
The Color Purple opens with a letter from Celie, a fourteen-year old
girl who is like a beast in her ignorance of the world around her. She
writes to God to tell him that her stepfather (whom she believes to be
her real father) has raped her:

First her put his thing up gainst my hip and sort of wiggle it
around. Then he grab hold my titties. Then he push his thing in-
side my pussy. When that hurt, I cry. He start to choke me, say-
ing You better shut up and git used to it.

In her next letter, we discover that her mother dies, presumably when
she realizes that her husband has fathered her daughter's child, for
Celie's pregnancy records her stepfather's transgressions. He steals this
child (whom Celie believes he has killed) and gives her away, but Celie
again becomes pregnant, and all she can think about is the mystery
and the pain of childbirth:

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.

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 119

In the following letters, we learn that her stepfather refuses to allow

her sister, Nettie, to be married, so that he might keep her for himself.
He passes off Celie to a widower who desires Nettie, but who accepts
Celie for three reasons: he needs someone to take care of his unruly
children; Celie can no longer give birth; her stepfather throws in a cow
to clinch the deal. Through marriage Celie becomes little more than
a mule of the earth. She tends her husband's fields while he sits in the
shade and watches. She makes it easy for him to relieve himself sex-
ually. She becomes the object of his frustrations:

He beat me like he beat the children. Cept he don't never hardly

beat them. He say, Celie, git the belt. The children be outside the
room peeking through the cracks. It all I can do not to cry. I make
myself wood. I say to myself, Celie, you a tree. That's how come
I know trees fear man.

To endure her condition, Celie writes to God. For a long time these
letters alone reaffirm her humanity.
Celie survives these difficult beginnings through her relationship with
her husband's mistress, who has come to live with them. As an odd
link between Celie and Albert (for they both find her enchanting), Shug
Avery becomes that color purple for Celie. Their growing friends hip
offers Celie a rich purpose in life, and fortunately Alice Walker has
the courage to follow her characters' desires, as Celie and Shug become
the most intimate of lovers. The bonding they share, of identity and
sexuality, is but one expression of the ideal of sisterhood as it gives
shape to the novel. At its best The Color Purple explores the different
ways women might love one another-regardless of whether they are
sisters, lovers, friends, or even enemies.
In writing what might be called "a womanly text," Alice Walker
assembles the conventions of black women's fiction. In particular, she
has chosen to dramatize the process whereby a female character comes
into her own and acquires a voice she can use to define and express
her identity. This process informs much black women's literature, as
the female protagonist rises above the men who exploit her, when she
learns how to negate the insensitive and domineering voices of men.
Here this notion of voice is of course a figure for action and sensibili-
ty, and Ms. Walker's own Meridian teaches how speech can represent
political activity, but having a voice is an accomplishment on its own
terms. None of us can forget how Zora Neale Hurston demonstrates
the power of voice when Janie robs Jody of his masculinity with one
well-aimed metaphor-especially not Alice Walker. She appropriates
this sacred moment of Their Eyes Were Watching God for her own ar-

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120

tistic and ideological purposes, and we are all relieved when Celie is
finally able to put her husband in his place: not through action, but
with the spoken word. She speaks:

You a lowdown dog is what's wrong. It's time to leave you and
enter into the Creation. And your dead body just the welcome
mat I need.
Say what? he ast. Shock.
All round the table folkses mouths be dropping open.
You took my sister Nettie away from me, I say. And she was
the only person love me in the world.
Mr. start to sputter. ButButButButBut. Sound like
some kind of motor.
But Nettie and my children coming home soon, I say. And when
she do, all us together gon whup your ass.

