Sula

“It was not death or dying that frightened him, but the unexpectedness of both. In sorting it all out, he hit on the notion that if one day a year were devoted to it, everybody could get it out of the way and the rest of the year would be safe and free. In this manner he instituted National Suicide Day.” 

This passage describes how Shadrack invented National Suicide Day. It was a chance to give people a sense of control over their own mortality. He had seen during the war how fragile life was and how eagerly it could slip away. Though Shadrack had returned home mentally unstable, he was very methodical about how he had instituted the holiday.

“Any enthusiasms that little Nel showed were calmed by the mother until she drove her daughter’s imagination underground.”

The narrator describes the manner in which Helene raised Nel. To make her more compliant, and better prepared for the demands of womanhood and wifedom, Helene gave Nel an early sense of how limited her world would be. She suppressed any creativity or ambition the girl might have had, which was not an unusual rearing method for mothers at the time.

“Because each had discovered years before that they were neither white nor male, and that all freedom and triumph was forbidden to them, they had set about creating something else to be.”

Nel and Sula were in pre-adolescence and already aware of their condition as burgeoning Black women. Nel knew from her mother’s instruction what was expected of her, while both had the Black women around them to observe. Their oppression was frustrating, but it also, ironically, gave them a path toward freedom—for, nothing in particular was expected of them.

“Eva said yes, but inside she disagreed and remained convinced that Sula had watched Hannah burn not because she was paralyzed, but because she was interested.” 

Eva recalled watching Sula standing at the top of the back board, very still, as her mother burned alive. This event marked the start of the tension between Eva and Sula, both of whom mistrusted each other.

“His arms ached for something heavier than trays, for something dirtier than peelings; his feet wanted the heavy work shoes, not the thin-soled black shoes that the hotel required. More than anything he wanted the camaraderie of the road men: the lunch buckets, the hollering, the body movement that in the end produced something real, something he could point to.” 

Jude craved hard labor to feel his manhood. At the time that he married Nel, he worked as a waiter at a hotel. His inability to acquire construction work on the town’s new road and bridge inspired both his marriage proposal and his infidelity. Jude’s desire to achieve an ideal of manhood that both mocked and eluded him resulted both in his undoing and Nel’s heartbreak.

“He needed some of his appetites filled, some posture of adulthood recognized, but mostly he wanted someone to care about his hurt, to care very deeply.” 

The narrator continues to describe Jude’s impetus for asking Nel to marry him. He wanted to feel like a man, but also wanted the semblance of maternal comfort.

“Her parents had succeeded in rubbing down to a dull glow any sparkle or splutter she had. Only with Sula did that quality have free rein, but their friendship was so close, they themselves had difficulty distinguishing one’s thoughts from the other’s.”

Here, the narrator describes how Nel was groomed to become a wife and mother, with little thought toward her becoming anything else. Only with Sula did she have the freedom to express how she truly thought and felt. Their intimacy, however, sometimes dissolved into codependency, as both girls struggled with similar alienation at home, leading them to find excessive comfort in each other. Morrison also depicts here how close girlhood friendships can be, especially in instances in which the girls find in each other what they can’t find in anyone else and haven’t yet discovered in themselves.

“I don’t want to make somebody else. I want to make myself.” 

Sula declared this in response to Eva’s entreaties to settle down and have children. Her eschewal of motherhood contrasts with Nel’s reluctant embrace of it. Sula respected herself as an individual worthy of her creativity, instead of putting that creativity into someone else’s development.

“Good taste was out of place in the company of death, death itself was the essence of bad taste. And there must be much rage and saliva in its presence. The body must move and throw itself about, the eyes must roll, the hands should have no peace, and the throat should release all the yearning, despair, and outrage that accompany the stupidity of loss.”

After discovering Sula and Jude in the midst of a sexual encounter, Nel, who had spent her life learning to repress her emotions, wondered how to mourn her losses. She knew that she should have expressed something violent, but the strict propriety with which she had been raised forbade it even at the right moment.

