Indiana State University

Alice Walker's The Color Purple: Emergent Woman, Emergent Text Author(s): Lindsey Tucker Source: Black American Literature Forum, Vol. 22, No. 1, Black Women Writers Issue (Spring, 1988), pp. 81-95 Published by: St. Louis University Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2904151 . Accessed: 06/06/2011 22:10
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Alice Walker's The Color Purple: Emergent Woman, Emergent Text Lindsey Tucker

It was Tillie Olsen who spoke so eloquently of a "literary history

... dark with silences," of "mute inglorious Miltons: those whose

waking hours are all struggle for existence; the barely educated; the illiterate; women" (6, 10). Yet writing is more than an act of bringing ourselves into existence; it also determines the way we are shaped. Women's self-creation is influenced, impeded, constrained by language that has embedded in it the codes of patriarchal culture. For the black woman writer, the search for voice-the rescue of her subjectivity from the sometimes subtle, yet always pervasive, dictates of the dominant white male cultureis even more problematic. Alice Walker, aware of black women as a particularly muted group, has addressed herself in much of her work to the problem of the black woman as a creator.' In her "womanist" prose work In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens, for example, she describes those "grandmothers and mothers of ours ... not Saints, but Artists; driven to a numb and bleeding madness by the springs of creativity in them for which there was no release" (233). "Perhaps," Walker continues, "she sang ... perhaps she wove the most stunning mats or told the most ingenious stories of all the village storytellers. Perhaps she was herself a poet-though only her daughter's name is signed to the poems we know" (243).There is no release for these mothers, but their hopes lie in the abilities of the artist-daughters who will be able to enunciate the experiences and feelings of their
Lindsey Tucker is Associate Professor of English at the Universityof Miami in Coral Gables. Among her publications is the book Stephen and Bloom at Life'sFeast:AlimentarySymbolism and the Creative Process in JamesJoyce's Ulysses (1984).
Black American Literature Forum, Volume 22, Number 1 (Spring 1988) ? 1988 Indiana State University

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maternal ancestors. However, the journey back to the mothers necessitates the creation of a history that Western humanistic tradition has denied the black woman. Historians, says Walker, are the enemies of women, especially of black women; what history there has been is "a history of dispossession" (143). What the black woman artist must do, then, is to create a history for herself by first re-possessing the past. She must create out of what was not taken from her, about which there has been nothing written, and fashion, from these sources, an authentic discourse-her own experience in her own language. While Walker has suggested that the development of the whole individual is related to the expression of language in portions of earlier works such as Meridian, "Everyday Use," and "Really, Doesn't Crime Pay?", The ColorPurple represents a more explicit turning toward the question of the making of a text by a black woman. With this work, Walker has created a truly modernist text; that is, a text that manifests itself as an artistic production in which language is essential to the shaping of vision. She has created a text that shows language as power and has also demonstrated through this work what the nature of black women's discourse might be. Since a discourse is an enunciation that requires a speaker or narrator, and a listener or reader, the use of the epistolary form is especially effective. First, it sets up within the smaller (con)text two speakers, Celie and Nettie, who are also the addressees. Their texts combine to make a larger text in which we, as readers, view the disruption between speaker and listener (Albert appropriates Nettie's letters to Celie) and the ways in which patriarchal society appropriates black discourse (Celie can only write to God, who, as a white male listener, is ill-equipped to hear what she has to say). The larger text displays the weaving of more than one woman's voice and demonstrates the means by which women have been silenced and their linguistic powers appropriated. Second, the epistolary form is effective because it has been a convention used mostly by women. Josephine Donovan describes it as a "semi-private" genre, used primarily by women because of their inferior education and because of the fact that such writings were not expected to be published. Less used by males, who were exposed to a classical education and whose writing style was patterned after classical models, letter writing was a means of describing domestic life, and was more informal, artless (Donovan 212-13). Celie, sexually violated and barely literate at the age of fourteen, has only her letters to God as a means of giving vent to her pain. But the fact that she is impelled to articulate her

