for Cynthia Erivo
Is Celie actually ugly?
Asks the charismatic star playing her
on Broadway.
How many times over the years
I have explained
this.
Celie and her “prettier” sister Nettie
are practically identical.
They might be twins.
But Life has forced on Celie
all the hardships
Nettie mostly avoids: a hazy anxiety surrounding
the lynching of her father when she was very small,
repeated rape,
a mother’s withheld love
that morphed into
distrust and disdain,
her children, for all she knows,
murdered by
the rapist psychopath who claims
to be her father.
Endless labor that would
demean and soon obliterate
the observable loveliness
of the most queenly slave.
I wanted us to think about
how superficial is our understanding
of beauty; but, also, how beauty
is destroyed.
And how, to bear our own disgrace
these hundreds of years
we’ve taught ourselves
to laugh at anyone
as abused and diminished
as we feel.
It is Celie’s designation
by heartless sufferers around her
that makes her “ugly” to them;
they who cannot see, until Love of Herself
lights the dreariness of Celie’s existence,
that
the beauty of her
resilient spirit
has become one with the compassionate
loveliness
of
her face.