Dee Dee Lefrak: What inspired you to have Celie become a pants designer?

Alice Walker: The notion that women in that period were often condemned to wearing dresses no matter what work they were doing, even milking cows or manual labor. Pants are liberating. I think that's why so many women since then have opted to wear jeans. She wanted her women to feel as free as she was beginning to feel. She was done with wearing dresses.

Tina Ann Forkner: I would like to know about the writing process behind The Color Purple. Thanks for writing such an important story.

Alice Walker: It started with getting a divorce from my husband in NYC. I was an editor at Ms. magazine and trying to write this book in NYC. But then I realized that none of these characters had ever heard the sound of traffic, so NYC was the wrong place to write this book. So I moved to a little town in northern California to surround myself with the sounds of nature.

Jenea Johnson: What is your connection with the actual color purple? Shug says she thinks God gets angry when you walk past a field and don't notice the color purple, what does that mean?

Alice Walker: It actually could be any color you don’t notice—anything!

Anything could be the color purple.

It’s a symbol.

It speaks to our blindness about the wonder of this place. This earth we live in.

People walk by amazing things [every] day and don’t notice it.

The Color Purple is chosen because [it] seems so rare, but it’s everywhere. It’s in the shadows of rocks, it’s in the shadows of many things.

It’s everywhere.

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