The Color Purple Collection by Alice Walker

Author:Alice Walker [Walker, Alice]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4532-7643-3
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2012-08-07T00:42:00+00:00

“OLA TOLD US LAST night,” Fanny wrote in her next letter, “that a play he is thinking of writing somewhere down the line—‘though admittedly,’ he joked, ‘my line may be quite short!’—is about Elvis Presley.

“‘The Elvis Presley?’ my mother queried. ‘Our Elvis Presley?’

“‘Mr. Rocket Sockets himself?’ I chimed in.

“‘Precisely,’ said Ola, smiling.

“‘You see,’ Ola said, enjoying our bemusement, ‘in our country we, too, have many different tribes, just as you have in America. You know, you have Black and Indian and Anglo and Jewish tribes; Asian, Chicano, and Middle Eastern tribes. And so on. Here we have the Olinka, the Ababa, the Hama, and the white tribe, of which there are several sub or mini tribes.

“‘Now all of these tribes try to maintain their own tribal identities, and that is natural to man, who perpetuates his genetic identity by controlling the woman he uses for production of his children, but it is not necessarily natural to nature, who will produce for anyone. So over time a lot of racial boundaries are crossed and new people created. What is fascinating is to see the love or hatred that is expressed for these new people, who don’t, after all, have a firm tribal category in which to be imprisoned.’

“‘But what has this to do with Elvis Presley?’ asked my mother.

“‘My play will use him only as a metaphor. He will be a kind of vehicle for what I attempt to point out.’

“‘Which is?’

“‘That in him white Americans found a reason to express their longing and appreciation for the repressed Native American and black parts of themselves. Those non-European qualities they have within them and all around them, constantly, but which they’ve been trained from birth to deny.’

“We talked on into the night about this; Ola eventually playing some of his treasured Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash records.

“‘I don’t listen to them as you do,’ he said. ‘I listen to them to hear where commercial and mainstream cultural success takes people, a part of whose lineage is hidden even from themselves, in a world—or in this case, a country—that insists on racial, cultural, and historical amnesia, if you wake up one century and find yourself “white.”’

“According to Ola, Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash are both Indians. A foreigner sees this immediately, he says; Americans do not. He says this explains Elvis’s clothing style. His love of buckskin and fringe, of silver. And of course culturally, he says, he was as black as all the other white people in Mississippi.

“‘But didn’t he have blue eyes?’ asked my mother.

“‘Probably the only white things he owned,’ said Ola. ‘Blue eyes are like money; they pay your way in.’

“So assume my father is right; what could it have meant to be as ‘successful’ as Elvis? Suppose that behind those blue eyes and full lips, and under that thick black Indian hair, there was another: the old, ancient Indian. Suppose he, too, or she, watched. If he was Indian, he would probably have been Choctaw, for that’s the tribe that existed, and maybe still does exist, in his part of Mississippi.

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