Color Purple Collection

by Alice Walker

  “‘I don’t feel free,’ she said.

  “‘When have you ever felt free?’ I asked.

  “She considered the question. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘I’ve never felt free, never in my life. And I want to.’

  “At the office several of my colleagues said how sorry they were that we were breaking up. Ours was the last stable, apparently happy marriage they knew. Something in the way they offered condolences made me realize they considered the breakup Fanny’s fault entirely. To a man they’d been polite to her but never liked her very much. And whenever she came to the office to see me before we went out to lunch together, she was cool, distant, never able to do much with small talk. And there was the way she dressed. The shorter the miniskirts on other men’s wives, the longer her skirts. And she wore flowing scarves made of silk, and once, in conversation with one of the guys, carelessly mentioned her pipe. A pipe more for ornament than anything else, really. Bought to smoke grass in, it’s true; because she could never learn to roll a cigarette; but then she smoked very little. However, certain things you don’t talk about in your husband’s office at a far from radical, not even liberal university, where every nonwhite instructor is already suspected of smoking dope, screwing students in the stairwells, and hiding submachine guns in his hair; and I brought this up with her.

  “‘Do I embarrass you?’ she asked.

  “‘How could you embarrass me?’ I said, leaning over the table to kiss her and holding her hand.

  “‘Freedom must mean never having (or being able) to embarrass anybody,’ she said.

  “And I ordered our lunch to save us from another discussion of that subject.

  “It became harder and harder to talk with her the nearer separation approached. She begged me not to draw away.

  “‘It’s marriage I don’t want,’ she insisted, ‘not you.’

  “But I couldn’t see it. Oh, I pretended I could. But my heart wasn’t in it. I felt abandoned, rejected, set adrift. After all, this was someone I’d known and loved for a good portion of my life. When we were married, I considered it a natural joining, a legal verification of what was already fact. We were one, in my opinion. And being legally married seconded that opinion.

  “‘Do you think your new wife will let us spend time together?’ she asked, for she was convinced I would remarry.

  “I hated expressions like ‘spend time.’ They sounded so hippie.

  “‘Once every few months, if more often made her upset?’

  “She was sitting at the foot of the bed. I was lying down. She placed her hand on my knee.

  “‘I know I’ll feel more sexy with you after the divorce,’ she said.

  “‘Promises, promises,’ I said bitterly. And she removed her hand.”

  Part Two

  Helped are those who learn that the deliberate invocation of suffering is as much a boomerang as the deliberate invocation of joy.

  —The Gospel According to Shug

  “MY MOTHER, CELIE, was very much influenced by color,” said Olivia. She was talking to Lance, the man she was not quite sure she would marry. They were walking along spacious, tree-lined streets after their duties at Atlanta’s only Negro hospital, Harrison Memorial, were done. To passersby they presented an unusual couple: she, short and very dark, he, tall and very light, with the sandy, wavy hair that would, under certain circumstances in their rigidly segregated city, have classified him as white.

  Olivia spoke with the simplicity and earnestness that characterized her, and Lance listened with the attentiveness of one who is, by lucky chance, finally hearing the good news of life he might otherwise have missed.

  “The year I met her,” continued Olivia, “in my middle thirties, she was fascinated by the color blue. Not the bright blue of skies or the drab blue of serge Sunday suits, but a complex royal blue with metallic glints. A combination of teal and electric blue that she one day, in her endless rummaging about in fabric shops across the country, ecstatically found. This was a blue that, she said, gave off energy, or, to use her own word, power. A person wearing this blue was suddenly more confident, stronger, more present and intense than ever before. She made me a pantsuit that gave me all of these qualities when I wore it, just as she predicted, and I was sorry when my daughter, Fanny Nzingha, while helping me make tamale pie, spilled chili sauce on it, and the stain wouldn’t come out, no matter how many times I took it to the cleaners. Years later I bought another blue pantsuit, but it wasn’t nearly as perfect as the one my mother had made. Though it was as close to the same shade of blue as I could get, it failed to give off any particular energy. In fact, I always felt slightly enervated when I wore it. It was like wearing the shadow of my old suit.

