It has been months since I wrote a post on this blog, but with the house and working overtime, I'm usually feeling rushed and not relaxed enough to feel too creative. My creative outlet of late has consisted of things of quick result: a hanging of a decorative something or other on a wall, a quick craft found on Pinterest and few other small non-time-consuming forays into the artsy realm.
But in order to write, I need to feel relaxed, something I have only managed to feel on this last vacation, which ends today. When I feel hurried, my mind is overcrowded with things that need to be done and I cannot seem to concentrate sufficiently. Well, perhaps concentrate is not the right word. I need time to let my mind wander and then bring those bits of imagination together in a concentrated something. I also no longer have the motivating factor of getting a failing grade should I not produce, which can be a formidable motivator at times.
However, on this vacation I was able to finally feel a sense of peace and relaxation. So, I took up a book that I have had for years but hadn't read. Oh, I've seen the movie, more than once, but not read the book. I had mentioned The Color Purple to a friend of mind who had labeled several things in her house with bits of notecard on which the name of the labeled item was written. It reminded me of the movie scene in which Nettie labels everything in Celie's house in order to teach her how to read. I believed my copy of the book was up in the attic where several of my books still are packed in boxes. But luckily I had kept it, for some reason (things happen for a reason), on my bookshelf in my bedroom.
Years ago, a wonderful friend had given me a this copy (along with several other books) and still the marks and notes in the margin are there from him having read it. It even smells like it did when I was first given it. (I know...I'm weird...I smell old books. It makes me imagine whose hands they have passed through and the paths they have followed to end up in my hands.)
Reading this book, immediately reminded me of my ex-mother-in-law, Myrtle Maddix. I could hear her voice as I read the characters' communication within their own minds or with each other. She was born and raised in Memphis, Tennessee. Her upbringing seems like from a novel. When she was quite young (10 or 11, I think she told me), her mother left her and her brother with their father and took off with a few of the older children. Myrtle's father died when she was still young, as a result of a head injury sustained from a fall from a vehicle during a parade and Myrtle saw it happen. When she was grown, her first son Thomas (nicknamed Bubba) had been burned in a fire. He later succumbed to the injuries. Then she met John Maddix, and many years later I became their daughter-in-law. Myrtle had not made it through high school, but John had and later he completed college. His speech was more refined than hers, but hers retained some of the southern drawl, locution and idiomatic expressions that correlated so closely with the book's characters' speech. She later went on to get her high school diploma at age 72. So proud was I of her! What an accomplishment at such an age and after all she had lived through until then. Sadly, though, she passed away from cancer in 2008.
Several passages in The Color Purple speak to me. The ones about Celie's progress through her faith in God, and ones that were just beautiful in their delivery, like this passage in which Nettie explains her feeling of love for Samuel. The way in which Alice Walker writes makes the character seem so real, so human. It is that sort of delivery which makes the reader think that he/she is reading about real people and not imagined characters:
"You may have guessed that I loved him all along; but I did not know it. Oh, I loved him as a brother and respected him as a friend, but Celie, I love him bodily, as a man! I love his walk, his size, his shape, his smell, the kinkiness of his hair. I love the very texture of his palms. The pink of his upper lip. I love his big nose. I love his brows. I love his feet. And I love his dear eyes in which the vulnerability and beauty of his soul can be plainly read." (Nettie, pg 211, Washington Square Press, 1982)
When I am missing Myrtle, as frequently still I do, I will pick up this book to hear her voice and see her in the characters: strong, vibrant, resourseful women, who know little of their immense worth until they overcome whatever challenge they meet to finally look back on themselves and realized the treasures they are and the regal quality of their persons. Perhaps this is why Ms Walker chose to name the book as she did, for the color has in the past denoted royalty, even that of our Sovereign Lord and why she writes through Shug's character: "I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it." She wants people to take notice that no matter where you look, God is there and He wants you to look, with your heart. That is why "[He] is always making little surprises and springing them on us when us least expect."
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