Celie’s Letters to God Wrecked Me for a Week

A girl writes letters to God because there is no one else

Celie is fourteen when the book starts and she is already being raped by the man she calls her father (he isn’t, we learn later, though that detail doesn’t make the first hundred pages easier to sit with). She writes to God because her stepfather tells her not to tell anybody else what he’s doing to her, so God becomes the loophole. Then she’s married off to a man she only ever calls Mr. ______, who wants her mostly for free labor and something to hit. Her sister Nettie escapes to Africa as a missionary and the two of them are separated for decades, writing letters that don’t arrive, which is its own quiet horror running under the main one.

Here’s the thing, the plot summary makes it sound like unrelenting misery porn, and for a solid chunk of the book, it kind of is. But Walker isn’t interested in showing you suffering as spectacle. She’s building the floor Celie has to crawl up off of, so that when Shug Avery walks into the story, a blues singer, Mr. ______’s longtime mistress, a woman who is loud and vain and generous and completely unbothered by what anyone thinks of her, you feel exactly how much oxygen she brings into a room that has had none. Shug is the hinge the whole book turns on. Without her, Celie stays a woman things happen to. With her, Celie becomes someone things happen because of.

What actually works, and the one place I think it stumbles

The letters are the whole trick and I did not expect them to work on me as hard as they did. Celie’s voice starts halting, misspelled, grammatically all over the place, because she is a girl who was pulled out of school. Watching that voice sharpen and gain confidence over four hundred pages, without Walker ever announcing “look, character growth,” is some of the best slow-motion character work I’ve read. You don’t notice Celie getting stronger. You just notice one day that she said something and you believe her completely, and you go back and realize the woman from page one would never have said that.

Shug and Celie’s relationship is the beating heart of the book and I think a lot of casual readers undersell how radical it still reads. Not just because it’s queer, though it is, refreshingly matter-of-fact about it in a book from 1982. It’s radical because it’s the first relationship in the entire novel built on wanting something for Celie rather than from her. Everyone else in her life, her stepfather, Mr. ______, even her own children at first, treats her like a resource. Shug treats her like a person worth knowing.

I’ll be honest about the part that doesn’t fully land for me: the Africa sections with Nettie. I get what they’re doing structurally, widening the lens, drawing a line between what’s happening to Black women in rural Georgia and colonialism happening to a whole continent, and there are individual images in there that are gorgeous. But they read cooler and more distant than Celie’s chapters, more essay than story, and every time the book cut back to Nettie’s letters I found myself a little impatient to get back to Celie. Maybe that’s a compliment to how strong the main thread is. Maybe it’s a real structural flaw. I go back and forth on this every time I reread it, and I’m genuinely not sure which it is, which bugs me, because I like having a firm opinion.

And I’ll cop to something else. The first time I read this in high school I found it kind of a slog, all that dialect on the page slowing me down, and I remember thinking it was “important” the way teachers mean important, which is a death sentence for a book at seventeen. It wasn’t until the laundromat re-read, a decade later, that it actually got me. So maybe some books need you to be a certain kind of tired and a certain kind of grown before they’ll work. Or maybe I just wasn’t paying attention the first time. I genuinely don’t know which.

The ending. Look, I know some people think the reconciliation and the reunion stretch credibility, that real abusers don’t get redemption arcs, that real families don’t get the bow Walker ties here. I’ve heard that argument and I respect it. But I think that’s missing what the book is actually doing, which isn’t promising you that abusers change. It’s promising Celie that joy is still available to her even after everything, that a woman who spent her whole life being told she was ugly and worthless gets to end the book rich in the things that were taken from her: her sister, her children, her own name spoken with love instead of contempt. I was a wreck by the last twenty pages and I don’t feel embarrassed about that even a little.

This is a book about what survives in a person even when almost everything else has been taken.

About Alice Walker

Alice Walker grew up the youngest of eight kids in Eatonton, Georgia, the daughter of sharecroppers, and lost sight in one eye as a kid when her brother shot her with a BB gun, an injury she’s said made her both an outsider and a watcher, which tracks with how observant her writing is. She was active in the civil rights movement in the sixties, coined the term “womanist” to describe a Black feminism rooted in the specific experience of Black women rather than borrowed from white feminist frameworks, and has never been an easy, safe interview. She says what she thinks, some of it brilliant, some of it in later years genuinely controversial, and I’d rather that than a writer who’s been sanded down into a brand.

If Celie’s letters wrecked you, read these next

Grab a copy here if you somehow don’t own one yet, and then chase it with:

• Beloved by Toni Morrison, for the same unflinching gaze at what slavery and its aftermath do to a family, told in prose that’s stranger and more haunted
• Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, the book Walker herself fought to get back into print, and the clearest ancestor to Celie’s voice
• Sula by Toni Morrison, for another fierce, complicated friendship between women that the world keeps trying to punish
• An American Marriage by Tayari Jones, if you want the modern descendant of this book’s interest in what marriage does to Black women specifically

For your book club

1. Why do you think Walker chose letters, first to God and then between sisters, as the entire structure of the book? What does that form let her do that straight narration couldn’t?
2. Shug Avery is often called the moral and emotional center of the novel even though she’s not the protagonist. What is it about her that makes her so pivotal to Celie’s transformation?
3. How did you feel about the ending? Earned catharsis or too tidy for what came before it?
4. The novel has been challenged and banned repeatedly since publication. What do you think people are actually afraid of when they try to keep this book out of schools?
5. Nettie’s letters from Africa run alongside Celie’s story the whole book. Did that dual structure work for you, or did you find yourself wanting to stay with Celie?