God is (a) Pussy: The Pleasure Principle and Homo- Spirituality in Shug’s Blueswoman Theology

Marlon Rachquel Moore

Preach the Blues, sing them Blues, they certainly sound good to me Moan them Blues, holler them Blues, let me convert your soul —Bessie Smith, “Preachin’ the Blues”1

When black women relate to our bodies, our sexuality, in ways that place erotic recognition, desire, pleasure, and fulfillment at the center of our efforts to create radical black female subjectivity, we can make new and different representations of ourselves as sexual subjects. (bell hooks, “Selling Hot Pussy”)

Shug Avery is many things to many people in the novel The Color Purple. To Albert, she is the love of his life, an unfinished story to which he returns again and again. To the men and women who are threatened by her sexual independence, Shug is a “nasty” woman, a whore. For the jook-joint crowd, she is a sexy songstress, beloved for her soul stirring renditions of popular Blues ballads. The most intriguing role, however, is as a priestess in her relationship with Celie, a function I describe as “Blueswoman evangelist.” The phrase “Blueswoman evangelist” unifies the multi-layered, intersectional relationships between Shug’s private/community life, the public “ministry” of the blues music she performs, and her influence as Celie’s spiritual guide. Shug’s ways of seeing and being in the world—blues artist, black woman and evangelist—should be understood as nonhierarchical, for each aspect of her personhood informs and reinforces the others. Shug’s “Blueswoman theology” is a spiritual model that facilitates Celie’s sexual discovery. Celie’s spiritual growth is also examined for the ways it reveals the foundation of Shug’s bodily-based theology: that a woman who recognizes her own sexual pleasure as sacred is a woman intimate with God. 78 Marlon Rachquel Moore

Blues Consciousness and Transgressive Black Womanhood

In Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, Angela Davis reminds us that there were three areas of African American life that were transformed dramatically in the post-Emancipation experience: the possibility to travel, opportunity for individual education and the freedom to choose sexual partners. Because of these profound changes in the life of the black masses, travel and sexuality were ubiquitous themes in early blues lyrics. These themes form a worldview, a “blues consciousness” that was shaped by and gave expression to this social transformation. The blues genre was formed out of the same social and musical fabric that the spirituals issued from, but with blues the social emphasis becomes more personal (Jones 63). That is to say, because the blues was (and is) an aesthetic of the psycho-emotional life and—composed of moans, hollers and a “churchy” tone—it is considered the secular counterpoint to spirituals, or “secular spirituals” (Cone qtd in Davis 8). According to this logic, if the spirituals are “God’s music,” then classic blues, its musical twin, belong to the Devil. In broad terms, the Devil’s music is a site of diverse, unsanitized expressions of black experiences. In women’s blues particularly, the lyrics speak of women’s frustration with cheating men, the loneliness and jealousy of being the other woman, good and bad lovers, domestic violence, homosexuality, suicide, violent revenge, drunkenness, incarceration and poverty. They often speak of romantic love but not in the idealized terms of mainstream love songs. Whether or not they authored the songs they sang, blueswomen represented versions of romance and sexuality that “often blatantly contradicted mainstream ideological assumptions regarding women and being in love” (Davis 8-11). As a blueswoman then, Shug Avery represents unchaste, unholy, ‘nasty’ womanhood. Alice Walker situates Shug in the blues tradition by linking her to Bessie Smith, the first real superstar in African American popular culture. Smith’s first recording, Down-Hearted Blues, established her as the most successful black performing artist of her time. “Her broad phrasing, fine intonation, blue-note inflections, and wide, expressive range made hers the measure of jazz-blues singing in the 1920s” (“Bessie Smith”). “First Shug sing a song by somebody name Bessie Smith,” Celie writes, “She say Bessie somebody she know. Old friend” (TCP 72). The evocation of Smith’s legacy is key