  “I do not know if she always loved color. Her childhood was an unhappy one, and most of her young adulthood was spent raising another woman’s children, while her own children—my brother, Adam, and I—were brought up by our aunt Nettie, who was a missionary in Africa. We were also brought up by our adoptive mother, Corrine, until we were teenagers. She died of fever and was buried outside the village where we lived. My father, Samuel, was a missionary also, but by the time we returned to America he had long since lost his faith; not in the spiritual teachings of Jesus, the prophet and human being, but in Christianity as a religion of conquest and domination inflicted on other peoples. He and Aunt Nettie, whom he married after our adoptive mother’s death, spent many long evenings with my brother and me discussing ways we might best help our people discover their own power to communicate directly with ‘God.’ We had all begun to see, in Africa—where people worshiped many things, including the roofleaf plant, which they used to cover their houses—that ‘God’ was not a monolith, and not the property of Moses, as we’d been led to think, and not separate from us, or absent from whatever world one inhabited. Once this channel was cleared, so to speak, much that our people had been taught about religion, much that diminished them and kept them in oppression, would naturally fall away. It was so hard for the Africans, in this new religion we brought, to ever feel ‘God’ loved them, for instance; whereas in the traditional religions they practiced they took this more or less for granted.

  “‘As a minister, I am quite unnecessary to anyone else’s salvation,’ my father found the courage to admit. ‘Surely it is one of the universe’s little jokes that I must be a minister in order to make them see this.’

  “The religion that one discovered on one’s own was a story of the earth, the cosmos, creation itself; and whatever ‘Good’ one wanted could be found not down the long road of eternity, but right in one’s own town, one’s home, one’s country. This world. After all, since this world is a planet spinning about in the sky, we are all of us in heaven already! The God discovered on one’s own speaks nothing of turning the other cheek. Of rendering unto Caesar. But only of the beauty and greatness of the earth, the universe, the cosmos. Of creation. Of the possibilities for joy. You might say the white man, in his dual role of spiritual guide and religious prostitute, spoiled even the most literary form of God experience for us. By making the Bible say whatever was necessary to keep his plantations going, and using it as a tool to degrade women and enslave blacks. But the old African religions also, in which mutilation of women’s bodies sometimes figured so prominently, left almost everything to be desired. Even in these, man, in his insecurity and feeling of unlovableness, made himself the sole conduit to God, if not at times the actual God himself. My father often commented on the way the villagers feared their holy men and prostrated themselves before them—as Catholics fear and bow before the pope—so much so that the actual assumed receiver of their petitions and prayers, God Itself, was quite often forgotten. Still, there was a small point in the colored man’s favor.

  “‘What is one absolute truth about the man of color on this earth?’ my father would ask. ‘He admits spirit,’ he would answer himself. And by this he meant spirit in everything, not just in God or the Holy Ghost, who at one time was the Female
in the Deity, or Jesus Christ.

  “Throughout these discussions I watched my mother magically create garments in that particular shade of blue, which she eventually dubbed ‘Power Blue.’

  “I was fascinated by her. By the way she parted her still-black hair severely in the middle and braided it in two braids that met at the back of her head and were turned under. By the way she invariably wore pants, even to church. But pants so subtle only other women noticed they were pants. By the way she spoke little, apparently out of a childhood and young-adult habit of silence, and how, when she did speak, there was a perkiness, a plainness, that was sometimes humorous but always compelling. She was a literal speaker. What she expressed she both felt and was.

  “We lived in a roomy old house in middle Georgia that she had inherited from her parents. Her father had been lynched by whites; and her mother, as a consequence of this terrorist murder, had lost her mind. My brother and I were the product of the rape of our mother by her stepfather, a man much admired by black and white in the community where he lived. It was he who gave us to our father, Samuel, who, with our adoptive mother, Corrine, and Aunt Nettie, sailed off with us to Africa when we were children.

