AUTHOR: Alice Walker

GIVEN NAME: Alice Malsenior Walker

BORN: February 9, 1944, Georgia

Much has been written on the relationship between Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982) and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937),undoubtedly due to Walker’s acknowledgment of Hurston as her literary foremother. Based upon the citations in the Modern Language Association (MLA) Bibliography, there are approximately fifty critical articles and dissertations that explore Walker’s novel in light of Hurston’s. The number remains almost the same for essays that discuss The Color Purple in conjunction with other texts, yet only 25 percent of them examine the novel in relation to works by subsequent African American women writers, many of whom had the benefit not only of studying creative writing in the academy but also of having access to the works of their cultural literary foremothers. Among this cadre of African American women writers is Gloria Naylor. Much has been written about her indebtedness to literary works in the traditional Western canon—Dante’s Inferno, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Hamlet,and King Lear. In addition, Naylor’s novels have been discussed in conjunction with those by African American women writers, such as Ann Petry’s The Street;Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, Beloved,and Tar Baby;Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow;and Walker’s Possessing the Secret of Joy—but notably absent from the list is The Color Purple. Yet The Color Purple is a pivotal text in the African American female literary tradition as suggested by the volume of criticism (over two hundred articles in the MLA Bibliography alone) dedicated to it, the awards, including the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, that Walker has received for it and its adaptation into a film with eleven Grammy award nominations and a Broadway musical that earned eleven Tony awards (Whitted “The Color Purple”). The Color Purple has proven to be a “text that ‘talks’ with and to other texts”; among such texts within the African American women’s literary tradition is Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day (1989) (Storhoff). Not only does Mama Day “talk with” The Color Purple; it revises certain aspects of the novel and exists in a “corrective relationship” for others (Smith-Wright 20); these features suggest that The Color Purple is a literary antecedent of Mama Day.

There are a number of similarities to suggest the influence of The Color Purple on Mama Day: both novels are set in the South; both privilege orality over the written text by utilizing a rhetorical strategy identified by Henry Louis Gates Jr. as “the speakerly text,” where language patterns produce the “illusion of oral narration” (181); and both use the narrative technique of “free indirect discourse” (Gates 248; Storhoff). These similarities are also applicable when Mama Day is compared to Their Eyes, Walker’s “pre-text”; however, there are many other parallels that are unique to Mama Day and The Color Purple (C. Wall 141). These novels not only attempt to replicate the protagonists’ language patterns but also intentionally involve the reader as their audience. According to Mary Jane Lupton, “the reader is . . . included by implication” in The Color Purple in the salutation of Celie’s final letter: “Dear God. Dear stars, dear trees, dear sky, dear peoples” (416). In the introductory chapter of Mama Day, the reader is directly addressed not only by the imperative to “listen. Really listen” but also by the phrase “the only voice [you hear] is your own” (Naylor 10). The only voice the readers hear in The Color Purple is also their own, for the novel is composed entirely of letters.

