Chapter 3.
“Us Each Other’s People Now”: Shared Trauma and the Holistic Value of Community in
Gayl Jones’s Corregidora and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple
Gayl Jones’s and Alice Walker’s respective portrayals of incest take significant
departures in representations of the protagonists’ struggle to find their place within a
female community. With Corregidora, Gayl Jones shares Walker’s assertion that
speaking hard truths, despite one’s lack of linguistic agency within a standard Englishdriven Western world literary tradition, must be continued through the African American
female narrative. Where the protagonists in both novels share a legacy of incest abuse
that initially structures that victim’s literary path, their individual stories become,
inevitably, intertwined with the abuse narratives of others: sisters, mothers,
grandmothers, great-grandmothers, cousins, neighbors, friends, and semi-anonymous
historical characters. In this way, instances of private trauma in the form of sexual abuse
break into the public realm, creating a shared trauma that finally becomes validated
within one’s empathetic community. As Mary Helen Washington writes:
If there is a single distinguishing feature of the literature of black
women…it is this: their literature is about black women; it takes the
trouble to record the thoughts, words, feelings, and deeds of black women,
experiences that make the realities of being black in America look very
different from what men have written.… and few, if any, women in the
literature of black women succeed in heroic quests without the support of
other women or men in their communities.1
Mary Helen Washington, “‘The Darkened Eye Restored’: Notes Toward a Literary History of
Black Women,” in Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism From
the Harlem Renaissance to the Present, ed. Angelyn Mitchell (Durham: Duke University Press,
1994), 446.
1
60
This community building extends beyond the confines of the literary page, as one can
barely peruse a critical piece written about contemporary African American women’s
writing without finding a reference to the main subject’s twentieth-century predecessors
and peers—i.e., Zora Neal Hurston, Nella Larsen, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, and Toni
Cade Bambara. Though Walker and Jones create, in Celie and Ursa, characters marked
and nearly destroyed by a legacy of incest abuse, their tales become interwoven with the
tales of other African American women within their daily lives. Not only do readers
learn of the individual struggles of several members within the novels’ African American
female communities, but also their stories are spoken to us through the African American
vernacular narrations of Ursa and Celie. While part of the female African American
literary tradition hinges on characters surviving despite the hostile community
surrounding them—think of Ann Petry’s The Street—both Ursa and Celie survive
because of their ties to the stories of the women around them—the matriarchal groups
that provide both a model for abuse resistance and a safe sounding-board for the
protagonists’ personal violations.
The female victims of physical and sexual abuse in both novels find solace and
strength in one another’s tales. Kai Erikson notes that trauma, despite its obvious
debilitating effects, works like a “common language” that unites its speakers. Those who
share the same past abuse seek solace in one another’s learned knowledge of the
violation. Further, Erikson writes, “Indeed, it can happen that otherwise unconnected
persons who share a traumatic experience seek one another out and develop a form of
61
fellowship on the strength of that common tie.”2 For both Celie and Ursa, the dialogue
that results from their abuse and the abuse of the women from their community connects
them in a world where men have tried to divide and conquer their groups; the positive
outcome at the end of the abuse narratives is the characters’ healing processes and their
reclamation of sex for pleasure.
Gayl Jones creates in Corregidora a way to depict problematic relationships
without framing them in a simple good or bad dichotomy. She notes that her novels do
place an “emphasis on brutality,” but she also portrays an “alternative to brutality, which
is tenderness.”3 This definition extends to encompass the complex ties within both
Jones’s and Walker’s novels, as each shows the multifaceted relationships that cannot be
fully encompassed within the two-sided notions of love or hate. Born in 1949 in
Lexington, Kentucky, Gayl Jones’s personal history is punctuated by tragedy and strife.
Though she was born into a poor working-class family, her mother enrolled her in the
local white high school so that she might have a greater educational opportunity. After
attending Connecticut College in 1971, she later earned an M.A. and D.A. from Brown
University. During this time, she was a young, prolific writer, publishing Corregidora in
1975 while she was still a graduate student. Other major works include Eva’s Man in
1976, and with a large break preceding their publication, The Healing and The Mosquito
were both published in the late 1990s. Jones’s personal life—though she claims she does
Kai Erikson, “Notes on Trauma and Community,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed.
Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 186-7.
2
Claudia C. Tate, “An Interview with Gayl Jones,” Black American Literature Forum 13, no. 4
(1979): 147.
3
62
not want to be known for her biography but rather for her writing4—is not without its
peculiarities. Reclusive since the 1980s, Jones is rarely seen or heard from today. On the
helm of the release of her latest novel in 1998, Jones was at the center of controversy
when police responded to her home because of a domestic dispute. Peter Manso remarks
on the fact that Jones’s career and work took bottom priority to the scandal surrounding
Jones’s marriage and the unusual events of this day.5 Upon the arrival of the police, the
couple threatened to kill themselves, at one point claiming they had turned on the gas.
When the police entered the home, Jones’s husband stabbed himself fatally in the neck.
Mirroring the complicated and violent portrayal of male and female relationships that
often occur within her novels, Jones’s life tragically mimicked the plight of Ursa
Corregidora and her volatile husband, Mutt. Noting Jones’s ability to mirror the
sometimes violent reality for African Americans, Roseann Pope Bell says of Jones’s
writing:
The subtleties, those refracted against historical mirrors, are the panoramic
palettes with which this young artist works. They include the cosmic
wonders suffered and enjoyed by all humans, but Jones’s imminent and
deft precision makes grief, indecision, disappointment, laughter, literal and
figurative hunger, orgasms, and blood mean something different when
they are experienced by Black people in the West.6
If it can be said that Jones highlights a universal truth in her depiction of the debilitating
forces of traumatic reenactment, so, too, can she create an experience that is uniquely
Peter Manso, “Chronicle of a Tragedy Foretold,” New York Times, July 19, 1998,
http://www.nytimes.com/1998/07/19/magazine/chronicle-of-a-tragedy-foretold.html.
4
5
Ibid.
Roseann Pope Bell, “Gayl Jones: A Voice in the Whirlwind,” Studia Africana 1, no. 1 (1977):
99.
6
63
relative to the traumatic force’s participant. Jones depicts this complex psychological
force within her achingly effective portrayal of Ursa.
Ursa Corregidora is the product of a matrilineal oral-tradition; she learns of her
ancestry through the stories of her mother (Mama), grandmother (Gram), and greatgrandmother (Great Gram). Great Gram and Gram were slaves owned by a Portugese
man named Corregidora whose stories begin in the South but not in the Southern United
States; they were slaves on a Brazilian plantation that forced them to do more than work
fields, as the common social practice in nineteenth-century Brazil was forced
prostitution.7 Though not directly a victim of the incest that hinders her family tree nor
was she systematically forced to sell her body for a master, Ursa inherits Gram and Great
Gram’s abuse psychologically and internalizes this cultural learning, jumping from one
unhealthy relationship to the next. So traumatized by the stories of her ancestors, Ursa is
incapable of cultivating loving friendships with other women and unable to find pleasure
in any sexual act. As Stephanie Li notes, “…the resistance of one generation becomes
the trauma of another. The abuse Great Gram and Gram suffered under Corregidora
becomes transposed across generations as these two women ultimately traumatize Mama
and Ursa through their suffocation narration.”8 This traumatic inheritance, though still
difficult to prove in formal psychological proceedings, is now recognized in trauma
theory as the negative results of a continually traumatized people. For example, Laura
Robert Edgar Conrad, Children of God’s Fire: A Documentary History of Black Slavery in
Brazil (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 129-30.
