Walker illustrates the experience of Black Americans as a kind of motherless children, to quote the jazz standard, who live as second class citizens in America, but are also rejected by the people of their home continent. In a letter to Celie, Nettie describes in near reverent terms: “try to imagine,” she tells her sister, “a city full of these shining blueblack people… I felt like I was seeing black for the first time” (119). In that same letter she confides that she did not like the Senegalese that she met in the marketplace.
Nettie is often disappointed by the way she is treated by Africans. It seems that her expectation is that of either an innate and immediate comradery to match her awe at encountering a continent full of people who look like her or appreciation for her work as a missionary, perhaps to match the magnitude of her sacrifice when she moved to Africa. In a later letter to Celie, where she recounts a conversation with Samuel, she describes the Africans as indifferent. Though one can recognize that the Senegalese in the marketplace were concerned with selling their wares, Nettie’s concern was that “they can look through us as quickly as they looked through the white French people who live here” (p119). It seems that there is no safe space to alleviate one’s sense of a double consciousness. Walker demonstrates that any romantic notions for Blacks of a pilgrimage home to a motherland are null. To the Africans Nettie is an American and as an unmarried woman she is pitied.