The Color Purple

Five years pass before Nettie resumes her correspondence with a Christmas letter. Changes are coming. A rubber corporation begins work on a tarmac road that they are cutting through the jungle near the Olinka. Tashi’s father dies. Olivia and Adam are learning much of the life of the Olinka since neither Samuel nor Corine have decided to send them home for their education as missionaries usually do. Nettie learns more about the importance of friendship between women, especially co-wives, who support each other as they deal with the power their husbands have over them. The friendship between Nettie and Corrine has deteriorated, however, after Corrine tells Nettie not to visit alone with Samuel for fear the villagers will assume the two are having an affair.

Nettie’s next letter comes a year later. The Olinka are devastated when the roadbuilders inform them that the path of the tarmac road cuts right through their village. The village is destroyed. The chief goes to the coast for more information. When he returns, he tells them all of the Olinka land now belongs to an English rubber corporation. To stay on their ancestral land, the Olinka will be required to pay rent and a water use tax. Meanwhile, Corrine has become ill with a fever.

The next letter comes after Easter. Corrine continues to sicken, and the more ill she becomes, the more suspicious she becomes of Nettie. Based on how similar Olivia and Adam look to Nettie, Corrine concludes that the two must be Samuel and Nettie’s children: She accuses Nettie of committing adultery with her husband. The Olinka are also suffering because the entire village will soon be planted in rubber; there is no readily available game nearby because of the disruption of the road construction.

Nettie learns that Samuel long assumed Olivia and Adam were Nettie’s children and so allowed Nettie to live and travel with his family. The story Samuel tells Nettie about where he got the children uncovers a secret: The man who delivered Olivia and Adam to Samuel and Corrine was not Nettie and Celie’s biological father. Alphonso was a stranger who took up with Nettie and Celie’s mother, a widow who ailed and suffered a mental health deterioration after white townspeople lynched her husband. Their mother eventually died. Celie, on reading this information, writes to God about how overwhelming this spate of tragic news is. Shug decides to take her to see her father and then to Memphis, where Shug lives. Alphonso confirms the truth about Celie’s origins. Alphonso is married once again, this time to Daisy, a fifteen-year-old girl, and has grown prosperous using the proceeds from the estate of Celie’s parents. Alphonso looks youthful and has built a big house. Celie is stunned by the sheer natural beauty that has sprung up around the house since she left.

Celie reads in Nettie’s letter that Nettie and Samuel finally tell Corrine the true story of the origins of Olivia and Adam. Corrine accepts the truth when Nettie reminds her of the day Corrine met Celie in town and the cloth she bought (now a part of a quilt). Corrine dies shortly after.

Celie resumes her letter writing, but now she writes to her sister instead of God. Shug is scandalized by Celie’s loss of faith in God as anything other than a masculine figure who ignores women and their pain. Shug shares her own take on God. She believes God “love admiration” (195) and believes that it “pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it” (195). The desire to be loved and admired is apparent anywhere one looks, from the natural world to people, and surely, Shug concludes, that must be because God made the world beautiful and extravagantly so. Celie struggles with this notion, even in prayer. Shug tells Celie that if the God her prayers conjures up is an oppressive and white man, Celie should instead “[c]onjure up flowers, wind, water, a big rock” (196). Celie is not yet ready to forgive God.

In her next letter, Celie writes to Nettie about Sofia finally coming home after eleven and a half years of servitude and the revolt of the women of the house. Shug announces one night that she is going back to Memphis, and Celie will be coming with her. Celie explains to Harpo how terrible he and his siblings were to her, and she tells Albert that nothing would be more welcome to her than his death when he tells her that she will have to leave over his dead body. Mary Agnes says she will be departing for the North to pursue her singing career. Only Sofia agrees to stay behind, both because of the terms of her parole and because she agrees to care for one of Mary Agnes’s daughters, a frail girl called Suzie Q. Sofia is also tied to Georgia by Eleanor Jane, who shows up at the house during this intense conversation.

When the day finally arrives for Celie to leave, Albert insults Celie, claiming her looks and poverty will never allow her to thrive. She is not fazed. She pronounces a curse on him, one that almost seems to flow from the life in the trees and rocks around her: All the abuse he heaps on her will come back on him. When Albert tries to strike Celie, something in the natural world—dust or God itself—intervenes. Shug pulls Celie into her car, and they leave.