Color Purple, The - Alice Walker [37]
Why not? say Shug. You do all the work around here. It's a scandless, the way you look out there plowing in a dress. How you keep from falling over it or getting the plow caught in it is beyond me.
Yeah? I say.
Yeah. And another thing, I used to put on Albert's pants when we was courting. And he one time put on my dress.
No he didn't.
Yes he did. He use to be a lot of fun. Not like now. But he loved to see me in pants. It was like a red flag to a bull.
Ugh, I say. I could just picture it, and I didn't like it one bit.
Well, you know how they is, say Shug.
What us gon make 'em out of, I say.
We have to git our hands on somebody's armyuniform, say Shug. For practice. That good strongmaterial and free..
Jack, I say. Odessa's husband.
Okay, she say. And everyday we going to read Nettie's letters and sew.
A needle and not a razor in my hand, I think.
She don't say nothing else, just come over to me and hug.
Now I know Nettie alive I begin to strut a little bit. Think, When she come home us leave bete. Her and me and our two children.
What they look like, I wonder. But it hard to think bout them. I feels shame. More than love, to tell the truth. Anyway, is they all right here? Got good sense and all? Shug say children got by incest turn into dunces. Incest part of the devil's plan.
But I think bout Nettie.
It's hot, here, Celie, she write. Hotter than July. Hotter than August andJuly. Hot like cooking dinner on a big stove in a little kitchen in August and July. Hot.
Dear Celie,
We were met at the ship by an African from the village we are settling in. His Christian name is Joseph. He is short and fat, with hands that seem not to have any bones in them. When he shook my hand it felt like something soft and damp was falling and I almost caught it. He speaks a little English, what they call 155 pidgin English. It is very different from the way we speak English, but somehow familiar. He helped us unload our things from the ship into the boats that came out to get us. These boats are really dugout canoes, tike the Indians had, the ones you see in pictures. With all our belongings we filled three of them, and a fourth one carried our medical and teaching supplies.
Once in the boat we were entertained by the songs of our boatmen as they tried to outpaddle each other to the shore. They paid very little attention to us or our cargo. When we reached the shore they didn't bother to help us alight from the boat and actually set some of our supplies right down in the water. As soon as they had browbeat poor Samuel out of a tip that Joseph said was too big, they were off hallooing another group of people who were waiting at the edge of the water to be taken to the ship.
The port is pretty, but too shallow for large ships to use. So there is a good business for the boatmen, during the season the ships come by. These boatmen were all considerably larger and more muscular than Joseph, though all of them, including Joseph, are a deep chocolate brown. Not black, like the Senegalese. And Celie, they all have the strongest, cleanest, whitest teeth! I was thinking about teeth a lot on the voyage over, because I had toothache nearly the entire time. You know how rotten my back teeth are. And in England I was struck by the English people's teeth. So crooked, usually, and blackish with decay. I wondered if it was the English water. But the Africans' teeth remind me of horses' teeth, they are so fully formed, straight and strong.
The port's "town" is the size of the hardware store in town. Inside there are stalls filled with cloth, hurricane lamps and oil, mosquito netting, camp bedding, hammocks, axes and hoes and machetes and other tools. The whole place is run by a white man, but some of the stalls that sell produce are rented out to Africans. Joseph showed us things we needed to buy.
A large iron pot for boiling water and our clothes, a zinc basin. Mosquito netting. Nails. Hammer and saw and pick-ax. Oil and lamps.
Since there was nowhere to sleep in the port, Joseph