“Now her thighs were really empty. And it was then that what those women said about never looking at another man made some sense to her, for the real point, the heart of what they said, was the word looked. Not to promise never to marry another man, but to promise and know that she could never afford to look again, to see and accept the way in which their heads cut the air or see moons and tree limbs framed by their necks and shoulders…never to look, for now she could not risk looking—and anyway, so what? For now her thighs were truly empty and dead too, and it was Sula who had taken the life from them and Jude who smashed her heart and the both of them who left her with no thighs and no heart just her brain raveling away.” 

Nel contemplated her sense of loss. Her thighs, in her mind, existed only to open and close in response to Jude or the birth of her children with him. The pain of both her loss and rejection made her wary of men, unable to resume the curiosity she had once felt for her husband. She mourned the sudden absence of her sensuality and the beginning of her obsession with loss.

“They insisted that all unions between white men and black women be rape; for a black woman to be willing was literally unthinkable. In that way, they regarded integration with precisely the same venom that white people did.” 

The Black people of Medallion rejected Sula partly because it was rumored that she slept with white men consensually. With the memory of slavery still close, unions between Black women and white men were usually the result of rape. For a Black woman to want to sleep with the men who had been raping them for centuries was both an affront and a betrayal. The idea of this was so infuriating to the members of this community that they rejected the prospect of integration, using their worry about sex between Black women and white men as an excuse in the same way that white people often used sex between Black men and white women as an excuse.

“She came to their church suppers without underwear, bought their steaming platters of food and merely picked at it—relishing nothing, exclaiming over no one’s ribs or cobbler. They believed that she was laughing at their God.”

The narrator goes on to describe the reasons why the Black people of Medallion held Sula in contempt. Her seeming indifference to their community gatherings indicated that she had no interest in their rituals and was devoid of any sense of feigning enthusiasm to be polite. Her refusal to adhere to custom felt like a mockery of their traditions, their God, and themselves.

“They began to cherish their husbands and wives, protect their children, repair their homes and in general band together against the devil in their midst. In their world, aberrations were as much a part of nature as grace. It was not for them to expel or annihilate it.” 

Sula became the force against which community rallied against. Unable to make her conform, she became an emblem of evil living among them. Like Satan himself, she became an embodiment of all that they were not supposed to be.

“Their evidence against Sula was contrived, but their conclusions about her were not. Sula was distinctly different. Eva’s arrogance and Hannah’s self-indulgence merged in her and, with a twist that was all her own imagination, she lived out her days exploring her own thoughts and emotions, giving them full rein, feeling no obligation to please anybody unless their pleasure pleased her.” 

The narrator goes on to describe Sula and why she so irritated the Black people of Medallion. Her unwavering feeling of distinction was at the crux of their hatred. She behaved as no woman was supposed to: living only for her own pleasure and interests.

“The first experience taught her there was no other that you could count on; the second that there was no self to count on either. She had no center, no speck around which to grow.”

The narrator explains Sula’s absence of social obligation—why she felt no need to meld herself with the others in Medallion. The first experience was Hannah admitting to friends that she didn’t like Sula. The second experience was her disavowal of responsibility after accidentally killing Chicken Little. Rejection by the one person who was supposed to love her the most and her eschewal of guilt for taking a life made her capable of anything and loyal to nothing but her own whims.

“She had clung to Nel as the closest thing to both an other and a self, only to discover that she and Nel were not one and the same thing.” 

Sula’s dependency on Nel was based both in a need for intimacy and a complement. Then, Nel married and placed her devotion and sense of intimacy in Jude, causing Sula to realize that their priorities were different.

“In a way, her strangeness, her naïveté, her craving for the other half of her equation was the consequence of an idle imagination. Had she paints, or clay, or knew the discipline of the dance, or strings; had she anything to engage her tremendous curiosity and her gift for metaphor, she might have exchanged the restlessness and preoccupation with whim for an activity that provided her with all she yearned for. And like any artist with no art form, she became dangerous.” 

