The Color Purple

Shug Avery is the quintessential blues woman: She engages in creative self-expression to make her living, unapologetically embraces her bisexual identity, and sometimes makes bad choices as the result of needing to love and be loved. Shug’s character evolves as a result of her friendship with Celie.

When Shug first enters the narrative, she is a self-involved woman who is so sick that she takes refuge in the house of her long-time lover Albert and his long-suffering wife to recuperate. She is overtly cruel to Celie, calling her ugly on her first sight of her, and disrespects Celie by resuming her affair Albert as she recuperates. Her disdain for Celie begins to dissolve when she realizes that the man she loves beats Celie, fails to take Celie’s desires into account during sex, and has alienated Celie from her sister Nettie by hiding letters. Shug’s decision to help Celie find and read these letters as well as her decision to make love to Celie mark a shift in Shug’s character.

Shug chooses friendship with Celie over her lifelong love of Albert. She also helps Mary Agnes leave Georgia, another act that shows that she champions the women in her life over the men. Shug teaches Celie about her own perspective on God as a figure who is available to everyone through pleasure, appreciation of beauty, and creative acts. This notion of God allows Shug to disregard gender norms with little guilt. Shug leaves Celie for a time for fling, an act that shows her rejection of monogamy as a gender norm for women, but she returns by the end of the novel.

Nettie is the beautiful, clever little sister of Celie. As a girl, Nettie is the favored child whose beauty eventually draws the eye of both her stepfather and Albert, and she is forced to run away to escape them, leaving behind her sister Celie, whom she loves dearly. Nettie’s life unfolds atypically for a young woman of her class and race during that time because she leaves Georgia to become a missionary among the Olinka, a tribe somewhere in western Africa. Nettie’s character is mostly developed through her correspondence to her sister over the years.

At the start of this correspondence, Nettie is a deeply committed Christian who leaves the United States to engage in her mission to the Olinka and as a means of staying close to Celie’s children, who have been adopted by Black missionaries Samuel and Corrine. As a result of her preparation for and early mission work, Nettie initially sees Africa as a formerly glorious set of civilizations that is now in need of her mission in order to be saved in both the religious and material sense of the word.

Once Nettie comes to live among the Olinka, however, she is confronted with forms of spirituality that are valid but do not adhere to what she learned about faith within institutional Christianity. She learns that her mission work is part and parcel of western forms of domination that are destroying Olinka culture and the very lives of the Olinka.

Over decades of time among the Olinka, Nettie is forced to reject the Christianity she learned as a girl and embrace different belief system, one that values relationships with others over rigid morality. This shift leads to her willingness to engage in premarital sex with Samuel after his wife dies and her ability to accept that Celie’s children are bicultural because they spent their early lives in Africa. When Celie does return to America for a reunion with her sister, she has also embraced spirituality over institutional Christianity.

Sofia is the character in the novel who most shows the ability of white supremacist ideology to break the spirit of even the most defiant and self-possessed of Black women during the 1930s and 1940s. Initially, Sofia is the epitome of independence: She speaks up for herself when men in her life attempt to oppress her, aided by confidence from her physical strength and beauty. Like Shug, she unapologetically embraces sexuality, leaving her husband Harpo and taking a lover when Harpo insists on trying to dominate her by hitting her.

The pivot in Sofia’s life comes when she uses her voice and physicality to reject the attempts of the white mayor and Millie, his wife, to make her a maid. The brutal beating she experiences as a result of her refusal to accept their patronizing offer of employment damages her permanently. Her bondage is both physical and psychological because she is forced to subordinate herself to white people and live in close proximity to them.

The Sofia who returns home after this eleven-year period of subjugation is quieter, alienated from her children, and initially accepting of the dependence of Eleanor Jane, the mayor’s daughter she raised. Sofia achieves some degree of peace only after she tells her truth to Eleanor Jane and finds her place as a clerk in store Celie owns and as a surrogate mother for one of Mary Agnes’s children. Still, her life shows that individual will is not always a match for the overwhelming forces of racial discrimination and sexism.

Albert, called “Mr._____” in many of Celie’s letters to God, first appears as a suitor for Nettie but is forced to grudgingly accept Celie after Alphonso refuses him for Nettie because his mother died scandalously. Albert is a brutal man defined by his verbal and physical abuse of Celie and his children as well, as his obsessive love for Shug Avery. He has three children with Shug, but her decision to hold him at arm’s length and to appear when and where she pleases break him over the years.

Albert only begins to change as a man after Shug tells him she can never love him the same way again after learning that he abuses Celie and has been withholding Nettie’s letters from Celie. Celie pronounces a curse on him—he will experience all the pain he has visited on others—when she finally leaves him. Having lost Shug, he is forced to rely on the kindness of others, especially his son Harpo, who nurses him through his deep depression when Shug takes Celie away from the house.

Over the years, Albert learns to listen to other people, to give love to others, and to accept it when offered. This humbler and more contemplative Albert grows enough as a man that by the end of the novel, he accepts Celie’s rejection of his offer to resume marriage and gives her a purple frog carving in acknowledgement of her love for Shug and their friendship.

