“You better not never tell nobody but God. It’d kill your mammy” (opening lines).
The Color Purple offers a heart-wrenching revival of the epistolary novel –it is told through a series of letters written by Celie (pronounced “See-Lee”), a young black girl living in the South during the early half of the 20th century (her character is loosely based on Alice Walker’s own grandmother who was murdered by a man who wanted to be her lover). At the outset, The Color Purple is dedicated to the “Spirit.” It opens with a Stevie Wonder quotation and ends with the author, Alice Walker, thanking us readers for coming along on this journey. She signs herself as the novel’s “author and medium.” In the first half of the book, Celie’s letters are addressed directly to God. She describes the horrific events of her life: beginning at the age of fourteen she is violently and repeatedly raped by her stepfather Alphonso, or “Fonso” (a man she believes to be her biological father, but she later learns her real father was actually lynched and buried in an unmarked grave). Celie bears a couple of children by Alphonso, and is then forced to marry another man, a widower and sharecropper whom Celie simply refers to as Mr. ___ (we later learn his first name is Albert). Celie’s agreement to marry Mr. ___ was an act of self-sacrifice, allowing for her more intellectually-minded younger sister, Nettie, to live a free life. Unsurprisingly, Mr. ___ turns out to be a fiercely tyrannical husband who also rapes Celie and forces her to work manual labor all day. Along the way, Celie falls in love with Albert’s female jazz-singing beau, Lillie “Shug” Avery (nicknamed “Shug” by her mother because “she just so sweet”), but Shug falls ill with an unknown sickness, perhaps a “nasty woman disease” or “two berkulosis.” When Shug recovers, she encourages Celie to explore her own sexuality. They both begin spending intimate time together while Shug is, at the same time, romantically involved with Albert to some extent. The second half of The Color Purple serves as a reawakening for Celie. She discovers a pile of hidden letters that were sent to her by her beloved sister Nettie but were then viciously concealed by Albert as vengeance against Nettie for not letting him rape her. Albert has been hiding these letters for years. As Celie reads the letters she learns that by now Nettie has joined a pair of Christian missionaries (Samuel and Corrine) who have adopted Celie’s two children (Adam and Olivia) and brought them along to Africa. The story Nettie tells offers a fascinating depiction of the complexities facing missionaries in Africa, as well as the empowering feeling for an African American to live among Africans as equals, rather than beneath white men in America (in some ways, this section reminded me a bit of James Baldwin’s writings). Nettie’s letters describe Africa as an idyllic land, superior in many respects to the legacy of Europe (there is a not-so-subtle rebuke of Western civilization’s colonial legacy throughout The Color Purple). The Color Purple is also a distinctly second wave feminist novel. The men in the novel are almost universally conveyed as ignorant, idle buffoons at best, and violent, chaotic animals at worst. Their world is entirely stifling and suffocating for women. In fact, upon initial release, a minor controversy was ignited when several African American intellectuals criticized Alice Walker for her portrayal of black men in The Color Purple. The argument was that black men are portrayed as essentially predatory throughout the novel. The controversy continues to this day, though it should be noted that most of the commentary on The Color Purple has been almost universally laudatory (in 1983 The Color Purple won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction as well as the National Book Award in 1983 –an extraordinary accomplishment matched only by William Faulkner for A Fable, Bernard Malamud for The Fixer, John Cheever for The Stories of John Cheever, John Updike for Rabbit is Rich, E. Annie Proulx for The Shipping News, Colson Whitehead for The Underground Railroad, and Percival Everett for James).
