Race and domesticity in 'The Color Purple.'

African American Review, Spring, 1995 by Linda Selzer

The self-interest that prompts Doris to become a missionary also characterizes the relationship she establishes with the Akwee upon her arrival in Africa. There she uses her wealth to set up an ostensibly reciprocal arrangement that in fact reflects her imperial power to buy whatever she wants: "Within a year everything as far as me and the heathen were concerned ran like clockwork. I told them right off that their souls were no concern of mine, that I wanted to write books and not be disturbed. For this pleasure I was prepared to pay. Rather handsomely." Described as a mechanism that runs "like clockwork," Doris's relationship to the Akwee clearly falls short of the maternal ideal for race relations expressed in the Olinka myths. In fact, Doris's relationship to the villagers is decidedly paternal from the outset, since her formal kinship with the Akwee begins when she is presented with "a couple of wives" (195) in recognition for her contributions to the village.(10) The fact that she continues to refer to the Olinka as "the heathen" in her discussions with Nettie implies that, in spite of her fondness for her grandson, Doris never overcomes a belief in the essential "difference" of the Africans attributed to her by the Missionary Society in England: "She thinks they are an entirely different species from what she calls Europeans. . . . She says an African daisy and an English daisy are both flowers, but totally different kinds" (115). By promoting a theory of polygenesis opposed to the Olinkan account of racial origins, Doris calls into question her own ability to treat the Akwee as kin. The true nature of her "reciprocal" relationship with the Akwee is revealed when she unselfconsciously tells Nettie that she believes she can save her villagers from the same displacement the Olinka suffered: "I am a very wealthy woman," says Doris, "and I own the village of Akwee" (196).

Stripped of both the religious motivation of the other missionaries and the overt racism of the other whites, Doris Baines through her relationship with the Akwee lays bare the hierarchy of self-interest and paternalism that sets the pattern for race relations in larger Africa. Indeed, from the moment that young Nettie first arrives in Africa she is surprised to find whites there "in droves," and her letters are filled with details suggestive of the hegemony of race and class. Nettie's description of Monrovia is a case in point. There she sees "bunches" of whites and a presidential palace that "looks like the American white house" (119). There Nettie also discovers that whites sit on the country's cabinet, that black cabinet members' wives dress like white women, and that the black president himself refers to his people as "natives" - as Nettie remarks, "It was the first time I'd heard a black man use that word" (120). Originally established by ex-slaves who returned to Africa but who kept "close ties to the country that bought them" (117), Monrovia clearly reveals a Western influence in more than its style of architecture, and its cocoa plantations provide the colonial model of integration that defines the white presence elsewhere in Africa - from the port town "run by a white man" who rents out "some of the stalls . . . to Africans" (127) all the way up to the governor's mansion where "the white man in charge" (144) makes the decision to build the road that ultimately destroys the Olinka village. Indeed, the later displacement of the Olinka villagers by the English roadbuilders - the main action in the African sections of The Color Purple - simply recapitulates the colonial process of integration already embedded in Nettie's narrative of her travels through the less remote areas of Africa.