Salamishah Tillet - In Search of the Color Purple

MORE PRAISE FOR
IN SEARCH OF THE COLOR PURPLE

Salamishah does what only great writers of literary criticism accomplishshe tells a story about a masterpiece without forgetting the extraordinary woman who crafted it and the legions of women made whole because of her work. A bold and vital tale that rightly treats Alice Walkers American classic as if it were a living, breathing being demanding our utmost attention and enduring affection.

JANET MOCK, AUTHOR OF
REDEFINING REALNESS AND SURPASSING CERTAINTY

This book is a stunning act of devotion, a literary and personal excavation of one of the great novels of American literature, The Color Purple.... Salamishah has allowed this extraordinary work of fiction to guide and heal her life, and her book does the same for us.

EVE ENSLER, AUTHOR OF
THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES AND THE APOLOGY

ALSO BY SALAMISHAH TILLET:

Sites of Slavery:
Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the PostCivil Rights Imagination

Copyright 2021 Salamishah Tillet

Cover 2021 Abrams

Published in 2021 by Abrams Press, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018958796

ISBN: 978-1-4197-3530-1

eISBN: 978-1-68335-685-1

Abrams books are available at special discounts when purchased in quantity for premiums and promotions as well as fundraising or educational use. Special editions can also be created to specification. For details, contact specialsales@abramsbooks.com or the address below.

Abrams Press is a registered trademark of Harry N. Abrams, Inc.

ABRAMS The Art of Books
195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007
abramsbooks.com

To my sister Scheherazade, without whom I would not have been able to pick up the pieces and make myself whole again
&
To my entire A Long Walk Home family, whose work to free us of sexual violence makes my faith possible

Healing begins where the wound was made.

ALICE WALKER

ALICE WALKERS FAMILY TREE
AND THE CHARACTERS INSPIRED BY THEM

BY GLORIA STEINEM

BY BEVERLY GUY-SHEFTALL

You are about to read the life story of The Color Purple, from the day Celie and Shug came alive in Alice Walkers imagination and asked for a quiet country place to be born, to a book, a movie, a musical, another play, and, finally, a worldwide life right up there with all the classics.

That is the mega-history of The Color Purple. But what is even more rare is how it weaves into the fabric of our own lives.

I was on a long plane trip when I first read The Color Purple. Because I was lucky to have Alice as a friend and a colleague, her people entered my life even before they inhabited a book. I was doubly lucky, because the long time span and intimacy of a plane trip allowed me to stay in their world until it came to a natural end.

In that magical time cocoon, Celie transformed herself from the downest and outest of women to a free spirit who helped others to be free. Shug became an agent of that freedom, as well as a miracle of strength, sensuality, and a new freedom within herself.

Even Mister, who begins as Celies cruel master, gradually becomes more understandable when we learn about his suffering at the hands of a cruel father. By the end, Mister isnt perfect, but he has become a person who enables others to be free.

Such transformation is pure Alice. She never gives up on anyone, in her imagination or in real life, and so she allows each of us to become better human beings. Imagination always paves the way to reality.

So, by the time I emerged from the cocoon of that plane ride and The Color Purple, I knew I would do pretty much anything to help more people enter the world Alice had created, partly from her own family myths and stories, and partly from dreams.

In the book you are about to read, Salamishah Tillet picks up the story of The Color Purple as it is published and explains the slowness of the publisher in realizing that this was a book for the whole country and the world. It was a resistance to the miraculous by people expecting the ordinary. Publishing also tends to apply adjectives to authors, and a black woman writer must be limited and special, not limitless and universal.

Its interesting that publishers, scholars, and critics so often assume that white males, like the Russian Tolstoy or the French Proust, are great writers Americans will understand and love. Yet, they may resist the idea that a black woman writer, who shares their country and language, will have a universal appeal here and around the world.

Fortunately, readers refused to be predicted by those publishers and critics.

But, to come back to my own personal history with The Color Purple: there were two accidental moments when I realized that this book about poor people in the rural American South would really be universal for people everywhere. Both were also meetings related to traveling, which, as you can see, I do a lot of.

First, I was in Tokyo and happened to meet Yumiko Yanagisawa, who had translated The Color Purple into Japanese. She had fallen in love with the simplicity of Alices writing, and somehow managed to convey this in her own more formal and ancient language. I couldnt imagine how this was possible, since Alice wrote as her people spoke, without even the quotation marks and apostrophes that, in this country, let the reader and the writer share the superior knowledge that this was a dialect, not standard English. Yumiko told me with tears in her eyes that she believed it was the first time such simplicity was the unapologetic entirety of a great novel.

Second, I met accidentally in an airport a woman who was translating Alices novel into Chinese. Amazingly, she told me a parallel story. She had chosen some part of rural China for the language of its countrypeople, whose speech also had not been used in a great novel or serious literature before.

Ever since then, Ive wondered if that translation included words from the famous Nshu writing invented by women in Hunan Province. Forbidden to go to school, they used this secret woman-only written language to send letters to each other. Many letters have survived, even though their correspondence was so precious that these women were often buried with letters from their women friends.

If so, I bet Celie and Shug would have loved the idea of this, the only woman-invented written language in the world, carrying their story. It seems just like the letters Celie wrote to God when she had no other friend, and then to her sister once she discovered her existence.

I tell you these stories from distant countries because they made me realize something important. If you create one true thing, it stays true wherever it goes.