7
Stephanie Li, “Love and the Trauma of Resistance in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora,” Callaloo 29,
no. 1 (2006): 132.
8
64
Brown remarks that “post-traumatic symptoms can be intergenerational.”9 She uses
children of survivors of the Holocaust as an example but extends this definition to include
any group that is inevitably under the threat of experiencing trauma. As she notes,
“membership in that group means a constant lifetime risk of exposure to certain
trauma.”10 This could mean women, who, though they may never have been sexually
assaulted, are aware of the fact that it could occur as a member of the female population.
In particular, as we see with Ursa, the trauma is compounded by the fact that she has a
family legacy of abuse of which she is incessantly reminded, and she is a black woman
living in early twentieth-century America—a hostile time and place for members of her
“group.”
Ursa’s learned knowledge of Corregidora and the horrors he enacted upon her
family create a character with whom Ursa is both enraptured and trapped. At the same
time that she despises Corregidora for his rape of her Great Gram and Gram—fathering
both her grandmother and her mother11—she obsessively creates and replays in her head
the learned tales of his life. As a twenty-five-year-old woman in Kentucky, Ursa is a
blues singer married to a man named Mutt. In a current day reiteration of the problematic
dynamic that existed between Ursa’s Great Gram and Corregidora, Ursa and Mutt uphold
the negative aspects of their family history within their own relationship. Jones opens
Laura S. Brown, “Not Outside the Range: One Feminist Perspective on Psychic Trauma,” in
Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1995), 108.
9
10
Ibid.
11
Gayl Jones, Corregidora (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979), 10. All subsequent citations from the
novel are included within parentheses in the text.
65
with Ursa’s personal abuse at the hands of Mutt, whose jealousy consumes him until he
pushes Ursa down a flight of stairs. She suffers a miscarriage followed by a
hysterectomy that leaves her incapable of fulfilling her family’s desires for her to “make
generations” (10), which are Ursa’s family members’ words to her that have been
reiterated through their stories for all of Ursa’s life. We barely get the full story of Ursa
and Mutt’s tumultuous relationship before stream-of-consciousness evidential
information concerning the entire Corregidora family slowly begins to unfold. Like the
traumatic flashback Cathy Carutth describes in her book on trauma, Ursa experiences the
effects of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder after the initial abuse. What is different,
however, is that Ursa’s inability to recall Corregidora’s abuse of Great Gram, working off
of the stories she knows from her maternal relatives, is translated even looser into a
dreamy stream-of-consciousness, half-imagined dialogue. Caruth writes,
The historical power of the trauma is not just that the experience is
repeated after its forgetting, but that it is only in and through its inherent
forgetting that it is first experienced at all. And it is this inherent latency
of the event that paradoxically explains the peculiar, temporal structure,
the belatedness, of historical experience: since the traumatic event is not
experienced as it occurs, it is fully evident only in connection with another
place, and in another time.12
This connection with “another place, and in another time” is two-fold for Ursa, whose
trauma is induced by the trauma narratives of her great-grandmother and grandmother.
Where Ursa might attempt reconciliation with the truth of a traumatic history, she is met
with uncertainty as to the specifics of the original acts.
Cathy Caruth. “Trauma and Experience: Introduction,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory,
ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 8.
12
66
All of the women’s stories are intermingled throughout the novel, though Ursa
does not learn of her Mama’s story until she is much older. At her Gram and Great
Gram’s insistence, Ursa must “leave evidence” about the slave-holding practices they
both suffered, though the Brazilian government burned all documents of proof
concerning the inhumane acts (9). That is, she must continue this tradition of storytelling with her future offspring, lest the horrors of what occurred at Corregidora’s
plantation be forgotten. In many ways, Ursa’s narrative becomes evidence of the abuse
her family suffered or the sexual and physical trauma of her own life; moreover, Jones
creates Ursa as a mouthpiece for the shared traumatic experiences of black women
throughout history. As Keith Mitchell notes, “Ursa, as racialized archetype, undergoes
lived experiences particular, not to every woman’s life, but most certainly, in a historical
context, to black women’s lives. Regardless of time, place, or social condition, every
black woman has experienced black and white male patriarchal oppression.”13 Jones’s
women’s tales span continents, cultural divides, socio-economic status, and decades of
social change that did little to improve their lot. Ursa’s opening remarks note the
physical and mental abuse of her marriage: “I didn’t see him at first because he was
standing back in the shadows behind the door. I didn’t see him till he’d grabbed me
around my waist and I was struggling to get loose….That was when I fell” (3-4).
Juxtaposed with this violation is Great Gram’s abuse tale: “He would take me hisself first
and said he was breaking me in. Then he started bringing other men and they would give
me money and I had to give it over to him” (11). Without a break in the cycle, the
Keith B. Mitchell, “’Trouble in Mind’: (Re)visioning Myth, Sexuality, and Race in Gayl
Jones’s Corregidora,” in After the Pain: Critical Essays on Gayl Jones, ed. Fiona Mills and Keith
Mitchell (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2006), 161.
13
67
Corregidora women have kept the namesake that mars their existence while reliving the
events surrounding the initial abuse. As Joyce Pettis comments, “Ursa’s realization of
completed individuation depends upon her release from the dominating centrality of the
historical experiences of her Great Gram and Gram.”14 In essence, Ursa will only be able
to heal her own negative repetition of abusive relationships if she can see herself defined
outside the realm of the experiences that marred her family history. Though she is
connected to this process of slavery, rape, and incest, Ursa is not wholly defined by these
principles; this is the message it will take her decades to learn.
Outside of her family, however, Ursa only finds more negative reiterations of a
violent environment for African American women. Ursa’s neighbor, Cat, is the
headstrong savior who swoops in after Mutt injures Ursa and brings Ursa to live
temporarily in her home. We learn that she once stood up to a doctor when refusing to
get undressed and get on the examination table at his crass demands (21). In her former
marriage, she had the upper hand and also speaks “the same way in front of men as she
do women” (21). When Ursa stays with Cat, they discuss Mutt. Ursa says, “I said if that
nigger loved me he wouldn’t’ve throwed me down the steps.” Cat responds, “I know
niggers love you do worse than that” (36-7). Not only does this show Cat’s hesitance to
believe a man can love a woman without enacting violence against her body, but also it
points to a history of abuse within her own life. In one such instance, Cat reveals an
attempted assault by a white man for whom she was working as a maid in her younger
years. While his wife slept, he tried to grab Cat, stating, “A lot of you nigger women is
pretty” (65). As the strongest female character in the novel, Cat betrays her own fears
Joyce Pettis, “‘She Sung Back in Return’: Literary (Re)vision and Transformation in Gayl
Jones’s Corregidora,” College English 52, no. 7 (1990): 797.
14
68
through her admonishments to Ursa about men and love. She connects a man’s “love”
for a woman with a violent need to own, beat into submission, and control the female
body he desires to keep. For Cat, it would seem, there is no positive model for
heterosexual coupling.
