back, intent on rectifying it. When she sees dignity threatened and trodden upon all around her, you’re safe to bet that she’ll fight it with all the force of her pen. Are heroines obligated to stage impressive feats in the fight for dignity, or can we act in smaller ways? Surely Alice and Celie’s real and fictitious life experiences point to different, equally valid approaches. Both warn against complacency, the enemy of action and of dignity. When we turn our eyes away from anything, be it injustice or the color purple, our heroine’s value is debased and denied. When we look life in the face, we may shy away from what we see. In Alice Walker’s world and in ours, there are too many things designed to knock a heroine’s teeth out, keeping her silent and small. But if Alice and Celie are to be our guides, we must learn that to give in to the threat is to give it all of our power. When we shy away from the task, we strangle ourselves. When we face it with all the force of our dignity as women and as heroines, things change for the better, however slowly or simply.
We may never develop Alice Walker’s own uncompromising vision, the power to keep looking at the fire even when we’re half blind. But we can practice, question, and reaffirm ourselves even when we’d rather leave indignity and brutality safely between the covers of a book. There’s a time for both the sweeping gesture and the smaller one. There’s always time for dignity, even if we can only lay claim to our own in Celie’s simple acceptance of what is: “I’m pore, I’m black, I may be ugly and can’t cook…. But I’m here.”
READ THIS BOOK:
• When complacent or a bit too contented
• Before important elections or contentious board meetings
• With your teenage daughters
CELIE’S LITERARY SISTERS:
• Sethe in
• Offred in
• Idgie Threadgood in
Chapter 5
Family Ties
Francie Nolan in
by Betty Smith
We never understood each other, Mother. and I know I gave you a hard time…. It was because I wanted you to talk to me. I know now why I told you so many lies, Mother. I wanted you to notice me. And I didn’t mind it too much when you scolded me.I would rather have had you scold me, Mother, than ignore me.
BETTY SMITH
My dad grumbled as he grudgingly forked over the $100 overweight fee to an impatient airline attendant. I fidgeted with my carry-on, eager at the age of fifteen to be shipped off to unknown territory along with two bulky suitcases. Headed to an unknown country and armed with only two words in German (“thanks” and “potato”), I only had room for one work of fiction in my bag. I had a suspicion that I’d need something, anything, in English to sustain me over the year ahead, a year in which my expensive monthly call back home would become something to relish, in which I would be plunged into an awkward family dynamic and separated by more distance than had ever stood between me and my already-tortured family ties.
So what was the book that pushed my baggage over the edge? A
Throughout her life, it seemed as if Betty Smith was doomed to run away from, parse through, and struggle against her family ties. The little we know for sure about her childhood seems sparse: daughter of immigrants, Elizabeth “Lizzie” Wehner grew up in tenement Brooklyn at the turn of the twentieth century, surrounded by harshness and poverty and denied the love that would later become her obsession. Lizzie was drawn to and cut off from her mother, Katie, a hard woman who passed her florid storytelling style, her bitter survival instinct, and her poverty to her daughter. Not much is known about John Wehner, who died when Lizzie was nineteen. Whatever the details, his life and death burned an irreparable hole through Lizzie’s heart, a hole she tried to fill with work, professional accomplishments, and the succession of alcoholic men she doted upon to the detriment of her own physical and mental health.
Faced with a painful home life, Lizzie was eager to create her own family. Her parents forced her to leave school and start working at age fourteen, and insecure, resentful Lizzie quickly moved to associate herself with education and upward mobility. Brooklyn’s settlement houses were her social center: there, she danced, debated, studied, and met George Smith, a driven young man who wanted to get out of Brooklyn as much as she did. When he moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, to study law, she followed. But life as a young wife was no easier than it was during the lean years of her childhood. As she recited her vows to George, Lizzie worried that his brutal schedule, his ambition, and their shared poverty would make it hard to enjoy marriage.
Her premonition was right. Five years later, she was no closer to happiness than she had been before. The intervening years had brought two daughters, Nancy and Mary. Now a young mother, Lizzie felt even more pressure to educate herself. She petitioned to attend the local high school, an unusual request for a married woman. But though she worked hard, life constantly interrupted her studies. Worse still, the man she had followed to this far-off place became more distant with each passing year. It seemed that George’s burgeoning legal practice and rising political career had no place for a naive, heavily accented wife. But Lizzie had aspirations of her own. She turned a blind eye to George’s affairs and focused instead on her new plan: to become a writer.
Soon, the ledger in which she recorded her literary submissions and sales read like a litany of her own family’s emotional and financial ups and downs. Lizzie the woman became Betty Smith the writer, fighting her way into college courses against school regulations that banned students without a high school diploma, writing plays that reflected the dreams of the poor and working classes, even winning the prestigious Avery Hopwood Award for dramatic writing in 1930.
But success couldn’t keep Betty’s family life from spinning quickly out of her control. Family crises prevailed, crowned by the deaths of Betty’s stepfather and George’s parents. The distant couple finally uprooted their family, moving east to Amherst, Massachusetts, and then to New Haven, Connecticut, in an uneasy and short-lived reconciliation. The stagnation and fear of her marriage were belied by her professional accomplishments: though she had never officially completed high school, Betty’s drama prize allowed her to enroll in graduate studies at Yale. And there she met the man who would puncture her family life for good: a man completely unlike her closed-off husband.
Bob Finch was an artist, an alcoholic, and most importantly, a needy man. He entered her life just as George was moving onward and upward. Left in the dust of her husband’s ambitions (he eventually went on to serve in the U.S. Senate and practice before the Supreme Court), Betty focused instead on Bob, a man whose desperation and dramatic nature mirrored her own. She separated from George in 1933.
Alone now with her daughters, Betty struggled as a single mother with no money, no time, and no emotional support. She left Yale and returned to New York, renting an apartment from her again-widowed mother in Queens. But the proximity to her stepfather’s memory was painful. Though she never gave details, Betty later hinted that he had sexually abused her. Hungry and concerned about her girls, Betty started selling confession stories to pulp magazines for a few cents a word. The income financed a move to her own apartment a few subway stops away from her mother. The girls came along, attending school and shoveling coal into the furnace while their mother wrote and worked as an actress in Manhattan.
Her children, bewildered by their uprooted life, had started skipping school and were often sick. Betty was