In the end, Celie’s paramour, Shug, falls in love with someone else (a nineteen-year-old boy) and Celie suddenly starts to appreciate her formerly abusive relationship in a light with her partner, Albert. Eventually Shug returns to Celie after declaring that her other love affair was merely a fling, and the trio continue with their unusual partnership. In the end, Celie receives notification from the military that Nettie has died in a drowning accident off the coast of Gibraltar but something inside Celie refuses to believe the story. She is later proven correct when Nettie and her new family suddenly arrive at Celie’s home to much elation. By the end, Celie’s unorthodox family is united once again –the novel concludes with a celebration of the communal idea of family as Celie finally admits she is happy. Though much like the seemingly divine origins of a beautiful color like purple itself (“where it come from?”), things remain somewhat ambiguous between Celie and Shug, Celie and Albert, Celie and Nettie, and Celie and her children. Perhaps the message here is that messy things, like the mixing together of colors to make purple, can produce great beauty in life. People who stay in their lane and quietly accept their fate miss the rich colors of the world. Indeed purple, as a thematic color, appears briefly several times throughout the novel. Near the beginning, Celie yearns to wear a purple outfit (like something Shug would wear) but the store doesn’t carry such a regal color. Later, during a discussion about doubts over the existence of God, Shug asks Celie not to forget the beauty of a purple field in nature (purple is a color that is “everywhere in nature”). And purple is also apparently the color of Celie’s genitalia. Purple serves as a rarefied color, a symbol of royalty, a regal gem, a sign from God, a reminder that beauty exists all around us.
The power of a novel like The Color Purple lies in its ability to successfully confront readers with a difficult subject matter (racism, rape, incest, colonialism and so on) while also gently offering the culturally silenced and overlooked viewpoint of a poor, black, uneducated women living in the segregated South as she discovers her own sense of empowerment and happiness in life. In The Color Purple we are generously treated to Celie’s personal hopes, fears, struggles, and dreams all while under the thumb of unimaginable suffering as she writes her letters, first to God, and then later to Nettie. Her journey toward self-discovery and liberation, as well as sexual awakening, is incredibly inspiring. While the story of black female empowerment is often justifiably the theme discussed in conjunction with The Color Purple, what is sometimes forgotten is that this is also a profoundly lesbian novel in portraying the dynamics of a compassionate, loving, sexual relationship between two women.
But how truly believable is Celie’s story? For the first half of the novel, she is a pitiful martyr in a world full of utterly rapacious white people and bestial black men. Her fortunes only change when the single complex character in the novel arrives on the scene –Shug Avery, a free-spirited, poetic, jazz-singing, sexuality-liberated woman. She helps Celie see her true worth and then eventually encourages her to claim her own freedom from Albert (a.k.a. Mr. ___). But to what end? In time, Shug abandons Celie in order to have a fling with a teenager and Celie later returns to her loveless, abusive husband Mr. ____ (whom she now calls by his first name Albert) only to spend time together like old friends, sewing pants for Celie’s new business venture. Somehow Albert has transformed from a vicious, violent oaf into a gentle, amiable conversationalist who has a sudden sense of respect for Celie –is any of this believable? Something about this smells suspiciously “Hollywood” to me. Albert then asks Celie to marry him in both flesh as well as spirit, but she declines. By now, Celie has grown into a stronger, more independent woman, rather than the “ugly” cow she was derided as at the outset, and now she proudly displays her sense of self-confidence by rejecting social conventions that do not fit her identity, such as marriage and religion. She maintains romantic relationships, but only on her own terms, and she holds onto a vaguely pantheistic understanding of the concept of God (as the novel progresses, Celie’s understanding of God evolves from an old white man to an “It” who exists in everything around her). And yet, Celie still strikes me as a uniquely bland, contrived character –perhaps even a caricature– a blank slate who serves as a convenient tool for Alice Walker’s predictable brand of social activism, a brand that was made markedly popular in academic circles in the latter half of the twentieth century. Published just when American academia began undergoing a revolution of sorts, particularly in the social sciences, as the fields of women’s studies, gender studies, peace studies, global studies, ethnic studies and so on were all beginning to flourish, The Color Purple echoes the spirit of the age, the social activist’s ethos –the dialectical theory that the world is divided into two categories: oppressor and oppressed. In my view, a character like Celie completely defies verisimilitude in her character’s unrelentingly submissive martyrdom (i.e. oppressed) while other characters in the novel are likewise wholly unbelievable for their refusal to be anything other than violent, hegemonic, and domineering malefactors (i.e. oppressors). For example, all the men in the novel are portrayed as essentially lazy rapists merely waiting for their moment to strike, while the United States and Europe are rebuked for being unrepentant colonizing forces in Africa, and every character aside from Shug Avery comes across as fairly wooden and one-dimensional (though, to be fair, our only glimpse of them comes from Celie’s descriptions). All of this paints a familiar picture. Alice Walker’s message in The Color Purple has become something of a tired and simplistic cliché today, lacking in nuance and dimension, and it appeals almost exclusively to our lower emotions, conscripting us into aligning with one particular narrative of noble martyrs versus malicious villains. As such, The Color Purple strikes me as a powerfully sentimental work of popular fiction, but little more. Nevertheless, The Color Purple still remains a popular but controversial novel for many readers and critics alike.
