The Color Purple

Letters to God

The Color Purple by Alice Walker was published in 1982. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award in 1983, and Walker was the first Black woman to win the fiction Pulitzer. Steven Spielberg made it into a film in 1985, and it became a Broadway musical in 2005 and a musical film in 2023.

The novel is told in letters. For most of the book they are written by Celie, a poor Black girl in rural Georgia in the early twentieth century, and addressed to God. Later come letters from her sister, Nettie, from Africa. Celie writes in the dialect she speaks, with little punctuation, and her voice grows as she does. The early letters are short and flat. By the end they are full of jokes, opinions and joy.

The book opens with a warning from the man Celie calls Pa: she had better never tell anybody but God. So she tells God.

Celie and Pa

Celie is fourteen. Her mother is sick, and Pa begins to rape her. She has two babies, a girl and then a boy, and Pa takes each one away. Celie believes he killed the first and sold the second. Her mother dies. Pa marries a young wife and starts to look at Celie's younger sister, Nettie. Celie tries to protect Nettie by making herself the target.

A widower with four children asks Pa for Nettie. Celie never names him. She calls him Mr. ___. Pa refuses Nettie and offers Celie instead, saying she is ugly but a hard worker and cannot have more children. He throws in a cow. Mr. ___ takes her.

Married to Mr. ___

On her wedding day, Mr. ___'s oldest son, Harpo, hits Celie in the head with a rock. Mr. ___ beats her the way one beats a child. Celie survives by going numb. She tells herself she is wood.

Nettie runs away from Pa's house to live with Celie. Mr. ___ makes advances to her, and she refuses him. He orders her out. Celie tells Nettie to find a minister's wife she once saw in town, a kind woman who had with her a baby girl who looked like Celie's daughter. Nettie promises to write. Mr. ___ swears that Celie will never hear from her. No letter comes.

Mr. ___'s sisters visit. One of them, Kate, buys Celie a dress, the first of her own, and tells her to fight. Celie says she does not know how. She says that as long as she can spell G-o-d she has somebody along.

Sofia

Harpo falls in love with Sofia, a big, strong, loud young woman who is pregnant with his child. They marry. Sofia does what she likes and does not obey Harpo. Harpo asks his father and then Celie how to make her mind. Both say to beat her. Celie says it out of envy.

Sofia fights back and wins, and Harpo shows up with black eyes. Sofia learns what Celie said and confronts her. She tells Celie that all her life she had to fight: her father, her brothers, her cousins and her uncles. She will not be beaten in her own house. Celie confesses she was jealous because Sofia does what Celie cannot. They make a quilt together and become friends. Sofia tells Celie she should bash Mr. ___'s head open and think about heaven later.

Harpo keeps trying to dominate Sofia, and eats until he swells, trying to grow big enough to beat her. Eventually Sofia leaves him and takes the children to her sister's.

Shug Avery

Celie has heard of Shug Avery for years. She is a blues singer, Mr. ___'s lover from long ago, and the woman he wanted to marry. Celie keeps a photograph of her and is fascinated. When Shug falls ill and no one will take her in, Mr. ___ brings her home. Celie nurses her. Shug is rude at first, then softens. She calls Mr. ___ by his first name, Albert, which Celie has never heard.

Harpo turns his house into a juke joint, and Shug sings there. She sings a song she calls Miss Celie's song, the first time anyone has made anything for Celie. When Shug learns that Albert beats Celie, she stays longer to protect her, and Albert stops.

Shug teaches Celie about her own body and that sex can be a pleasure, not something done to her. The two women become lovers. It is the first love Celie has known. Shug leaves to sing, and comes back married to a man named Grady, but her bond with Celie holds.

Sofia's punishment

Sofia, now with a prizefighter, visits the juke joint and fights Harpo's new girlfriend, Squeak. Later, in town with her children, she meets the mayor and his wife, Miss Millie. Miss Millie admires the children and asks Sofia to be her maid. Sofia says, "Hell no." The mayor slaps her. Sofia knocks him down.

The police beat Sofia nearly to death. She is sentenced to twelve years. In prison she washes laundry and does what she is told, because thinking about her own anger is the only way to stay alive. The family tries to help. Squeak, who is related to the white warden, goes to plead for Sofia. The warden rapes her. Squeak comes back and insists on her real name, Mary Agnes, and begins to sing her own songs. Sofia is moved out of prison to work as Miss Millie's maid, which is the job she refused.

Nettie's letters

One night Shug notices Albert taking letters from the mailbox. She and Celie find a bundle of letters from Nettie hidden in his trunk. They have been arriving for years.

Nettie's letters tell her story. She found the minister's wife, Corrine, and her husband, Samuel. They had adopted two children, Olivia and Adam. Nettie realizes they are Celie's children. The couple took Nettie with them as missionaries to the Olinka, a people in West Africa. Nettie describes the village, its customs, and the way the Olinka value boys over girls. She grows close to Olivia's friend Tashi. Later an English rubber company builds a road through the village and destroys it.

Corrine, noticing how much the children look like Nettie, suspects that Nettie is their mother and that Samuel is their father. She grows cold. Nettie and Samuel tell her the truth, and she believes them only shortly before she dies of fever. Nettie and Samuel later marry.

Samuel also tells Nettie a story he heard: their real father owned a store and was lynched by white rivals. Their mother lost her mind, and the man Celie calls Pa married her for her property. Pa is their stepfather. Celie's children are not her brother and sister.

Celie is furious with Albert. She wants to cut his throat with his razor, and Shug stops her. Celie also stops writing to God. She says the God she was writing to is a man, and like all the other men she knows, he does not listen. She writes to Nettie instead. Shug tells her that God is not a white man with a beard. God is in everything, wants to be loved, and is annoyed when people walk past the color purple in a field and do not notice it.