Harpo is the eldest son of Albert. With Albert as a model, Harpo grows up with the idea that women are to be dominated by any means. His subordination of women is moderated because of the presence of Celie, who acts as a mother figure and counter to Albert’s brutishness, but it is his relationship with Sofia that most shapes him. Sofia’s ability to deliver just as much physical punishment as he can dole out teaches him that women are his physical equal. Her decision to leave him with their children in tow forces him to acknowledge the part of him that enjoys nurturing his children.

When he builds a life without Sofia, he discovers that he can be his own man outside of his father’s shadow. He is handsome, sought after by women, and the part-owner of a juke joint. Although he still holds patriarchal ideas about women in the immediate years after establishing a relationship with Mary Agnes, he also embraces his more nurturing side by caring for Albert after Albert breaks down. Ultimately, Harpo reflects some more enlightened attitudes about men and women’s roles by the end of the novel, although he is certainly a man who believes the somewhat conservative ideas of this period about gender.

Mary Agnes, called Squeak because of her high-pitched voice, is Harpo’s second wife. As a light-skinned Black woman, she is afforded privilege due to colorism and Eurocentric beauty standards, and she also accepts her subordinate role early in the novel. Mary Agnes’s life takes a turn when she is raped by her white uncle during an attempt to convince him to allow Sofia to serve out her sentence as a maid. She learns that her proximity to whiteness is no protection.

In the aftermath of this violation, she sings a blues about colorism; like Celie, she eventually escapes her relationship with her husband, which she finds oppressive, by relying on Shug for her mobility. She takes the big step of performing in public, but her freedom is truncated when she takes up with Grady and is ensconced on his marijuana plantation in Panama as lady of the manor. The last major mention of Mary Agnes is that she is frequently high, with the implication that she resorts to intoxication to escape from her traumas.

Samuel is a respected missionary who believes his life’s calling is to bring Christianity to Africa, a form of racial uplift that has an international scope. Samuel is a dark-skinned, handsome man who can be generous: He allows Nettie to accompany his family to Africa because he erroneously believes Adam and Oliva, his adoptive children, are hers. He is profoundly conservative, however. When Nettie asks for his help in intervening when Nettie’s letters to Celie go unanswered, he refuses because he believes it is not anyone’s place to come between a man and his wife, even when the man is cruel.

Like Nettie, Samuel finds that his years among the Olinka erode his belief in his mission. He has sex with Nettie before marrying her and confesses to her that he believes their mission to Africa was a fruitless one. When he returns to America, it is as a partner to Nettie in her desire to establish a different kind of faith community.

Corrine is the wife of Samuel. She is a proud woman who also endorses the mission to minister to the Olinka as a calling, but unlike Samuel and Nettie, she never learns to bend to the cultural context in which the missionaries find themselves as they live and raise children among the Olinka. Near the end of her life, she becomes increasingly suspicious of Nettie because she is too concerned about appearances of propriety and thinks Nettie is having an affair with her husband. She also allows her jealousy to alienate her from her children. Her death illustrates the limits of rigid Christian morality when it comes to confronting cultural differences and challenging circumstances.

Tashi is an Olinka girl who comes of age during a moment of tragic transition in the culture and history of the Olinka. Walker uses her as a figure to show the predicament of members of African cultures as those cultures confront colonialism and modern western capitalism. As a girl, Tashi is ostensibly compliant with her father’s demands that she grow up in the Olinka way, preparing for a life as a subservient wife. When Tashi has the chance to learn some of the school curriculum from Oliva, she becomes so engrossed in the knowledge Olivia has to offer that she neglects the tasks assigned to girls in order to prepare them for their lives. Her father intervenes as a result.

Tashi reluctantly accepts her role, but there is a thread of defiance that persists, especially after her father’s death. She does not undergo the rites of scarification and genital cutting that most girls undergo until well after adolescence. The culture for which her childhood prepared her crumbles around her after a rubber corporation destroys the Olinka and dispossesses them. Tashi’s decision to marry Adam shows that she chooses to embrace a life as an immigrant to America over life among the dying Olinka. Her story is also one that revises the story of Black Americans’ diaspora history because she undertakes her sojourn from Africa to America willingly.

Olivia and Adam are Celie’s children. They spend their formative years adopted by Samuel and Corinne among the Olinka with Nettie, and as a result grow up in a cultural context that allows them to escape the painful rites of passage Black American children experience as they encounter racism.

While Olivia is a relatively slight character, Adam is more fully fleshed out. He pursues Tashi, an Olinka girl, and undergoes scarification in order to make her feel less alone when they decide to marry and return to America.

Eleanor Jane is the neglected white daughter of the mayor and Millie. Eleanor Jane relies on Sofia over the years for consistency and emotional support without ever questioning the circumstances that brought Sofia to live with the family. She insists on seeing Sofia as a member of the family, a convenient fiction she only comes to question when Sofia refuses to be mammy to her son after Eleanor Janes marries and has a family of her own. Eleanor Jane’s privilege blinds her to the enormity of the wrong done to Sofia, but she comes to see Sofia as a person in her own right after Sofia bluntly rejects her. Eleanor Jane’s evolution as a character is signaled by her willingness to work as a babysitter for Sofia at the end of the novel.