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experiences is Walker's way of showing the need for language. Perhaps Celie is saved from that "numb and bleeding madness" because she is able to write. Besides the use of the epistolary form, there is another narrative strategy that seems to influence this novel, albeit indirectly. That is the slave narrative, an important component of black literary tradition because, as a mode of discourse in which the first-person narrator becomes central, it helps to re-possess subjectivity by means of the "I" or, as Susan Willis expresses it, "to wrest the individual black subject out of anonymity, inferiority and brutal disdain" (213). Another key to Walker's technique can be found in an interview with Mary Helen Washington in which Walker describes three types of black woman: first, the suspended woman, characterized mostly by immobility; second, the assimilated woman, a woman "still thwarted," ready to move, but without real space to move into; and third, the emergent woman, a woman "making the firsttentative steps into an uncharted region" (213, 214). In The Color Purple Walker seems to embody this concept in a text which actually moves from suspension and assimilation through to emergence: the two sisters, separated for years, first write in a vacuum; yet in spite of their inability to communicate, their letters-those Celie writes to God, those Nettie writes to Celie (withheld by Albert), those Celie writes to Nettie (returned from Africa unopened)-eventually comprise an emerging black woman's text containing within it several voices. Two notable features strike us as we scan the novel's first page. We see that Celie's letter is preceded by an italicized injunction:

"You'd betternot never tell nobody but God.It'dkillyourmammy"

(3). These words, uttered by the presumed father who is also the rapist of his daughter and who has twice impregnated her, establish not only the primacy of a male text, but also convey the essence of patriarchalrepression-a silencing of the young Celie that leaves no recourse but communication with a transcendent white male deity. Even the rape is characterized by silencing. As Celie describes it, "Then he push his thing inside my pussy. When that hurt, I cry. He start to choke me, saying You better shut up and git used to it" (3).2The second part of the father's injunction-"It'd kill your mammy"-sets up another patriarchal silencing, namely the separation and linguistic isolation of mother and daughter by creating sexual jealousy between the two, resulting in the severance of important female bonding.

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So Celie begins her letters to God, sets up a discourse with an absent presence. Since Derrida, we have become aware of the tendency of Western consciousness to logocentricity, to the establishment of an absolute Word, which itself suggests a transcendental signifier, one established prior to language. God still performs this function, and Celie is naive when she says, "Long as I can spell G-O-D, I got somebody along" (18). But as she soon learns, at least on the instinctive level, if her text, her creation of selfhood, is to proceed, the male text of the deity must be overturned and rewritten in female terms. First, Celie must learn the essential activity of naming, for naming is a means of having power. Yet as Mary Daly has expressed it, "Women have had the power of naming stolen" from them; "we have not been free to use our own power to name ourselves, the world or God" (7-8). Celie needs to be able to name in order to establish selfhood. For example, she is unable to name male figures. She refers to her father as "Him," and the capitalizing of his name aligns him appropriately with God. Albert is referred to as
Mr. ,and even Samuel, the kindly reverend and stepfather . The text to her children, is designated as the Rev. Mr.
_

draws attention to the fact that, for Celie, all men are nondifferentiated forces that exercise power over her, and their names are reduced to an appropriate semiological (and phallic) line. When Shug Avery first mentions Albert by name-and it is significant that she is the first woman to do so-, it takes Celie a moment or two to realize who Albert is. Celie's object status is evident in the beginning when she is given to Albert in place of Nettie, whom the father is reluctant to surrender; she is also a substitute for Albert's dead wife and a substitute for Albert's true love, Shug. Moreover, she is handed over to Albert as if she were a cow. We might mention again the now well-known connection that Claude Levi-Straussobserves between kinship systems and their means of communication, the fact that marriage is "a kind of language, a set of processes permitting the establishment, between individuals and groups, of a certain type of communication" (61). Women like Celie are the medium of exchange: a kind of word, circulated in place of words; objects signified, not signifiers. Celie's problem, then, is how to establish her own text against those dominated by male perceptions, which impose on Celie in a number of ways. Male texts have already consigned the mothers to be victims. When speaking of her mother's death, Celie makes a rather strange observation about "trying to believe his story kilt