  “The Africa that we encountered had already been raped of much of its sustenance. Its people had been sold into slavery. Considering both internal and external ‘markets,’ this ‘trade’ had been going on for well over a thousand years; and had no doubt begun as the early civilizations of Africa were falling into decline, around the six-hundreds. Millions of its trees had been shipped to England and Spain and other European countries to make benches and altars in those grand European cathedrals one heard so much about; its minerals and metals mined and its land planted in rubber and cocoa and pineapples and all sorts of crops for the benefit of foreign invaders. I almost said, as foreigners do, ‘investors.’ And Africa itself became—was made—in the world imagination, an uninhabited region, except for its population of wild and exotic animals. On the maps of Africa of five hundred years ago, as someone has pointed out, Europeans placed elephants where there were towns.

  “I left America when I was six years old. I do not remember it. But I do remember the ocean. The sheen on the endless water, the deep steady rocking of the ship, the confusion over whether so much water, by its sheer density, might not—if one stepped upon it—become a kind of glassy land. And I remember tasting the ocean spray on my face and someone mentioning at that same moment that the sea was salt. If it was salt, I wondered, why was it not white and grainy, as salt was at home. But its water tasted salty. And this puzzled me until I overheard Aunt Nettie saying sadly to my mother that, well, perhaps it was the tears and sweat of all the suffering people of the earth. She cried so much on the voyage over, and none of us, not even my mother and father, knew why.

  “For several years after we arrived in Africa I was quite sickly. I had recurring bouts of malaria, as did everyone in our family. And I was plagued by rashes, sores, and other skin irritations, which were aggravated, horribly, by the heat. Aunt Nettie, whom at times we called ‘Mama Nettie,’ praised me for not being more complaining. As I recall it now, I was too miserable to complain. Sometimes it was so hot I could not speak. In my teen years I was much better.

  “I was, in fact, happy. And why not? All day long I could be found in the company of my best friend, Tashi. We played house, we splashed in the river, we collected wild foods and firewood in the forest. A forest of magnificent fecundity, density, and mystery. There were trees in the forest thousands of years old and bigger by far than the huts in which we lived. There was nothing we did not share, and I loved her better than I would have loved my own sister; as much, or more, than I loved my brother, Adam, who, from an older boy who teased us, chased us, pulled our braids, and tattled on us to our mothers, became Tashi’s confidant, then her suitor, then, many years later, her husband.

  “It is in the year preceding their marriage that my own story begins. For it was in that year that Tashi became more my brother’s companion than mine. This caused me much bitterness, because it caused me much loneliness; and then, too, their companionship was considered by everyone in our compound as cherished and inevitable. Even to Tashi this was so. And the days of our girlish joys together became a thing of the past. Seeing that this must be so, I steeled myself to bear it, and turned to both my brother and Tashi a face of loving willingness to serve them. But such sweetness and light takes its toll, and many dark thoughts occasionally strayed across my mind. It was my first understanding that it is possible to love people very much and to resent their happiness partly because you do love them.

  “While all attention focused on Adam and Tashi, I was left to my own devices, largely ignored, or, I should say, unobserved. Corrine had long been dead. The Europeans had come and destroyed the village that had been our home. We had been moved to a barren stretch of rock that lay surrounded by a vast rubber plantation owned and run by Englishmen, whose field labor consisted entirely of our friends. This plantation system used people up in fewer than seven years, and used up the soil as well; it also effectively destroyed the native wild rubber trees, which had once grown abundantly, everywhere. Where there had once been leafy forest, there was now widespread erosion. Many of our friends were dying from various fevers, malnutrition, and overwork. Or were running away to join the Mbeles, a mythical—so we thought—group of African guerrillas who lived deep in the forest many, many miles away.

