The Color Purple

On one of the afternoons when the women are alone at the house, Shug reveals that Albert may have been intercepting and hiding letters from Nettie. She is aghast and falls out of love with Albert. Celie, on the other hand, is so furious with Albert that it is all she can do not hurt or kill him. Shug steals a key to a chest of Albert’s, and the two women discover correspondence from Nettie that goes back all the way to when she first left town. They remove the letters from their envelopes and place the envelopes back in the chest to avoid detection.

The letters from Celie to Nettie tell the story of what happened in the immediate aftermath of Nettie’s departure from Albert and Celie’s house. Albert follows Nettie and attempts to assault her. When she fights back, he swears Nettie and Celie will never hear from or see each other again. Nettie goes to the house of the minister and his wife, who turn out to be named Samuel and Corrine, respectively. When she arrives, she discovers that Adam and Olivia, Celie’s children, have been adopted by the couple (she does not share that her sister Celie is the child’s birth mother. Nettie writes to Celie, but she never gets a reply, and Samuel is unwilling to insert himself into a dispute between Celie and her husband, so nothing can be done.

The next letter is dated two months later, and Nettie is now on her way to serve as a missionary in Africa alongside Samuel and Corrine. In the weeks before the trip, Nettie saw Sofia in town serving as a maid to Millie. She also educated herself about Africa and shares with Celie all she has learned about Africa’s early civilizations. This history is a revelation, as is seeing a couple like Samuel and Corrine who love each other and are committed to racial uplift. Nettie feels inspired by them.

Nettie describes the travel and fundraising trips required to get them all to Africa. Nettie sees Harlem in all its glory and is amazed when the prosperous Black people of Harlem give so generously so that the missionaries can make it to Africa. The standard of living for the Northern Black people Nettie encounters is noticeably better than life in rural Georgia (there are indoor toilets, for example). Nettie’s excitement about the mission dims, however, when she realizes that their white sponsors at the Missionary Society of New York hold racist and paternalistic ideas about the Olinka villagers among whom Nettie, Samuel, and Corrine will be ministering. Samuel tells her to cheer up. He assumes that being Black will give the three of them an advantage over the white missionaries who have gone before them.

From New York, the missionaries take the Malaga to England. Seeing the deeper knowledge that the English missionary societies have about Africa due to Great Britain’s imperial history as well as the African treasures in British museums, Nettie begins to think about the role the English have played in despoiling the African continent. Nettie has so many questions, particularly about why Africans were willing to sell her enslaved ancestors to European slave traders.

Nettie’s wondering continues even as she travels from Europe to Senegal, and then to Monrovia, Liberia, founded by ex-slaves from the United States. In Liberia, Nettie is taken aback to find that very light-skinned Black people seem to dominate the power structure, and the Liberian president’s use of the term “natives” (141) to describe other Black people troubles her. As Nettie travels the countryside to get to the Olinka, she hears people tired from working on Dutch cocoa plantations singing as they go home from very long days of work, and Nettie is struck by how much the weariness and the music remind her of home.

Despite these indications of problems in Liberia, Nettie and her compatriots are deeply moved the first time they caught sight of the African coast: they kneel to pray thanks for to God for allowing them “to see the land for which [their] mothers and fathers cried—and lived and died—to see again” (142).

Back in the present, Celie is devouring these letters and feeling a murderous rage toward Albert as she considers how he kept the letters from her. Shug appeals to Celie’s Christianity and distracts her by getting her to take up pants-making.

Celie resumes reading the letters from Nettie. Nettie describes the arduous boat trip to get to the village of the Olinka, who live four days’ journey into the bush. Nettie continues to report all she sees of the culture she encounters. She notices, for example, that work is strictly divided along gender lines. The Olinka have never seen Black missionaries before, so the arrival of Nettie and the others causes a stir and leads to an extended welcoming ceremony during which the villagers share their presiding myth, the story of the roofleaf.

The roofleaf, the story goes, became sacred after it had to be rescued from extinction when a greedy chief planted cash crops to trade with Europeans instead of the roofleaf. When a storm blew the roofs off of every structure in the village, no roofleaf was available; the people sickened and died. Five years passed before the roofleaf revived. Watching the ceremony during which a man dressed as a roofleaf offers the missionaries the roof to their hut, Nettie is forced to admit that there is no reason to see the roofleaf as anything less than a god.

After a gap, Nettie writes another letter, one in which she describes the challenges and joys of the family as they settle in with the Olinka. Olivia struggles with the subordinate place of women and befriends Tashi, an Olinka girl with whom Olivia shares her lesson since girls are not permitted to attend the mission school. Meanwhile, Corrine demands that Nettie stop borrowing her clothes and to make it clear to the Olinka that she is not a second wife to Samuel. Nettie has the luxury of her own hut and writing desk. She tells Celie she wishes she had a picture of Celie to put on her walls; the missionary society only sends pictures of white explorers and white Jesus, which make Nettie feel small.

The friendship between Tashi and Olivia leads to tension with Tashi’s parents. They want to prepare her for a traditional life among the Olinka and believe the missionaries—even Nettie—are temporary visitors who have little to offer their children, especially daughters. Nettie realizes that her dreams of Tashi, a clever and hardworking girl, becoming a teacher are objectionable to Tashi’s father, who sees women as people who should listen to men without question. Nettie says nothing to counter Tashi’s father, but she does accept his offer to allow Olivia to come to his house to learn about the life of an Olinka woman and girl.