A review by gaybf
In Search of the Color Purple: The Story of an American Masterpiece by Salamishah Tillet

3.75

fav quotes 
  • "What I knew," she responds, "was that I had a responsibility to those after me and if I could be helpful by leaving a map, that's what I'd do." 
  • In her 1972 essay, "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens," a decade before the publication of The Color Purple, Alice mourned how year after year, century after century, creative black women who might have been painters, sculptors, and writers were not simply denied a room of their own: under slavery, the very act of reading and writing had been criminalized. If they were lucky, these artists turned to other forms of self-expression, like cooking, quilting, or gardening, outside the purview of their oppressors; but more often than not, these women were driven mad. "What did it mean for a black woman to be an artist in our grandmothers' time? In our great-grandmothers' day?" Alice had queried. What did it mean for Walker's grandmothers? For mine? "The answer," Walker calculated, "was cruel enough to stop the blood." 
  • (Zora Neale Hurston) was known only to the octogenarian Mathilda Moseley, her former classmate and the teller of the "woman-is-smarter-than-man" tales in Hurston's Mules and Men. Moseley guided Walker to Hurston's grave site ninety miles away at the Garden of Heavenly Rest in Fort Pierce, Florida. There, among the snakes and thigh-high weeds, Alice found an unmarked grave. "There are times--and finding Zora Hurston's grave was one of them," Alice wrote, "when normal responses of grief, horror and so on do not make sense because they bear no real relation to the depth of emotion one feels." Before leaving, Alice bought a headstone that read, "Zora Neale Hurston: a genius of the South. Novelist. Folklorist. Anthropologist." 
  • Once on campus, Walker found herself drawn to those Spelman students and to Howard Zinn, their thirty-nine-year-old Jewish-American faculty advisor and American history professor, who taught at Spelman from 1956 to 1963. In his article "Finishing School for Pickets," published in The Nation in August 1960, Zinn praised a dormitory notice on campus that encouraged Spelmanites to protest: "Young Ladies Who Can Pickett, Please Sign Below." Zinn not only inspired and encouraged his students to be activists but also joined them in their sit-in at the white section of the gallery at the Georgia State Capitol in January 1961. When Alice enrolled in Revolution and Response, Zinn's Russian history course, she was determined to put her unique stamp on everything she encountered there, even the works of Dostoyebsky and Tolstoy. Zinn wrote in his memoir of her work, "Not only had I never read a paper by an undergraduate with such critical intelligence, but I had rarely read a literary essay of such grace and style by anyone. And she was nineteen, from a family farm in Eatonton, Georgia." 
  • Urging Morrison to reach beyond "the black side of provincial American life," (sara) Blackburn suggested "that she might easily transcend the early and unintentionally limiting classification 'black woman writer' and take her place among the most serious, important and talented American novelists now working."
    Angered by Blackburn's assumptions, Walker offered a riposte that appeared the next month in the Times: "As I read over Ms. Blackburn's review I began to discern why, as a reviewer, she seems so utterly untrustworthy." Walker concluded, "It is because she, like only too many reviewers before her, is incapable apparently of experiencing black fiction as art but must read it instead as sociology." Walker's insistence that the black writer be not only a recorder of African American social ills but also a creator who chooses to chronicle black life resembled her earlier disregard for Hendin's dismissal of Third Life. 
  • Walker went on to tell fellow writers that "it is language more than anything else that reveals and validates one's existence, and if that language we actually speak is denied us, then it is inevitable that the form we are permitted to assume historically will be one of caricatures, reflecting someone else's literary or social fantasy." To break that cycle, we know Walker did not shy away from Celie's reality but rather adorned her heroine with the speaking styles of Walker's own southern black family. 
  • As I passed by a replica of the Pex Theatre's marquee and ticket window that triumphantly advertised The Color Purple, I conjured up Walker's own words: "Joel Chandler Harris and I lived in the same town, although nearly 100 years apart. As far as I'm concerned, he stole a good part of my heritage. How did he steal it? By making me ashamed of it." In due time, Celie became Walker's ultimate weapon in their duel. 
