The Color Purple: Why Sofia Said “Hell No” to the Mayor’s Wife

by Rochelle Zappia
Why did Sofia, who had lived in the Jim Crow South all her life, dare answer so rudely when
Miss Millie, the mayor’s wife, asked her to be her maid? Feisty as Sofia was, it is hard to believe
she faced the almost certainty of being attacked and/or imprisoned simply because she felt like
saying “Hell no” (Walker [1982] 1992, 83) rather than “No, thank you.” However, Sofia had
good reason to suspect that if she turned down Miss Millie’s offer politely, the mayor and his
wife would get her arrested on a trumped-up charge and then do her the “favor” of having her
“paroled” from prison to work as a maid in their home. Never having experienced the horrific
conditions of a Jim Crow jail, Sofia had yet to learn the spirit-breaking lesson that even being a
white woman’s maid was better than being a prisoner.

Sofia and Arbitrary Arrests of Southern Blacks

Miss Millie could have easily gotten Sofia arrested because the southern states had some vague
laws which were rarely if ever enforced on whites but were often used to criminalize blacks. For
example, Sofia could have been charged with vagrancy, a crime so loosely defined that any black
could be convicted of it unless s/he was under the protection of a white person.

Sofia was especially vulnerable to arrest and incarceration because she was separated from
Harpo, intimate with another man, and fiercely independent. Since she neither lived with a
solvent husband nor worked as a servant or sharecropper, she could have been accused of turning
down a lawful means of support. (As Phoebe Ryles [2010] points out in “Convict Lease,” the
Black Codes, which preceded the Jim Crow Laws, made it illegal for ex-slaves to be
unemployed.) Sofia’s involvement with the prizefighter, to whom she was not married, could
have been misrepresented as prostitution. Once arrested, Sofia could never have contained her
proud spirit well enough to obtain clemency from a jury consisting of southern whites, who
would have expected blacks to appear deferential and simple-minded.

Sofia, Convict Leasing, and Parole

If Sofia had been found guilty of even minor “wrongdoing,” she could have been forced to
become Miss Millie’s maid. Although the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution had ended
slavery, it specifically allowed involuntary servitude “as a punishment for crime whereof the
party shall have been duly convicted” (“U.S. Constitution – Amendment 13” [1865]). Georgia,
like the other southern states, took advantage of this loophole to institute penal slavery through
the convict lease system, in which prisoners could be leased to private and public parties. At least
90 percent of the leased convicts were black. The beginning of a private enterprise or public
works project requiring backbreaking labor always resulted in a mass arrest of blacks who had
committed petty or vaguely defined crimes.

Georgia had abolished convict leasing, and replaced it with the chain gang, long before Sofia’s
confrontation with Miss Millie could have taken place. However, black prisoners could be
“paroled” as servants to white families that wanted cheap domestic labor. Since convicts could
not be released without white employers to sponsor them, some masters used the parole system
to instill deference and obligation in black workers (Garton 2003, 8–9). This suggests that if
Sofia had said no to Miss Millie politely, Miss Millie and her husband may have decided to teach
Sofia proper respect for a white “benefactor” by getting her arrested and then having her paroled
to be their servant. Given the authoritarianism of the Georgia penal system and the
constitutionality of forced labor as punishment, it is unlikely that Sofia could have chosen to
remain in prison rather than become a white woman’s maid.

Sofia Paroled to Miss Millie as “Punishment”

Sofia soon found out that being in jail was far worse than being “some white lady maid” (Walker
[1982] 1992, 89). She had to toil in the prison laundry for fifteen hours a day, breathe foul air,
eat nauseating food, and deal with roaches, lice, mice, and even snakes in her cell. Intimidated by
the guards, who would strip her and make her sleep on a cement floor with no light if she dared
complain, Sofia became a model convict who obeyed orders immediately. She also started to
become so sickly that her relatives saw she would die if she stayed in prison much longer.

They knew they had no chance of persuading any white employer to sponsor Sofia as an act of
mercy after she had sassed the mayor’s wife and knocked the mayor down. So they had Harpo’s
girlfriend go to the prison warden and tell him Sofia was perfectly happy in jail as long as she
didn’t have to be some white woman’s maid. Shortly afterward the mayor and his wife took
Sofia out of the prison to complete the rest of her twelve-year sentence as a servant in their
house. Terrified of being sent back to jail, Sofia served them so well that they gave her six
months off for good behavior.

Sofia Defeated by the Harshness of Prison and the “Mercy” of Parole

When Miss Millie asked Sofia to be her maid, Sofia said, “Hell no,” certain that she’d rather be a
prisoner in the county jail than a servant in a white lady’s house. However, she ended up having
to accept involuntary domestic servitude as punishment because she was dying from the
unwholesome food, filthy living quarters, severe discipline, and exhausting labor of a Georgia
prison. Together the brutality of jail and the paternalism of parole forced Sofia into the
humiliating role of Miss Millie’s obedient servant.

Sources

Blackmon, Douglas A. 2008. Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black People in
America from the Civil War to World War II. New York: Doubleday.

Davis, Ronald L. F., Ph. D. “Surviving Jim Crow: In-Depth Essay.” The History of Jim Crow.
Accessed February 3, 2012. www.jimcrowhistory.org/history/surviving.htm.
Garton, Stephen. 2003. “Managing Mercy: African Americans, Parole and Paternalism in the
Georgia Prison System 1919–1945.” Journal of Social History (Spring): 1–17.
findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2005/is_3_36/ai_99699491.

Ryles, Phoebe. 2010. “Convict Lease.” Georgia Public Record Search.

georgiapublicrecordsearch.org/138/convict-lease-2.

“U.S. Constitution – Amendment 13.” (1865). U.S. Constitution Online. Accessed February 2,
2012. www.usconstitution.net/xconst_Am13.html.

Walker, Alice. (1982) 1992. The Color Purple. 10th anniversary ed. New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich.