Alice Walker, The Color Purple. Students' contributions

When Celie is fourteen years old she has to marry Albert and after this marriage her life turns worse than it was before. On her wedding day Albert's son Harpo hits her with a stone so that she begins to bleed but Albert does not care and just says "Don't do that". He does not love her and even when he sleeps with her she has the feeling that he only thinks of himself and does his business," going to the toilet on her," as her friend Shug Avery later says. Albert beats her and shows her that she does not mean anything to him but a wife that has to do what the husband says. He never helps Celie with all the work she has to do inside and outside the house. Albert thinks that all these things are women's work. Instead of doing anything or helping her he sits on the porch, smoking his pipe and reading a newspaper or staring down the road. He only loves Shug Avery, a famous singer who has an affair with him and who enjoys sex with him, and he hates Celie for not being Shug. All the time she is regarded as inferior to him and has to endure this.

Later on Shug lives in Celie's and Albert's house so that they continue she continues her affair with Albert. During this time Celie is not beaten so often. Celie and Shug develop a close relationship. They find out that Albert hides letters from Celie's sister Nettie in Africa. He never gave those letters to her although they were addressed to Celie. She reads all the letters and slowly gains her self-confidence. But her self-confidence also develops through her relationship with Shug because she is a very strong person that lives her life the way she wants to. Her love for Shug gradually makes her steady and firm so that eventually she becomes so strong that she leaves her husband. She is not frightened anymore and leaves him although Albert derides her and calls her an ugly black (sic!) woman that no one likes and so on.

After many years Celie returns to the South to live in the house she has inherited from her stepfather, and it seems that her husband has become another person and he even respects her. They talk about the old days and he tries to explain why he behaved so ill in the past. He has really changed and it is very strange to see how he has turned into a completely new person. Celie teaches him how to help her sewing pants, which he would never have done in the past. Sewing pants she and Albert sit together and talk about everything that comes to their minds. Celie tells him about Nettie and her life in Africa as reported in her letters that Albert had hidden from her because he wanted both never to see each other again. But now Celie tells him about her and about the Africans and their opinions of the missionaries and the whites. Then Albert asks Celie to marry him again but Celie does not want to and she says that she does not love frogs.

When Nettie returns from Africa with her husband and Celie's children arrive at Celie's house, Albert helps her up when she, being overjoyed by this reunion with her beloved sister and her children, has fallen down on her her knees.

First published in the Yearbook 2000 of the Gymnasium Hamm, pp.78f.; written in the third term of a Leistungskurs.