I make myself wood

“I make myself wood” is Celie’s stark expression for enduring violence by imagining herself as something other than a feeling human being. First spoken amid a beating, its image returns in her account of caring for the children, where wood also gives shape to emotional distance. The expression links immediate self-protection to a numbness that persists beyond the violent scene.

The Expression in the Beating

Celie recalls that her husband beats her as he beats the children, though he hardly ever beats them. He orders her to fetch the belt while the children peer through the cracks in the room. With all she can do to keep from crying, Celie tells herself, “Celie, you a tree.” She follows that instruction with “I make myself wood,” describing a deliberate inward shift: rather than meet the beating as a person who can openly feel and protest pain, she imagines herself as a thing that can endure it.

The image does not suggest that the danger has passed. Celie concludes, “That’s how come I know trees fear man.” The tree is at once the form she takes in her imagination to bear the violence and an image of something vulnerable to human force. That reversal makes the expression more than a figure for toughness: even the imagined wood is afraid of the person who can hurt it.

The Image Returns in Domestic Life

Later, Celie describes how others say she is good to Mr. _____’s children, while admitting that she feels nothing for them. Patting Harpo on the back does not feel like patting a dog; it is like patting “another piece of wood.” Celie distinguishes this object from the earlier tree: it is “Not a living tree, but a table, a chifferobe.” The first scene presents becoming wood as a way to withstand a beating; the later comparison makes wood a measure of how little feeling her gestures seem to contain.

The difference between caring for the children and feeling affection for them remains explicit. Celie says that however good she is to them, they do not love her either. The image thus recurs not as a claim that she has become literally unfeeling, but as her account of a gap between outward care and inward connection. Harpo’s place in both passages makes the return especially pointed: he is among the children who watch the beating, and later the person whose back Celie pats as if it belonged to an object.

Meaning and Narrative Function

The repeated wood image carries the effect of violence from the room where the belt is fetched into the ordinary act of touching a child. Its meaning shifts with its context: first, wood is a self-protective identity Celie invokes when she tries not to cry; later, it names the emotional flatness she recognizes in an otherwise caring gesture. The movement from a tree that fears people to a table or chifferobe makes the expression a compact record of both survival and its cost.