Having thrown off Fonso and Albert's vicious domination, Celie's newfound strength begins to crumble. Why? she asked God in the first letter she wrote to him, and now, she asks why again. Long before Job, people who were victims of injustice cried out to their gods and, when they got no answer, they did what Celie does here — that is, she seemingly renounces God. Celie has sufficient psychological distance now that she can look back on her childhood and on the numerous times that she was raped and beaten. She tries to reconcile all that physical abuse with her unflagging love and belief in God. It is little wonder that Celie wonders if God isn't, after all, "just like all the other mens I know. Trifling, forgitful and lowdown." Celie was strong when the situation called for strength; now that the crisis is past, she lets down and allows herself to feel the awful pain of injustice once again.
For the first time in the novel, Celie resents all of the unnecessary pain she has endured for decades. Significantly, Celie relates all this pain to the way that men have treated her. Seemingly, her faith is gone. But if faith is figuratively like flat land, and Celie's doubts and blasphemy are like debris that covers that flat land, remember that debris does not destroy the land. For the present, Celie thinks that God has betrayed her and ignored her; God seems to be only another callous, uncaring man.
We can accept the likelihood of Celie's feeling this way, but what catches us unaware in Letter 73 is not Celie's anger, but, in contrast, Shug's defense of God. From the beginning, Shug has been a "sinful" person — drinking, smoking, whoring, and so on. In fact, in Letter 22, the minister at church used Shug as an example of a tramp, "a strumpet in short skirts . . . singing for money and taking other women mens."
