What, in your opinion, is the key moment In 'The Color Purple' by Alice Walker?

        The next turning point in the story is when, writing to Celie, soon after her arrival in Africa, Nettie describes a village ceremony and gives an outline of her daily routine. In Nettie’s letters, Alice Walker perfectly captures the style and tone of a missionary magazine of the period, careful, earnest and unassuming. All Africa and her prodigies are recorded in much the same manner, gods and insect bites alike. The correct schoolteacher’s prose counterbalances the non-standard discourse of Celie’s letters. Nettie’s are carefully composed pieces of writing, produced at leisure. In her sister’s letters, which sometimes sounds as urgent as dispatches from battle, we hear the rhythms of live speech. Although Celie’s style is much more fun, Nettie’s writing has its own dignity and appeal, connected with the disciplined regularity of the way of life described by Nettie. The writing is functional and makes its points clear. These often serve to interweave themes shared by the African and American parts of the story. The ceremony of delivering the roof is part of the villagers’ welcome when Samuel, Corrine, Nettie and the children arrive at their African mission station. A villager has just told the Olinka tale, related by Nettie, of a greedy chief who used land assigned to the sacred roofleaf for his own private cultivation. The ritual of honouring a new roof is preserved among the people as a mark of reverence for the leaf itself. Here, in a surprising shape, is an African God. Yet Celie will not be completely surprised when she reads about it because Shug is teaching her to see the divine in trees and in all of nature rather than the patriarchal images of Christianity. The next letter reveals another connection, in the theme of education for girls. Nettie regrets the backwardness of the Olinka men, and Olinka women who submit to their prejudices, wherever this impedes female emancipation. For example, the villagers send boys to school but not girls. The child Olivia, who makes it without hesitation, spots a comparison with America: ‘They’re like white people at home who don’t want coloured children to learn’. When she sets out to educate her friend Tashi, the image of two girls, American and African, sharing knowledge in secret under the sheltering roofleaf, in defiance of men, attractively reaffirms the theme of worldwide sisterhood. It may occur to some readers, especially if they have read African novels about colonial encounters with traditional culture, that Nettie does not try to analyse the problems with any depth or subtlety. But his imitation does not interfere with the novel’s long-range, transatlantic overview of colonial Africa, or with its plain polemical purposes. Nettie reveals the problems, the indifference of the rubber company, which obliterates the rooftree and offers tin-roofed huts in exchange, the remoteness of the church authorities in England, and at least one barbarity to be found in Africa, the female circumcision. Instead of solutions, Nettie offers emotions, including indignation and concern, but mostly an unyielding love, which is given to the children and in due course to Samuel, but is concentrated on her sister. ‘Dear Celie … always I am writing to you’, ‘Dear Nettie’ – these forms of address resound with the devotion that unites the two sisters. It is this bond of sisterhood, so strongly felt, shared by Shug, Sofia, Mary Agnes, Tashi and Olivia, rather than social or political analysis, that conveys the novel’s hope for the future.

        The last major turning point in the story is when Celie leaves Albert to live with Shug. In the previous letter Celie reports how she rebelled against Albert, saying it is time ‘to leave you and enter into the Creation’. Now, it seems the Creation curses him through her lips. Shug has persuaded Celie that trees, or anything in nature, can serve as a better image of God than a man, especially a white man. The words of her curses now come to her as though ‘from the trees’. Perhaps it is her guardian ‘Familiar’ who speaks, or a long-repressed rage, which finds utterance while she is for a few moments ‘beside herself’. The curses are not especially forceful in phraseology, but they are appropriate and the drama of the scene lends them strength. Albert’s resistance adds to the drama. He speaks with conviction: ‘Look at you. You black, you pore, you ugly, you a woman. Goddam, he say, you nothing at all’. ‘Goddam’ is spoken on a rising note bringing the heavy stresses on ‘black’, ‘pore’, ‘ugly’, ‘woman’ to a climax, before the dismissive falling cadence in ‘you nothing at all’. Albert may be a weak man but he has a good ear for effective sentence rhythm and Celie echoes him in her final, victorious assertion, ending ‘But I’m here’. This is a crucial passage. Celie is here, although Albert cannot yet acknowledge her because his contempt for the concept of ‘poor black ugly woman’ obstructs his awareness of the person he married. The conviction Walker gets into his words serves her purpose because it shows how instinctive his contempt is. She wants the reader to believe that all men, Olinka, American, black and white, share this unthinking assumption that a woman is inferior. This is the most powerful of all encounters between Albert and Celie: it demonstrates very forcefully the lightly spoken ironic reversal of a common sexist saying, ‘Where there’s a woman, there’s trouble, which opens the letter. That little bit of mister means trouble. ‘Amen’, meaning ‘so be it’, the traditional close to a Christian prayer, becomes the closing word of Celie’s letters when she stops writing to God, in the letter where Shug speaks about the divine Spirit everywhere, and writes to Nettie instead. Shug is allowed the last word in the present crucial letter, which proclaims that not all the male contempt in the world can reduce Celie to ‘nothing at all’. ‘But I’m here,’ she says, and Shug says ‘Amen’, three times. Walker means it to be a sacred affirmation.

        So Walker uses a number of key events or moments rather than just one moment, to help change the direction of the story. She does this in a number of ways but her favourite way is to use the characters and events surrounding Celie to help direct her character and show how Celie matures over time, and the sudden leaps in maturity that she takes.