In one deft moment of verbal aggression, Celie sends her years of be-
ing silent scurrying off in search of her former self. The woman who
remains will teach women within and without the literary enterprise
that they have the right to speak and the authority to shape their own
meanings.
The novel's peculiar narrative form reinforces its womanist content.
Ms. Walker creates The Color Purple out of a series of letters, writing
what may well be the first epistolary novel in the Afro-American canon.
This form prospered in the eighteenth century; such works as Richard-
son's Clarissa, Rousseau's La Nouvelle Heloise, Smollett's Humphrey
Clinker and Laclos's Les Liaisons dangereuses have become classics.
Although the epistolary novels women wrote have been largely forgot-
ten, Alice Walker's novel reminds us that works like Frances Sheridan's
Memoirs of Miss Sydney Bidulph, Fanny Burney's Evelina, Clara
Reeve's The School for Widows, and Maria Edgeworth's Letters for
Literary Ladies define the shape of that literary form as well. Letters
have traditionally given voice to the ideas and desires of women denied
other forums. In spite of how we have come to know the epistolary
novel, women actually wrote the majority of them. How fitting, then,
that Walker should revive both the form and its dominant expressions;
for The Color Purple internalizes her female characters' quest for voice.
It allows Celie, right from the novel's beginning, to speak to us as
readers, even though she must learn through experience to proclaim
her identity to the people with whom she lives. Celie merely records
the activities of her day-to-day existence, and her natural sense of the
figurative qualities of language makes her one of the most authoritative
and compelling storytellers in contemporary fiction.

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 121

Nevertheless Celie does share narrative voice with her long-lost sister
who writes to her from Africa. After Celie has married, Nettie manages
to run away from her stepfather and goes first to stay with Celie and
Albert. When Nettie rejects Albert's sexual advances and must leave
them, she relies upon the Christian charity of two black missionaries
who take her with them to a tiny African village. Although Albert hides
her letters, she writes Celie constantly, chronicling the experiences of
the Olinka as they resist the intrusions of a British rubber plantation
that somehow manages to "own" the village. Nettie's letters achieve
authority through their political relevancy. As well, her focus on African
customs informs and reassures; her discussions of African peoples re-
mind us how much Afro-Americans are like the peoples of Africa. She
writes of the Olinka:
They love meat. All the people in this village. Sometimes if you can't
get them to do anything any other way, you start to mention meat,
either a little piece extra you just happen to have or maybe, if you want
them to do something big, you talk about a barbecue. Yes, a barbecue.
They remind me of folks at home!
She establishes connections of pleasure and pain in the spirit of
villages in Liberia:

We watched the weary families come home from work, still car-
rying their cacoa seed buckets in their hands (these double as lunch
buckets next day), and sometimes-if they are women-their
children on their backs. As tired as they are, they sing! Celie. Just
like we do at home. Why do tired people sing? I asked Corrine.
Too tired to do anything else, she said.

Nettie's letters succeed because they reveal the aggressions of European

colonialism, the resilency of black culture, and the strength of the bonds
of sisterhood. Nevertheless, these letters, written in standard English,
generally lack immediacy. As Walker has been faithful to her character's
point of view, these well-written letters can seem stiff when compared
to Celie's, and the reader wonders if Walker intends to direct this irony
at our assumptions about the authority of standard English, for this
is clearly their effect.
However lifeless Nettie's letters can be, they cannot make us forget
the extraordinary moments of beauty of her sister's narrations. Celie's
letters, sifted through the languages of her rural Southern community,
respond and give shape to many different voices, all steeped in the
rhythms and complex variations of black vernacular speech. Whether
she is registering her moral response to the insensitivities of men,
describing the events of her idiosyncratic community, or telling us how

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122

it feels to make love to a woman, her letters tremble with life. We share
in her suffering and pleasures. We enter her world.
We fantasize that The Color Purple will not end, that Celie will keep
talking to us wherever we need her, but when the novel does close,
we fear that Ms. Walker has already consoled us too much. Like most
of the other masterpieces of Afro-American literature, The Color Pur-
ple ends with a burst of optimism: here lovers, friends and family are
reunited. Yet Walker seems overtaken with the spirit of reconciliation.
While Toomer's Cane, Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching
God, Wright's Native Son, Ellison's Invisible Man, and Toni Morrison's
Song of Solomon are all tentative in their final assertions of hope, The
Color Purple posits a faith in unqualified redemption. Certainly Afro-
Americans today have become wearied in their struggles, and we all
need the inspiration that this novel gives us, but we cannot help feel-
ing that maybe Alice Walker sees more of the color purple than our
world can provide.

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