Happy Dr. Martin Luther King Day 2024

I attended the 20th Anniversary “In the Name of Love Program,” Sat., January 13. New venue, the plush Paramount Theater. Yes, impressive despite the pouring rain. The musical arrangements and performances were amazing, as in outstanding!

Here are a few conversations from Wanda’s Picks podcast about King Day, In the Name of Love, and Peace with Justice:
Wanda’s Picks podcast, January 13, 2016 with Cat Brooks etc.
Wanda’s Picks podcast, January 15, 2016 with Charles Curtis Blackwell, Glenn Pearson et al
Wanda’s Picks podcast, January 19, 2022 with Charles Curtis Blackwell & Rev. Clarence Johnson, Veteran of the Civil Rights Movement

Cat Brooks @Reclaim MLK Jr. 2024

January 15, 2009, Dakar, Senegal, West Africa@Artists’ Village

https://wandasabir.blogspot.com/2010/01/january-15-2009.html

The Color Purple, A Story of Atonement

This is my third attempt at a review. Well, you might think this is more commentary than review. I agree with you. It is both, more the latter. I am always looking for alternative perspectives. Stanley Williams, co-founder of Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, said of me, “She’s always different.” He said this with a smile. Why be a cookie cutter? I no longer bow, scrape or care what other’s think. The truth can hold its own. Also, at 65 years old, retired and loving life, a life I do not take for granted having survived a life-threatening diagnosis, I am just having my say as long as I can. So thanks in advance for taking this journey with me. I saw the musical on stage a few times and the film, read and taught the novel. In fact my classes centered its research and study on Alice Walker. We even produced skits from scenes in “The Color Purple”. We attended lectures where she was appearing.

I think, we could call ourselves experts. Loved the polemic; “Alice Walker, A Life.” This was before the film on the famed author, humanitarian. Walker lives justice at personal sacrifice. I admire her. She sees and lifts the voices of those people we might and often choose to ignore or forget, just because it is easier to do so. I am speaking of incarcerated women, survivors of Hurricane Katrina at the Convention Center in New Orleans, The Cuban 5, Palestinians, and so many more of us whose presence in the world is silenced. She is a wonderful example of beingness. I also want to add my support to Rev. Barber’s decision to not let the theatre get away with their illegal and inappropriate behavior when he needed an accommodation for his physical disability. He was literally thrown out the theatre, while his 90 year old mother watched. It was on Christmas Day too. I think about those of us whose disabilities are not visible. I appreciate his use of his public profile to bring this forward and call for a public conversation (which you can watch).

Here is the first draft of my last (?) maybe review of “The Color Purple”, Opened Dec. 25, 2023

Perhaps Coleman Domingo’s Mister got it, that is, what he needed to correct, because Mister is after all embodied by Coleman Domingo, Philly born and raised which means certain values kinda leak through all his characterizations. Mister, son of an enslaved man too, is mean because he is unhappy. When we meet Mister’s father, trauma bound to a system though ended, slavery still owns his mind, that and patriarchy which enslaved his heart.

All men in the Purple world are slaves to misogyny and oppression. Most characters learn to do better, but their lessons are earned on the backs of Black women. Both Black men whom one would think sympathetic and white women and men, use the Black women as a physical validation of their superiority.

The beauty of “The Color Purple” film and musical in the creative hands of African and African American male hands, especially Marcus Gardley’s hands whom we know, is that this “Color Purple” acknowledges Her sacrifice and does not hide behind excuses.

Mister is wrong. Celie’s stepfather is wrong. The white woman who enslaved Sophia, a free Black woman, is wrong. Harpo, Sophia’s first love is wrong. She says to her husband, she’d been fighting off men all her life, but never expected to have to fight in her own house.

Hell no!

And so Sophia goes to hell. A lot of martyrs end up there. Hell is warm, yet lonely. However, in this “Color Purple,” Sophia, has company. Someone remembers her and her visitor helps her remember herself.

I don’t know what solitary confinement feels like, but Sophia spent seven (7) years in a cell because she refused to relinquish her agency to a system clothed in white skin and female gender. Justice lived in a white pocketbook, and so as she sat there in a cell, Sophia might have had second and third thoughts. Her decision meant she did not get to hold her babies. Her decision meant a painful separation from whom and what she loved. Was it worth it? One thing about consequences is you can’t undo the action that put you wherever it lands you.

So to have Celie visit Sophia weekly for seven (7) years to give her good news about her family and to more importantly encourage this woman who fought back to hold on, is a story that gets lost in Alice Walker’s novel, Steven Spielberg’s film and the Broadway stage. It’s important to not forget our friends and family behind bars. It is the civilizing act in an inhuman place that helps, Sophia says later.

She could not have made it without her mother-in-law’s weekly visits, but then Celie also needed to make amends to Sophia. She told her son Harpo to beat his wife if he wanted her to mind like she did Mister.
Wives are not children. Wives are equal partners except in unions where dominance and fear rule, a patriarchal motif normalized. These words — “beat her,” spilled from lips who didn’t know love. Celie’s sister (Nettie) was gone, run away, disappeared so Celie knew only despair, anger, envy. She had not learned to stand up and fight back like Sophia.