    Walker longed for a writer who appreciated and could express the vitality of black southern oral traditions and she found it in Zora Neale Hurston... "she was precious to me because I could see that we shared a culture." ... For "what Zora's book did was this: it gave them back all the stories they had forgotten or of which they'd grown ashamed that had been told to us years ago by our parents and grandparents." In Hurston, Walker found an ancestral writer whose ears were so sharp and whose pen was so powerful that they repaired years of cultural degradation.
  • (Pa, Albert, and Harpo) black film critics and activists saw as racist stereotypes, characters there only to fulfill long-standing white myths of black men being innately sexually aggressive and violent. 
    In contrast, Steinem understood Albert and Harpo as Walker intended; they were figures of redemption, while their transformation was part of the pleasure and power of reading the book. But when I asked Steinem if she, Walker, and even Walker's publishers were a bit naive in their marketing of The Color Purple given the tepid responses to Walker's earlier works, she says, "All along feminism was perceived as being anti-male no matter what. We were all man haters." A few seconds later, she admits, "I just was not prepared for this to be translated into Alice's work because it was fiction. I understood it better when it happened with Michele (Wallace), since that was journalism."
  • (Mickalene) Thomas saw something else. Now forty-eight, a graduate of two of our most elite art schools--Pratt and Yale--Thomas is best known for her monumental paintings of her "muses," black women like her mother, former lovers, her partner Racquel, and occasionally celebrity icons like Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey. Thomas rose to art-world fame in 2012; her most iconic images show black women in recline, and partially nude, as a way of both honoring their sexuality and beauty and reversing the gaze of European painters like Manet and Matisse. ... "I was looking at the intimacy and the love between Shug and Celie," Thomas says. "At that point I was really starting to have strong feelings towards other girls and question my own desires, but not know how to express that." (one of the scenes she chose), Celie bashfully listening to Shug's performance, and the moment when they kiss in the bedroom, which showed me the limits of my own gaze. Her reflective aesthetic also reminded me of one of the few favorable reviews by a black male critic that greeted the film upon its arrival. "Watching this film is like returning to your own reflection in a mirror. You don't notice what others may see, you recognize traits distinctly familiar to yourself, perhaps marveling at their form and substance." 
  • Mickalene Thomas always knew better. Witnessing herself in Shug and Celie, she transformed Spielberg's chasteness into a real intimacy and simply gave us a new way to picture Walker's radical vision of love. Thomas tells me, "To sit there and see them on the large screen in surround sound helped me validate what I was feeling and not be confused by my emotions. I just remember sitting there completely transfixed, engaged, mesmerized, and just in it." 
  • Being on set transformed Oprah in other ways too. Seeing Whoopi's mother gingerly attending to her daughter in between shoots, Oprah asked herself, 'Is this what mothers and daughters do?'--a question that was triggered by her own feelings of maternal abandonment and abuse. She also experienced a solace and had spiritual epiphanies that she'd never known before. "I got to see what could happen when you work fro something, give it your all, and then release it," Oprah tells me. "So, I live my life through give, offer, surrender." In between takes, she also watched as Alice, Steven, and Menno whispered notes to each other, altering the script ever so slightly, to make sure the scene reflected their mutual respect for each other and for their characters. "I learned to love people doing that film," Oprah told Time in 2001. For three days straight, as she sat on the grass outside of Albert's home and watched Spielberg shoot the same scene over and over again in front, she had an epiphany, writing in her journal, "This feels like passion, like love, when people come together with the common purpose." 
  • "Just this week, I was asked about interviewing Ruth Bader Ginsburg, which I originally agreed to do. Then they came back with all these constraints, like, "You can't ask her about the court or current events." Then I said, "This week we can't talk about current events? You got the wrong person.' I can't do that. I literally said to her, "I can't compromise myself to make things comfortable for everyone else." Noting how much she people pleased at the beginning of her career, Oprah reflects on her long journey to self: "When you don't feel you have the right to say no to someone actually touching your body, there's no boundary of your physical personhood. It takes a lifetime to learn to establish that."