Ursa soon discovers that both Cat and the teenage girl she sometimes keeps at
night while her mother works, Jeffy, are lesbians. In the middle of the night, while
sleeping in Ursa’s bed, Jeffy touches Ursa’s breasts (39). The next morning, Ursa
overhears Cat and Jeffy discussing what happened. Cat says to Jeffy, “I could’ve told
you she wouldn’t” (47). Though Jones uses a guarded language to describe what appears
to be a conversation between two homosexual women—one guiding and protecting the
other in the protocol of their group’s then underground sexual preferences—the dialogue
mimics the silence surrounding lesbian African America women in the early-middletwentieth century. Caroline Streeter calls the vague language Jones uses to discuss Jeffy
and Cat’s sexuality “black vernacular terms that are subtle and allusive—other characters
refer to their lesbian sexual practices by describing Jeffy and Cat as ‘that way’ and ‘like
that.’”15 While the main plot comprises ways in which unhealthy or violent heterosexual
relationships have all but destroyed its participants, the subtext underscores the fact that
there was little alternative to the heterosexual model. Cat and Jeffy had to be careful
about sharing their sexual preferences for fear of being ostracized in their community, so,
too, does Jones’s inclusion of their tale seem almost peripheral, as lesbian women,
especially black lesbian women, were forced to remain on the periphery of society.
Caroline Streeter, “’Was Your Mama Mulatto?’: Notes Toward a Theory of Racialized
Sexuality in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora and Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust,” Callaloo 27,
no.3 (2004): 779.
15
69
Ursa is so disturbed by what occurs at Cat’s house that she immediately returns to
stay with Tadpole, the owner of the club where she sings. One of Ursa’s traumatic
inheritances involves the knowledge that Corregidora’s wife also sexually abused the
female slaves. After Corregidora’s wife, as Great Gram relays, was shunned by her
husband, she began taking the women as lovers (23), becoming, in the end, another
source of sexual abuse for Great Gram. This tale has been internalized in Ursa to the
point where she does not trust anyone—male or female—and Cat and Jeffy’s lesbianism
only compounds this threat. Yet, there is also some indication that society has failed
Jeffy as a teenage African American girl. Jeffy, at a mere fourteen years old, is already
overtly sexually aware to the point of vulgarity. She says to Ursa, “I heard mama talking
bout women like that. Mess up their minds and then fuck up their pussy” (38). While her
mother, a single parent, is working evenings, Jeffy is either left alone or shuffled between
her home and Cat’s, who is a stand-in parent to the young girl. Jeffy is caustic, cynical,
and perpetuates the myth that female victims of abuse likely had a role in their own
exploitation. She threatens to tell Mutt where Ursa is staying (39). Not yet old enough to
understand the need for female solidarity and community, Jeffy reiterates the negative
remarks she hears from her mother.
This cycle of tearing down one another for the sake of enemy-making is
reinforced later in the novel by other female associates of Ursa. Between Sal Cooper,
Ursa’s female coworker who judges her based on her light skin (69), fifteen-year-old
Vivian who eventually cheats with Ursa’s new husband, Tadpole (87), and the women
from her hometown who believed Ursa was there to “take their husbands” (105), Ursa is
initially incapable of finding her place within the surrounding female community. She is
70
light-skinned, which makes her suspect with African Americans, while her singing puts
her on display for the lingering eyes of the men in town. If Ursa’s form is, as Sirene
Harb notes, like a “museum for the perpetuation of a past that Great Gram thinks is
dying,”16 then the knowledge of trauma that Ursa contains within her body and soul is
shared every night with an audience of potential violators. The women that judge her as
an outsider do not connect her abusive history with their own because of Ursa’s lack of
propriety even within her own family tale: she never experienced direct abuse at the
hands of Corregidora. As Elizabeth Yukins notes, Ursa is a “bastard protagonist” who
“struggle[s] within and against a pervasive sense of social and legal illegitimacy” because
she did not inherit anything from her father but a legacy of abuse that she also cannot
claim because she did not experience it firsthand.17 Ursa seeks shelter and guidance from
both the men and women in her community, but her status is so marginalized that she
retreats into herself in an inner dialogue that engages others in imaginary conversations.
So traumatized by the perceived threats of everyone in her life, Ursa retreats into
the traumatic memories of those who came before her rather than attending to the present.
She begins to imagine Mutt as her conversational partner in a scene where her memory of
him and her learned memory of Corregidora overlap. Ursa says to Mutt in her mind,
“Didn’t I tell you you taught me what Corregidora taught Great Gram.” She imagines
Mutt’s response: “I got a terrible memory. I kept asking you, but you never would tell
me…” (76). Even in the conversations she creates in her head, Ursa imagines Mutt
Sirene Harb, “Memory, History and Self-Reconstruction in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora,”
Journal of Modern Literature 31, no. 3 (2008): 122.
16
Elizabeth Yukins, “Bastard Daughters and the Possession of History in Corregidora and
Paradise,” Signs 28, no. 1 (2002): 223.
17
71
unwilling to listen, remember, or hear the traumatic memories she attempts to share.
Later, she dreams that she is being raped by Corregidora, who offers his sympathy for the
abuse she experienced at the hands of Mutt. He says, “What did Mutt do to you, baby?...
It looks ugly in there” (77). During this scene, the imaginary Corregidora asserts his
status as “father” while simultaneously sexually abusing Ursa. These violent overlapping
fantasies blur the lines between pain and pleasure. At one moment, Ursa is engaged in
consensual adult sex, but she retreats into a scene where she becomes the abused
daughter, taking in the memory of her Grandmother, who was both mother and sister to
Mama. Jones’s juxtaposition of the two men shows how Ursa’s knowledge of trauma
creates trauma within her present relationships. Ashraf H. A. Rushdy connects Ursa’s
failed sexual relationships to other contemporary African American relationships that are
marked by the knowledge of problematic historical relationships:
Jones focuses on the subject of desire as constituted historically in order to
show how both the spectacular and the hidden experiences of slavery,
especially the historical subjection of desire, operate in the formation of
contemporary African American subjectivity….She demonstrates how
historical forces continue to inform modern social relations…by dwelling
on the ways an ancestral slave narrative causes unhealthy deviations in the
psychic and sexual lives in one family descended from slaves.…”18
It is as if victims of abuse, or, as is true of Ursa, descendants of incest abuse who come
from a family heritage of slavery, are already marked by the time they reach sexual
maturation. Ursa feels doomed to repeat the cycles she learns from her matrilineal
lessons.
Ashraf H. A. Rushdy, “’Relate Sexual to Historical’: Race, Resistance, and Desire in Gayl
Jones’s Corregidora,” African American Review 34, no. 2 (2000): 274.
18
72
It is not just the women in Corregidora, however, that are affected by their family
narrative. If the historical problems that functioned to create dysfunction in early African
American families are perpetuated within modern and contemporary African American
families, then Jones views this legacy as just as problematic and pervasive for the males
in her story. Tadpole also has an incestuous story that affects his modern-day
consciousness. Like Ursa, his family heritage is of mixed race, and he tells of his
grandmother, who was a white orphan made to work in the fields with black people.
Tadpole says, “She was a little girl about nine, ten, ‘leven. My granddaddy took her in
and raised her and then when she got old enough he married her. She called him Papa.
And when they were married, she still called him Papa” (13). This complicated move
from daughter to wife and lover remains a part of Tadpole’s familial inheritance, yet he
finds the race factor—“One of the children came out black and the other one came out
white”—the most disconcerting and remarkable aspect of his tale (13). Unlike Ursa,
however, there are missing parts to Tadpole’s history. Though he has pieces of his
heritage, he tells Ursa, “They didn’t just sit me down and talk about it” (78). He does
learn that his father, who saved up money to buy land so “the generations after him
would always have land to live on,” was never able to claim what was rightfully his
because all evidence of ownership was torn up by courthouse officials (78). Like Ursa’s
personal stories, someone tried to remove evidence of Tadpole’s family history, property
ownership, and abuse; he is incapable of claiming both his literal and cultural inheritance.
In many ways, Tadpole’s desire to control Ursa’s singing voice the moment they get
married (68) points to his desire to reclaim, in even a small way, the propriety from
which he has been disallowed. He eventually resents Ursa’s heritage, as though she
73
somehow has more agency than him for her ability to at least tell the entire story of her
traumatic heritage.
Mutt also has a history built on complex patriarchal dynamics that hinder and
complicate his present relationships. His awareness of his ancestor’s stories resurface in
his unhealthy desire to control Ursa. Endlessly fearful that she is having sex with the
men that frequent the club where she sings (84), Mutt’s hysteria ranges out of control
until he permanently injures Ursa by throwing her down the stairs. Though Mutt does not
want to know his family history (150), he learns some tales despite himself. His greatgrandfather worked to buy freedom for himself and his wife, but when he got into debt,
the townsmen came to take his property from him—his purchased wife (151). Mutt says
his great-grandfather “just gone crazy after that” (151). Whether he has internalized his
great-grandfather’s reality to the point of reiterating an anxiety about losing one’s lover,
or if he merely perpetuates a patriarchal cycle of ownership he witnesses within his
contemporaries, Mutt clings to Ursa, abusing her physically and mentally, until their
relationship can no longer survive. As Mitchell notes, “Mutt’s actions challenge Ursa’s
mastery over her body and her voice, just as a slave master would summarily exercise
power over his female chattel.”19 It is almost as if Ursa can see no way around
perpetuating the same unhealthy master/slave dynamic within her current relationship,
and she certainly conflates Mutt with Corregidora in many of her imagined conversations
with the two men. When Ursa speaks of her female family members, she notes, “Their
survival depended on suppressed hysteria” (59). In many ways, the men in Ursa’s life
have attempted this same practice of suppression, as they are even less connected to the
19
Mitchell, “’Trouble in Mind,’” 158.
74
stories of their ancestry. They know only the worst sections of these horrific tales, and
they have no clear way of dealing with their traumatic inheritance. Their suppressed
hysteria manifests in violent enactments against those they purport to love. If Mutt’s
only real knowledge of his family is that they “were slaves” (150), then there truly is no
freedom in knowing one’s past. As Rushdy asserts, these familial tales are indicative of
the “anxiety and antagonism between believing in the impossible idea of a rootless
identity unburdened by historical memory and the equally impossible idea of an identity
wholly suffused with the past.”20 Finding the medium between the two extremes of
consciousness—knowing and understanding one’s past without accepting its
inevitability—is the key for all of these characters to create healthy relationships without
the weight of their ancestors’ and abusers’ experiences.
Ursa’s journey to uncover the few missing links in her traumatic narrative lead
her back home to her mother’s house where she learns the one story from which she has
been sheltered: the tale of her father and her birth. Ursa says to the imaginary Mutt, “…it
was as if my mother’s whole body shook with that first birth and memories and she
wouldn’t make others and she wouldn’t give those to me, though she passed the other
ones down, the monstrous ones, but she wouldn’t give me her own terrible ones” (101).
When Ursa returns home, she says to her mother, “What happened with you was always
more important. What happened with you and him.” Her mother responds, “Corregidora
is responsible for that part of my life. If Corregidora hadn’t happened that part of my life
never would have happened” (111). This conversation reveals the effect Mama’s
incestuous birth has had on her: No matter the trauma she experienced firsthand, her
20
Rushdy, “’Relate Sexual to Historical,’” 275.
75
marked ancestry defined and overshadowed, at least in her eyes, all subsequent traumas.
Unlike Ursa, Mama was able to “make generations” that would leave evidence of the
abuse the Corrregidora women suffered. At her mother and great-grandmother’s
insistence, Mama meets a man and conceives the baby she feels her “whole body knew it
wanted…knew it would have…” (114). It is as if her destiny was predetermined by the
path of both her mother and grandmother. Escape from their cycle was not an option for
Mama, so she gives birth to Ursa as a vessel for memory making. Like all of their
stories, however, Mama’s husband, Martin, turns on her after she shares the tales of
Corregidora with him. Martin recreates the abuse narrative and eventually objectifies
Gram by staring at her nude while she dresses (129) and by beating and stripping Mama
of her clothes, forcing her to walk the streets like a prostitute (121). As the story of
Mama and Martin unfolds, Mama reverts to the voice of Great Gram, falling easily into
another Corregidora story without faltering. Ursa says, “I stared at her because she
wasn’t mama now, she was Great Gram talking” (124). As Erikson notes, trauma is the
process of one’s consciousness being overtaken in favor of something “alien” that
“breaks in on you, smashing through whatever barriers your mind has set up as a line of
defense.”21 It is as if, in this moment, Mama’s own traumas are not merely replaced by
the traumas of her ancestors; instead, their experiences run parallel in an overlapping
narrative of the ways in which men have raped, abused, disrespected, shamed, tortured,
loved sadistically, hated, and left them. Mama’s traumatic past is no more near to her
than the learned histories of her relatives, as each of the women can only speak in a halfconscious level—at times, almost becoming the voice and hands of their abuser—when
21
Erikson,”Notes on Trauma,” 183.
76
they relay their tales. Mama speaks her pain and her mother and grandmother’s pain
interchangeably until Ursa is incapable of discerning one story from the other.
In many ways, the Corregidora women are constantly undermining their own task:
at the same time that they are trying desperately to erase the evidence of their mixed
blood, Great Gram being the only one with “coffee –bean” skin (60), Corregidora’s rape
of his daughter, Gram, and the eventual birth of Mama repeats this lightening process.
Though Ursa is not Corregidora’s daughter, she cannot help but notice the lightness of
her skin that still persists (60), a visual representation of her mixed ancestry. Now that
she has lost her ability to work toward a new lineage further removed from its horrific
past, Ursa feels Corregidora’s presence coursing through her. When she and Mutt marry,
she chooses to keep the Corregidora name instead of taking Mutt’s name (61). The part
of her that hates her namesake is also incapable of viewing herself any differently.
Consequently, the very women urging her to move on from the point in her heritage
where incest marked her existence are the very women that keep her story static by
revisiting incessantly their own histories. Ursa is bound to her community, despite
herself, and she needs these women to release her. Ursa must interpret their tales if she is
to crack the code of her own abusive relationships, as Great Gram and Gram’s powerful
recollections have overshadowed her own history. She is forced, instead, to repeat their
stories while forsaking her own tale. As Deborah Horvitz remarks, the Corregidora
women still identify as slaves, so they are psychologically enslaved.22 Mama, like Ursa,
remarks that she could never experience any pleasure with Martin, and her excuse was
Deborah Horvitz, “’Sadism Demands a Story’: Oedipus, Feminism, and Sexuality in Gayl
Jones’s Corregidora and Dorothy Allison’s Bastard out of Carolina,” Contemporary Literature
39, no. 2 (1998): 251.
