by Alice Walker

‘Dear God, I am fourteen years old. I am I have always been a good girl. Maybe you can give me a sign letting me know what is happening to me.’

So begins Alice Walker’s brilliant, prize-winning epistolary novel, The Color Purple. It introduces Celie, a poor, black, badly-educated and ugly (in some people’s eyes) woman, living in the southern United States in the nineteen thirties. Beaten and raped by the man she thinks is her father, she is pregnant, and has no idea how that came about. In fact, by the end of the second chapter, we know Celie has had two children. Both have been taken away and either killed or sold.

The Color Purple is the story of Celie’s struggle to overcome her circumstances and, from being a naive and compliant teenager, to become a self-reliant, liberated and happy woman. Dr Tom Shippey, an expert on Tolkien, has called Celie ‘one of the most influential characters of literature‘.** She is certainly one of the most memorable.

Celie narrates most of the story in a series of letters addressed to God. At the beginning of the novel, she is at the bottom of the heap, both socially and psychologically. Her only source of comfort is her younger sister Nettie, whom she fears is likely to receive similar abusive treatment. However, when their mother dies ‘screaming and cussing‘, ‘Pa’ marries another girl of Celie’s age, and she is married off to a man referred to throughout the book as ‘Mister —‘, but whose name we learn later is Albert. Nettie is sent away.

Abused and treated as a household slave by Albert (and not much better by his children), Celie seems to be in a no better situation than before. However, Albert soon brings home a girlfriend called Shug Avery, a nightclub singer, who is everything Celie isn’t – glamorous, talented, wealthy and successful, a woman who has made her own way in the world, using sex when she had to. And Albert wants to impress!

‘Shug Avery standing upside a piano, elbow crook, hand on her hip. She wearing a hat like Indian Chiefs. Her mouth open showing all her teef and don’t seem to be troubling her mind. Come one, come all, it say. The Queen Honeybee is back in town.’

When Shug falls ill, Albert orders Celie to look after her, but the order has unexpected consequences. Shug begins to take an interest in Celie, who finally finds herself in a loving relationship, an affair which is the beginning of Celie’s fight-back against her circumstances. Through Shug’s intervention, she discovers Albert has been intercepting and hiding Nettie’s correspondence. Having read a few letters, Celie learns something of Nettie’s life as a missionary in Africa and that, by a bizarre twist of fate and plot, her two children are still alive and have been adopted into a missionary family.

‘Here’s the thing, say Shug. You come into the world with God. But only them that search for it inside find it. It, I ast? Yeah, It. God ain’t a he or a she, but an it. But what do it look like? I ast.’

Celie rages at God. She wants to kill Albert with his own razor but is persuaded otherwise by Shug. Shug tells her to take hold of her life and do something useful instead. Celie gives up on God and starts addressing her letters to Nettie. With a bit of help from Shug she sets up in business making pants and makes a success of it. She begins to hope that one day she and Nettie may be reunited.

I have given only an outline of Celie’s journey. The Color Purple tackles many themes, which have contributed to its censoring and banning in more than one state in the forty years since its publication. Some, such as racism, violence against women and even same sex relationships are still controversial today. But there are religious themes too, if one takes the meaning of religion as widely as one should. The novel has a big cast of characters, their qualities and faults all seen through Celie’s eyes. There’s Sofia, who knocks down the (white) mayor for insulting her; Squeak, who wants to be a singer like Shug; Adam, horrified that his girl Tashi chooses the customary mutilation of her tribe; Henrietta, fighting for her life against sickle cell disease. Even Albert, the despicable husband undergoes something of a transformation by the end, becoming something approaching a decent human being.

The Color Purple is a wonderful novel, as a Pulitzer prize winner up there with the great novels of the past – and Alice Walker is up there too, along with Hemingway, Steinbeck, Wharton, Pearl S Buck and others who have produced splendid and often unusual works. It is a book I have meant to read for a long time and have somehow not got around to starting. Now, having started it, I wasn’t able to put it down. The language of the Southern States, as spoken by people of Celie’s class, is tricky at first but one quickly gets used to it.

If you haven’t already read it, I recommend it!

** Heroes and Legends – lecture series from The Teaching Company’s Great Courses