Oprah as Sophia standing up to the mayor in “Color Purple”
The disturbing instance of an out-of-control cop at a McKinney, Texas teenage pool party has even conservative columnist Katherine Parker of the Washington Post asking, “What in God’s name is wrong with our cops?” Meanwhile, the incident got me thinking about a scene from The Color Purple. Doing so has revealed a silver lining to the whole affair.
First we must acknowledge the seriousness of what happened, however. Apparently there was a graduation party and black residents of the neighborhood invited their friends to the pool. According to them, they used guest passes to allow others in. Nevertheless, it disturbed some of the white residents, and two white women set off a commotion by shouting racist slurs. To quote Parker,
What has been reported is that the original melee, which had ended by the time police arrived, may have been prompted by two white women hurling racial slurs when a crowd of teens, mostly black, arrived for a cookout at the private, planned-community pool.
“Go back to [your] Section 8 home,” one of them reportedly said, according to the party’s host, a teenager who lives in the pool’s neighborhood.
When the police showed up, things got worse. According to The Washington Post, video footage shows Officer Casebolt “manhandling, arresting and drawing his gun on a group of black children outside a pool party.”
And:
Casebolt can be seen running through the confused crowd of teenagers while swearing and appearing to randomly handcuff teenagers, who protested that they’d just arrived at the scene to attend the pool party.
Eventually Casebolt’s fellow officers calmed him down.
As the Daily Show wryly commented, the incident represented progress in that no one was shot.
I too think there are positives that one can take away but I say so from a historical perspective. Walker shows us only too vividly what might well have happened in the past when blacks didn’t show whites the respect that the latter felt was their due. Sophia, Harpo’s ex-wife, tries to hold her tongue when the mayor’s wife patronizes her and her children but eventually finds herself pushed past her limits. Celie, the novel’s narrator, describes what happens next:
She [the mayor’s wife] say to Sofia, All your children so clean, she say, would you like to work for me, be my maid?
Sophia say, Hell no.
She say, What you say?
Sofia say, hell no.
Mayor look at Sofia, push his wife out the way. Stick out his chest. Girl, what you say to Miss Millie.
Sofia say, I say, Hell no.
He slap her.
And then:
Sofia knock the man down.
The polices come, start slinging the children off the mayor, bang they heads together. Sofia really start to fight. They drag her to the ground
This far as I can go with it, look like. My eyes git full of water and my throat close.
We can thank God and Martin Luther King that what happens to Sophia did not happen to anyone at the pool party:
When I see Sofia I don’t know why she still alive. They crack her skull, they crack her ribs. They tear her nose loose on one side. They blind her in one eye. She swole from head to foot. Her tongue the size of my arm. It stick out tween her teef like a piece of rubber. She can’t talk. And she just about the color of a eggplant.
The incident stands out in The Color Purple because most of the novel deals with relations within the black community, not between blacks and whites. Walker is taking lessons from her model Zora Neale Hurston in this regard. Nevertheless, she inserts Sophie’s mauling to remind us that racism backed by force still rules the day.
Now note the contrasts. As reprehensible as the Texas incident was, at least the police did not operate with the same sense of impunity. Yes, Casebolt handled the situation much differently than he would have had all the participants been white. Yes, the police probably would not have been called in at all if everyone had been white. Yes, there were people hurling racist slurs, and yes, the police might have gotten away with their unnecessary violence had there been no cell phone video.
But Office Casebolt has resigned, and enough of the country has expressed repugnance that few are defending the police.
With all the deaths of unarmed African Americans at the hands of cops, it has become fashionable to say that the Civil Rights movement changed little. To refute that, one only need recall what would have happened in the old days.