22
77
that “they were in there” (130). Basically living under the same roof as Gram and Great
Gram, still hearing their stories every night, Mama’s ability to trust Martin is stunted
when her body plays host to all the tales that create her traumatic inheritance. Because
she does not tell Ursa her tale until decades later, she remains incapable of cultivating any
new relationships. Ursa, without the ability to make generations, has no one to collect her
own stories, so the psychological backlog that is her containment of Great Gram’s,
Gram’s, Mama’s, and now her own abuse render Ursa incapable of having a healthy,
loving, and sexually fulfilling relationship. It seems that the cycle will end tragically
with Ursa.
This community of abuse narratives, which begins decades before any of the
current characters were conceived, collides in the final scene when Mutt and Ursa are
reunited decades later. Both middle-aged and no closer to exorcising the historical
demons that captivate their contemporary consciousness, Ursa is still singing the same
violent, vaginal blues songs that she sang the night she met Mutt:
When I first saw Mutt I was singing a song about a train tunnel. About
this train going in the tunnel, but it didn’t seem like they was no end to the
tunnel, and nobody knew when the train would get out, and then all of a
sudden the tunnel tightened around the train like a fist. Then I sang about
this bird woman, whose eyes were deep wells. How she would take a man
on a long journey, but never return him. (146)
Before any of the abuse that occurred with Mutt, before Ursa married Tadpole, and was
nearly assaulted by Max, her boss, before Ursa even knew of the pain her mother
encountered with Martin, her songs decried the kind of violent longings she associated
with male and female sexuality. Mitchell interprets Ursa’s songs as a “screen” that works
78
to “conceal the deeper horrors of her matrilineal burden.”23 This may be true, but these
“deep wells” and “endless tunnels” in which she imagines men and phallic trains falling
and never returning also reveal Ursa’s strength to fight back; it is only that she is not fully
conscious of her abilities until many years into her adulthood. Up until the moment Mutt
returns and they go home together, Ursa does not know what she will do when she is
alone with him. Mutt, too, has been thinking about his past and how his traumatic history
affected his life. He recalls the grandfather whose wife was stolen from him and how he
would “eat nothing but onions and peppermint. Eat the onions so people wouldn’t come
around him, and then eat the peppermint so they would. I tried it but it didn’t do nothing
but make me sick” (183-4). Mutt believes his grandfather’s story to be his own. In many
ways, his sadistic desire to own and control Ursa’s body when she was his wife is his way
of reclaiming the wife his grandfather lost. It is not until Mutt learns that trying to repeat
his grandfather’s practices will only make him “sick” that he understands that the
repetition of history is not inevitable, necessary, or productive.
In the meantime, Ursa uncovers what it is “a woman can do to a man that make
him hate her so bad he wont to kill her one minute and keep thinking about her and can’t
get her out of his mind the next” (184). She realizes in a moment of clarity that it had to
be sexual—a “moment of pleasure and excruciating pain” (184). Ursa performs a sadistic
fellatio on Mutt; clamping her teeth, she stops just short of castration. Ursa realizes her
own role in the unhealthy nature of their first cycle together, but she also understands,
finally, the power she holds as both the one who can give and take away eternal pleasure.
Ursa says, “It was like I didn’t know how much was me and Mutt and how much was
23
Mitchell, “’Trouble in Mind,’” 159.
79
Great Gram and Corregidora—like Mama when she had started talking like Great Gram”
(184). Though it would seem her survival depends upon the ultimate forsaking of her
ancestor’s tales, Ursa finds the fine balance between containing and reinterpreting their
meanings. As Li comments, Great Gram’s “moment of supreme aggression and
empowerment” is the one aspect of the tale not shared with her offspring.24 Li further
connects Great Gram’s resistance against Corregidora as the reason she was forced to
leave the plantation, leaving an opening for the subsequent incestuous abuse of her
daughter, Ursa’s grandmother. In this way, Great Gram’s aggression, though not the
direct cause of Corregidora’s subsequent violation, is linked with her daughter’s abuse.25
Great Gram’s resistance comes full circle in the end when Ursa’s learned aggression from
Great Gram becomes the very thing that allows her to move forward into a life with new
sexual and physical agency. This cultural and historical purging, a near castration of the
male legacy that haunts both Mutt and Ursa, ends with a lyrical exchange. They state
their own rules for love in a bluesy narrative of statement and response:
MUTT: “I don’t want a kind of woman that hurt you…”
URSA: “Then you don’t want me.”
MUTT: “I don’t want a kind of woman that hurt you.”
URSA: “Then you don’t want me.”
MUTT: “I don’t want a kind of woman that hurt you.”
URSA: “Then you don’t want me…. I don’t want a kind of man that’ll hurt
me neither.” (185)
All of Ursa’s violent narration purges to cathartic ecstasy. Rushdy views Mutt
and Ursa’s reunion and reconciliation as a testament to Ursa’s use of the “past to
construct the present, of using an act of historical resistance to create the conditions for a
24
Li, “Love and the Trauma of Resistance,” 133.
25
Ibid.
80
contemporary love.”26 As Horvitz comments, this final act displays Ursa “consciously
working to understand and assimilate her history, rather than mindlessly perpetuating a
destructive, ‘inherited’ repetition compulsion.”27 Though this scene could easily be
interpreted as Ursa’s reverting to her role as subordinate—literally bowing at her
master—it is instead Jones’s tale of the complex meanderings one must take to heal from
a historical cycle of physical, mental, and sexual abuse. There is no black or white, good
or bad, route to the recovery from a traumatic past.
Certainly this same epic course to self-discovery, resistance, and agency is
explored in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, where the protagonist, Celie, finds her way
back from sexual abuse and a dysfunctional marriage to a triumphant reunion with her
family. Like Corregidora, the theme of community is still key to the narrator’s tale, but
unlike Jones’s novel, Walker creates a more readily affable bond between the women
who save one another over and over again. As Kathryn Seidel remarks, “One antidote for
contemporary Southern writers to familial degeneration is female friendship.”28
Illustrative of this premise is Walker’s novel that links one woman’s traumatic life, at
first a decidedly lonely existence, to the violent narratives of several women within her
local and global community. It is through their strength, compassion, and support that
Celie finds her literal place in life.
26
Rushdy, “’Relate Sexual to Historical,’” 285.
27
Horvitz, “’Sadism Demands a Story,’” 257.
Kathryn Lee Seidel, “Myths of Southern Womanhood in Contemporary Literature,” in The
History of Southern Women’s Literature, ed. Carolyn Perry and Mary Louis Weaks (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002), 437.
28
81
Alice Walker was born in Eatonton, Georgia, in 1944 into a family of
sharecroppers. Like Jones, Walker was given an early educational boost by her mother,
who enrolled her in the first grade a year early at age four. As a young girl, Walker was
permanently blinded in one eye when one of her brothers accidentally shot her with a BB
gun. She attended Spelman College in 1961 but later transferred to Sarah Lawrence
College, where she graduated in 1965. Active in the Civil Rights Movement, Walker
married Jewish civil rights lawyer Mel Leventhal in New York City in 1967. After
relocating to Jackson, Mississippi, hence making them the first legally married interracial
couple in the state, they received death threats from the Ku Klux Klan. After their
amicable divorce in 1976 (the marriage produced one daughter), Walker continued to
write and engage in activist work. Many of her earlier years of self-loathing due to the
unusual appearance of her eye influenced her later scholarship. In her essay, “In Search
of Our Mothers’ Gardens,”29 Walker writes about the lost black female voices of the
women that grew up in a time before there was an avenue or an outlet for their creativity.