Notable Quotations
“Shug Avery was a woman. The most beautiful woman I ever saw. She more pretty then my mama. She bout ten thousand times more prettier then me. I see her there in furs. Her face rouge. Her hair like somethin tail. She grinning with her foot up on somebody motorcar. Her eyes serious tho. Sad some” (6).
“Most times mens look pretty much alike to me” (15).
“Harpo ast his daddy why he beat me. Mr. ___ say, Cause she my wife. Plus, she stubborn. All women good for –he don’t finish. He just tuck his chin over the paper like he do. Remind me of Pa” (22).
“Wives is like children. You have to let ’em know who got the upper hand. Nothing can do better than a good sound beating” (35).
“She say, All my life I had to fight. I had to fight my daddy. I had to fight my brothers. I had to fight my cousins and my uncles. A girl child ain’t safe in a family of men. But I never thought I’d have to fight in my own house. She let out her breath. I loves Harpo, she say. God knows I do. But I’ll kill him dead before I let him beat me. Now if you want a dead son-in-law you just keep on advising him like you doing” (40, Sofia, Celie’s son Harpo’s wife).
“Shug Avery sit up in bed a little today. I wash and comb out her hair. She got the nottiest, shortest, kinkiest hair I ever saw, and I loves every strand of it” (53).
“My life stop when I left home, I think. But then I think again. It stop with Mr. ___ maybe, but start up again with Shug” (81).
“White folks is a miracle of affliction, say Sofia” (106).
“My mama die, I tell Shug. My sister Nettie run away. Mr. ___ come git me to take care his rotten children. He never ast me nothing bout myself. He clam on top of me and fuck and fuck, even when my head bandaged. Nobody ever love me, I say” (112).
“Oh, Celie, there are colored people in the world who want us to know! Want us to grow and see the light!” (132).
“The world is changing, I said. It is no longer a world just for boys and men” (161).
“Your daddy didn’t know how to git along, he say. Whitefolks lynch him. Too sad a story to tell pitiful little growing girls, he say. Any man would have done what I done” (181).
“The key to all of ’em is money. The trouble with our people is as soon as they got out of slavery they didn’t want to give the white man nothing else. But the fact is, you got to give ’em something. Either your money, your land, your woman or your ass. So what I did was just right off offer to give ’em money” (182).
“But it ain’t easy, trying to do without God. Even if you know he ain’t there, trying to do without him is a strain” (193).
“Everything want to be loved. Us sing and dance, make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved. You ever notice that trees do everything to git attention we go, except walk?… Well, us talk and talk bout God, But I’m still adrift. Trying to chase that old white man out of my head. I been so busy thinking bout him I never truly notice nothing God make. Not a blade of corn (how it do that?) not the color purple (where it come from?) Not the little wildflowers. Nothing” (196-197).
“I’m pore, I’m black, I may be ugly and can’t cook, a voice say to everything listening. But I’m here” (207).
“Then the old devil put his arms around me and just stood there on the porch with me real quiet. Way after while I bent my stiff neck onto his shoulder. Here us is, I thought, two old fools let over from love, keeping each other company under the stars” (271).
“Dear God. Dear stars, dear trees, dear sky, dear peoples. Dear Everything. Dear God” (285, Celie addressing her final letter after Nettie arrives).
