The color purple: Alice Walker: Chapter 10
It has been a long time since I had time to write. But always, no matter what I’m doing, I am writing to you. Dear Celie, I say in my head in the middle of Vespers, the middle of the night, while cooking, Dear, dear Celie. And I imagine that you do get my letters and that you are writing me back: Dear Nettie, this is what life is like for me.
We are up at five o’clock for a light breakfast of millet porridge and fruit, and the morning classes. We teach the children English, reading, writing, history, geography, arithmetic, and the stories of the bible. At eleven o’clock we break for lunch and household duties. From one until four it is too hot to move, though some of the mothers sit behind their huts and sew. At four o’clock we teach the older children and at night we are available for adults. Some of the older children are used to coming to the mission school, but the smaller ones are not. Their mothers sometimes drag them here, screaming and kicking. They are all boys. Olivia is the only girl.
The Olinka do not believe girls should be educated. When I asked a mother why she thought this, she said: A girl is nothing to herself, only to her husband can she become something.
What can she become? I asked.
Why, she said, the mother of his children.