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her" (7). "His story" may, on one level, refer to the father's rape of Celie and his denial of it to his ailing and jealous wife, yet Walker may intend for us to take the line another way, as a reference to the fact that Celie's mother, ill from excessive work and childbearing, has tried to fit the patriarchal script of the submissive wife with no voice and no power. Another "story" of the father is that Celie is loose, "evil"-certainly a projection of the old patriarchal text whereby all women are either virgins or whores. When the father hands Celie over to Albert, he concocts another false story about Celie: "She tell lies," he says (10). This seems a strange accusation to make of a helpless girl; what it really does is attempt to offset Celie's own story-that of the rape. So the true text begins with what is, to the father, a lie. One interesting commentary on the female creative process relates to Celie's inability to menstruate. This condition has apparently occurred after her two pregnancies. While the condition can be explained as an hysterical symptom, it also suggests, on a metaphorical level, pregnancy, and indeed Celie is pregnant with her own story. If autobiography is a self-mothering, then Celie's body language bespeaks a gestation period, a condition necessary to the creation of an identity which will come into being through her letters. Celie will offset the silencing and suppression by writing her self. As Helene Cixous urges, "Write yourself. Your body must be heard." She continues: "To write. An act which will not only 'realize' the decensored relation of woman to her sexuality, to her womanly being, giving her access to her native strength; it will give her back her goods, her pleasures, her organs, her immense bodily territories" (880). In order for Celie to "write herself," however, she needs an image, an objectification of the female to counter the victim-figures like her mother, and the dominant male figures of Albert and her father. Shug Avery serves that function. When Celie encounters Shug, it is firstas a word, then as a picture supplied by one of the many helping females of the book. As the central figure of Celie's narrative, Shug refuses in textual terms to be signified. She has fought to avoid becoming the victim her mother has been. Furthermore, as Albert's father says, "Nobody even sure exactly who her daddy is" (50), and this lack of a father is a refutation of patrilineage, which is, after all, only a linguistic construct.4 What Shug possesses instead is a freedom which has always been involved with mobility and sexuality. In fact, Shug's sexuality suggests that untranslatable French word jouissance, an experience beyond pleasure, beyond orgasm, not phallocentric but concentric. Like Shug herself, the word refuses to "be displaced

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into another language's 'equivalent' (Cixous 882). Shug's behavior represents, in fact, a disturbing state of affairs to the various patriarchal figures that preside in the early pages of the book. It even becomes the subject of the minister's sermon. As Celie puts it, "He take her condition for his text" (40). This "text" involves the usual pejorative language, the preacher referring to Shug as "slut, hussy, heifer and streetcleaner" (40)-yet these terms do not explain or describe the character whom the reader gets to know. One way Walker helps the reader to perceive Shug differently is through the use of song, which is a kind of semiology or subtext. Addressing the problem of creativity for black people, since their means of expression have obviously been denied them, Walker asks us to consider "what might have been the result if singing, too, had been forbidden by law. Listen to the voices of Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, Roberta Flack, and Aretha Franklin, among others, and imagine those voices muzzled for life" (InSearch 234). Walker often speaks of song in connection with the making of art, and it is not accidental that one of the dominant figures of The Color Purple is a singer. But song is more than an art form; it is also a subversive text. Shug's song, for example, is described by Celie as being "like what the preacher tell you its sin to hear" (48). Song is also a means by which Shug does battle with Albert's father, the archetypal patriarch. During the old man's visit (he does most of the speaking while the women remain silent), Shug can be heard humming inside the house. What she pits her song against is the old man's categorizing of her deficiencies: "She black as tar, she nappy headed. She got legs like baseball bats" (49). Song also plays a role in the development of Celie's self-image, for as she combs Shug's hair one day, Shug makes up a little song which later becomes Celie's because, Shug says, "she scratched it out of my head when I was sick" (65). For Celie, the song is importantbecause it indicates that she has been part of the creative process: "First time somebody made something and name it after me," she says (65). In the undermining of the rigid signifier-signified relationship, Celie has somewhat broken free from being only something signified to being more of a creative participant, and hence a kind of signifier. A minor character who first appears as "Squeak" serves as another example of a woman liberated through song. In the beginning of the story, she is silent, submissive. Her only claim to a positive identity is through her body, her yellow skin, which creates her as a more sexually, racially, and hence socially

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acceptable object: "honey colored curly hair ... cuteness" (220). Furthermore, she has been named by Harpo who, Celie observes, "coo at her like she a baby" (74). She only becomes a real individual when she decides to help her "rival" Sophia get out of jail. (Since a rivalry exists only when the male is the central figure, the establishment of female bonding has the effect of nullifying that rivalry and uniting everyone.) In her attempt to help free Sophia, Squeak is raped by a white sheriff, who is really her uncle. Her white identity is turned against her, or, to put it more accurately, this identity is shown to be a source of usurpation and violence-a text imposed on her. Furthermore, when she returns home, she insists on telling her story. Her words to Harpo,"Shut up Harpo.... I'm telling it" (83), already indicate a change in her. The rape has separated her from a false identity, while her utterances about ither story-create a new identity for her, one that serves to unite her with her family. Walker enforces this new identity by having her declare: "My name Mary Agnes" (84). It is after this experience that Mary Agnes begins to sing. Not surprisingly, Shug serves as the source of her first songs, but soon Mary Agnes is making her own songs. And for at least one of these, her own body becomes a creative source, nicely exemplifying Cixous's words, "Text: my body-shot through with streams of song" (882):
They calls me yellow like yellow be my name ... But if yellow is a name Why aint black the same Well, if I say Hey black girl Lord, she try to ruin my game (85-86)

In the above passage black and yellow are signifiers created by a white patriarchal world that would impose hierarchies of worth based on color and sex appeal. ButMaryAgnes is able to deny both her nickname and her "color" name, thereby creating a new, authentic text of her self. Besides song, Walker incorporates into her narrative another art form that also becomes a text. Spinning, sewing, and weaving have long been associated with women, but less with art. Lately, however, Walker and a number of feminist critics have begun to point out that many of the so-called decorative arts are devalued, much like letter writing, because they tend to be associated with women.

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Quilting in particular operates as a rich metaphor for Walker because it involves the making of a useful object from material which is customarily regarded as worthless: scraps and throwaways.5 Yet what can be created out of these worn bits and pieces of cloth is a truly beautiful yet functional work of art. The beauty of the art work comes from the fact that the scraps are pieces of clothing which have belonged to individuals, and hence carry a story with them. Speaking of a quilt that hangs in the Smithsonian with a note designating it as the work of "'an anonymous Black woman from Alabama,' Walker reflects on the fact that the woman was "one of our grandmothers-an artist who left her mark in the only materials she could afford, and in the only medium her position in society allowed her to use" (In Search 239).6 That quilting is related to discourse is suggested by the fact that text has for one of its meanings 'fabric.' Also, Walker associates quilting with discourse in "Everyday Use." In this story an old family quilt, pieced by a grandmother from scraps that exemplify family history, becomes the center of a struggle between a mother and her two daughters. One daughter, Dee, has denied her heritage, the house of her childhood, even her mother and her "black" sister Maggie, for a new, Africanized, yet basically white middle-class, identity. Also linked to the question of her identity is language. The mother comments about Dee: "She used to read to us without pity; forcing words, lies, other folks' habits, whole lives upon us two, sitting trapped and ignorant underneath her voice" (50). The daughter has, without realizing it, become appropriated herself, and seeks to impose on her mother and sister the same appropriated discourse. When Dee returns home to claim the family quilts so that she can hang them on her walls and in this way celebrate her "heritage," the mother rebels, recognizing the crucial difference between lived heritage and the dissociated, artificial kind (the daughter Maggie can create her own quilts), and rescues the special quilt for Maggie. Dee's final admonition to Maggie to make something of herself (59) is ironic. For Walker, the "making something of oneself' is here to be taken literally;one is composed of bits and pieces of family history, the stories of the mothers. Consequently, Walker associates her own writing of The Color Purple with quilting: "I bought some beautiful blue-and-red-andpurple fabric, and ... a quilt pattern my mamma swore was easy
.... My quilt began to grow. And of course, everything was

happening. Celie and Shug and Albert were getting to know each other" (In Search 358). In the novel, it is not Shug but Celie who is the practitioner of the art of needlework. Sewing for Celie begins,

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as it does for most women, as a necessary activity; but it takes on deeper meaning as it objectifies bonding. For example, as a powerless and abused fourteen-year-old, Celie embroiders the name of her girl child, Olivia, into her diapers and thereby not only manages to maintain her connection with the child-to "author" her-but also her power to name her. Sewing is also involved in the establishment of a genuine bond between Celie and Sophia. Out of jealousy, Celie has supported Harpo's attempts to impose a patriarchal form of rule over his household, and when Sophia discovers Celie's betrayal, she returns Celie's thread and the curtains Celie has made. From these curtains, however, will come the first quilt, the piecing of it symbolizing female bonding, sisterhood, and a mutual commitment to Sophia's equality in her
marriage.

Another instance in which quilting is connected to bonding occurs during a visit from Albert's brother. The brother is a second emissary from the patriarchy. The first has been Albert's father, and through his appearance it becomes clear to us that Albert is also a victim of the patriarchal family system, since he has submitted to its dictates (his father has forbidden him to marry Shug, mainly because her paternity is not clearly established, while her erotic and freedom-loving nature has always been a threat).When Albert's brother Tobias arrives to dissuade Albert from living with Shug, his argument is established through an attempt to stir up rivalry between Celie and Shug, whom he calls "Queen Honeybee" another patriarchal put-down (50). Throughout his visit, Sophia and Celie work on a quilt. Clearly, the quilting is a defense or, rather, a kind of affirmation of Shug, who herself now gets interested in it: "How you sew this damn thing?" (51), she asks Celie. As the brother leaves, Celie observes, "I see myself sitting there quilting tween Shug Avery and
Mr. . Us three set together gainst Tobias and his fly speck

box of chocolate. For the first time in my life, I feel just right" (52). The quilt, a work that Celie and Sophia have begun earlier, is a pattern appropriately called "Sister's Choice" (53).! Needlework is also the means by which Nettie uncovers the proof of Celie's maternity. Having become intrigued by the quilting of the Olinka, the children's adoptive mother decides to begin a quilt, and in hunting for scraps for it, Nettie comes upon the material that Corrine had purchased when Celie and the adoptive mother met years before. The fabric becomes the means of convincing Corrine

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that Nettie is the children's aunt and not their real mother, and also the means of destroying her suspicions about Nettie. Celie's most remarkable creation with her needle is her pants. These are truly a product of the imagination, a product of both female consciousness and female economy, and they are fashioned for individuals so as to encompass both their physical and emotional needs. The first pair of pants that Celie makes, however, is at the suggestion of Shug, who is at a loss to see how Celie manages "plowing in a dress" (124). While functionality, "everyday use," is maximized, and pants making becomes a profitable outlet for Celie's enormous but mostly unrecognized energies, pants also suggest mobility. Beyond the need for more sensible working clothes, pants have always represented a freer form of clothing, one usually forbidden to women. It is no coincidence that Celie turns her art into an enterprise only after she herself has been mobilized-has moved out of Albert's house and up to Memphis to live with Shug. Thus, Celie's pants are associated with freedom and movement-all kinds of movement. They become part of Celie's text when she signs a letter to Nettie:
Your Sister, Celie Folkspants, Unlimited Sugar Avery Drive Memphis,Tennessee (182)