Both novels are centered on a female community that includes three principal characters: Celie, Shug, and Nettie in The Color Purple and Sapphira Wade, Miranda (Mama) Day, and Ophelia (Cocoa) Day in Mama Day, yet it is with their respective protagonists, Celie and Cocoa, that the similarities become most apparent. Both women are orphaned; they are emotionally damaged by the perceptions of others—Celie is labeled black, “pore,” and ugly (Walker 206) while Cocoa is called a leper because she is near-white in a community that treasures brown-skinned women; they are “saved” by another who provides a “life-giving intimacy”—Celie by Shug and Cocoa by her husband, George (Byrd 375). Finally, letters are crucially important to them: Celie communicates by letters—fifty-six to God, and fourteen to her sister, Nettie. Cocoa communicates by letter with her grandmother Abigail and great-aunt Mama Day while she resides in New York; according to Betina Entzminger, Cocoa has written seventy-seven letters home (60). The motif of hearing/listening is significant to The Color Purple and Mama Day. Because Celie has been ordered by her (step)father “to tell nobody but God” of the incest that leads to her birthing two children, she writes to God and continues to do so even after she learns that her husband (whom she identifies only as Mr. ________) has been keeping Nettie’s letters from her (Walker 1). It is when Nettie informs her that the man they believe to be their father is actually their stepfather that Celie ceases to write to God. When Shug asks what happened to her letters to God, Celie says, He’s “trifling, forgitful and lowdown.” When Shug cautions that God might hear her, Celie responds: “Let ’im hear me. . . . If he ever listened to poor colored women the world would be a different place” (Walker 192, my emphasis). Visualizing God as sitting in heaven and “glorying in being deef” [i.e. deaf], Celie is angry because He seems not to listen to her prayers (Walker 193, 195). In Mama Day, hearing/listening is crucial,thus, the instruction to “listen. Really listen” (Naylor 10). Listening with Mama Day, readers hear about the beginning of the Days as a woman “humming a lost and ancient song” heads “toward the east bluff over the ocean,” and they hear the coming storm (Naylor 118, 226–27). With Cocoa, readers hear the silent whispers in the west woods telling her she is going to break George’s heart, and they eventually realize that they are listening to George as he speaks from the grave (Naylor 223, 224). Walker and Naylor use the hearing/listening motif to prepare readers to move from the realm of the natural to the realm of the spiritual: because Celie thinks her God, whom she views as a white man, does not listen to her, she becomes receptive to Shug’s notion of God as neither he nor she, but “It,” and as readers learn to listen in Mama Day, they are presented the choice, like George, to move beyond the rational with its verifiable facts to that which cannot be verified by facts but must be accepted through belief (Walker 195).

Perhaps the most subtle of the similarities in these novels is the incorporation of the color purple itself. The passage in The Color Purple, where Shug discusses the nature of God to Celie, has been often quoted:

The reference to purple in Mama Day is also from a passage about God:

In this passage, purple appears not only with mention of the color itself but also through its composite colors, blue and red; consequently, its significance is underscored by the repetition. In both novels, purple becomes significant because of its association with God.

Noting the dearth of early critical attention on the spiritual aspect of The Color Purple, Alice Walker states that it is “a theological work” (Thyreen 49). Discussing its theological nature, scholar Jeannine Thyreen asserts that the novel seeks to answer the question “What is God” (50). Gloria Naylor is also interested in the spiritual enterprise; consequently, Mama Day is organized around “tropes of spiritual power and Biblical revision” (Naylor and Ashford). Therefore, it is within the context of their explorations of God that Mama Day becomes a literary descendant of The Color Purple. As they undertake such an examination in their novels, Walker and Naylor begin “in the beginning”—with the biblical story of creation.

The Biblical Creation Story

The biblical story of God and His original encounter with humans is revealed in Genesis 1 and 2, which scholars generally agree are comprised of two narratives—one that relates the creation of the world, the other that recounts the creation of mankind (Tsumura 27–29). These two narratives appear, with some variations and revisions, in The Color Purple and Mama Day.

The creation story in The Color Purple is from the Olinkas, the African tribe to whom Samuel, Corinne, and Celie’s sister Nettie are missionaries. Joseph, their African translator/guide, tells them that the white missionaries had shared the story of Adam and Eve’s being tricked by the serpent and expelled from the Garden of Eden. When the Olinkas heard the part of the biblical narrative where Adam and Eve became aware of their nakedness, they laughed. Explaining that the Olinka word for naked is white, the Olinkas informed the missionaries that “it was they who put Adam and Eve out of the village” because of the couple’s nakedness (Walker 273). In the Olinka version of the biblical creation story, Adam was not the first man, but the first white man (Walker 272, my emphasis). Thus, as Wendy Wall explains, the Olinka displaced “the Christian myth of origin. . . . Instead of the creation myth explaining the fall, the Olinkas read it as an explanation of white prejudice.”