In fact, an article Walker published in 1975 renewed interest in Zora Neal Hurston, as the
two come from similar backgrounds and explore many parallel themes of the African
American woman’s release from a debilitating marriage in favor of a spiritually and
sexually fulfilling relationship.30 The Color Purple, which was published in 1982, not
only was Walker’s greatest literary success, but also was later adapted into a film in 1985
Alice Walker, “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” in Within the Circle: An Anthology of
African American Literary Criticism From the Harlem Renaissance to the Present, ed. Angelyn
Mitchell (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 401-409.
29
James Robert Saunders’s 1988 article, “Womanism as the Key to Understanding Zora Neal
Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple,” details the
similarities between the two authors’ lives and literary themes.
30
82
and into a Broadway musical in 2005. She won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel in 1983.
Other works include her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), Meridian
(1976), and the short story “Everyday Use” (1973), which is frequently anthologized.
The opening lines of Walker’s novel reveal the near silence to which Celie has
been relegated. In rural Georgia, Pa, the man Celie believes is her biological father, rapes
her when she is in her early teenage years. He says, “You better not tell noboby but God.
It’d kill your mammy.”31 Celie’s only initial outlet is to write letters to God: “Dear God, I
am fourteen years old…. I have always been a good girl. Maybe you can give me a sign
letting me know what is happening to me” (1). This is where Celie’s journey from
traumatic silence, shame, and suffering to finding her voice and her place within a
matrilineal community begins. As Erikson notes in his work on trauma and community,
“To describe people as traumatized is to say that they have withdrawn into a kind of
protective envelope, a place of mute, aching loneliness, in which the traumatic experience
is treated as a solitary burden that needs to be expunged by acts of denial and resistance.
What could be less ‘social’ than that?”32 So it seems, Celie, limited by her lack of
educational and economic resources, a problem that is compounded by her race and
gender, will not have the linguistic capability to purge the traumatic effects of her rape.
Erikson, however, describes the positive aspects of shared trauma wherein members of
the same traumatic group feel separated and marked from the rest of society yet drawn to
one another as if to the center of the same sphere.33 As Celie’s story unfolds, her circle of
31
Alice Walker, The Color Purple (New York: Pocket Books, 1982), 1. All subsequent citations
from the novel are included within parentheses in the text.
32
Erikson, “Notes on Trauma,” 186.
33
Ibid.
83
friends grows until her personal strength depends upon the sharing of stories and
collection of traumas that lead its victims back toward a sense of security and place.
After Celie’s mother dies, and she is raped by Pa, she gives birth to a girl and a
boy. Those children are taken from her, and Celie is forced to move from her father’s
home to the home of her husband, Albert. For the most part, Albert is a nameless,
faceless figure about which Celie knows little to nothing. Celie refers to him as
Mr.______, a sign that he is no more connected to her by name than any other man, and
his perceived status as her master, owner, and controller warrants the formal prefix.
Recently widowed and raising his children alone, Albert initially desires Celie’s younger
and prettier sister, Nettie. At Pa’s insistence that he can only have Celie—claiming she
“ain’t fresh tho…. God done fixed her” (9)—Albert takes Celie home with him when she
is only nineteen. Like Ursa, Celie suffers a premature hysterectomy and is no longer able
to have children. The fact that she is described as not “fresh” by Pa, the man who both
creates this status and uses it as another way to demean Celie, cements Celie’s inactive
role in her own classification. After a short stint living with Albert and Celie to escape
the advances of Pa, Nettie is kicked out of the house by Albert, who is angry with her for
denying him. Promising that only death could keep her from writing, Nettie leaves town
(19). Celie never hears from her again for years and can only assume Nettie died.
Here begins Celie’s survival narrative—and her recording of others’ survival—as
she spends decades believing herself spoiled by the abuse that punctuated her young
existence. Writing to God throughout the years, Celie discovers the letters her sister has
been sending from continents away, which were kept from her by Albert, and thus learns
of her sister’s survival. Valerie Babb remarks on the unique use of a conventional
84
medium in Walker’s novel. Babb states, “The Color Purple is not only a novel in which
black women make an inhospitable male environment amenable to their growth and
development, it is also an epistolary novel in which black women take a form
traditionally inhospitable to oral cultures, the written word, and transform it, making it,
too, responsive to their names.”34 Without these letters to God—the silent father—
Celie’s story could not be heard. Especially considering Celie’s narrative as one
beginning with the inception of incest, one understands that her tale must be revealed in a
unique forum. Karen Jacobsen McLennan calls the secrets Celie reveals to God “too
shameful and unique to share in dialogue, too painful to utter.”35 This form becomes her
therapy, and it is through these letters that we witness the passing of time, Celie’s healing
process, and her eventual reunion with Nettie and her children.
Like Ursa, Celie’s sexual agency is stolen from her by her knowledge and
firsthand experience of the bad things men can do to women. Even the children she
conceives before the unintended hysterectomy are explained away as God’s babies (3),
another male father figure that plays a problematic role in Celie’s narrative. Though God
is her confidant, he is for Celie the silent partner that never speaks back. He is the entity
that contains her secrets but never responds or sends help. Failed by all of the men she
knows in life, Celie immediately recognizes her own ease around other women. She
says, “I don’t even look at mens. That’s the truth. I look at women, tho, cause I’m not
Valerie Babb, “The Color Purple: Writing to Undo What Writing Has Done,” Phylon: The
Atlanta University Review of Race and Culture 47, no. 2 (1986): 107.
34
Karen Jacobsen McLennan, ed., “Introduction,” in Nature’s Ban: Women’s Incest Literature,
ed., Karen Jacobsen McLennan (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996), 2.
35
85
scared of them” (6). The woman she notices as “the most beautiful woman I ever saw.
She more pretty then my mama” (7) is Shug Avery—Albert’s long-term lover whom he
was forbidden to marry at his own overbearing father’s wishes. Unlike Ursa’s visceral
repugnance toward what she perceives as lesbian advances from Cat, Celie is drawn to
the physical affection Shug offers to her.
Shug is described, similarly to Cat in Corregidora, as an outspoken woman, who
“talks like a man” (85). Celie is enthralled by Shug’s ability to speak against Albert
without fear of physical assualt: “What the matter with you, you crazy? I don’t need no
weak little boy can’t say no to his daddy hanging on me. I need me a man…” (49). As
Shug appears omni-sexual rather than homosexual—thus giving her nearly superhuman
abilities to seduce men and women alike—she is the first person to awaken any feelings
of arousal within Celie; this is the first steps to Celie’s healing. Though Ursa seeks and
cannot gain sexual pleasure for the entirety of Corregidora, Celie has feelings of lust the
moment she sees Shug naked. She says, “First time I got the full sight of Shug Avery
long black body with it black plum nipples, look like her mouth, I thought I had turned
into a man” (51). Where Jones creates a much more vague indication of homosexuality,
writing little more than an allusion to lesbianism,Walker notes the complex longings that
overcome Celie, though she herself does not understand the nature of her feelings toward
Shug. Daniel Ross connects Celie’s newfound eroticism via Shug to her path toward
selfhood. He notes, “Shug introduces Celie to the mysteries of the body and sexual
experience, making possible both Celie’s discovery of speech and her freedom from
masculine brutality.”36 Shug teaches Celie about her anatomy, which is something
Daniel W. Ross, “Celie in the Looking Glass: The Desire for Selfhood in The Color Purple,”
Modern Fiction Studies 34, no. 1 (1988): 71.
