Admiring the Color Purple

The Color Purple by Alice Walker was a Pulitzer Prize winning novel and Stephen Spielberg’s 1985 movie by the same name was nominated for eleven Academy Awards. Last month June and I both re-read the book and watched the movie again—and were impressed again by both. 

Alice Walker is a talented novelist and poet. She is also a lifetime social activist and the one who coined the term “womanist” (in “Coming Apart,” her 1979 short story).

Walker was born in Georgia, the youngest of her sharecropper parents’ eight children. She was an excellent student, and upon graduating from high school she received a scholarship to prestigious (HBCU) Spelman College in Atlanta. Howard Zinn was one of her professors there.

Under the direction of SNCC, Alice and many other Spelman students joined the effort to desegregate Atlanta. They were supported by Prof. Zinn—who subsequently was fired in the summer of 1963. Because of that, Alice transferred to Sarah Lawrence College in New York and graduated in 1965.

Through the 1970s Walker was active both as a teacher and an author, and then 40 years ago, in 1982, The Color Purple, her third novel was published. The next year she became the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

The Color Purple is a feminist work about Celie, an abused and uneducated African American woman’s struggle for empowerment. According to Britannica, among other things the novel was “praised for the depth of its female characters and for its eloquent use of Black English Vernacular.”

Here is a short conversation between Shug and Celie that shows some of that vernacular—and indicates where the title of the book came from:

Listen, God love everything you love—and a mess of stuff you don’t. But more than anything else, God love admiration. You saying God vain? I ast. Naw, she say. Not vain, just wanting to share a good thing. I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it (Kindle ed., p. 195).

The same Britannica article goes on to say, “The Color Purple movingly depicts the growing up and self-realization of Celie, who overcomes oppression and abuse to find fulfillment and independence.”  

The novel is a classic, for there are many today who need to overcome oppression and abuse the same as Celie did 100 years ago. More broadly, as a theology professor in Australia writes, The Color Purple is

both a cry of rage and protest against the injustices and inhumanity we humans inflict on one another, and a stubborn affirmation of hope in the midst of suffering, of endurance against all odds, of a kind of triumph in the end as we become more and more who we truly are.*

The Color Purple is also a book about God. The above quote from the book is just one of many referring to God.

The author herself said in a 2006 interview, “Twenty-five-years later, it still puzzles me that The Color Purple is so infrequently discussed as a book about God. About ‘God’ versus ‘the God image.’”**

The blogger cited above explains that Walker clearly holds a panentheist view of God in which “the divine is deeply immanent within everything, a faithful creator and life-giving Spirit. She revolts against the intellectual idolatry that reduces God to the white, to the male, to the human.”

And Walker herself states that the “core teaching of the novel” is delivered by Shug, who says to Celie, “I believe God is everything, . . . Everything that is or ever was or ever will be. And when you can feel that, and be happy to feel that, you’ve found it” (Kindle ed., p. 194).

In his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said, “Look how the wild flowers grow. They don't work hard to make their clothes. But I tell you that Solomon with all his wealth wasn't as well clothed as one of them” (Matt. 6:27-28, CEB).

Perhaps when he said this, Jesus was looking out over a field of wild flowers and admiring the color purple.

_____

* Michael O’Neil in a 2016 blog post.

** From the Introduction of the book in the Kindle version (loc. 80).

Note: For an abundance of information about Alice Walker and her outstanding book, see https://bookanalysis.com/alice-walker/the-color-purple/.

Honoring Katie Cannon, Womanist Pioneer

The Rev. Dr. Katie Geneva Cannon died a year ago, on August 8, 2018. This article honors the life and legacy of this outstanding black woman. 

Katie Geneva Cannon (1950~2018)

Who Was Katie Cannon?

Katie Cannon was born in 1950 in Kannapolis, North Carolina, the town that grew up around Cannon Manufacturing, the textile mill that began production in 1908 and soon became the world’s largest producer of sheets and towels.

That company, which in 1928 became Cannon Mills, was founded by J.W. Cannon (1852~1921), and Katie was a descendant of slaves who were owned by his family at the time of his birth.

In 1974, Katie Cannon was the first African American woman to be ordained in the Presbyterian Church USA. She also was the first black woman to earn both the M.Div. and Ph.D. degrees from Union Theological Seminary in New York.

Through the years, Cannon taught in several universities and seminaries/divinity schools. From 1993~2001 she was a professor in the Department of Religion at Temple University.

June’s and my daughter Karen, who is now a professor at the University of Arizona and head of the Department of Religious Studies and Classics, did her graduate work at Temple. During her Ph.D. studies there, Cannon was one of her main professors and her dissertation advisor.

(I was happy to have had the privilege of meeting and talking with Katie during that time.)

Cannon finished her career as Professor of Christian Ethics at Union Presbyterian Seminary in Richmond (Va.), where she taught from 2001 until her death last year.

The Womanist Ethics of Katie Cannon

Alice Walker, best known for her award-winning book The Color Purple, coined the term womanist in her 1983 book In Search of Our Mothers’ Garden: Womanist Prose. Katie Cannon soon began popularizing that term in theological circles.

Cannon’s first major book was Black Womanist Ethics (1988), and she became the first theologian to use the term womanist widely. (She accepted Walker’s definition of womanist as a black feminist or feminist of color.)

Early in her book, Cannon states:

Black women are the most vulnerable and the most exploited members of the American society. The structure of the capitalist political economy in which Black people are commodities combined with patriarchal contempt for women has caused the Black woman to experience oppression that knows no ethical or physical bounds (p. 4).

That is a compelling statement of the challenge Katie Cannon spent her lifetime combatting—and her efforts helped to make American society better than it was thirty years ago, although there is still much that needs to be done.

Tributes to Katie Cannon

In April of last year, the Katie Geneva Cannon Center for Womanist Leadership was inaugurated at Union Presbyterian Seminary. Alice Walker (b. 1944) was the guest speaker at the inaugural ceremonies. 

Katie Cannon and Alice Walker (4/18)

In January 2020, the first issue of the new Wabash Center Journal on Teaching (formerly Teaching Theology and Religion) will include a special section on Katie Cannon's contributions to the development of womanist pedagogy.

Our daughter Karen was one of Cannon’s former students asked to write a brief article for that special edition. Here is how she began her tribute to her graduate school professor:

Katie Geneva Cannon’s life and legacy stand as a call to grapple with the injustices of the past and present while creatively constructing previously unimaginable futures.

With Karen and many others, I am still sad because of Cannon’s passing last year at the age of 68. Still, there is much to celebrate because of Katie’s active efforts to combat racism and sexism.

American society has been made better because of how Katie Cannon creatively confronted those challenges—and taught her students to do the same.