The second Olinka story reveals the tribe’s conception of God. The translator/guide also relates the story of the roofleaf to the black missionaries during the village’s welcoming ceremony. The leaf of a certain plant that grew in abundance was used by the Olinka for the roofs of their huts. After the chief began to cultivate the land with other crops to trade with whites on the coast, a powerful storm arose that destroyed the roofs of Olinka huts. Joseph describes the storm:

When the storm season finally ceased, the Olinka discovered that only a few dozen roofleaf beds remained. They recultivated the crop, and when it returned, they repaired their roofs, celebrated with song and dance, and from that time on worshipped the roofleaf. Turning to the missionaries, Joseph explains, “We know a roofleaf is not Jesus Christ, but in its own humble way, is it not God (Walker 154). Because the Olinka received no answer during the storm, they changed the focus and locus of their worship—from “their gods” to “a place without walls but with a leaf roof” (Walker 152). The relocation of worship from “their gods” to the roofleaf was intracultural; however, it also influenced the Olinkas’ perspective of the Christian God. Implied in the comparison of the roofleaf to God—“its own humble way, is it not God”—is the premise that the roofleaf is equal to God. The corollary then is that God is the roofleaf. For the Olinkas, the Christian God is supplanted by the roofleaf. The first of the two accounts that relate to the biblical creation story in Mama Day appears as one of the novel’s three “introductory texts” (Page 172). A genealogical chart tracing the lineage of the Day family beginning with its ancestor, Sapphira Wade, is located between a map of the island of Willow Springs and a copy of Sapphira’s slave bill of sale. The chart outlines six generations of the Day family, including two consecutive generations of seven males followed by generations of females. In the first generation is an echo of the biblical creation narrative: Sapphira gives birth to seven sons each carrying the name of an Old Testament prophet. Only the seventh son carries the surname Day, which is accompanied by an asterisk. Below the names of the two females of the sixth generation is the notation for the asterisk—two sentences: “‘God rested on the seventh day and so would she.’ Hence the family name” (Naylor 1). Shirley A. Stave summarizes the import of elements of the genealogical chart. She writes,

Unlike the Olinka creation myth, which displaces the biblical story of human origin, the genealogical chart in Mama Day invokes it; its revision is that the “original forebear” is a woman. The import of this revision is underscored in the repetition of the genealogical chart—in prose form—later in the novel.

The second creation myth in Mama Day addresses the origin of the island of Willow Springs:

The God who creates Willow Springs appears in this version of the Genesis creation story. However, when He reaches down to retrieve the stars, He meets a woman who asks Him to leave them so she can “lead on with light.” The phrase is an important one, for it is linked to Candle Walk, the annual Willow Springs celebration held December 22 that supplants Christmas. The original purpose of the celebration—and the light—has altered with time, but the omniscient narrator, able to trace it back two generations, explains: when Miranda was a child, people would walk to the ocean bluff beyond the east woods, raise their candles and say, “Lead on with light, Great Mother. Lead on with light”; the people of Miranda’s father’s generation worshipped his African-born grandmother, “a slave woman who took her freedom,” and the candles were to light her way (Naylor 111). The two explanations of Candle Walk reinforce the two versions of the novel’s creation story and their singular argument of God as woman. However, just as the Olinka story of the roofleaf does not displace the Christian God, God is not displaced in the creation myths in Mama Day. In Naylor’s variants of the creation story, God is “the first creator,” yet there is a “powerful female partner” (Levy 219).

Within the two biblical creation stories in The Color Purple and Mama Day are three thematic strands—the nature of God, the creation of the world, and the Adam and Eve story. Each of these strands is developed in the novels: what is not addressed in the myths themselves is presented through textual references to creation. When Shug tells Albert (Celie’s Mr. ________) that she is taking Celie to Memphis, he replies, “Over my dead body,” to which Celie responds, “It’s time to leave you and enter into the Creation. And your dead body just the welcome mat I need” (Walker 199). The image of Celie entering Creation by walking over the “dead body” of Mr. ________ evokes the image of the biblical Eve standing over an awakened Adam; therefore, it is a subtle revision of the creation of woman. But, more importantly, the image is also one of Celie’s rebirth. Celie enters into a new world as a new person; thus, in this passage of The Color Purple is the thematic strand of the biblical creation of the world. In Mama Day, it is the Adam and Eve story that is recounted when Cocoa takes George through the west woods to the other place. Seeing the flowering trees with “bursts of color among all the dark greens and browns: magnolia, yellow jasmine and wisteria” as a “wild garden,” a “paradise,” George suggests that they play “Adam and Eve” (Naylor 217, 222). George’s perspective of Willow Springs is that of the Garden of Eden before the Fall and the fig leaves. Having grown up there, Cocoa knows that Willow Springs is Eden after the Fall and Adam’s biting into the forbidden fruit; therefore, she informs George that the consequence of his becoming naked in the west woods of Willow Springs is being bitten by the red ants (Naylor 222). In these references to the biblical creation story in each novel is an allusion to death. In The Color Purple the reference is explicit: Celie eventually verbalizes her cloaked desire to kill Mr. ________ because he has withheld Nettie’s letters. In Mama Day, the allusion is oblique: Cocoa gets George to acknowledge the realities of life in paradise after the Fall by mentioning the immediate consequences in the Adam and Eve story. What she does not mention—and does not want to acknowledge even to herself—is the long-range consequences: a knowledge of good and evil, and with it, the inevitability of death. Cocoa does not share with George her knowledge that the other place is linked to death.

Walker and Naylor’s revisions of the biblical creation story are significant. Both authors revise the biblical narrative in terms of gender, but Walker also revises it in terms of race. The Bible is displaced in The Color Purple; it is signified upon in Mama Day. The Olinka myths in The Color Purple further Walker’s pantheistic vision; the creation myths in Mama Day expand the Biblical creation story to include the aspect of the feminine. However, incorporation of the biblical creation stories in both novels becomes part of a larger enterprise—questioning the concept of God.

Depictions of God in The Color Purple and Mama Day

If The Color Purple is a spiritual descendant of Their Eyes Were Watching God as Jane Davis argues, then Mama Day is a spiritual descendant of The Color Purple. Walker’s novel is a conscious effort to revise the patriarchal image of God that appears in Their Eyes, and Naylor’s novel is a conscious effort to revise the depictions of God in The Color Purple.

The depiction of God as a white man appears in Their Eyes when Janie and her husband Tea Cake, who are among those who do not leave before the hurricane arrives, become silent during the raging winds, thunder, and lightning—the evidence that “Ole Massa is doin’ His work” (Hurston 150). The implication that “Ole Massa” (a synonym since slavery for the white man) is God not only is suggested by the capitalization of “His” but also made explicit in a subsequent line that serves as the novel’s title: “their eyes were watching God” (Hurston 151, my emphasis). The image is revised in The Color Purple, but first it is repeated. In the passage where Shug asks Celie why she no longer writes to God, Celie describes God at Shug’s request:

Walker begins the conversation with Their Eyes by repeating the white male God image; Naylor begins by rejecting it. Therefore, Mama Day enters into dialogue with The Color Purple through what is identified as a “corrective relationship” (Smith-Wright 20); the novel modifies the question on the nature of God from “What is God” in The Color Purple to “Who is God”

Mama Daybegins its revision of the nature of God by switching “the gender of the deity” (Stave 99): God is depicted as a woman. This substitution is implied in the introductory genealogical chart, for Sapphira Wade is presented as the sole creator of the Days/days (i.e., time). Sapphira is depicted as having other characteristics of the divine: like the biblical YHWH, her name is “too sacred to be spoken aloud” (Ohlsen 16:f2); folks in Willow Springs “only whisper the name Sapphira” (Naylor 151). While awaiting the coming storm, the natural event that shapes the novel, the people of Willow Springs send up “prayers . . . to be spared from what could only be the workings of Woman. And She has no name” (Naylor 251). The residents of Willow Springs worship the Woman with no name; the capitalization suggests that she is God. Even the rationally minded George acknowledges that God is a woman; sitting quietly and helplessly during the storm, he recognizes that “the winds coming around the corners of that house was God” (Naylor 251).

Naylor’s revision of Walker’s depiction of God does not end with a regendering; she complicates the issue by depicting God as both male and female. The female God, Sapphira Wade, is present in the genealogical chart, but so is a male God. Both are there in the beginning: he “rested on the seventh day and so would she” (Naylor 1). The two deities also appear together in the Willow Springs creation myth: when God reaches down to gather up the stars, He shakes hands with Sapphira, who requests that He leave them so that she can lead with light. God complies with her request; a handshake binds their agreement, and the two enter into an equal partnership. James Robert Saunders provides a third example; he writes, “there is the suggestion . . . that God is a woman. Mama Day . . . ‘prays to the Father and Son as she’d been taught. But she falls asleep murmuring the names of women’” (60). Naylor’s intent is not to displace the traditional Christian God; instead, she seeks to expand the concept of God. As Stave so aptly explains it, “Mama Day can be read as Naylor’s exploration of what a theology of [the] feminine counterpart [to the male Jahweh] might entail” (98).

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Mama Day provides a counterpoint to Walker’s notion of pantheism: the elements of nature are not God; they are controlled by God—more specifically, the female God. When Shug instructs Celie to “git man off [her] eyeball” by “conjur[ing] up flowers, wind, water,” Celie responds, “He been there so long, he don’t want to budge. He threaten lightening, floods, earthquakes” (Walker 197). Mama Day counters this by clearly indicating that conjuring is the domain of women as seen through Sapphira, Mama Day, and her nemesis Ruby. Moreover, the natural elements in Shug’s list—flowers, wind, and water—are specifically linked to Sapphira. At the beginning of the Days/days, Sapphira places flowers in the garden she designed—zinnias, morning glories, the deeper-colored [i.e., purple] wisteria—as well as flowering bushes (224, 226, 243; my emphasis). She leaves the island by wind in 1823, but returns in 1985, bringing wind and water together to form a hurricane:

Naylor makes it clear that the God who “threaten[s] lightening, floods, earthquakes” is a woman.

In Mama Day, time is Sapphira’s domain. The genealogical chart makes it clear that Sapphira creates—and names—the Days/days (the oral nature of the text is important here: by listening, the reader hears the wordplay); the Days/days, thus time, do not exist until she names them. In addition, as Valerie Lee notes, in producing seven sons in one thousand days, “Sapphira is not fixed by time,” she manipulates it (130).

Sapphira also controls nature and land:

Willow Springs becomes hers because, according to George, she “talked a man out of a whole island (Naylor 219). All acts of nature, including the island’s major storms of 1823, 1920, and 1985, are manifestations of her power over nature. Shug’s belief that “God is everything” is corrected in Mama Day,whose premise is that God is the Creator of everything (Walker 195).

Naylor further advances the premise that nature is not God but rather “the realm of God” through an extended counterargument using tree imagery, addressed in both novels within the context of spirituality (Harris 96). The first significant reference to a tree in The Color Purple is in Celie’s explanation of her coping strategy when being beaten by Mr. ________: “It all I can do not to cry. I make myself wood. I say to myself, Celie, you a tree” (Walker 22). Shug later affirms Celie’s notion of becoming one with the tree when she explains the steps in her evolutionary process from traditional Christianity to pantheism. Shug’s “first step from the white man [is] trees”; then, believing that God was in everything, she acknowledges that if [she] cut a tree, [her] arm would bleed” (Walker 195, 196). After experiencing a life-saving transformation under Shug’s tutelage, Celie, like Shug, views nature as God. In response to Mr. ________’s insolence when he is told that she is going to Memphis with Shug, Celie pronounces a curse on him and then predicts that everything he dreams of will fail. Explaining her source for this newfound act of courage, which occurs after Celie has abandoned her communication with God, Celie says, “it seem to come to me from the trees” (Walker 206). Celie’s total acceptance of Shug’s philosophy of pantheism is expressed in her final letter in The Color Purple; she writes, “Dear God. Dear stars, dear trees, dear sky, dear peoples. Dear everything. Dear God” (Walker 283). Like Shug, Celie comes to view God as/in everything; consequently, a number of the elements of nature, including trees, are listed in the salutation.

To underscore Shug and Celie’s spiritual journeys to nature in America, Walker provides a parallel in Africa. Shug’s worship of trees corresponds to the Olinkas’ worship of the roofleaf, which takes on the properties of a tree as its leaves provide shelter and protection. The mass destruction of the roofleaf, first by the village chief and then by the white men from the coast, indicates that as a God, it is as powerless as the missionaries’ Christian God (Walker 227). The equivalent, then, to the Olinkas’ abandonment of the worship of the roofleaf God is Celie’s abandonment of the Christian God, for both discover that their God is powerless to help them.

Perhaps because the tree becomes God in The Color Purple, it is an important image in Mama Day. Setting figures prominently here: the island’s name, Willow Springs, is part tree (even though there are no willow trees there). Also, there are three sets of woods on the island; consequently, trees of all kinds are in abundance. Although Sapphira had planted peach and pecan trees in her original garden, she is primarily connected to wind and water. It is her twentieth-century counterpart, Mama Day, who is more closely aligned with trees. Just as Sapphira “could walk through a lightning storm without being touched,” the young Miranda, or Little Mama, could “walk through a dry winter without snapping a single twig” or “disappear into the shadow of a summer cottonwood”; as a result, “folks started believing [that] John-Paul’s little girl became a spirit in the woods” (Naylor 3, 79). Unlike Celie, the young girl does not become wood (i.e., tree); rather, she becomes a spirit in the woods. Reaching adulthood, Mama Day retains her connection with trees. The evening she takes a stroll in Ambush Duvall’s woods, the narrator reveals that “she can still stand so quiet she becomes part of a tree” (Naylor 81). The emphasis in this sentence is on Mama Day’s ability to be so quiet that she appears to become part of a tree. As Cheryl Wall explains, Mama Day’s quiet standing is a model for the kind of listening that is required in Willow Springs—a stillness that allows one to hear the sounds of nature (178). Finally, at the other place after the hurricane, Mama Day

Mama Day does not merge with the tree; in fact, it seems to be antagonistic. Nonetheless, the tree communicates with Mama Day. Licking her bloody knuckles, she tastes death and the pain Bernice Duvall feels because her son has died. In contrast to Celie, Mama Day remains separate from the tree; like Sapphira, she works in conjunction with nature; thus, the message is clear: the tree is not God. The corrective relationship between The Color Purple and Mama Day concerning the nature of God is threefold. The traditional God of Christianity is not displaced as in The Color Purple; instead, God is explored in the feminine. Moreover, God is not “gender-neutral” (Andujo 73); on the contrary, God becomes inclusive, incorporating both the masculine and the feminine, as revealed in a passage in the Genesis creation story that has been ignored: “[s]o God created man in His own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female He created them” (Genesis 1:27, my emphasis). Thus, Naylor restores the image of God to the biblical original. Finally, in response to the pantheism in The Color Purple, Mama Day proposes that God is not in nature; God is God of nature. Walker’s theological question “What is God” is replaced with the question “Who is God” As Mama Day enters into the theological debate with The Color Purple, it becomes to The Color Purple what Jane Davis argues The Color Purple is to Their Eyes Were Watching God—a spiritual descendant. Another literary work is added to those claimed to have influenced Mama Day, but, just as importantly, because of the dialogue between The Color Purple and Mama Day, Alice Walker not only has a literary foremother, she is a literary foremother.

Works Cited