“Hell, No!”: The Color Purple’s Advice to Black Women and Girls
I have purple African violets in my house. They are delicate but powerful and resilient plants. I love when the seem to resurrect themselves and bloom throughout the year. I love the color puple. As Alice Walker writes in The Color Purple: “I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.” I always notice it.
I had the amazing pleasure of watching The Color Purple movie. I loved it! The women actresses were incredible—all of them. The movie had powerful advice for Black women.
In my new book, Blackwildgirl: A Writer’s Journey to Take Back Her Superpower (available for pre-order, April 2, 2024),
I write about the influence of The Color Purple in my life. Watching the movie was a trip down memory lane. I resonated with the characters in so many ways and their Blackwildgirl journeys.
Blackwildgirl is about my journey from girlhood to womanhood as a twelve-stage initiation journey, reclaiming my ancient ancestral power as a woman in the world. I share my journey through 50 years of journal entries, many of which are letters to Love. Like Blackwildgirl, The Color Purple is structured as letters to God. In many ways, Celie, Nettie, Shug, Sophia, and Mary Agnes are all on their Blackwildgirl journeys: a journey to find their voice, a journey to speak up, a journey to validate themselves; and a journey to honor their womanhood and their wisdom.
There are so many lessons and take-aways for me from The Color Purple. In honor of Black History Month, let me share my take-aways:
1. “I am I have always been a good girl.”
Celie’s first letter to God has an important lesson:
“DEAR GOD,
I am fourteen years old. I am I have always been a good girl. Maybe you can give me a sign letting me know what is happening to me.”
In Blackwildgirl, my first journal entry on March 1, 1976 reads: “8 going on 9, 4th grade. I started violin lessons and I think I’m doing a good job. I started with Mrs. Sompong (my first piano teacher) when I was 6 and I’m rolling along just fine.”
Celie writes that she is and has always been a good girl. I write that I am doing a good job and rolling along just fine. We are young Black girls validating ourselves through our journals, through our writing.
Writing allows us to validate and affirm ourselves. When the world seeks to invalidate us and is non-affirming, our writing allows us to reclaim our agency and define ourselves for ourselves.
Writing is part of our power. It is a tool for us to reclaim and remember our power. This is why as part of Blackwildgirl, I include a journal, the Blackwildgirl Journal: Finding Our Superpower. The journal allows you to journal along and undertake the challenging work of discovering your power within.
2. “Remember your name, shake your shimmy.”
The Color Purple reminds us that our names are important. Our names matter. And when we remember our names, we must have pride, and shake our shimmy. There is ancestral power in our names.
In the book, The Color Purple, Celie recounts hearing her name as the title of a song by Shug:
“Then I hear my name. Shug saying Celie. Miss Celie. And I look up where she at. She say my name again. She say this song I’m bout to sing is call Miss Celie’s song. Cause she scratched it out of my head when I was sick. First she hum it a little, like she do at home. Then she sing the words. It all about some no count man doing her wrong, again. But I don’t listen to that part. I look at her and I hum along a little with the tune. First time somebody made something and name it after me.” (pg. 48).
In the movie, Shug sings: “Oh sister, have I got news for you. I’m somethin’ I hope you think that you’re somethin’ too. …So let me tell you somethin’ sister Remember your name No twister gonna steal your stuff away My sister, we sho’ ain’t got a whole lot of time, so shake your shimmy.”
Our name announces our presence, our personality, our power. As Johnnetta Betsch Cole wrote in her new book, Speechifying: The Words and Legacy of Johnnetta Betsch Cole, she has more recently began including her maiden name, rather than the initial B, as she did earlier in her life. She writes, “In doing so, I am repeatedly connecting to the paternal side of my family, a part of my heritage. … To know ourselves fully, we must connect with our full stories. Using the name Johnnetta Betsch Cole is one way that I connect with my full story.” (p. 3).
When Johnnetta signed her book to me, she wrote, “to Menah Adeola Eyaside Pratt, With respect and administration for who you are and the righteous work that you do.” She wrote my full name.
As I share in Blackwildgirl, my name has powerful meanings and in my journey, I realize the full meaning. I, too, know that I needed to use my full name, not just my first and last name, or not just my initials. The Color Purple reminds us that our names matter.
3. “I’m somethin’ I hope you think that you’re somethin’ too.”
In the movie, Shug sings: “Oh sister, have I got news for you. I’m somethin’ I hope you think that you’re somethin’ too.”
When we have our power, we can affirm not only ourselves, but also we can use our power to affirm our sisters. Sisterhood matters. As Black women, we often have moments when we feel beat down, discouraged, unworthy, vulnerable, and fragile. We need our communities, our sororities, our church families, our blood families, our chosen families. We need to be reminded that we are SOMETHIN’
We are SOMETHIN’ strong, powerful, worthy, and beautiful.