Sophia was Celie’s teacher too. However, it wasn’t until she met Shug, an independent, wealthy woman who knew her power, a power enhanced by her voice that told Celie to speak her name, that this cowered child-girl wife, then girl-woman, stepped into herself. Funny how Mister and Celie loved the same woman. In a way, Shug freed them both. However, it is Celie’s freedom that broke the curse.

Shug also had to make amends. She came into Celie’s home and took her husband, not that Celie minded. Who was this woman that made Mister tremble? What was her power? Shug made her amends to Celie by talking to her about power and dominance, self-determination and self-respect. She helped this woman who’d been beaten to find the spaces within where joy had retreated.

She wasn’t all the way gone. Mister knew the shell, the she who obeyed. Celie thought she was stuck until she found her sister Nettie’s letters. This was Shug’s amend which went even further once she left and returned.

Actress Taraji’s Shug has a classiness and sass that opens the way like Esu-legba. Doors swing open like they do in the scene, where Shug, dressed in red, christened Harpo’s nightclub. Shug encourages us to embrace our sexuality. It’s natural like our breath. She also encourages Celie to embrace her freedom. Slavery is over. Her stepfather might have sold her to Mister, but she belongs to She.

Period.

Celie gets it. Shug’s dad gets it too. They make their amends in church in song. Celie’s stepfather’s wife makes an amends too. Celie learns she has an inheritance.

It all works out because grown people take responsibility and do better, not with empty apologies but with their hands. Talk does nothing except make your throat dry. If you are wrong, fix it with your hands.
Mister does not tell Celie what he has done, he doesn’t deserve credit for anything. He was horrible to her, yet with this good deed the curse is concluded. We start our lives over as many times as we need to. That’s one good thing about being alive.

The concluding scene, a large table filled with good food, shows how we don’t throw away each other.
Redemption is a possibility for the worse of us. Not that I would have eaten at the same table as Mister and his father. Sometimes we inherit behaviors and ideas which become actions, we need to let go.

(Adults do not react. Adults think before acting.)

Most people walk through life as if life owes us something when the gift is life. It is enough to still be breathing. We might be wise to take advantage of this — the air (heir(ess). Life is an inheritance we don’t have to earn or pay back, so why not just get out of other people’s way and be thankful?

In 12 step programs we speak of making amends and defects of character. I do not believe Celie or Shug even Mister and his dad had defects of character. Their behavior reflected a generational program that was advantageous to a dominant culture based on racial privilege. It kept them breathing and to a certain degree happy to be breathing.

For Celie, even Shug, their bodies were in service, like a good, well-running car. It was movement that mattered. If the engine was shot, another would take its place. Shug’s chassis had a nice body too. Celie’s deportment was inconsequential, what was between her legs was all that mattered.

She was a portable outhouse. Most Black women are, even now expected to anticipate and take care of other people’s needs. Look at who gets locked away. Look at whose rights to her person get challenged more often. No, it’s not a defective character it’s a choice Black women like the Celie, Sophia and Shug characters have lived with, out of necessity.

We look for understanding and we get more trauma. “The Color Purple” did not make Black life pretty, but it also lifted the joy. It did not glamourize sexual violence, but it also did not linger in cinematic despair. TCP is a story of Celie’s journey into self-love, and we get there imaginatively as we witness her walk through years of not knowing if she’d ever see anything different. Somehow she kept walking and even found reasons to smile.

We have to do this for ourselves– find hope.

Hope is an action. A hero’s story is a story of hope. The quilts are maps to freedom and these quilts frame TCP storytellers who wear Ms. Celie’s pants and dance and sing a new beginning one where Ms. Celie doesn’t have to lose all she loves. Returns come when we live righteousness. My life is all I get to live, no one else’s and I am not giving my life to anyone else either, so don’t ask.

Hell no!

Fantasia as Celie is transforming. It’s slow. Just as her undoing happened over time, the healing or nurturing repair of a wounded soul takes equal time to mend.

One hears the drumbeat in everything whether that is carpenters building Sophia’s house, Harpo posting signs about his club or men in stripes breaking rocks.

Large musical numbers signify or capture intent: Celie’s happiness or the title song. These important moments are given space in the re-memory work. Celie’s body has not forgotten anything, neither have we.

The cinematography is amazing as is the choreography and scenic design and music. Ambrose Akinmursrie’s name is listed as a musical consultant. He and my daughter grew up together. TaSin texted him after the screening to congratulate him. I sent greetings to his mom. Ambrose is African (Yoruba) and Black American.

I also saw Christian McBride’s name as director of music. We love McBride’s work in the Bay. “Purple” was teamwork. Well done team! This generation gives me hope. Whoopi Goldberg makes an appearance as a midwife. Beautiful symbolism. And Ms. Winfrey is such a light in the world! Blessings to the team, cast, all whose hands touched this production!

People ask why we have to keep telling this story? It is a Sankofa concept. We reflect until we are well, until the medicine is no longer needed, until we are truly free. This is not a Celie story, a Shug story, a Nettie story, a Sophia story . . . a Harpo story, a Mister story. . . . It’s an American story, an African story, a story that reaches cross the waters and then returns in tears both happy and in sorrow.

The Color Purple Virtual Townhall with Oprah Winfrey & Special Guests, Dec. 20, 2023, 5 PM PT/ 8 PM ET. Register at ZoomWithOprah.com