Contextual Background

African-American Life in Georgia  

The Color Purple is set in rural Georgia near Eatonton, where Alice Walker was born. The novel takes place from 1911-43. In 1865, the end of the American Civil War led to Congress passing the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Known as the Emancipation, this act prohibited slavery.   

Slavery, the forced servitude of one person by another, was brutal and inhumane. Besides having to perform incredibly difficult labour, slaves were subject to horrific physical, emotional, and sexual abuse. Slaves were viewed as property instead of people, and there was no regard for any family ties from capture to being sold to different plantations. Husbands and wives were separated, and children taken from their parents. Amy and Andrew Billingsley note “Slave women were exploited by white owners...for pleasure and profit. A role for the Black man as husband and father was systematically denied...In a word, the black family had no physical, psychological, social, or economic protection.” While the eras of slavery occurred before the time of The Color Purple we can see the repercussions in regards to racial power dynamics, family relations, and treatment of women ripple through the community in the play.  

There had been 400 000 slaves in Georgia, and for decades afterward, the state was in upheaval. Many plantation owners wanted former slaves to stay powerless and tensions were high. The reorganization of the South after the war was called Reconstruction. Some former Georgia slaves were granted parcels of land, but only landowners with decrees from the court could keep their land after harvest. Not everyone could prove their claim and sharecropping became the new form of labour. In this system, wealthy whites - former slave owners - owned farmland, and Black farmers (and some poor whites) were permitted to lease some land by paying a portion of their profit from their crops. All supplies were given to them by the owner who also took that cost out of the farmers’ profits. Some landowners would determine every year that the farmers were a few dollars short of what they owed, and debt would accumulate until it was so great there was no hope of it ever being repaid - keeping sharecroppers tied to the land and forcing them to work it in a variation on slavery. Many sharecropping contracts were unfair and Blacks were intimidated into signing them by “Black Codes” drafted by southern legislatures. Despite the fact that slaves had technically been freed, they were still incredibly oppressed. Under such codes freedmen were only supposed to work as field hands and if unemployed they could be punished; children could also be separated from families and forced to work. Black farmers saw that the only way to prosper was to own land outright and many worked towards this goal. By 1910, Black farmers owned almost one-fourth of the farms that were worked by Blacks (the rest being sharecroppers). In The Color Purple, Mister owns his land, passed down to him by Ol’ Mister who worked the same plot as a slave. Celie’s stepfather Pa runs a store that eventually allows him to build a house on an acreage which Celie inherits.   

However, Georgia was not a particularly wealthy state and any Black economic success made whites determined to cling to any power possible. In the play, Celie’s father “real Pa” (who originally ran the store) was seen as an economic threat to white businesses, and he was lynched. Politically, a philosophy of “separate by equal” was adopted - as long as facilities existed for both white and Black citizens, they were “equal” and one could not serve the other population. This meant that institutions separated by race included schools, restaurants, parks, rail cars and other transportation, barbershops, cemeteries, baseball teams, mental hospitals, and prisons. The fact that two schools existed, for example, did not mean that both had the same access to resources and funding, though, and were not necessarily an the same quality of experience. There are many examples of southern law, called Jim Crow laws, that legally disenfranchised Black citizens. These included depriving Blacks of the right to vote with a tax - and then a literacy test, as more people became able to pay the tax - and forbidding interracial marriage. Consequences for not playing along with racial etiquette rules took the form of vigilante justice as well as legal repercussions, as seen in The Color Purple when Sofia is beaten by a mob and then imprisoned for talking back to the white Mayor’s wife.  

By 1920, there were very strong anti-Black feelings in the south; membership in the white supremacist group the Ku Klux Klan grew to high numbers. In the 1930s, the Great Depression struck rural Georgia particularly hard, while cities were less impacted because of industry. Federal government programs for unemployed people were available but the Georgia Governor did not allow Blacks to participate until President Franklin Roosevelt threatened to withhold all aid money from the state. In the 1940s, when the script ends, Georgia’s economy began to recover.   

Gender Roles   

In the south, most of the southern population lived in rural areas and extended families had to work together to keep the household going. There were defined gender roles in patriarchal family structures, in which men were the “head of the house” doing most of the physical farm work and dealing with finances. In this play, Mister and his family were relatively prosperous in their community; he could hire men to work for him, and Harpo would have done fine as owner of the juke joint. Options were less varied for women who were expected to care for children, make meals, and do physical chores such as cleaning house, chopping wood, and carrying water. Because of high mortality rates large families were valued. Bearing children, often each year, could leave a woman weak and vulnerable to illness. Families were separated during slavery and some were able to reunite after Emancipation, but the strain of living under slavery “took its toll on both men and women: men had to reassert their expected place as head of the family, while women were forced to give up their say in family matters. This was not true of all families, but it was a common situation among those trying to adjust to a new way of living” (StageNotes). This only served to add conflict to families in already difficult situations. When The Color Purple starts the Civil War has been over for barely two generations, so men and women still had clearly defined family roles. A wife was expected to be subservient to her husband. As violence was being used in power dynamics between rich and poor and white and Black, it was also commonly used to enforce gender roles as it was seen as a man’s right to physically discipline his wife or children. Some women did work outside the home at this point.  Most were cooks or maids (as Sofia had to become) and about half of white southern families employed at least one Black servant. Sofia is a surprise to all as she rails against prevailing gender stereotypes, and Celie breaks free of them by eventually leaving Mister. She also sets up an independent living for herself as an entrepreneur. Shug defies these domestic expectations too, but we do see her being judged by the rest of the community for that. It was less common at this point for an African-American woman to work as a teacher, as Nettie planned. Even in Nettie’s missionary work, she finds that the Olinka also have strong ideas about men and women.  

The Church   

As a result of deep racial divisions, many Black citizens established all-Black communities, usually organized around the church. During the time of slavery a large number of AfricanAmericans converted to evangelical religions, including the Methodist or Baptist churches. Slaves used signals and messages to mix African rhythms and singing with evangelical Christianity, and so the predominantly white worship services of the time hold similarities to what would later become Gospel music. With the abolition of slavery, independent AfricanAmerican churches were established. The church was a place where one could feel safety and community, and to express hope for a better life. Music was an important part of this. Howe and Began say “Gospel music focuses on eternal hope and triumph in the midst of the most difficult circumstances. There are no “style” restrictions to gospel music, only common themes and spirit in order to reach the widest audience possible.”   

Music  

Throughout the African diaspora, music is an incredibly important point of connection. The tradition of a work song was brought to America by enslaved Africans. Labourers would sing rhythmic songs that coordinated their movements (swinging tools, picking fruit, and so on). Work songs were also known as work calls, field hollers, or arhoolies. They were also a form of communication to workers farther down the field. A sung or shouted line would get an answer back; this “call and response” structure where a lead singer has a line and the rest of the group responds was brought into gospel music as well. During the post-Reconstruction Era, the majority of African-Americans were unable to read. The call and response method let everyone participate in religious worship without reading. It is also present in the rock & roll/rhythm & blues music that draws on gospel for inspiration (such as the music of Ray Charles). Work songs and field hollers gave rise to spirituals and the blues.  

Spirituals expressed deep grief and pain felt by slaves. These often incorporated Biblical phrases and imagery - particularly those of the Israelites, enslaved in Egypt. These were songs of anguish and hope for a free future. Civil rights activist Dr. W.E.B DuBois described spirituals as “sorrow songs” for those who were “weary at heart.”   

Feelings are also expressed in music in the Blues genre - these songs are non-narrative and less concerned with story. Also coming from the work song background, but sung by one person instead of a group, this genre carries on the traditions of West African storytellers. You’ll often hear techniques like melisma (one syllable sung across several pitches) or “bending” or flattening notes, and rhythmic syncopation. These can give a wailing or crying-like quality to the song. The blues was based on a simple pattern, usually using 12 four-count bars (measure of music). The 12-bar blues uses the three most common chords in a scale, known as the I, IV, and V chords. The blues singer is able to improvise over this basic chord pattern. Georgia was one of the major centres of the birth of blues (Britannica gives Blind Willie McTell and Blind Boy Fuller as examples of the Georgia style). In the 1920s, the first blues recordings were made by Black women, including Mamie Smith, Ma Rainey, Ida Cox, and Bessie Smith; in The Color Purple these women are represented by Shug Avery.  

Jazz, swing, and rock & roll evolved from the blues; the I-IV-V chord progression being used in many early rock songs. From 1900 on, jazz grew, and reached its peak in the 1920s (the “Jazz Age”). It incorporates European harmonic structures and African-American rhythms. Jazz arose as musicians explored more complicated harmonies than blues’ simple chords, while keeping the flattened “blue notes” on the 3rd and 7th notes of the scales. Jazz players were also often improvisational. There was overlap between the genres - trumpeter Louis Armstrong, one of the musicians developing this new style, recorded several songs with “Blues” in the title - but through the 1930s music began to get more specific. Jazz dance bands grew in size and parts were written in particular arrangements, with special sections for improvising in solos. A tighter musical style was known as swing, for the way that musicians played with a “bounce” slightly behind the beat. This musical style was popular through the 1930s and 40s.  

As music evolved, so did places to hear it. Using music for worship in church remained important, but to hear blues and later jazz, you often needed to go to a juke joint. West African languages Wolof and Bambara have the word “dzug” which roughly means “unsavory.” From this evolved the words joog, jook, and juke in the Gullah dialect (a creole language developed in Georgia and South Carolina as a mix of English and West African languages.) These early nightclubs were a place for the Black community to gather safe from Jim Crow laws, but from this etymology it’s evident that these juke joints were definitely secular places to gather, very different than a church environment! Also known as barrelhouses, you could go to a juke to hear music, socialize, dance, and have a drink. They appeared through the southern states during the Reconstruction Era. Juke joints were typically out-of-the-way and surrounded by secrecy, relying on word of mouth for customers - in The Color Purple Harpo says that a juke joint is supposed to be in the woods. Most historic juke joints no longer exist, some due to economic reasons and competition, but the “back-door secrecy” inspired more mainstream commercial venues, like House of Blues, and the musical styles that the jukes incubated are their legacy.  

Dialect   

In the foreword to the 2009 edition of the script, novel author Alice Walker wrote about the way her characters spoke. As a tool of both historical accuracy and characterization, folk dialect is a device that was kept in this version of the published script. Walker calls this Black Folk English; in academia, it may be referred to as African American Vernacular English (AAVE), African American English (AAE), African American Language (AAL), Black English (BE), and Black English Vernacular (BEV). While the patterns and phrases might seem “wrong” to audience members hearing a dialect that may be unfamiliar to them, all speakers of English have unique dialects based upon factors such as age, heritage, region, and economic class. AAVE has its own grammatical rules that differ from British English, which created a linguistic stigma related to socioeconomic class, race, and prestige. Alice Walker’s introduction follows:  

“The characters in The Color Purple who speak with what I term Black Folk English do so because this was the speech of Southern country people for many generations. It has mostly to do with structure: What you think bout that? How far you all go? What cause that drop in the economy? Etcetera. Words may be left out of a sentence, yet the sentence makes perfect, understandable sense. This is where Black folk English connects with folk languages around the world… The intent in the novel, the movie and the musical is to affirm the dignity of folk expression. That these (Black folk English speaking) characters, the way they sound, is based on my memories of how my own parents and grandparents spoke, is a constant source of delight. In writing their voices, I have kept these ancestors with us.  

“The temptation when presenting Black voices on the stage, especially Black voices from the South and from a by-gone era, is to exaggerate what one assumes all poor Black people sounded like. In The Color Purple this would be a mistake. There are many levels of education presented in the story, and many nuances in the way people say things. There is no minstrel quality to the speech of any of the characters, all of whom are serious, full blown human beings, and not caricatures. Care should be taken to protect this hard-won representation of dignity.”