The Triumph of Womanist Blues Over Blues Violence in Alice Walker's the Color Purple Cour

“My Man Treats Me Like a Slave”: The Triumph of Womanist Blues over Blues Violence in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple

Courtney George

[…]if Celie were singing, she would be like Mamie, Bessie, and Ma Rainey, all of whom were abused. Those women were abused by men. I always feel so deeply when I listen to them, and then I think about how people took it for granted that your man would be this way. Of course you’ll be abused. And so they weren’t really heard, and they got used to it, actually dancing to this. It was like a spiral that was not going up but going down. People sing about this and then expect it in relationships. It was self-perpetuating. I doubt if any of these people had relationships that nourished them. They had relationships, instead, that prompted cries of anguish that were then used to entertain. The people who were entertained modeled themselves on what they were hearing, and it was just a very bad cycle. (Alice Walker, “I Know What the Earth Says”)

In the blues-filled world of The Color Purple, Alice Walker revisits and revises the historical era of 1920s blues singers like Mamie Smith, Bessie Smith, and Ma Rainey. Shug, Celie, Sofia, and Squeak revive the spirit of the great blues divas and their audiences but also break out of the cycle of abuse to which Walker alludes above. In these characters, Walker engenders a new type of blues lifestyle—a blues that combines her love of these historical women’s songs and lives with her conception of “womanism.” Walker defines womanists as feminists of color, women who love women, women who are concerned with the salvation of the entire race (not just women), and women who love to sing and dance. By merging these characteristics with the strengths of the first popular blues women, Walker creates a womanist blues to demonstrate how her female characters emerge as successful women who combat the violence done to them by men.

120 Courtney George Because womanism is interested in uplifting men as well as women, Walker also uses the blues to consider how black men, who internalize violence from a racist white power structure, are caught in these same cycles of abuse when they exercise violence on their daughters, wives, and lovers. In his book Seems Like Murder Here, cultural and literary blues scholar Adam Gussow discusses this kind of domestic violence as it occurs in blues culture, terming it “intimate” violence. Gussow defines intimate violence as “the violence that black folk inflict on each other: the cuttings, shootings, razor slashings, beatings, and murders described—and more often than one might expect, celebrated as a locus of power and self- making—by African American blues people in both story and song” (196). In her revision of blues history, Walker suggests that the blues community’s celebrations should not be imbued with violence, but instead with harmony and love. While women can also inflict intimate violence as Walker herself depicts, the intimate violence in The Color Purple is aligned with a dominant male perspective as readers watch Pa, Albert, and Harpo brutally try to tame their wives and children. Walker pits intimate male blues violence against an intimate female blues womanism; the latter ideology triumphs over blues violence and allows for a collective union between black men and women. In critiquing the brutality present in historical depictions of the blues, Walker twists the abuse “spiral” upwards; she creates an alternate womanist blues history that calls for unity amongst southern African Americans in order to transcend the “very bad cycle” of gender and sexual violence perpetuated by racism and sexism. Although Walker draws from the history of blues men and women to fill the pages of the novel, she employs these historical portraits to create the fictionalized memory through the autobiographical letters of narrator Celie. Because Celie does not sing (like Mamie, Bessie, or Ma), she writes—letters that are first addressed to a white God and then to her sister Nettie. In the first lines of the novel, Celie’s Pa forbids her to speak of his rape of her to anyone except God, which automatically signals to readers the black woman’s silent plight with domestic abuse. In incorporating women’s blues (a public acknowledgement of abuse) through Shug, Walker allows Celie to voice her interior struggles out loud by the novel’s end. Her transition—from first addressing letters to God and later addressing them to her sister Nettie—shows how Celie moves from an object in a patriarchal society to a subject in a womanist space.