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Alice Walker Reads The Color Purple

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In archival footage in Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth, Walker reads from the novel for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The text is from a letter the novel’s protagonist, Celie, writes to her sister. Celie recounts the conversation she had with her friend Shug about God. Walker calls this “the God section” of her novel

“Yeah, I say, and he gave me a lynched daddy, a crazy mama, a low down dog of a step pa and a sister I probably won’t ever see again. Anyhow, I say, the God I been praying and writing to is a man. And act just like all the other mens I know. Trifling, forgitful and lowdown.”

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