Volume 34, Number 1 · January 29, 1987
Black Victims, Black Villains
By Darryl Pinckney
The Color Purple
by Alice Walker
Washington Square Press, 253 pp., $6.95 (paper)
The Color Purple
a film by Steven Spielberg
Reckless Eyeballing
by Ishmael Reed
St. Martin's, 148 pp., $12.95
Steven Spielberg's The Color Purple might as well have been about a bunch of dancing eggplants for all it has to say about black history. In its disregard of black life outside its cartoon images, the film is a throwback to Marc Connelly's The Green Pastures or Disney's Song of the South, to the days when the NAACP had to constantly petition for fair treatment, and when the casting of a black woman as an uppity maid was heralded as progress. But no studio mogul could have set the darkies singing and bopping more merrily down that perpetually dusty back road than America's present so-called master of enchantment.
Review, 5474 words
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