It upsets God, “when you walk by the color purple in a field and don’t notice it.” Alice Walker
What is the significance of the Color Purple in Alice Walker’s most famous book? Why do senior citizen readers get together to discuss books that were written many years ago? Our Classic Book Club convenes once per month in one of the libraries of Chesterfield County, Virginia. We have been meeting for over a year and have considered books, such as. Huckleberry Finn, Great Expectations, My Antonia, and 1984. Our monthly flyer states: “Mark Twain wrote that a classic book is one that everyone has heard of, but no one has read. However, our members say that a classic keeps speaking to us long after it has been written.” With a mailing list of over 30 people, about ten active members show up regularly and rotate leading books that mean the most to us. We often choose ones that we walked by or read when we were younger and wish to re-examine more closely for the treasured meanings we may have missed.
Our April book, The Color Purple by Alice Walker, was led by Joann, the only African-American member of our group. This was the first time that she led and she examined a few books before considering this choice. She confided that she was, at first, reluctant to lead us in this book because she had retained memories that it was most heavily focused on racial divisions between blacks and whites. After re-reading it, she conceded that, although this was an important topic, but not the central theme. She did extensive preparation on Walker’s most famous book and had a list of questions sent to the participants in advance, which certainly helped us to focus and enliven our discussions. Among the questions she asked was why the book was titled The Color Purple, and what significance does God play in the book?
Joann started us off by providing a brief overview of Alice Walker, who was familiar with the characters in the southern setting because she had grown up in a rural county of Georgia. Joann is a retired social worker and also seemed to be quite familiar with the types of characters Walker wrote about. Each of us also had some unique experiences and points of connection with this book; therefore, the discussion flowed easily for 90 minutes. Joann explained that though they were poor, Walker’s parents raised her to appreciate nature and the value of education. She began attending Spellman, a black college for three years and then completed her formal education at Sarah Lawrence College in 1965. After college, she became active in the civil rights and the black women’s liberation movement. Her marriage with Melvin Leventhal, a white Civil Rights lawyer, became strained by the strong negative southern attitudes about inter-racial mixing and breeding.They had a child together, but after several years, Walker felt that the negative attention her marriage was getting was too stressful on the couple and was interfering with her ability to get her works published and recognized.
After a later divorce with Leventhal, she moved to New York in 1976. By living there, she started noticing how much she missed the natural setting and culture of the South. She wrote in the book’s Introduction, that living in New York influenced her to write a book focusing on a subject she was most familiar with— rural women and southern culture. The publication of The Color Purple, in 1983, which was her third novel, yielded a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award for Fiction, and an Oscar-nominated Steven Spielberg movie with Oprah Winfrey, Whoopi Goldberg, and Danny Glover.
The first question we considered was, how much did seeing the movie affected our appreciation of the book? I had re-read the book and seen the movie recently. Like most movies made from great books, I didn’t feel like it enhanced my reading experience. Others agreed that the movie fell short of the high standards of the book. I felt like the characters had landed from Hollywood on an extra-terrestrial spaceship and were trying to learn to inhabit the foreign territory of the Deep South. I had a difficult time feeling the hardships of Sophia and Celie because they were portrayed by now rich and famous actresses—Oprah Winfrey and Whoopi Goldberg. One of our members brought in and discussed a copy of Walker’s 1996 book, The Same River Twice, where Walker noted that she felt frustrated with the movie because her screenplay was rejected. She also wrote that she felt that the movie failed to bring out the ironic contrasts between humor and the women’s hardships that her book had emphasized. Our members felt that the movie mainly depicted the negative side of the male characters, and did not show their positive development toward the end of the book. Walker wrote that many men were upset with her after seeing the movie. We agreed with Walker that, if those men had also read the book they might not have felt so angry.
