The Color Purple

Wards Chapel A.M.E. Church

 Today, Paul and I drove to Eatonton, Georgia, where Alice Walker was born and raised. We saw the falling down A.M.E. Church where she was baptized and the teetery signposts along Wades Chapel Road that point out where her birthplace and childhood home are no longer standing. There’s no museum, no bookstore, no choice photo ops. Just a few faded purple signs with arrows pointing at the empty spaces.

I’d checked out The Color Purple from the library (unabridged and read by the author on CD), and we listened to it as we drove along.  Last time I read it was 25 years ago, so it felt fresh and new, the prose blisteringly clear. It’s satisfying to experience an author’s work as you explore her origins, humble and wretched though they may be.

The Wards Chapel A.M.E. Church is now a falling-down building with a plea for donations for its restoration next to the Alice Walker sign, which claims “It is here where Alice’s strong faith began to grow, giving her a sense of security and a place in the community.” Given that connection, you might wonder (as I did) why the highly successful author hasn’t paid for the restoration herself.

The answer might be found in the preface to The Color Purple, where Alice earnestly describes herself as an 11-year-old Nature worshiper sitting in church while her “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.” Alice further explains the novel’s intent was “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.”

They might want to update that sign, to expand on what Alice’s strong faith looks like, because it’s that which makes her compelling enough to want to detour off the Sparta Highway looking for meaning among the ruins. The conclusion of her preface brings it home, and if they put me in charge, the revised and freshly painted landmark would quote it directly: “No one is exempt from the possibility of a conscious connection to All That Is. 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.”

The restoration might then be guaranteed.