Her creativity is seemingly unlimited, born out of and nurtured by Shug's faith in her. Her new home on Sugar Avery Drive is free female space, a space that bears the signature of Shug. Walker has described The Color Purple as a historical novel: "My 'history' starts," she says, "not with the taking of lands, or the births, battles, and deaths of Great Men, but with one woman asking another for her underwear" (In Search 356). Shug, as the dynamic essence of textuality, has helped create that history, first by getting Celie to articulate the incest incident and her early life with Nettie but, more importantly,by her discovery of the theft of Nettie's letters by Albert. Even the discovery is made in terms of language. To manipulate Albert, "Shug talk and talk," Celie says (104). The theft is such a serious one because at the very least it amounts to a severing of the bonds of sisterhood in both emotional as well as linguistic terms, and also because Celie's recovery of Nettie's letters introduces a second major text. In their early years together, both Celie and Nettie have been drawn to books and language, for, as even Celie knows then, "us know we got to be smart to git away" (11). She seems to understand

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that language and mobility are related. Indeed, Nettie's linguistic aptitude has enabled her getaway from the father, from Albert, and finally, from America. Her years in Africa are not, however, an escape from oppression, for she discovers a history of white exploitation and the existence of a gender bias that transcends race. Nettie's letters, despite some technical problems I shall discuss later, add substantially to the depth and variety of the entire novel, for in them Nettie reveals a world beyond the limited one that Celie knows. They take Celie out of her rural environment and help her to gain an awareness of African life, of a land where blackness carries multiple images, where villages suffer tragically from white exploitation, and where women submit silently to male oppression. To her description of her travels, Nettie also adds other stories that become part of a larger text. Not surprisingly, she brings to her letters her own reading about Africa-a black woman's view. A new "reading" of the Bible comes to Celie from Nettie too. Nettie discovers for Celie that the Bible is a black text: "All the Ethiopians in the bible were colored.... it is perfectly plain if you pay attention only to the words," she tells Celie (113). Nettie also relates the "story of the roofleaf," a kind of creation myth which unfolds a spiritual, albeit different, version of God. Like all creation myths, the telling of the original event-here a violation of ecological a ritual act that has become sacredness and its consequences-is the basis of the Olinkas' worship of the roofleaf. Their reverence for this essential vegetation is understood by Nettie, who writes to Celie, "We know a roofleaf is not Jesus Christ, but in its own humble way, is it not God?" (131). It should be noted that Walker has carefully structured the introduction of these different texts. For example, after the discovery of Nettie's letters, Celie's epistolary voice recedes, and seven of Nettie's letters are given in sequence. These are followed by three of Celie's that explain the struggle that she and Shug have undergone and the closer relationship that has emerged (Shug now sleeps with Celie, for example). This is also the time when Celie creates her first pair of pants, and the making of the pants accompanies the reading of the letters. More of Nettie's letters follow. These relate the roofleaf story and Nettie's life with the Olinkas. Most important in these pages is the emergence of a re-vision of the sisters' own family story. Nettie has learned from Samuel the circumstances surrounding his adoption of Celie's children and the fact that Celie's "father" is, in truth, her stepfather. This discovery, disturbing as it is for Celie, has positive ramifications. First, it removes the stigma of incest from Celie's

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children. Second, it symbolizes the diminution of patriarchalpower. Third, it serves to mobilize Celie. It is at this juncture that Celie-like so many of the other women in the novel who go off on journeys and attain new freedom and/or Albert and goes to live in strength from the experience-leaves Memphis. Celie's words to Albert, "It's time to leave you and enter into the Creation" (170), are particularly significant. "Creation" seems to refer to an almost cosmogonic rendering of Celie's world; it suggests the creation of a whole woman in place of the numb, frightened, servile creature that has inhabited the early pages of the book. It also signals the trip to Memphis where Celie's business will originate. And these important creative awakenings are accompanied by another important textual transformation,as Celie ceases to address her letters to God and begins to address them to her sister. With this change, the sisters become both writers and addresses, women speaking to one another. While the function of Nettie's letters seems clear, the letters themselves have given some readers problems. After "listening" to Celie's voice for so many pages, readers are wont to find Nettie's language dull, devitalized, too correct. And her letters are long. We might ask ourselves if Walker has overextended herself, whether the strategy of weaving the two sisters' voices into one fabric fully succeeds. Perhaps, however, we are supposed to find Nettie's letters less successful. For one thing, they are written in "white" missionary language. Metaphorically speaking, Nettie wears her language much like she wears Corrine's clothing-without total authenticity or comfort. In spite of a new home, a new career, and a new self, at the end of the novel, Celie has held onto one precious possession, her language. Although urged to become "educated," to learn to talk as the books do, she refuses to change her speech patterns by submitting to white language. "Books," she says, have "whitefolks all over them, talking bout apples and dogs.... Pretty soon it feel like I can't think"(183).She also continues to regard silence in males as a positive character trait and language as an oppressor. Furthermore, after Nettie's letters make their appearance, an important discussion between Celie and Shug on the nature of God gives evidence of a more female mode of religious consciousness, a movement away from the dominant society's imposed concept of divinity. Shug's idea of God is now added: "My first step from the old white man was trees. Then air. Then birds. Then other people.... I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it" (167). Shug's God,

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described in such transformative language, is more of a process than an abstraction, and her "step from the old white man" has been part of a necessary "moving away" that has energized the text from the beginning. Another change in Celie's text occurs in a scene with Albert (who has undergone quite a few transformationshimself by now, and has even learned to sew). She tells him an African re-vision of the Adam and Eve story, a story we have not heard from Nettie but hear as it has been transmitted to and transformed by Celie. The fact that she can articulate it to Albert shows how their relationship has changed. The story itself involves the Olinka version of Genesis. According to their text, black people have the first white children (albinos, "colorless" babies can be explained, they reason, more easily: black babies don't happen without a black person involved). All these white babies have been killed off as freaks except for Adam, who got away. Furthermore, Celie tells Albert, Adam and Eve are naked because all white people are naked. They are missing their black covering. In any case, all the characters are eventually united as they finally wend their ways from England and Africa and Memphis to a home that is now appropriately feminized. Their getting there has involved over thirtyyears of time and a lot of making and unmaking of bonds. Although the victim-mothers are part of the story too, and it continues to bear their signatures, they have been vindicated. Celie, we remember, spoke in reference to her mother's death of the belief that "his story kilt her." By the novel's end, his story (history) has been deconstructed, has become herstory, a story of female love, female work, female song, and, most importantly, female bonding, which does not, finally, exclude the males at all, but accommodates, redeems, even celebrates them. Walker, like the quiltmaker, has pieced together from the only materialsavailable-materials of poverty, ignorance, brutalization-a work that, like the product of the quiltmaker, may seem artless, but is instead a carefully crafted and brilliantlypatterned piece of work.

Notes 'See Christian's work on Alice Walker, especially "Alice Walker: The Black Woman Artist as Wayward" 457-77. See also DuPlessis 93-94 and her discussion of women writers' use of narrative displacement, which occurs so that there can be a possibility of female speech, a giving of "voice to the muted" (108). 2See Froula 621-44. Froula sees The Color Purple as a textual cure for hysterical silence. Her analysis of silence in The Color Purple (637-44) is most insightful.