The narrator ponders the possibility that, if Sula had known a proper outlet for her creativity and whimsicality, she might not have posed so much danger to others. Her sense of daring might have been satisfied by art. Her in-access to such pursuits reiterates for the reader the myriad ways in which racism and sexism place limitations on people’s lives.

“There, in the center of that silence was not eternity but the death of time and a loneliness so profound the word itself had no meaning. For loneliness assumed the absence of other people, and the solitude she found in that desperate terrain had never admitted the possibility of other people. She wept then. Tears for the deaths of the littlest things: the castaway shoes of children; broken stems of marsh grass battered and drowned by the sea; prom photographs of dead women she never knew; wedding rings in pawnshop windows; the tidy bodies of Cornish hens in a nest of rice.” 

The narrator expresses for Sula her sense of what happens after the sex act is over for her. It made her aware of the endings of things, which made her feel lonely. It made her think, too, of death and discarded items. This description harks back to the moment beside the river when Nel and Sula’s boredom leads them to bury trash, as though to give it meaning. The end of lovemaking, which had always been so important to the women in the Peace family, came with a feeling of mourning for Sula.

“When I was a little girl the heads of my paper dolls came off, and it was a long time before I discovered that my own head would not fall off if I bent my neck. I used to walk around holding it very stiff because I thought a strong wind or a heavy push would snap my neck. Nel was the one who told me the truth. But she was wrong. I did not hold my head stiff enough when I met him and so I lost it just like the dolls.” 

Sula reflected aloud on her relationship with Ajax after he left her—a consequence of her growing attached to him. For the first time, Sula, who had long been indifferent to relationships, fell in love and felt the sense of loss that only others had known. Instead of accepting the sense of loss as an aspect of the experience, as so many others do, she resolved that she was suffering because she had not held onto herself strongly enough while with him. This is indicated, too, by the ways in which she began to behave like a conventional homemaker toward the end of their relationship.

“At thirty her hot brown eyes had turned to agate, and her skin had taken on the sheen of maple struck down, split and sanded at the height of its green. Virtue, bleak and drawn, was her only mooring.”

The narrator describes how Nel aged. She had hardened, it seems. The analogy to a maple struck down in its prime suggests that she felt that sense of defeat when she was still young enough to do something about it. Like her mother, she clung to a sense of virtue to give her self-worth.

“You think I don’t know what your life is like just because I ain’t living it? I know what every colored woman in this country is doing […] Dying. Just like me. But the difference is they dying like a stump. Me, I’m going down like one of those redwoods. I sure did live in this world.” 

Sensing the limitations of Nel’s life and that of other Black women, Sula told Nel how she could identify with the things that ailed them, though she refused to experience them. The difference between the way in which they chose to live and the way in which she did was that she refused to live by any standards other than her own, refused to limit her existence to satisfy someone else’s expectations.

“Oh, they’ll love me all right […] After all the old women have lain with the teen-agers; when all the young girls have slept with their old drunken uncles; after all the black men fuck all the white ones; when all the white women kiss all the black ones […] when Lindbergh sleeps with Bessie Smith and Norma Shearer makes it with Stepin Fetchit […] then there’ll be a little love left over for me. And I know just what it will feel like.” 

Sula responded to Nel’s concern about leaving behind a poor memory. Sula knew that her community’s obsession with her was largely based on their false sense of superiority in relation to her. When she was gone, they would no longer have someone to contrast themselves against. Her presence gave them a sense of order. When she left, she predicted, they would descend into disorder and miss having her around.

“So he had said ‘always,’ so she would not have to be afraid of the change—the falling away of skin, the drip and slide of blood, and the exposure of bone underneath. He had said ‘always’ to convince her, assure her, of permanency.” 

After Sula died, Shadrack remembered the time she had come to his cottage when she was a little girl, after she had killed Chicken Little. His statement was meant to assure her in response to the inevitability of death.