“NOW if you want a dead son-in-law you just keep on advising him like you doing!”
A character named Sofia warned the raconteur, a semi-illiterate woman of African-American extraction known as Celie, as she accused her – whilst she had a hand menacingly placed on her hip – of coaxing her husband, Harpo, to beat her! “I’ll kill him dead before I let him beat me!” The former deadpanned whilst adding, for intimidatory measure: “I used to hunt game with a bow and arrow!”
The unsavoury confrontation was unfolding on the grounds of a smallholding in America’s rural Georgia when, out of exasperation, Harpo had resorted to Celie for advice regarding how to reign in a doughty and haughty wife with the impudence to even beat him up to a pulp whenever the couple become embroiled in domestic disputes!
Sofia Butler is Harpo’s wife and Harpo is Celie’s stepson and Celie is Harpo’s father’s wife who was given in matrimony – along with a cow – by Pa, Celie’s ‘father’ whom she incestuously begot two children, a boy and a girl named Adam and Olivia who were given up for adoption against her will!
Celie, or Miss Celie, has a kid sister named Nettie, who upon noticing Pa setting his eyes on, eloped from his clutches and sought refuge in her marital home, only for Celie’s husband, Albert – whose attention she done caught – to expel from his house out of spite of her repelling his advances!
Upon the sisters’ parting – which unbeknownst to both then, was to last for a period spanning two decades during which their only mode of contact would be through correspondence by streams of letters before they eventually reunited – Celie expressly directed Nettie to Corrine, “the only woman she’d ever seen with money,” with the intension of possibly fixing her up with a job. The wife of Reverend Samuel of the American and African Missionary Society – Celie had earlier met and conversed with her whilst both women were running shopping errands in town during which moment she had thought the Black missionary was accompanied by her long-lost daughter, Olivia!
Later on after Nettie had beat a path to the reverend’s place, whether by deliberate or sheer coincidence, she would discover that the young girl from town was indeed Celie’s daughter and what more, that both herself and fellow adopted sibling, Adam resided with the missionary couple!
The bitterness Albert – whom Celie refers to as Mr. – experienced over the unrequited affection he had for Nettie served to only compound the sisters’ separation as he’d been deliberately withholding her letters intended for Celie – vindictively informing her that she’d never hear from her again! The pattern would persist for years until one Saturday morning a popular singer named Shug Avery who happened to be visiting Albert and Celie for Christmas told on his malicious secret by handing the unsuspecting hostess a letter from Nettie – with her furthermore discovering bunches
of others hidden in his trunk!
The most beautiful woman Celie reckoned she ever saw, albeit in a picture a mere glimpse at prompted her to dream! Lillie (Shug’s actual name) was imbued with a rouge face, sad eyes and came across like The Queen Honeybee enough to inspire Celie to go shop for a dress in the color purple! She made oodles of money singing across the country whilst accompanied by an orchestra, and personally knew celebrities such as Duke Ellington.
She drove around in a big Packard automobile and resided in a fine house in Memphis in which she owned hundreds of dresses and a room full of shoes! She indulged in lesbian experiments with Celie, during one session enlightening her thus: “right down there in your pussy is a little button that gets real hot when you do you know what with somebody!” ‘It was the Shug who had enquired of Celie whether she minded if Mr. – with whom she had an on-off-on relationship – slept with her, going on to gush mirth when the paterfamilias’ better half resignedly admitted to no longer enjoying the deed, to which the songstress remarked: “You make it sound like he going to the toilet on you.”
Upon Shug becoming sick, folk pervaded the town with nasty speculation about the cause of her ailment, with her pappy referring to her as a tramp and the local preacher once basing his sermon on her condition as he alluded to ‘a strumpet in short skirts’ singing for money and taking other women men’s. Adding, ‘talk ‘bout slut, hussy, heifer and streetcleaner.’ Whereupon Mr., the father of her three kids, brought her to his abode by the creek which served home cured ham, grits, eggs, hot biscuits, flapjacks, butter, strawberries and cream, buttermilk, orange juice and steaming coffee – to convalesce!
She meant so much to Albert that in conversation with his dad, who was visiting, he revealed: “I love Shug Avery. Always have, always will. I should have married her when I had the chance!”
Reprise Sofia Butler who, upon eventually becoming fed up with Celie’s stepson, Harpo, left him, upping with their children to go shack up with one of her sisters. One day in town, the mayor’s wife, Millie stood on a street admiring her children and ending up enquiring, “Would you like to work for me, be my maid?” Upon retorting haughtily, the mayor took umbrage and slapped her, to which Sofia responded by knocking the man down and the police arriving and proceeding to beat her up to a pulpy mess before being hauled to penitentiary where she’d be incarcerated until the mayoral couple had her released, only to have her end up working in their home – the very cause of her tribulation to begin with!
Then, through a twist of probabilities, Sofia got to teach Madam Millie how to drive an automobile the mayor had bought her!
Enter Nettie, unto whom Reverend Samuel disclosed that Pa, whose real name was Alphonso, wasn’t her and Celie’s real dad! According to the reverend, once upon a time, the sisters’ actual father, a well-to-do farmer and property owner, prospered so exceedingly that the White merchants around his town resented his success – leading to his businesses being demolished, and worst of all, himself and his two brothers getting lynched!
With his wife and two daughters surviving him, a stranger (Pa) who happened to be a past acquaintance of Samuel’s, appeared in their community and ultimately married the widow – who went on to beget additional offspring who included Olivia and Adam, and who the husband placed with the missionary couple upon their mother’s demise.
Promptly beating a hasty path to Pa in order to corroborate the reverend’s version, Celie, who’d all along been of the impression that she’d been co-opted into incest, was able to hear out the man confirm the unexpected revelation’s veracity. Furthermore, she’d learn from the stepdad’s wife, Daisy, upon his death, that he’d concealed from the sisters, ownership of land, a store and a house – in which he’d been residing under guise of it being his – which had been bequeathed unto them according to a will written by their real father.
Meanwhile, Nettie was far away at a tribal village in Africa on missionary duty with the reverend’s family. There, she experienced the ambivalent side to reality as first, Corrine succumbed to an unspecified illness followed by a foreign construction entity forcefully decimating the tribal settlement to make way for a rubber plantation and consequently becoming Samuel’s wife – all this while whilst Celie, excited by the will’s inference, exhorted her to return to America in order to claim her inheritance!
Eventually, of a multilayered canvas onto which author Alice Walker thanked everybody, characters, for partaking in – Nettie, along with Samuel, Olivia, Adam and Tashi (a girl from the Olinka tribe in Africa, Adam married), sailed back to America to a joyous reunion with Celie on July 4th!
Alice Walker, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, is a canonical figure in American letters. The first edition of The Color Purple was published back in 1983 and the current edition – described by writer, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie as ‘A lush celebration of all that it means to be a Black female’ – issued forty years on!
A hardback, The Color Purple is published by Orion and distributed in South Africa by Jonathan Ball Publishers.
Available at leading bookstores countrywide, it retails for R450.
