Praise house at Sapelo

Praise house at Sapelo

Muriel Barrow Bell & Malcom Bell

Photographed: 1939
Printed: 1991

The building in this photo is of a praise house in Georgia in 1939, around the time of The Color Purple’s time period. Praise houses were typically one-room buildings, no more than 10 by 15 feet wide. This building has no more than four walls, a roof, and a bell outside on the steps leading up to the door. There is a good chance that the “church” that was referred to in Georgia, was similar to this praise house in Sapelo. African Americans typically gathered in buildings such as these for worship and religious services. The most interesting piece about this is the misshapen boards. It truly shows the poverty of the south during this time period, particularly in any buildings owned by the African American population. We know that Celie and her family are very poor, uneducated African Americans, and this would have been the type of building that she would have spent her time in. Many of the other places that she spent time in: school buildings, houses, shacks, would have also resembled this structure.

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Bell, Malcom & Bell, Muriel Barrow. Praise house at Sapelo. 1939. 1 Photographic print : gelatin silver ; 40.5 x 50.3 cm (board). Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C. 20540 USA.

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