About the 1983 Pulitzer Prize Decision
The 1983 Fiction Jury consisted of the following three members:
- Midge Decter, Chair (1927-2022) was a politically conservative journalist for publications including Midstream, Commentary, Harper’s, The National Review, First Things, The American Spectator, and others. She later became a prominent figure in the 21st century neoconservative movement and she co-chaired “The Committee For The Free World” with Donald Rumsfeld. She was also a leading critic of feminism and the women’s liberation movement. She died at her home in Manhattan in 2022 at the age of 94.
- John Clellon Holmes (1926-1988) was a Professor at the University of Arkansas and a lecturer at Brown and Yale. He was the author of Go, a novel that is widely regarded as the first true “beat” generation work because it features his friends: Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, and Allen Ginsberg. He died in 1988 of cancer and had no children.
- Peter S. Prescott (1935-2004) was the former Senior Book Reviewer for Newsweek. He also served on the Pulitzer Fiction Juries in 1981, 1983, 1987 and 1989 at the behest of Robert Christopher, Secretary of the Pulitzer Board and administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes from 1981-1992 (a former Newsweek colleague). As an aside, Robert Christopher was the first Pulitzer Prize administrator to be recruited directly from the profession; both his immediate predecessor (Richard T. Baker) and the inaugural secretary (John Hohenberg) were already tenured members of the faculty at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism upon assuming the post.
The Pulitzer finalists in 1983 included: Rabbis and Wives by the Yiddish author, Chaim Grade, a book which contains three novellas about a Jewish village in Lithuania between the two world wars; and Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler, a novel about three children raised by a single mother in Baltimore, Maryland. Chaim Grade passed away before he received his nomination for the Pulitzer so technically this was a posthumous nomination.
Perhaps somewhat unsurprisingly, the jury did not have unanimous agreement in 1983, with Midge Decter disagreeing with the other two members. Nevertheless, a majority of the jury praised The Color Purple. As stated in the jury report: “Covering thirty years in the life of an impoverished black family in rural Georgia, Walker’s story revivifies the form of the epistolary novel.”
The jury’s ranking was: 1) The Color Purple by Alice Walker, 2) Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler, and 3) Rabbis and Wives by Chaim Grade.
With this Pulitzer win, Alice Walker became the first black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (previously, Gwendolyn Brooks won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1950). Notably, after Walker’s victory in 1983, she scribbled an amusing entry in her diary:
“Hello, This is a very tired Alice Walker. If you are calling to congratulate me thank you.
If you are calling for an interview I am all talked out.
If you need to talk to me about something else, please leave your name & number.”
Who Is Alice Walker?
Alice Malsenior Tallulah-Kate Walker (1944- ) was raised in the segregated South during the 1940s and 1950s. Her parents were sharecroppers in Eatanton, Georgia. The youngest of eight children, Walker received minimal attention from her parents. When she was eight-years-old her older brother shot her right eye with a BB gun, but since her family lacked money or a car, she was unable to receive proper medical attention and she has remained entirely blind in her right eye. She remained estranged from her father following this incident. After attending the only school available for black Americans in her region, Walker enrolled in Spelman College in 1961 where she was exposed to progressive social activism under the tutelage of Howard Zinn and others. After Howard Zinn was infamously fired from his teaching post, Walker accepted a scholarship to attend Sarah Lawrence College. During her senior year she became pregnant and had an abortion –an experience she later said fueled her suicidal depression and inspired much of her early poetry. She later had two more abortions which she has publicly shared and then underwent tubal ligation (she has discussed all of this on her blog).
Alice Walker went back to the South and worked for a variety of nonprofit organizations before returning to academia and eventually becoming a full-time writer. In 1967, she married Melvyn Rosenmen Levanthal, a Jewish civil rights lawyer. They were the first interracial couple to be married in Mississippi (they later divorced in 1976). Later in life, Alice Walker moved to Northern California near Mendocino where she currently resides as of the time of this writing.