We concluded that Purple was a ground-breaking book in the early 1980’s for oppressed southern women. It depicted black female characters who were struggling with being physically abused by the significant men in their lives, including their fathers and husbands. No details were spared about the sexual and other injustices they had endured. They were also sometimes harshly treated by the privileged white families they were often forced to work for. We discussed how this subject was also covered by a later book and famous movie, The Help. Another significant theme of the book was the strong emotional and sexual relationship between the main character, Celie, and her mentor and lover, Shug Avery. Although lesbian relationships had been a shocking subject of feminine literature for over a century, our “old-school” seniors were more able to accept the tender relationship that developed between these two women after we had painfully read about the sexual cruelties that were doled out to them by men.
For example, Celie was forced by her step-father to marry Mr. ___________. Though legally his wife, she just served as his hired help to keep his house and raise his kids. She told Shug that having sex with him felt like he was using the toilet in her. Shug was originally brought in to be the live-in lover for Celie’s husband. Mr.__________’s son thought it was very understanding of Celie to let her husband’s “whore” live in their house. Her husband retains an anonymous identity until nearly the end of the book because Celie didn’t need to find out what it was. She endured his harsh treatment for years only to survive until she finally rebelled. Joann pointed out that it was only after Shug helped Celie to find years of letters that Mr. _____ was hiding from her sister, Nettie, who was a missionary in Africa, that she gathered the strength to confront and leave him. Without Shug’s advice, she would have killed him. She reminded Celie that he was not worth going to jail or getting her lynched just to seek revenge on him. Shug then teaches Celie about love and offers her the emotional support she needed to get stronger and go her own way without a man.
Shug is a very significant character in the story. Celie describes her as “the Queen.” Her clothes are purple but tinged with red. Celie makes purple and red pants for her. Shug “wears the pants” in relationships with men. Perhaps, she is a model for the ideal black woman who Walker imagines. Our participants noted that purple is the color that is created after one mixes red and blue. Perhaps, then, the color purple in this book also represents the mixing of the women’s’ blues with the shedding of their red blood through forced sex and childbirth.
Shug is so sexually charged that everyone in the book, including the preacher, “can’t keep their eyes off of her.” Although she is openly sexually active with many men, and with Celie, she serves as the book’s moral and spiritual advisor. It seems that Walker, by stressing such a complex character, is trying to say that what organized religion advocates as the ideal for a woman is not necessarily the same image that God values. Walker writes in her Introduction, that many critics missed noting that one of the main themes of the book was about Celie’s ultimate realization of the true nature of God. The first half of the book was written in the form of letters written by Celie to God, mostly about the hardships she was enduring. In her earlier understanding of God, she believed that it was necessary for her to bear such cruelties because God would reward her in the next “Everlasting Life.”
After Shug helps her to find those letters, which were seized earlier by Mr.____________, she stops writing to God and writes directly to her sister. At first, she felt that God had abandoned her and had “done nothing to help black women.” Rather than encouraging Celie to abandon her faith, Shug helps her to accept an expanded view of the Creator, which is essentially in line with our present understanding of mindfulness in eastern philosophy. She tells Celie that “God is inside of her and each person, but only those who search inside find it.” Everything,” she proclaims, “wants to be loved. Us sing and dance, make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved.” As she continues, “You ever notice that trees do everything to get our attention except talk and walk?” Her sermon’s most important conclusion is that “It pisses God off when you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.”
Celia then realizes that she has been too busy and too self-absorbed, and has never noticed anything: “Not even a blade of corn, the color purple in the field, nor the little wildflowers. “Now that my eyes are open,” she concludes, “I feel like a fool.” However, after such a profound epiphany, she realizes that she still had many purple fields and flowers to see.
Members of our club felt that it had been a very worthwhile experience to read or re-read this book. The characters are well-developed, and the plot, carefully constructed. We were inspired by Walker’s portrayal of women who gathered more strength the more adversity they faced. Her book took us to areas and experiences that most of our relatively comfortable white readers don’t usually get to visit. However, it also could help black Americans to look at their relationship and feelings about their African ancestors. I say that it might “piss God off” if you walk by this book on a library shelf or a bookstore and don’t read it!
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