36
86
previously foreign to her. As Celie takes a mirror and places it between her legs, Shug
says, “It a lot prettier than you thought, aint’t it?” (82). Shug shows Celie how to
masturbate, which is a step toward Celie’s release from the shame she carries from
having her first sexual experiences attached to incestuous rape. It is also an escape from
the obligatory and dispassionate sex in which she engages with Albert.
Celie also finds solace in her friendship with Sofia, who is married to Harpo,
Celie’s stepson by Albert. When Harpo complains to Celie that he is incapable of
controlling Sofia, Celie responds, “Beat her” (38). Jealous of Sofia’s authority in her
own marriage, Celie wishes to knock Sofia down to the only place she has ever known
women to exist: as subordinate property to men. After a guilty conscience leaves Celie
feeling sick (41) and Harpo attempts to beat Sofia into submission to no avail, Sofia
leaves Harpo and returns to her strong, matriarchal family. Though arguably the
strongest character of all the women in Walker’s novel, Sofia is eventually captured and
nearly destroyed after she curses at the white mayor’s wife and is beaten by authorities.
Jailed with multiple injuries, Celie says, “When I see Sofia I don’t know why she still
alive” (91). Necessary to Celie’s survival story is the inclusion of all of the other
survivors she encounters in her life. While we know Albert’s dead wife, Annie Julia, was
subjected to physical and emotional abuse throughout her short life (127), and she died
without the chance for her own survival story, Sofia’s tale provides the alternative to this
model. Her equally traumatic encounters take her on a sad journey that eventually brings
her back home to her kin. Shanyn Fiske’s description of The Color Purple compares the
characters to varied pieces that connect into a quilt. Their individual stories depend upon
their links to one another, as their shared traumas create the greater story of their
87
combined, communal existence.37 Though Celie’s tale of silence begins with her Pa’s
warnings that she not tell anyone about her abuse, and her solitude grows when her sister
Nettie disappears without a word of correspondence, Walker’s slow weaving of all of the
women’s tales—Shug’s, Sofia’s, and others—slowly works the narrative back toward a
communal effort until Celie is overwhelmed with shared tales.
One positive effect of Sofia’s defeat at the hands of unjust town officials is Mary
Agnes’s assertion of herself as a woman of strength. As Harpo’s new lover and a visual
foil to Sofia’s heavy-limbed body, Mary Agnes’s diminutive figure fulfills Harpo’s
desires to play the dominant party in his relationship. Referring to her by the nickname
“Squeak,” Celie urges Mary Agnes to make Harpo call her by her real name (89).
Though she initially fights with Sofia, Mary Agnes is the first person to cry for her when
she hears of Sofia’s incarceration (91). In one of the most endearing depictions of
community, everyone from both sides of the complex relationship that involves Mary
Agnes, Harpo, Sofia, and Sofia’s new partner, known as “The Prizefighter,” along with
Shug, Albert, and Celie, works to find a way to get Sofia out of prison. It is Mary Agnes,
whose connections to the warden—a long lost uncle she remembers from childhood—
give her access and authority to speak about Sofia’s condition. Using reverse
psychology, she is able to get Sofia released from prison under work probation, but not
before she is raped by her own uncle. Denying his status as family, Mary Agnes says,
“He say if he was my uncle he wouldn’t do it to me. That be a sin. But this just little
fornication. Everybody guilty of that” (101). Even though the asking and the receipt of
her request brought trauma and shame, Mary Agnes risks everything for the sake of her
Shanyn Fiske, “Piecing the Patchwork Self: A Reading of Walker’s The Color Purple,”
Explicator 66, no. 3 (2008): 151.
37
88
lover’s ex-lover. Ross views Mary Agnes’s act as “an example of the kind of sacrifice
women must make in order to bind themselves together in a community that resists the
pressure of male domination.”38 Though Mary Agnes and Sofia were previously
enemies, Mary Agnes willingly gives herself as a “sacrifice” to save Sofia, which
suggests she views her life and Sofia’s life as having equal value. Upon her return home,
she stands and says to Harpo, “My name Mary Agnes” (102). If Celie’s selfhood
depends upon her sexual learning with the help of Shug, then Mary Agnes’s search for an
identity, though not without much suffering along the way, is directly connected to the
power she feels from helping Sofia—someone thought to be much stronger than she.
Her final order that she be called by her proper name cements her reclaimed identity—
something that triumphs despite the trauma of rape that elicited Mary Agnes’s bargaining
power in the first place.
Mary Agnes’s victimization at the hands of her uncle also now connects her to
Celie, who, as a survivor of incest abuse, does not immediately have the courage to share
her story. Alone with Shug, Celie tells how Pa abused her until all of the memories of
that time “all come back to her” (117). Celie’s repression comes to a head when she
allows herself to explore the psychological markers that expel the details of her abuse:
she remembers how her Pa would make her cut his hair after he raped her (116). This
memory is connected to the death of her mother and the subsequent loss of her sister. In
essence, Celie loses her family through a sexual violation of familial rules, death, and
absence. Just as Shug has worked to change Celie’s association with sexuality as
something forced and violent to something erotic and empowering, she creates new
38
Ross, “Celie in the Looking Glass,” 80.
89
concepts of family with the varied roles she takes up in Celie’s life. After Celie shares
her traumatic history, Shug puts her mouth on Celie’s breast. Celie says, “Then I feels
something real soft and wet on my breast, feel like one of my little lost babies mouth.
Way after while, I act like a little lost baby too” (118). When the two women wake up,
Celie says sleeping with Shug is “little like sleeping with mama…. Little like sleeping
with Nettie…. It feel like heaven” (119). Shug becomes for Celie a lover, a daughter, a
mother, a sister, and a god, covering all of the people Celie has been denied during her
hard life. Shug, who is estranged from her family as well, tells Celie, “Us each other’s
people now” (189). Not only does Shug make a statement on the nature of their
relationship—they are more than lovers—the language she chooses, spoken in the
traditional black vernacular, underscores the shared communication that marks both her
and Celie’s membership in a similar group. As Babb comments, “Traditionally, the
standard form of a language is used primarily to impose unity on the community which
employs it….however, this goal of social unity can deteriorate…and exclude [minority
groups] from the dominant group’s privileges.”39 In her use of the pronoun “us” instead
of “we,” Shug comments distinctly on the fringe dynamic of being black women in
America who engage in a lesbian relationship while simultaneously extending to include
one another as family. They have created the name and means toward how they will
interact with one another, and none of these rules require the validation of men or their
language.
All of the friends Celie gains—Sofia, Mary Agnes, and Sofia’s sisters—are the
extended members of the family Celie lost before she ever entered adulthood. Secondary
39
Babb, “The Color Purple,” 114.
90
to the indelible ties these women share are the various men who often act as shared
lovers: Albert sleeps with both Celie and Shug; Shug’s husband, Grady, eventually sleeps
with Mary Agnes; Sofia sleeps with Harpo, who later ends up with Mary Agnes and back
again with Sofia. Though none of these pairings represent a traditional long-term
monogamous relationship, they do serve to work backwards from the patriarchal model—
the male at the head of the household and as the leader over the family he creates, owns,
and controls—while creating an alternative to the traditional marital arrangement. In The
Politics of Survivorship, Rosaria Champagne asks, “For what exactly is a heterosexual
patriarch without a family to lord over?”40 The same could be asked in opposite, in that
there must be a defined family hierarchy in order for someone to hold the role of the
dominant head. Walker circumnavigates this concern by upsetting traditional familial
roles. Though it is Albert who keeps Celie from a relationship with Nettie, they
eventually become friends in the end, though they never again act as lovers. The more
time that passes in the novel, the more the relationships become less fixed. Even mothers
become stand-in parents for others’ children. When Sofia is sentenced to work for the
mayor’s wife for many years, her children are raised by her sisters and by Mary Agnes
and Harpo. After Sofia returns, however, Mary Agnes decides she must travel and sing,
so Sofia becomes the caretaker for Mary Agnes and Harpo’s daughter, Suzie.
