The Color Purple

The Color Purple by Alice Walker

The Color Purple is one of those books where the author doesn’t bother setting up the story for you.  As the book begins, we really have no idea of the background.  We don’t know where we are, who it is we’re reading about, nor any kind of backstory at all.  The author plows right into the tale – and we learn about the main character from a series of poorly written diary entries by young, uneducated Celie.

We eventually learn that Celie is a teen-aged African American girl living in rural Georgia around the 1920s.  Although slavery has been abolished for close to sixty years, you would never know that from reading this book.  At least not for African American women, that is.  As the story opens, she’s repeatedly raped by a cruel step father – even bearing a couple of children that are quickly given up for adoption. Her stepfather than gladly “gives her” away to an equally cruel man whose wife has recently died.  All this man really needs, though, is a woman to take care of his unruly children.  This man doesn’t really even want Celie.  He wants Celie’s little sister Nettie, but the father won’t part with Nettie.  She’s too pretty, and Celie is too “ugly”, so he unloads the older daughter.

So Celie essentially now lives a life of subjugation and servitude.  She doesn’t even know her husband’s name until well into the story (she refers to him as “Mr. ______”).  Sadly, Celie is such a mistreated, abused person, that she’s not even aware that she’s mistreated and abused.  After all, these circumstances have essentially been present her whole life.  She doesn’t even bat an eye, for instance, when Mr. _____ announces that he’s bringing his mistress home to live with them.

Strangely, over time it’s the mistress (Shug Avery) that slowly befriends Celie.  Little by little, Celie starts to find happiness in the small things and starts to discover what it’s like to be a loved human being.  Eventually, she’s reunited with many of her long lost family members and the story is very uplifting and encouraging.

One of the strong points about the writing of this book is that the author, Alice Walker, presents Celie’s story in a series of diary entries, yet records these entries as a poor, uneducated woman would write.  So we see tons of misspellings and grammatical errors.  So many that it can be a bit unnerving.  Sometimes you read about three or four pages before you realize the person that you thought was narrating the portion of the story was actually somebody else altogether.  Young Celie doesn’t know, sadly, how to use things such as quotation marks.  As the story progresses (and I want to say it goes on for about 20 years) the writing in the diaries becomes progressively better.  Celie, fortunately is becoming more educated and even manages to have a trade rather than be a slave to her husband and children.

As the book progresses, we meet a lot of characters.  There’s a lot of family and families of family, a lot of relationships, and a lot of names to keep track.  Combine this with Celie’s vernacular, and it can become very easy to get lost at times.  This was really a minor issue, as this book focuses one to feed on emotion and not nitpick such details.

Many people know this story, not because of the book, but because of the Steven Spielberg movie.  If you love the movie, you might be a tad disappointed in the book (I think I can say that about every Steven Spielberg movie).  One should be warned, for example, that much of the language here can be rather explicit, as are some of the sex scenes where young Celie is “discovering” herself.  Spielberg also has a habit of turning complex stories into situations where all bad is obliterated and only love prevails.  The book is a bit more complex then all of that.  Nothing against the movie – it’s a great movie, and one should never expect a movie to be based entirely on its literary source, it’s just that I can see where some would be jarred by some of the inconsistencies.

A good book, but also a sad book – even though the good guys “win” in the end.  It’s a sad commentary on how many lived, and one hopes that by reading this book, one can learn to just be a bit more compassionate about people and their situations.