Alice Walker is a self-described “womanist” feminist, pacifist, and civil rights advocate. She has published numerous novels, short stories, essays, poetry, and other nonfiction, however The Color Purple, first published in 1982, remains her magnum opus. In more recent years, Alice Walker has drawn criticism for her controversial defense of antisemitic conspiracy theorists, including her outspoken defense of David Icke –a man who believes himself to be a spiritual messiah, that the earth has been hijacked by a reptilian race (the unhinged anti-semitic “lizard people” conspiracy), and the “9/11 was an inside job” conspiracy theory. He has also notoriously claimed that the horrors of the holocaust have been overstated, and other bizarre claims that have sadly gained traction among much of the broader United States population in recent years thanks to hyper-online propaganda. It appears that Alice Walker became engrossed in anti-semitic theories as a result of her activism over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict –activism over the latter is perfectly understandable, but delving into anti-semitic conspiracies is just a bridge too far for many critics. Her feminist activism has also led to her publishing outspoken opprobriums of the transgender movement (she somewhat infamously defended J.K. Rowling’s obsessive antagonism toward transgender people by claiming that Rowling critics were “burning the wrong witch” and that the colloquial use of the word “guy” has led to gender confusion in children). Alice Walker has since continually referred to herself as a spiritual “medium” and a wise “Elder (which I take seriously)” in addition to a “womanist” (a particular strain of feminism geared specifically toward women of color). Throughout the years Alice Walker’s activism has taken her across the globe: aboard the 2011 flotilla against Israel’s blockade of Gaza, to Cuba to meet Fidel Castro (a figure she apparently found to be sympathetic), and other forms of activism that remain close to her heart.
As far as I can tell, Alice Walker appears to be unmarried as of the time of this writing but she did have one daughter (Rebecca) with her ex-husband before they divorced. Unfortunately, there have been some tabloid squabbles over the years between Alice and Rebecca. Every family has their ups and downs, but things came to a head in 2008 in a fiery Daily Mail article penned by Rebecca (“How My Mother’s Fanatical Views Tore Us Apart”) in which Rebecca alleged that she suffered severe emotional and physical neglect as a child. Alice allegedly forbade her daughter from playing with dolls or stuffed animals, and inculcated her with the strict ideology that marriage and mother is actually a form of “slavery.” Rebecca has claimed that Alice left her alone with neighbors while she flew off on trips around the world for weeks or months at a time, and that she later sent a letter to her daughter stating that she was ‘resigning from the burden of being her (Rebecca’s) mother.’ Their relationship suffered even more when adult Rebecca called her mother to tell her she was pregnant. Alice did not take the news well and refused to meet her grandson (Alice apparently disputes this stating she has been forbidden from seeing her grandson). When Alice found out about the allegations, she sent emails threatening to undermine her daughter’s reputation as a writer. Regardless, Rebecca became a celebrated writer in her own right. Whereas her mother was firmly planted in the second wave of 20th century feminism, Rebecca was a key voice in the third wave. She often juggled her complex identity, from her father’s conservative, wealthy, white, Jewish suburban community in New York, and her mother’s avant garde, multi-racial, activist community in California. Growing up, she would spend two years living with each parent at a time. When all of this was released in the press, Alice Walker apparently fired off some angry emails and threatened to undermine her daughter’s reputation as a writer. It’s a shame that all this family drama spilled out into the public; I’m sure there is greater nuance to the story behind-the-scenes, but it certainly paints an unflattering portrait of Alice Walker as a universally celebrated “womanist,” handsomely paid to travel the world and deliver speeches extolling the virtues of sisterhood and feminism, all the while neglecting her own daughter and grandson.
Lastly, it’s unfortunately worth noting that, since its publication, The Color Purple has often been the target of censorship and book-bannings by various American conservative organizations seeking to remove controversial books from libraries. Ironically, 1982 was the same year the United States began instituting “Banned Book Week.”
