Study Questions

1. When Nettie tells Samuel and Corrine the entire story about Celie, what shocks Samuel the most?

2. What did the dry goods store smell like on the day Celie and Corrine met?

3. What does Corrine mean when she says to Nettie, “Don’t touch my things. I’m not dead yet”?

4. What did Corrine remember about the clerk at the dry goods store?

5. From what college did Corrine graduate?

6. What do the villagers think about women who menstruate?

7. What is Celie’s description of God?

8. Is God a man or woman, according to Shug?

9. Why doesn’t God think that sex is dirty according to Shug?

10. What does Shug think about people who always try to please God?

Answers

1. Samuel is shocked that Celie was raped by her “father.”

2. The dry goods store smelled like peanut shells.

3. Corrine thinks that Nettie is cheating her husband, and now wants to take her things as well. Corrine wants to remind her that she is still Samuel’s wife.

4. Corrine was upset that the clerk treated her “like any other nigger.”

5. Corrine graduated from Spelman Seminary.

6. Nettie writes that villagers “...think women who have their friends should not even be seen.”

7. God is “big and old and tall and graybearded and white.” Celie also says that “he wear white robes and go barefooted.”

8. Shug says that “God ain’t a he or a she, but an It.”

9. Sex cannot be dirty because God made it, according to Shug.

10. According to Shug, the people that worry the most about pleasing God never see God “always trying to please us back.”