4. “I’m beautiful and I’m here.”
This song, sang by Celie, evolves as she evolves. The first time she sings, she says: “I may be black, poor, ugly, and I’m here.” As she gains more of her Blackwildgirl wisdom, her song changes:
“I’m beautiful, yes, I’m beautiful, and I’m here.” This is a marvelous example of the journey of a Blackwildgirl. We are working to get to the point where we can boldly proclaim: “I am beautiful and I am here.” These are words of resilience, survival, and defiance. These are words of power and presence. These are words of agency. As Black women in a world that often seeks to erase us, invisibilize us, and stereotype us, there is incredible power in being able to say, “I’m beautiful and I’m here.” We are here; we have survived; we are descendants of a long line of 13 generations of African women, of African queens who survived the Middle Passage, survived enslavement, survived rape, survived dehumanization. We are still surviving ridicule; we are still surviving stereotypes; we are still surviving abuse. But, we are still here. It isn’t easy and we are always having to fight.
5. “All my life I had to fight.”
When Sofia finds out that Celie told her husband Harpo to beat her, she confronts Celie and asks her why. Celie says: “I say it cause I’m jealous of you. I say it cause you do what I can’t. What that? she say. Fight. I say.
She stand there a long time, like what I said took the wind out her jaws. She mad before, sad now. She say, All my life I had to fight. I had to fight my daddy. I had to fight my brothers. I had to fight my cousins and myuncles. A girl child ain’t safe in a family of men. But I never thought I’d have to fight in my own house. She let out her breath. I loves Harpo, she say. God knows I do. But I’ll kill him dead before I let him beat me.”
This is an important reality. All my life I had to fight. This is the reality for Black women in America. We have to fight. We have to fight not only against patriarchy, sexism of Black men, racism of White people, men and women, heterosexism, homophobia. We have to fight. That is the reality. It is important to acknowledge our reality. We have fought throughout civilization, but because our ancestors fought, we are still here! And we will find for those coming after us.
One of the conversations that has become associated with the movie has been the treatment of the Black actresses during the filming. They had to fight, for pay, for food during filming, for separate trailers. All our lives, we have to fight.
Blackwildgirl is about my fight against racism, sexism, patriarchy, and dominant ideologies and structures. Understanding that we will have to fight allows us to make sure we are prepared and that we have the tools we need as women warriors to be victorious.
In the past few months, I’ve written several blogs about the challenges Black women are navigating. As you have time you may want to check them out: www.menahpratt.com.
6. Seek the Spirit; She is waiting to be found.
What is our image of God? I first read Color Purple in 1990. In my journal entry on January 2, 1990, I wrote in Blackwildgirl:
“The Color Purple was the book that first began my odyssey. It enabled me to come closer to a new perception of God. No longer did I see him as a White man.”
In the Color Purple, the book ends with Celie’s journal entry:
“DEAR GOD. DEAR STARS, DEAR TREES, DEAR SKY, DEAR PEOPLES. DEAR EVERYTHING.”
In the movie, Celie sings: “Dear God, dear stars, dear trees, dear sky, dear peoples, dear everything. Dear God God is inside me and everyone else that was or ever will be. I came into this world with God and when I finally looked inside I found it just as close as my breath is to me.”
Celie has evolved and can see God as everything. In the preface/introduction, 10 years after the initial publication, Alice Walker writes:
“WHATEVER ELSE The Color Purple has been taken for during the years since its publication, it remains for me the theological work examining the journey from the religious back to the spiritual that I spent much of my adult life, prior to writing it, seeking to avoid. Having recognized myself as a worshiper of Nature by the age of eleven, because my spirit resolutely wandered out the window to find trees and wind during Sunday sermons, I saw no reason why, once free, I should bother with religious matters at all.
I would have thought that a book that begins “Dear God” would immediately have been identified as a book about the desire to encounter, to hear from, the Ultimate Ancestor. Perhaps it is a sign of our times that this was infrequently the case. Or perhaps it is the pagan transformation of God from patriarchal male supremacist into trees, stars, wind, and everything else, that camouflaged for many readers the book’s intent: to explore the difficult path of someone who starts out in life already a spiritual captive, but who, through her own courage and the help of others, breaks free into the realization that she, like Nature itself, is a radiant expression of the heretofore perceived as quite distant Divine.
If it is true that it is what we run from that chases us, then The Color Purple (this color that is always a surprise but is everywhere in nature) is the book that ran me down while I sat with my back to it in a field. Without the Great Mystery’s word coming from any Sunday sermon or through any human mouth, there I heard and saw it moving in beauty across the grassy hills.
