Queen Bee, King Bee: The Color Purple and the Blues

© Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue canadienne d’études américaines 30, no. 3, 2000 Queen Bee, King Bee: The Color Purple and the Blues Jerry Wasserman Alice Walker’s The Color Purple chronicles the life of an African American woman from rural Georgia during the first forty years of the twentieth century, a blues life of indignity and severe emotional poverty that is salvaged and ultimately redeemed, in part through the agency of the blues itself. On the opening page, warned by her stepfather never to tell anyone but God that he has raped her, Walker’s protagonist, Celie, erases herself. “I am,” she writes, striking out the word “am” and correcting herself, “I have always been a good girl” (3). She presents herself as “an absence, an erased presence” (Gates 243). Later her husband further (un)defines her: “You black, you pore, you ugly, you a woman. Goddam, he say, you nothing at all” (Color Purple 176). From this condition of absence, of ostensible nothingness, Celie learns to make herself present and real. She achieves subjectivity and agency under the tutelage of Shug Avery, blues singer. Celie has the deep blues. A third of the way through the novel, she offers up this short history of her life so far: “My mama die, I tell Shug. My sister Nettie run away. Mr. come git me to take care his rotten children. He never ast me nothing bout myself. He clam on top of me and fuck and fuck, even when my head bandaged. Nobody ever love me, I say” (97). Quincy Jones, collaborating with Walker on the movie version of The Color Purple, observed that “Celie is the blues” (qtd. in Walker, Same River 55). But only by embracing the blues, literally in the person of Shug, is Celie reborn as subject rather than object. She enacts her rebirth in an emblematic moment after she and Shug kiss for the first time, when she finds her mouth at Shug’s breast: “I act like a little lost baby,” Celie says (Color Purple 97). Well established by now in both the African American and the broader American literary canons, The Color Purple has attracted a lot of critical attention, nearly all of which has had something to say about Shug’s role in turning Celie’s life around. The significance of blues in the novel and of Shug’s vocation as a blues singer certainly has not gone unnoticed. Maria V. Johnson observes that, in both The Color Purple and Walker’s short story “Nineteen Fifty-five,” “The blues Canadian Review of American Studies 30 (2000) 302 woman, whose song is true to her own experience and rooted in the values and beliefs of the community, empowers those who love her and effects change in those around her” (222). Keith Byerman suggests that the combination of Shug’s singing and sexuality implies for Celie “the possibility of creativity in a context other than the endless cycle of reproduction ” (65). Thomas F. Marvin explores what he calls Shug’s “blues conversion” of Celie (411). He examines the novel’s secular theology in relation to Bessie Smith’s paradigmatic “Preachin’ the Blues” and argues that both novel and song are fundamentally shaped by African beliefs about the spiritual power of music. I propose to take a somewhat different direction in trying to pin down how the blues is central to Celie’s emerging subjectivity. First, I want to look briefly at some of the general principles that make the blues—as both a musical form and a cultural sensibility—a fertile medium for Shug’s reclamation project and Celie’s resulting ego-formation. Secondly, my study explores the gendered nature of Shug’s blues persona and the ways that the blues allows for a negotiation across gender’s traditional borders that points to the radical transformations of gender relations that ultimately occur in the novel. Finally, I examine a range of blues songs that utilize the key tropes associated with Shug—sugar and the bee. Signifying on each other, these songs illustrate, over an even longer period than the forty-plus years of the novel’s span and beyond the novel...