Just when Celie begins to find a balance in her life, she and Shug uncover the
letters from Nettie that Albert kept for decades. Celie learns the story of Nettie’s journey
to a preacher’s house, where she became friends with him and his wife before embarking
on a missionary trip to Africa. Raising the couple’s adopted children, who Nettie knows
40
Rosaria Champagne, Incest and the Politics of Survivorship (New York: New York University
Press, 1996), 179.
91
to be Celie’s biological son and daughter, Nettie shares her years of triumph and tragedy
in Africa. Celie’s desire to know more about her children and her fear that their birth
spawned from incest will have tainted them (154) is short-lived because of the revelation
from Nettie that “Pa is not our pa!” (182). Though Celie’s rape at the hands of the man
she now knows is her stepfather is certainly still traumatic, the stigma of blood-mixing
and her fear of children that are “dunces” due to incest (154) are now dispelled. Along
with that knowledge is the fact that Celie’s stepfather is living in a house and on land that
belonged to Celie’s birth father. When Pa dies, Celie inherits the property. Moving her
now-successful pants business to the home she owns, a business that represents her new
ability to straddle and complicate sexual roles, Celie begins a relationship with the
changed Albert. They bond over their love for Shug—something they share and which
unites them—and Celie teaches Albert how to sew. He says, “When I was growing
up…I used to try to sew along with mama cause that’s what she was always doing. But
everybody laughed at me. But you know, I liked it” (279). This scene portrays Albert’s
relinquishment of his place as the head of the household. Sitting on the porch of the
house Celie owns, on the land she owns, and allowing her to teach him how to do a
traditionally female task undermines all of the previous reiterations of his masculinity—
the physical, sexual, and emotional abuse that mimicked his own father’s authoritarian
pattern. After an affair with a younger man, even Shug returns home to Celie, stating, “I
missed you more than I missed my own mama” (290). Once again the role of their
relationship has shifted, highlighting the fluid boundaries of the African American
community portrayed within Walker’s text.
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Nettie’s return home with her husband, Samuel, the widowed preacher, and
Celie’s children, Adam and Olivia, along with Adam’s African wife, Tashi, completes
Celie’s community. Even across oceans, as her family was stretched and moved away
from her, they all reunite on Celie’s land. On this day, Celie’s final letter to God expands
to include the following address: “Dear God. Dear stars, dear trees, dear sky, dear
peoples. Dear Everything. Dear God” (292). Where once the only person with authority
to hear and contain Celie’s thoughts was a silent father figure God, now her notion of a
ruling entity within the universe has transformed to include a community of powers that
are equal. Like “God,” “Everything” is capitalized, suggesting Celie’s newfound
religion, wherein she has agency to interact within nature as a part of a greater circle of
interconnected life. Stacie Lynn Hankinson views Celie’s transformation over the fortyyear span as indicative of her turn away from traditional Christianity in favor of a “more
pantheistic outlook [that] parallels her movement from feelings of oppression under the
domination of patriarchy into a sense of connectedness with others and selfacceptance.”41 Celie’s final reconciliation with her oppressor, Albert, represents another
positive outcome despite the negative and abusive dynamic that once existed between the
two of them. Where Ursa in Corregidora finds she has equal power within her
relationship with Mutt (this knowledge spawned from her revelation of the relational
connection between power and sex), Celie does not take Albert as a lover, but she finds
room for him within her fluid community of family and friends and the rules she creates.
Ross connects Celie’s transformed notions of a paternal God to her willingness to accept
the new Albert. He writes, “Matrifocality dissolves the hierarchies that perpetuate
Stacie Lynn Hankinson, “From Monotheism to Pantheism: Liberation from Patriarchy in Alice
Walker’s The Color Purple,” Midwest Quarterly 38, no. 3 (1997): 320.
41
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dominance and oppression. The loss of such hierarchies changes one’s perception of the
self in society and even in relation to God. Thus, it is only a short step from a belief in
woman’s independence from man to… a nonracial, genderless God.”42 Quite possibly, it
is Celie’s new religion that allows this breakthrough with the man she formerly hated, as
her dispelled belief in a singular, ruling God gives Celie the power to dispel the myth of a
singular, ruling husband.
In both Jones’s and Walker’s novels, two women begin an arduous and epic
search for release from their traumatic past. Ursa and Celie witness the abuse narratives
of their family members, their friends, and their fellow community members, and they
mingle their own stories with these inherited tales. Both protagonists must find a way to
reconcile the knowledge they contain about the problematic bonds between men and
women while allowing for pleasure and agency in their personal lives. Published a few
years prior to Walker’s novel, Jones’s Corregidora alludes to, but never gives life or
breath to, the silence surrounding lesbian women in the African American community.
Walker’s novel, however, picks up where Jones’s left off with a complex portrayal of
lesbian relationships that does not shy away from frank homosexual sexuality. In their
shared examination of the fluid nature of marriage, parenting, and family within the lives
of its characters, each novel contains a model for the matrilineal alternative to debilitating
patriarchal family units. Removing the stigma of their own incest ties also proves to be a
necessary process for both protagonists, as this shameful mark keeps them feeling
unworthy of affection. Incapable of making generations at all, Ursa creates, in Mutt, an
imaginary party privy to her memories and desires. Similarly, Celie can no longer have
42
Ross, “Celie in the Looking Glass,” 82.
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children, and after losing the children she did birth, she, too, must find an outlet for her
silence. For decades, her letters are addressed to a silent “God.” By the end of both
books, however, Mutt is no longer Ursa’s oppressor, sitting in on her scintillating
narrative of abuse, and God is no longer Celie’s complacent addressee, as she discovers
her own part in the “Dear Everything” that connects her pain and renewal to that of every
other living entity on this planet. Babb’s discussion of The Color Purple precisely equals
the truths of both Jones’s and Walker’s novels. She states, “The cycle of rape or
attempted rape, oppression, escape, and awareness that each sister becomes a part of is a
smaller representation of these elements within the course of black history....”43 Though
taking routes much departed to create their characters’ final catharsis, Jones and Walker
follow Toni Morrison’s model for escaping the “silencing” aspects of writing within a
white, English tradition: “Now that Afro-American artistic presence has been
‘discovered’ actually to exist, now that serious scholarship has moved from silencing the
witnesses and erasing their meaningful place in and contribution to American culture, it is
no longer acceptable merely to imagine us and imagine for us.”44 In their revisioning of
the traditional family unit, in their speaking taboo knowledge through the African
American vernacular, and in their linking of shared traumas in a literary-historical model,
certainly these writers have not only spoken the previously silenced spiritual, beautiful,
sad, longing, creative, complex, and emotive depths of the African American woman’s
soul, but also changed the rules concerning who can say what and when and how.
43
Babb, “The Color Purple,” 115-6.
Toni Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American
Literature,” in Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism From the
Harlem Renaissance to the Present, ed. Angelyn Mitchell (Durham: Duke University Press,
1994), 375.
44
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