No one is exempt from the possibility of a conscious connection to All That Is. Not the poor. Not the suffering. Not the writer sitting in the open field. This is the book in which I was able to express a new spiritual awareness, a rebirth into strong feelings of Oneness I realized I had experienced and taken for granted as a child; a chance for me as well as the main character, Celie, to encounter That Which Is Beyond Understanding But Not Beyond Loving and to say: I see and hear you clearly, Great Mystery, now that I expect to see and hear you everywhere I am, which is the right place.”
Like Alice and The Color Purple, Blackwildgirl is about my journey to understand Spirit, to understand Love, to understand my place and space and purpose in the world. It is my journey to get to a place where my spirituality allowed me to align with my Blackwildgirl power and the wisdom of women. It is my journey to find Love within me. I think this is part of our journeys as human beings—to find our connection to others, to humanity, to nature, to life.
When we find our Blackwildgirl within, we are able to speak up, and tell the world, “Hell, No.”
7. “Hell, No!”
In the movie, there is a duet with Celie and Sofia that includes the lines:
“Sister you got to say, you got to say; you got to say, you better say, you oughta say, Hell No!
This is consistent with Blackwildgirl’s new year resolution: “I refuse.”
“Hell, No! I refuse.” It is an emphasis and intentionality and finality. It is definitive. It is full of attitude which is foundational to being a Blackwildgirl. You have to be sassy, and outrageous and courageous and audacious, too. As Black women, we have to have a Hell, No! attitude. Hell, No! I won’t allow you to treat me that way. Hell, No! You can’t beat me. Hell, No! You can’t disrespect me. Hell, No! You can’t ignore me. Hell, No!
My life has been filled with Hell, No! moments; the moments I gathered enough gumption to speak truth to power as they say. My first metaphorical “Hell, No!” was when I was 5 years old. From Blackwildgirl:
“Blackwildgirl, a little Black girl, was five years old in 1972. She was acting grown and sassy, being womanish in the Alice Walker (1983, xi–xii) way with “outrageous, audacious, courageous or willful behavior,” behaving like Blackwildgirl should and must be in the world. However, her way of being in the world enraged her father. Towering over and peering down, he shouted so loud it almost shattered her soul: “Who do you think you are?” With tears streaming down her face, Blackwildgirl said, “Queen of Sheba.” … Seemingly out of the wild, out of nowhere, she claimed to be the biblical, powerful, beautiful, and wise queen of an ancient African nation. This story, almost lore, was often shared with me by my parents, like a joke, accompanied by hearty, and maybe even haughty, laughter: “How dare a little girl say she was Queen of Sheba?” But I did, because I knew I was.” (pg. 13).
I believe that all Black girls are queens—Queens of Shebas. Powerful, willful, sassy, courageous, audacious spirits. The world doesn’t know how to respond to us, so tries to silent us. But a Blackwildgirl refuses to be silent, so we undertake initiation journeys to reclaim our crowns and our superpower—the African queen spirit of knowing, sensing, dreaming, and divining. While we are on our journey, we are gathering the tools we need to tell the world, “Hell, No!”
Pre-order Blackwildgirl and the Companion Journal! Be ready to join in conversation with other Blackwildgirls!
Resource:
https://s3.amazonaws.com/scschoolfiles/112/the-color-purple-alice-walker.pdf
I also read and highly recommend Alice Walker’s book about her own journals.
From National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize–winning author Alice Walker and edited by critic and writer Valerie Boyd, comes an unprecedented compilation of Walker’s fifty years of journals drawing an intimate portrait of her development over five decades as an artist, human rights and women’s activist, and intellectual. For the first time, the edited journals of Alice Walker are gathered together to reflect the complex, passionate, talented, and acclaimed Pulitzer Prize winner of The Color Purple. She intimately explores her thoughts and feelings as a woman, a writer, an African-American, a wife, a daughter, a mother, a lover, a sister, a friend, a citizen of the world. In an unvarnished and singular voice, she explores an astonishing array of events: marching in Mississippi with other foot soldiers of the Civil Rights Movement, led by Martin Luther King, Jr.; her marriage to a Jewish lawyer, defying laws that barred interracial marriage in the 1960s South; an early miscarriage; writing her first novel; the trials and triumphs of the Women’s Movement; erotic encounters and enduring relationships; the ancestral visits that led her to write The Color Purple; winning the Pulitzer Prize; being admired and maligned, sometimes in equal measure, for her work and her activism; and burying her mother. A powerful blend of Walker’s personal life with political events, this revealing collection offers rare insight into a literary legend.