  “There was one young African man who remained, finally, in the ugly, dusty, tin-roofed compound that was our common home. His Christian name was Dahvid, and since this was all he ever used, I never heard his tribal name, until years later. Dahvid stayed in the compound because of me. But I did not know this was his reason. He was a sullen, restless, sometimes impish young man without a thought in his head for anyone, I believed, least of all, girls; and at times he made my life harder than it needed to have been by his irritable, cutting remarks and rude behavior to my family and me, which my father interpreted as Dahvid’s way of railing against the catastrophe that had overtaken the Olinka people and reduced them to virtual slavery. Yet why it should have been directed against us, I could not decipher, since it was not our fault that the Europeans had come.

  “At other times, when he was not being abusive and calling us ‘the white man’s wedge,’ Dahvid was capable of great charm. And I confess at those times I was drawn to him, as to Adam. I could see that the requirements for males in the world were often such that only a machine could fulfill them, or someone of no feeling and much supernatural strength. Dahvid alone could not chase out the Europeans, for instance. Could not even prevent them looking at him and at all of us as if we were born to be their own divinely ordained beasts of burden. Many of them went so far as to view the Africans themselves as having no right to be in Africa, since it was the plan of the white people to take over the continent; the Africans represented merely the burdensome responsibility of genocide.

  “In the year that Adam brought Tashi back from the Mbeles, to whom she had run in her confusion over the destruction of her people and Adam’s insistence that she come with him to America, I became receptive to the persistent inquiries of one of the young English engineers, who wanted to learn the Olinka language. I asked permission from my new mother, Mama Nettie, and my father before I began, in the evenings when the work was done, to try to teach him. He was a tall, sunburned, ugly man, whose earnestness and attentiveness made him attractive. And for hours we sat with our backs against the rough boards of our barrack, and I taught him the Olinka language, which I spoke as fluently as I spoke English, and which I could also write, because my father and Mama Nettie had created an Olinka alphabet. The creation of this alphabet had been Corrine’s idea. She was Cherokee on her mother’s side, and her mother’s mother had been involved in the creation of the Cherokee alphabet and had also been an editor of the first Cherokee newspaper ever printed in the Cherokee language. The fact that they had a newspaper was one of the reasons the
Cherokee were considered one of the five ‘civilized’ tribes of Indians in America. This did not, however, prevent the white man from burning them out of their homes and resettling what remained of the tribe in Oklahoma when he discovered he wanted their land.

  “One day, because it was still very hot and because it simply happened and no one seemed to care what we did—all thoughts were on Adam’s pursuit of Tashi—we strolled some distance from the compound and stood talking to each other in Olinka in the shade of a huge rock. And the man, whose name was Ralston Flood, leaned down his reddish, perspiring hairy face and kissed me. Out of politeness, surprise, boredom, loneliness, I returned it. That is to say, I placed both my hands on his arms while the kiss lasted. Then, when it had ended—I waited until his back was turned and he was chattering on in Olinka ahead of me—I scrubbed away the kiss with the corner of my blouse.

  “This scrubbing of my mouth Dahvid did not see. Apparently he’d turned away during the kiss itself. For he was also seeking coolness that evening in the shadow of the rock.

  “For days afterward he did not speak to me. The Englishman, having proved something he felt needed proving, did not attempt to kiss me again. Shortly afterward, having learned the language sufficiently to give orders to Olinka workers in the field, he ceased to arrive for his daily instruction. Nor did I miss him after the first few days, though I was alone a lot of the time. Not alone if you counted all the sick and shattered people my parents and I constantly attended, but alone because there was—with Tashi and her mother and Adam gone—no one with whom to really giggle or converse.

  “I knew the Olinka had ruled it a crime to have any dealings with the Europeans, and that they were against my teaching the Englishman their language. ‘Let him order us to fetch and carry in his own wretched tongue,’ they said, for they enjoyed mimicking the foreigners and ridiculing them behind their backs. To the Olinka, the English language, as spoken by their captors, had a sickly, regurgitative sound and was as lacking in nuance and music as a stone. Still, when my father had asked their permission for me to teach the Englishman, they had not withheld it. This was because I was not one of them. Since I was a woman, the permission was given grudgingly and with an attitude that they washed their hands of me and of whatever might result.