The Purple Flower

Triple Constraint, Single Dignity

Bonner’s essay “On Being Young — A Woman — and Colored” describes sitting “like Buddha” — quiet, still, watchful — in the face of a world that has decided she is less than fully human on three separate grounds. Her response is not to accept that verdict but to refuse it, quietly and without bitterness.

What sustains that refusal is the question TLA puts to her work. The refusal itself is a testimony: to the existence of a dignity that the triple constraint cannot finally reach, to something in the human person that resists reduction even when reduction is the organizing principle of the surrounding world.

What The Purple Flower Reveals

The Purple Flower is one of the most extraordinary plays of the Harlem Renaissance — an expressionist allegory in which the Sundry White Devils keep the Us’s from reaching the Purple Flower that grows at the top of the hill. The Purple Flower is never clearly defined — it is whatever represents the full human flourishing that the Us’s have been denied. Its very indefiniteness is significant: it points beyond any particular political program to something more fundamental, a condition of being fully human that no political arrangement has yet achieved.

The Seed of the Woman

Genesis 3:15 describes a conflict in which the seed of the woman presses against the serpent’s work even at the cost of a bruised heel. Bonner’s life and work are a form of that pressing: the insistence, maintained through silence and precision rather than rage, that the image of God in the human person is not reducible to the categories that race, sex, and class have imposed upon it.

Her instruction — “Sit quietly without a chip. Not sodden, not bittered. Even a little amused” — describes a posture that is only possible if one believes that there is a dignity beneath the triple constraint that the constraint cannot reach. That belief is itself a form of theological witness.

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