Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books (34 page)

“Reification” is the fine abstraction that is used to designate treating a person like a thing. What might “thinghood” feel like? Mr. beats her routinely: “He say, Celie, git the belt. The children be outside the room peeking through the cracks. It all I can do not to cry. I make myself wood. I say to myself, Celie, you a tree.” Making yourself into wood leads, if you are successful, to the desired result that you soon feel nothing at all. Your body decides that feeling is unacceptable: “Then after a while every time I got mad, or start to feel mad, I got sick. Felt like throwing up. Terrible feeling. Then I start to feel nothing at all.” There’s nothing volitional or even conscious here; the body has learned its lesson. In today’s culture, stamped by hyperawareness of feelings and sensations, it is useful to realize how sentience can be put out of business if one is subjected to adequate abuse.

What is gripping about
The Color Purple
is Celie’s exit out of thinghood and her entry into the human. Not that she is unaware at the beginning but that she is utterly “done unto,” utterly without resources. But her growing up is about to become a story of agency. It starts with the sexual awakening triggered by the book’s femme fatale and love apostle, Shug Avery, adored by Mr. and now adored by Celie as well. Shug asks Celie to describe her sex life: “He [Mr.] get up on you, heist your nightgown round your waist, plunge in. Most times I pretend I ain’t there. He never know the difference. Never ast me how I feel, nothing. Just do his business, get off, go to sleep.” Shug’s reply—“Do his business. Why, Miss Celie. You make it sound like he going to the toilet on you”—is in line with the reification and functionalism of Celie’s existence. Time to educate this woman, Shug decides.

Critics have observed that male-driven sex has not paid much attention to these buttons. I’d want to call Shug’s intervention that of a teacher as well as a lover: she’s helping Celie toward a grasp of not only her own body but her own estate, her own capacity for pleasure and feeling. One senses an inventory in process here, a moving into one’s domains. As the novel registers the long passing of time, Celie’s worship of Shug remains constant, even as it mellows in older age, even as Shug proves to be unownable, a free spirit committed to loving, destined to make all her partners hungry and jealous. But Shug’s greatest contribution is to empower Celie, to gift her with a sense of her indwelling resources. I’m talking about more than buttons; I mean that Celie is discovering something like a bill of rights, like a creatural entitlement of the good life.

This project of ownership marks what is most hopeful and inspiriting about Walker’s book. Some of the most poignant scenes between Celie and Shug are almost Proustian or Faulknerian in character, as Celie revisits her past life of abjection and abuse and makes it hers at last. She remembers the first time she was taken sexually, how she “never even thought bout men having nothing down there so big,” how Pa did it to her during “intermission” while she was trimming his hair, “how it stung while I finish trimming his hair. How the blood drip down my leg and mess up my stocking.” Like a hemorrhage, indeed, this memory triggers a still-deeper sense of the injuries she’s received, of her entire life as injury: “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.” For me, these passages have a vitality and healing dimension beyond the horrors they detail, for they signal that Celie is at last processing what has been done to her and that she realizes she is entitled to being loved. The warmth of Shug’s affection catalyzes this growth, this newfound sense of worth, against which the treatment meted out to her must be measured. For that is the beauty of Walker’s retrospective manner: measures are being taken, the voyage into adulthood requires “owning” your earlier self, even if—especially if—it was abused.

Up to now, I’ve said little about the Nettie plot. She has disappeared out of Celie’s life but, lo and behold, has found her way not only to Africa but even to Celie’s own lost children. She writes regularly to Celie, we later learn, but Mr. hides the letters. This material has a mix of fairy tale, anthropology, and crash course on African history, and it is written in a way that does not quite match the pathos, sass, and brilliance of Walker’s rendition of Celie. But the Africa story fulfills another role: it makes the entire narrative stereophonic, two-eyed, and hence vital to the project of growing up and seeing clear. Africa rewrites America. Uncle Remus is seen to have African origins. Jesus is now seen from an Ethiopian perspective as wooly-haired and darker-skinned. All this is akin to Celie’s own growing awareness, abetted by Shug, that the old white God who has dictated so much of what folks can think or see needs to be unseated, cast aside. Ike McCaslin learned to decode the history of the South. Celie’s exposure to Africa—as a control case for the culture that has trapped her—leads, indirectly but crucially, to her slowly growing sense of agency.

I’d link this African plot material to something equally dramatic: namely, Nettie’s piecing together of the family mystery and realizing that Samuel’s two children are in fact Celie’s lost babies. Of course this is incredible, from any realist perspective, but it fits into a larger “might-be” perspective that opens up closed facts and constraining principles into something partaking of desire and fable. And it is no less fitting that Nettie informs Celie that the man who impregnated her—“Pa”—is not her real father; hence there has been no incest. Here too we see the miraculous transformation at work: hard facts, facts you can barely live with, yield to new fictions that set you free. What you thought imprisoning suddenly opens up and is seen in the light of a new prism. The dreadful connections turn out to be illusory, the severed connections turn out to be retrievable.

Walker is reversing the fateful logic we saw in the story of Oedipus. He thought himself free and found out how heinously abused his vision was. Celie is not the victim of some illusion—she was indeed abused systematically, denied any form of recognition as a person—but there is a building project here, an artisanal drive of self-making. And it doesn’t hurt to find out that at least some of the worst injuries done to you were not quite what you thought.
Oedipus the King
closes with a dreadful family reunion: the Shepherd and the Messenger arrive on scene in order to tighten the noose entirely, to bring the parricide/incest plot to full visibility. Walker too closes with a family reunion, but it is life-affirming, not condemning. Growing up so often entails cutting the cord, leaving the nest, vanquishing (even if symbolically) the parents. Not so here. From faraway and long ago, the lost and the exiled come together. At life’s late stage, Celie will come into the larger family. Can a writer get away with this?

As acknowledged,
The Color Purple
evinces a triumphalism that sticks in some readers’ throats. It closes with Celie and Nettie, both old and young at the same time, hugging each other, happy to be united, happy to be alive. And the big family comes together, wedding Africa to America, retrieving the lost or stolen ones, yielding a vision of harmony, showing that the fullness of time might bring a true harvest. But some finish better than others. Sofia has been permanently damaged by her fight with the system, and her rage will not easily disappear; she remains in our minds as what Celie too might have become, as what outright resistance might lead to. Harpo and Squeak have taken their hits too. Injury is real, it doesn’t simply go away. And one needs to ask: does getting your lost children back when they’re almost adults really constitute a happy ending?

For all these reasons, I’d like to close my remarks on this powerful novel by focusing on what I take to be the single strongest force that it hallows as resource, as weapon:
voice
. By voice I mean many things. First of all there is the splendid, inventive, lively, sometimes breathtaking idiom that Walker has fashioned in order to “write” Celie: a black English that has chutzpah, poetry, pizzazz, and wit. This is what most embarrasses the “Nettie material” and the African saga, because the social science discourse in that part of the novel is limp, virtually academic, in comparison. Beyond that, however, I want to emphasize Celie’s language as a trump of a different sort altogether. Underlying this entire argument are questions going all the way back to Quevedo’s
Swindler:
Can language itself be a tool, a weapon, a resource for making your way? Can words play a determining role in growing up? Faulkner’s Ike McCaslin traced a history of subjugation from scribbled entries in a ledger. Celie’s use of language is outright lifesaving.

Celie is, as noted, among the most victimized figures in narrative literature. Yet Walker wants to show us that people who have nothing still have words. Initially Celie writes to God, but the richer conceit of the book is that she writes to us. And what she writes displays a marvelous dialectic, a redressing of wrongs achievable by the elemental magic of words and thought. Let me explain. At one point, Celie is visited by Mr.’s two sisters; they are predictably condescending to Celie but try to compliment her nonetheless, observing that Celie is a “good housekeeper, good with children, good cook. Brother couldn’t have done better if he tried.” These are forms of banality we’ve all seen, heard, and uttered. But note what Celie then says to herself: “I think about how he tried.” In my view, this is how you fight back. You cannot change the givens, but you can season them, you can ironize them, you can replay in your head, and all this gives you a kind of agency you don’t have in any other way.

Here’s another instance. Celie is scrutinizing Albert: “I look at his face. It tired and sad and I notice his chin weak. Not much chin there at all. I have more chin, I think.” Again small beer, you might say, yet these are the materials of rebuttal, of assertion. Celie’s gaze stalks her husband’s face, sizes it up, finds it lacking, finds herself more imposing. Nothing is uttered out loud, but then it needn’t be. Celie hears it well enough. That homely little passage starts in observation and closes in affirmation. These are the tiny closet dramas that parse every life, consisting of moments—not years—of ascendancy, scattered moments when you right your vessel, take the lead, come out ahead. No declaration of war is required; this minute guerrilla warfare goes on, on the inside, and nobody is the wiser except for the silent resister. I’d argue that the true balance of power in human relations might well lie in this hard-to-measure direction. Certainly whatever balm we find for our wounds, whatever stand we make against circumstances, is likely to be situated, at least in part, in such virtual precincts. Perhaps literature is our best entry into this strategic field, our best glimpse of how we fare, since it rarely gets into the public record.

But eventually in this novel, these small skirmishes are indeed going to go public, and when they do, we see a veritable explosion of rage, energy, and agency. Celie is about to come of age. It happens at the dinner table, when Shug coolly announces to Albert that Celie is going to go back to Memphis with her. He is stunned and says (and believes what he says): “I thought you was finally happy, he say. What wrong now?”

Don’t forget: Albert has not only brutalized her, he has also hidden all of Nettie’s letters from Africa. Time to let loose:

What strikes us most is the sheer vehemence and unstoppable force of Celie’s outburst. Mr.’s sputtering is rightly compared to a motor, but we see Celie’s attack as a volcano. My simile is not chosen lightly. Walker wants us to grasp the elemental power of Celie’s responses, as if earth, wind, fire, and water were all brought into play as carriers of human volition. A few pages later, when Albert refuses to tell Celie if further letters from Nettie have arrived, language now begins to take on the character of fate itself, as if Celie had the power of the Delphic oracle: