Troubling the Water

Abstract

In this memorable scene from Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982), Shug Avery imparts to Celie the wonder and freedom of a woman’s autonomy to define her faith. Shug, who lives a life in contradiction to her father’s religion, teaches Celie to theorize her own system of belief rather than suffocate under the weight of a constricting Christianity. Only after she fondles with the idea and renegotiates her own concept of the divine is Celie able to come to voice and action, defending herself against “Mr.——’s evil” (Walker, Color 204). Shug’s discourse on renegotiating faith is not, however, an original concept. The practice of adapting Western ideas of the divine to better accommodate the confines of peculiar patriarchal institutions has been commonplace in African American religion, reaching back to the forced introduction of Africans to the New World. The syncretization of African and other religious practices is evidenced both in pre–middle passage Africa as well as in the New World.¹ Albert Raboteau points to the Convince cult and Revivalist tradition of Jamaica, the Spiritual Baptists of Trinidad, and Evangelical Protestantism in the United States as primary examples of such blending and borrowing among religions.² This history is certainly not lost on Walker, whose tragic character blossoms into a new woman upon the realization that spirituality can take any form she imagines.

“Here’s the thing,” say Shug. “The thing I believe. God is inside you and inside everybody else. You come into the world with God. But only them that search for it inside find it. And sometimes it just manifest itself even if you not looking, or don’t know what you looking for.”

—Alice Walker, The Color Purple