“You have to git man off your eyeball, before you can see anything a’tall”

“You have to git man off your eyeball, before you can see anything a’tall” is Shug Avery’s image for the work Celie must do to reclaim her attention. The phrase turns male dominance into an obstruction of sight: seeing clearly requires removing it from the foreground of the mind.

Meaning and Image

The saying makes an inward struggle physical. The man on the eyeball is not simply someone standing in the way; he is a presence that dictates what Celie can notice and how she understands the world. Shug Avery’s blunt, colloquial instruction presents vision as something Celie can recover, but only after she challenges that obstruction.

Context in Celie’s Spiritual Crisis

Celie recognizes that her fixation on the “old white man” she associates with God has kept her from attending to what God makes: a blade of corn, the color purple, and wildflowers. As her eyes open, the man’s evil seems to shrink beside even a scrub of bush in her yard, though it does not disappear altogether. Shug Avery’s phrase names this partial change: Celie can begin to see beyond male authority without pretending its hold has vanished.

Connection to Nature and Prayer

Shug Avery extends the idea by warning that men can make themselves seem omnipresent, even in food, thought, and the radio, until people mistake that presence for God. When a man intrudes on prayer, she advises Celie to turn her attention toward flowers, wind, water, or a rock. The phrase therefore links clear sight to a changed spiritual practice: attention moves away from the human figure claiming ultimate authority and toward the natural world.