Film Adaptations
- The Color Purple (1985)
- Director: Steven Spielberg (under considerable controversy)
- Starring: Whoopi Goldberg, Oprah Winfrey, Danny Glover, Adolph Caesar, Margaret Avery, and Rae Dawn Chong
- The Color Purple (2023), an adaptation of the musical stage production
- Director: Blitz Bazawule
- Starring: Taraji P. Henson, Danielle Brooks, Colman Domingo, and Corey Hawkins
Further Reading
- Alice Walker: A Life, a biography by Evelyn C. White
Literary Context 1982-1983
- Nobel Prize for Literature (1982): awarded to Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2014) “for his novels and short stories, in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent’s life and conflicts.”
- National Book Award Winner (1983): The Color Purple by Alice Walker (hardcover), and The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty by Eudora Welty (paperback).
- Note: this was during a brief period wherein the National Book Awards divided out their winners between paperback and hardcover awardees (1980-1983). It was also an era when the National Book Award calendar lined up with the Pulitzer Prize, both of which awarded prizes in the calendar year after the eligibility period. Post-1984, however, the National Book Award switched back to awarding its prizes in the same calendar year.
- Booker Prize Winner (1982): Schindler’s Ark by Thomas Keneally.
- Per Publishers Weekly, the bestselling novel in 1982 was E.T., The Extraterrestrial by William Kotzwinkle (a novelization of the film). Other bestsellers that year included Space by James A. Michener, The Parsifal Mosaic by Robert Ludlum, Different Seasons by Stephen King, 2010: Odyssey Two by Arthur C. Clarke, and The Man from St. Petersburg by Ken Follett.
- In February 1982, Philip K. Dick ignored advice to go immediately to the hospital. A fortnight later, after suffering two strokes, he was pronounced brain-dead and disconnected from his life-support machine.
- In Island Trees School District v. Pico, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that “local school boards may not remove books from school library shelves simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those books and seek by their removal to ‘prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion.'”
- Also in 1982 “Banned Books Week” was instituted in the United States.
- The Oxford Shakespeare began publication.
- The House of the Spirits (“La casa de los espíritus”) by Isabel Allende was published.
- Foundation’s Edge by Isaac Asimov was published.
- The Dean’s December by Saul Bellow was published.
- 2010: Odyssey Two by Arthur C. Clarke was published.
- Conan the Barbarian by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter was published.
- Battlefield Earth by L. Ron Hubbard was published.
- Friday by Robert A. Heinlein was published.
- A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro was published.
- Schindler’s Ark by Thomas Keneally was published.
- Stephen King published several novels including Pet Sematery, The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger, and Different Seasons.
- Space by James A. Michener was published.
- The BFG by Roald Dahl was published.
- Life, the Universe and Everything (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, #3) by Douglas Adams was published.
- The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley was published.
- Ham on Rye by Charles Bukowski was published.
Did The Right Book Win?
I tend to be deeply suspicious of novels that appeal exclusively to my sense of pathos above all else, and I’m equally allergic to “message” novels that offer a fairly simplistic moralistic agenda. While I might agree with much of Alice Walker’s political activism, particularly with respect to the Civil Rights movement, advocacy for women of color, and concern for the plight of the Palestinian people (despite disagreeing with some of her more conspiratorial, bigoted stances toward Jewish people), I have admittedly struggled to find a reason to elevate The Color Purple beyond the realm of mere sentimental popular fiction, though I have tried. The novel surely has a decidedly inspiring story to tell –Celie’s journey toward reclamation and self-actualization stands out as uniquely American– and I would say The Color Purple ranks a step above other popular “feel-good” novels– but for me it sits several steps below some of the best of the Pulitzer Prize-novels. Perhaps once I’ve finished this chronological read-through of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novels I will return to The Color Purple again in the hopes of coming to a more favorable conclusion, but I have already read it twice for this project and it seems unlikely I will give it another go. With that being said, I know of no other novel that would easily unseat The Color Purple for the Pulitzer Prize in 1983. Perhaps much like Gone with the Wind before it, the award for The Color Purple serves as a fitting nod to the huge pop cultural phenomenon the book inspired rather than representing a commendation for its enduring literary excellence.
Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. Orlando, FL, Harcourt, Inc., 2003.