This letter is one of the longest and most complex letters in the novel. Not only is there the well-developed contrast between the physical and the emotional worlds of the characters, but there is also a letter within a letter, and note that Shug's letter to Celie is not unlike one of Nettie's letters to Celie. Shug's son James faces many of the same problems on the Indian reservation that Samuel and Nettie faced among the Olinka. He is an outsider who is oppressed by the ruling power structure.
Shug is now a grandmother, although her parents have reared her three children. Celie doesn't mind; she loves Shug even if Shug isn't young anymore. She loves Shug best, she admits, because of "what she [Shug] has been through." We, in turn, love Celie because she has survived what she has been through; Celie is a survivor, and no one in the novel has undergone more injustice and unhappiness than Celie.
Even Albert is able to honestly acknowledge the reason why he beat Celie; as we have noted before, he beat her because she was not Shug — a wholly irrational excuse. Albert also admits that he loved Shug because of her independence; for that reason, he also admits that he never understood the relationship between Shug and Celie. With this in mind, recall Letter 64. There, Nettie told Celie how the many wives of an Olinka man became friends, and she explained how those friendships excluded the husband. Interestingly, neither the Olinka husbands nor Albert is able to understand the special bonds between women, especially between women who share the same man.
