674 The American Century: Literature since 1945encounters with white colonists and developers, she also quietly links the story of
racial oppression in America to a larger history of imperial adventure and conquest.
The third mentor Celie encounters is a blues singer, Shug Avery. The first person for
whom Celie feels a definite physical attraction, Shug teaches Celie about her body,
she offers her the possibility of sexual pleasure. She also unpacks the cultural forms,
specific to America, that she and Celie share as African-Americans: the sensual
promise of jazz, the tragic melancholy of blues. And, like Sofia and Nettie, she leads
by example. She is a powerful illustration of selfhood, a person who positively fills
the space she occupies. More than anyone, Shug encourages Celie to believe in
herself. Everything, Shug suggests, is holy. Everything is worthy of respect and
wonder. The divine is to be found, not in “the old white man” worshipped in church,
in this place or that, but in everything. Even the color purple. Even, and especially,
Celie. It is a profoundly American sentiment, this belief in a democracy of being, a
divinity that informs every individual. And it allows Celie to flower from absence
into presence: to become herself.
That process of becoming herself is coextensive with learning a language; Celie
learns “how to do it” by learning how to say it. The Color Purple is an epistolary
novel. Most of the letters are written by Celie. And they measure her growth, not just
as a person, but into being a person. Language, finding the right words, and being,
finding a real self, are inseparable here. At first, the words written by Celie seem to
come from nowhere. They are a series of shapes to fill a lack; they seem existentially
sourceless, because Celie has never been allowed properly to exist – never been given
the opportunity to be and know herself. Gradually, though, Celie learns the right
words. She develops a language, vibrant and vital, that is a medium of selfhood.
As she does so, her letters cease being letters to “God” – sent from nobody to
nowhere – and become letters to her sister Nettie. By implication, they are letters to
all her sisters, as she edges toward that discovery of communality, the divine in
everything, on which her own belief in herself depends. Since writing The Color
Purple, Walker has written several books that push at the formal boundaries of
fiction while developing themes and revisiting characters first encountered in this
seminal 1983 novel. The Temple of My Familiar (1989), for instance, explores a wide
variety of subjects from a womanist perspective. It reintroduces Shug Avery; it
introduces us to the granddaughter of Celie; and it is, perhaps, not so much a novel
as a collection of loosely related tales, a sermon, and a stream of dreams and
memories, bound together by the belief that “all daily stories are in fact ancient and
ancient ones current.... There is nothing new under the sun.” In turn, Possessing the
Secret of Joy (1992) picks up the issue of female circumcision, touched on in The Color
Purple as a symptom of male cultural violence; By the Light of My Father’s Smile
(1998) explores the thin, permeable boundaries between different ethnic traditions,
and between life and death; and Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart (2004) describes
a woman’s quest to accept the aging process. No subsequent book, however, has
matched either The Color Purple or Meridian as an account of human wholeness, the
discovery of being. And none has matched The Color Purple, in particular, in its
revelatory use of form. The Color Purple is not just a story of personal growth thatGGray_c05.indd 674ray_c 05 .indd 674 8 8/1/2011 7:31:38 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 38 PM