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3I am inclined to see Walker's admirationfor ZoraNeale Hurstonemerging belongs in the characterof Shug. Observe what she says about Hurston:"Zora in the traditionof black women singers, ratherthanamong 'the literati,'at least to me. Therewere the extreme highs and lows of her life, her undauntedpursuit of adventure, passionate emotional and sexual experience, and her love of freedom" (In Search 91). 4Gallop comments on Lacan's Name-of-the-Fatheras "the patronym, law, patrilinealidentity,language as our inscriptioninto patriarchy. patriarchal is the fact of the attributionof paternity by law, by The Name-of-the-Father language" (47). sChristian has already noted this dominant metaphor in her study. She observes: "As a craftsman, Walker sorts out throwaways, the seemingly insignificantand hidden pieces of the lives of Southerners,particularlyblack females, and stretches them into a tapestry of society" (180). 6See Mainardi330-46.Mainardiargues not only that women's arts, such as quilting,have not been ones highly valued by male society, although "women who made quilts knew and valued what they were doing" (332),but also that quiltingis so stronglyan Americanartformbecause it derives its richness from numerousquiltswere Africanand Indiandesigns. Since on the slave plantations necessitated because of the many bedrooms, Africanwomen were the main source of design. She says, "It is too great a coincidence that the South was the 'home' of applique quilts while many of the quilt makers in the Southwere from Dahomey where much beautiful applique was made" (336). TMainardi observes that "in designing their quilts, women not only made beautifuland functionalobjects, but expressed theirown convictions on a wide varietyof subjects in a language forthe most partcomprehensible only to other women. In a sense, this was a 'secret language'" (338).

Works Cited Barbara. "Alice Walker:The BlackWomanArtistas Wayward" Black Christian, A Critical Evaluation.Ed. MariEvans. Garden Women Writers(1950-1980): City: Anchor, 1984. 457-77. . Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892-1976. Westport: Greenwood, 1980. Cixous, Helene. "The Laughof the Medusa." Trans.Keith and Paula Cohen. Signs 1.4 (1976):875-93. Daly, Mary. Beyond God the Father: Towards a Philosophy of Women's Liberation. Boston: Beacon, 1973. Donovan, Josephine. "The Silence is Broken." Women and Language in Literatureand Society. Ed. Sally McConnell-Ginet,RuthBorker,and Nelly Furman.New York:Praeger, 1980. 205-18. DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. Writing beyond Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-CenturyWomen Writers. Bloomington:Indiana UP, 1985. Froula, Christine. "The Daughter's Seduction: Sexual Violence and Literary History."Signs 11.4 (1986):621-44. TheDaughter'sSeduction.London: Gallop,Jane.Feminismand Psychoanalysis: Macmillan, 1982. Levi-Strauss,Claude. StructuralAnthropology. Trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke GrundfestSchoepf. Garden City: Doubleday, 1967.

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The GreatAmericanArt."Feminismand ArtHistozy: "Quilts: Patricia. Mainardi, New York: Questioning the Litany.Ed. NormaBroude and MaryD. Garrard. Harper, 1982.331-46. Olsen, Tillie. Silences. New York:Delacorte, 1978. Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. New York:Harcourt,1982. . "EverydayUse." In Love and Trouble.New York:Harcourt,1973.47-59. . In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens. New York:Harcourt,1983. Washington,MaryHelen. "Teaching Black-EyedSusans: An Approach to the ButSome of UsAre Brave.Ed. GloriaT. Hull, Studyof BlackWomen Writers." Smith.Old Westbury:FeministP, 1982.208-17. PatriciaBell Scott,and Barbara Willis, Susan. "BlackWomen Writers:Takinga CriticalPerspective." Making a Difference: Feminist LiteraryCriticism. Ed. Gayle Green and Coppelia Kahn. New York:Methuen, 1985. 211-37.