The Best Thing I Learned at Sarah Lawrence
The Best Thing I Learned At Sarah Lawrence
©2016 by Alice Walker
During my senior year at Sarah Lawrence College I wrote my “contract” (thesis) on the anti-Nazi, anti-Fascist rebel combatant and war correspondent (always depicted wearing a cool trench coat), Albert Camus. He was also a great writer. My “Don” or primary teacher dissuaded me from spending the year dissecting Thomas Hardy’s emotionally complex novels, which I adored, finding linkages in them to my Southern “black” folk country speech. Hardy’s work revealed a number of 17th century English “isms” I recognized, along with hints of a few English practices familiar to me, like the slaughter of pigs and the eating of chitterlings.
The assignment was to read every published thing Albert Camus ever wrote. I was a bit daunted at the thought of how many hours of work and visits to libraries and bookstores this was likely to entail, but having read The Stranger (a novel) and The Notebooks (scraps of thoughts – some profound – his widow published after Camus was killed in a car crash) I was more than a little in love with him. That sad, handsome face that showed such restrained emotion behind the cloud of cigarette smoke…. hard not to be intrigued. Or maybe it was just that he’d published a newspaper, Combat, as part of the French Resistance, or maybe it was just… that trench coat! After all, with my first earnings working the two jobs that allowed me to remain reasonably clothed and coifed at such an elite school, I bought my own navy blue trench coat, which was promptly stolen off the back of my chair the first time I wore it. Teaching me a lot about the ways of the casual rich.
The best thing I learned was that you do not study, or critique, or condemn a writer (or anyone, presumably) without taking into account their whole body of work. That there is a reason it is called a body of work and not an arm or a leg or a tonsil.
I thought about this a lot as criticism – harsh, condemning – met the publication of The Color Purple and later the movie. It is hard to believe the controversy lasted a decade. Long enough that I had time, once I caught my breath, to write a book about it. The Same River Twice; Honoring the Difficult. I did not want future writers and creators of any sort to find themselves pilloried as I was, without a supportive testament of endurance and survival.
When you read a person’s entire body of work it is possible to better understand their intention in the single work you are focused on. For instance, if you read my volumes of poems, and essays, or the novels The Third Life of Grange Copeland, Meridian, The Temple of My Familiar, and so on, it is impossible to find hatred of any of our people, and certainly not hatred of black men. Who would hate Langston Hughes? DuBois? Booker T.? Malcolm X? King? My father? Or the cute boy I fell in love with when I was six, hooked up again with when I was fourteen, and dated throughout high school. His grown up response to the criticism, by the way, was quietly protective of me; whereas my two gangster brothers spoke with heat about chasing down my critics and putting them under a different kind of contract than Sarah Lawrence offered. They did not read novels or even quite know what they were, but I was their baby sister, God damn it. (Their rage helped a lot.)
I have thought it odd that many critics could not see male characters if they were different from men they themselves knew. But that is part of what literature does: it shows us the broader spectrum of humanity. Thirty odd years later, let’s take a look at some of the men in The Color Purple and how they can teach all of us, but especially young men, how to grow.
For instance, in The Color Purple, you can think of “Pa,” the rapist stepfather and exploiter of Celie’s mother, and would-be rapist of Nettie, as the essential predator that comes into a woman’s life when she is most distracted: by grief, by loss, by whatever overwhelm. He is a typical Bluebeard (and I recommend re-reading, if you haven’t picked it up in a while, Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ extraordinary book Women Who Run With the Wolves). He preys on women whom he perceives to be weak – before they know it he has sucked the rest of their life out of them. To my mind he is the only evil male in the book. And the evil he represents is universal, and apparently timeless. (Hence the ancient “fairy” tale of Bluebeard, which readers might wish to engage again).
Men (and some women as well) might consider learning to recognize the predator in themselves and seek to avoid inflicting suffering on “hosts” too feeble or grief-stricken to fight them off. Think of this as a gift to our politically, socially, and morally, weakened community. If inner evil is entrenched and altruism is not an option, then seek to find the root of the bitterness that has deadened you to the pain of others, and heal yourself if you can. Call on all your ancestors, healers, shamans, and guides. Believe you have them, even if you realize that, when alive, some of them were even bigger devils than you.
“Mister” is deformed by the dictates of his father, “Old Mister,” the son of a white slave owner and a black enslaved woman.
Old Mister is as much an artifact as the large white plantation house in the movie (which doesn’t exist in the book), a man caught between eras and two conflicting ways of being. He is as confused as you or I would be if we were born into a situation in which our mother was enslaved and black and our father was white and free, and had the power of life and death over her and whatever children she birthed. These children could be, and were often, sold by their father. This might have been Old Mister’s fate, had the Civil War not occurred. So hatred of this poor soul, this black man? No. Compassion is required, and standing up to him, which Sofia and Shug do. But which the son, “Mister,” “Albert,” cannot do. However, as we see later in the novel, Mister, now Albert, learns to stand up to the Old Mister and the Mister in himself! He grows up. Which is impossible as long as controlling women is one’s idea of manhood.
Harpo is a good hearted, loving man, temporarily corrupted by his father’s mistaken notions of how to treat women. Lucky for him he marries his own best teacher.
Swain is a great best friend to the family. Supportive of Harpo’s efforts to build a juke joint and eager to play back-up to Shug’s singing. Low key and psychologically balanced, musically gifted and secure as a man, a woman would love hanging out with him! But was he even noticed by the men who couldn’t see him? No.
Or the Prize Fighter, the redoubtable Henry Broadnax. What a cool dude he is. “I don’t fight Sofia’s battles,” he says. “My job just to love her and take her where she want to go.” I consider this one of the sexiest statements ever made and it certainly explains why Sofia has six children (to Harpo’s shock) and not five.
Samuel, the missionary (all of whose scenes were cut from the movie) is a large, very black skinned, gentle soul who is the epitome of decency and caring. Sexy, too, but you’d have to understand the missionary position. (Pun intended.)
Adam, Celie’s son, is soulful and empathetic. His deep love of Tashi, who chooses mutilation as a sign of belonging to her tribe, is explored even more deeply in Possessing the Secret of Joy. How to raise a gentle boy? What would a consciously gentle boy look/be like? The character of Adam, in both novels, answers these questions.
Grady, Shug’s “husband,” is superficial and fly, lacks substance, but is essentially harmless. He’s the light-skinned city slicker some black women of that period chose almost as an ornament. Little is expected of him, and he has little to deliver. It doesn’t really surprise us that he goes off into less developed women (than Shug) and narcotics.
Germaine is the creative younger musician a woman like Shug would find irresistible, though with a clear understanding that he’s probably her last male fling.
And what of the little African boy the old white writer on the ship to England claims as her grandson?
And so on.
It appeared to me also that black male critics found it impossible to believe in Mister’s transformation. That eventually he understood why Celie loved Shug (he loved her too), and that he asked properly for Celie’s hand in marriage when he realized what/who he had lost. All of this was part of his growing up, as a human being, not just as a black man. That he learned to sit and sew and talk with Celie as an equal was ignored. It was as if these critics believed a man who could sit and sew with a woman, and converse with her in normal tones, was not really a man.
Why was this? And what has been the impact on generations of black boys who, because of this ideology, will not have a literary example of a way of being that could help all black people, or any people, thrive?
Literature is not separate from life; it is an enchantment that nourishes us, a teacher that prepares us to meet and explore the world, and a guide to all we might wish to discover, whether far away or inside ourselves.
