Sula

Nel Wright is the daughter of Helene Sabat, who had been born to a Creole prostitute and an unknown man, and Wiley Wright, a cook on a Great Lake shipping line. Nel is born in 1910 and spends her whole life in Medallion. She attends Garfield Primary School, where she meets Sula Peace. She marries Jude and has three children, one of whom they call “Mickey.” Nel’s life as a homemaker is unsatisfying, but the strictures placed on her due to both race and gender squashes her imagination and leads her to believe that there were never other options.

Morrison describes Nel has having “the color of wet sandpaper—just dark enough to escape the blows of the pitch-black truebloods and the contempt of old women” (52). Both her dark skin color and her wide nose shape make her the target of her mother’s colorism—an internalized racism based on the notion that lighter-skinned Black people have proximity to whiteness and are, therefore, deserving of some of its privileges. Thus, Helene encourages Nel to pull on her nose, believing that this exercise will train it into a different shape. During their trip to New Orleans, Nel realizes the indignity of her mother’s acceptance of white supremacy and decides, after their return home, to embrace herself completely—an act she performs in a mirror. Befriending Sula is part of her radical self-acceptance, as Sula is both darker-skinned and comes from an unconventional family.

Nel seems stronger than Sula and more reliable. During difficult moments, such as the accidental death of Chicken Little, Nel is able to keep a cooler head, while Sula is shocked and distraught over what she has done. Later, Nel realizes that she may have been secretly pleased to watch Sula perform an act so bold and forbidden, even if it was an accident. The death of Chicken Little both secures the sacred bond between Sula and Nel and establishes the vicarious nature of their relationship. Nel partakes in the act without performing it. Similarly, later, Sula goes to bed with Jude without ever becoming his wife.

Finally, Nel is practical and methodical, while Sula is insouciant and rash. She takes quiet pleasure in thinking that she is more responsible than her friend, particularly when, at the end of the novel, she notices that Sula carries no wallet or change purse. Conversely, Nel, Sula surmises, “thrived on a crisis” (140). Sula first notices this during and after Chicken Little’s death. After Jude leaves her, Nel takes on the persona of a betrayed, spurned woman. To support herself and her children, she takes a job as a chambermaid in the hotel in which Jude had once worked.

Helene Wright, born Helene Sabat, is Nel’s mother and the wife of Wiley Wright. She was born in a New Orleans brothel called the Sundown House to a Creole prostitute named Rochelle and an unknown man. She was raised by her devout Catholic grandmother, Cecile Sabat. She marries Wiley, who takes her to Medallion, at age 16. The town’s inhabitants eschewed the French pronunciation of her name and called her Helen. This may have been a subtle and passive-aggressive way to diminish some of Helene’s superior airs. Otherwise, the people of Medallion regard Helene as “an impressive woman” (18) who wears her long hair in a bun and belongs to “the most conservative black church” in town in the absence of a Catholic one (18). She has an air of unquestioned authority, which allows her to cast doubt on others’ manners. She establishes the practices of providing seasonal flowers for the church’s altar and welcoming returning Black veterans with bouquets.

Nel’s relationship with her mother is tolerant but tense. She allows her mother to direct her life—telling her to pull her nose to make it narrower, telling her when to marry—in a way that is similar to how Eva tries to direct those of her children, grandchildren, and boarders. Sula’s refusal of Eva’s directive to marry and have children stands in contrast to Helene’s hasty engagement to Jude. Helene instills within her daughter the internalized racism of valuing white standards of beauty.. Also, due to her shame about her own mother, she leads Nel to believe that sex is something that only ought to occur within a marriage. Perhaps as a result, Nel’s relationship to Jude seems almost functional—procreative but not especially pleasurable. 

Eva is mother to Hannah, Ralph (“Plum”), and Pearl and grandmother to Sula. Originally from Virginia, where she had met her husband, BoyBoy, Eva builds the house in which the Peace family lives, supposedly with money she had gotten from a railroad company after sticking her leg under a train. After five years of marriage, BoyBoy leaves the family and provides no money. Their marriage had been “sad and disgruntled” (32). BoyBoy spends most of his time away from home, drinking and spending time with other women before leaving altogether. When he is home, he abuses Eva. When he returns to Medallion for a brief visit, dressed well and accompanied by another woman, Eva resolves to spend the rest of her life hating him. She hates how BoyBoy’s status as a man, even a Black one, allowed him to take what he wanted from her and other women without giving much in return. She hates that she had to lose a limb—literalizing the trope of making sacrifices for loved ones—to care for her children, while he remained whole. Finally, BoyBoy, as defeated as he may have seemed, still has the relative freedom to move around in the world, while Eva remains static.

Eva lives on the third floor of her house on Carpenter Road, where she “sat in a wagon […] directing the lives of her children, friends, strays, and a constant stream of boarders” (30). No one in town ever speaks of Eva’s missing leg, and few people recall when she had had two. She keeps her remaining leg stockinged and places her foot in a nice shoe or slipper. She never hides her missing leg behind a long dress, instead she wears dresses that fall mid-calf. A fanciful woman, Eva creates stories about how she lost her leg. She also interprets dreams. Like her daughter, Hannah, Eva also loves the company of men and “had a regular flock of gentleman callers” (41). Unlike Hannah, Eva is uninterested in sex. She prefers flirtation, laughter, and a bit of pecking. She argues with men occasionally about current events, but with less interest in conveying her point of view than in reinforcing their feelings of importance. Men who argue with her come away stronger in their convictions. She chastises the new wives who stay with her when she feels that they don’t take care of their men properly.

Eva’s name echoes the biblical Eve—the first woman and the Earth’s first mother. Her approach to motherhood is one that eschews tenderness in favor of preservation. In her children and, in Plum particularly, she channels her fierce survival instinct. When Plum succumbs to heroin addiction, Eva, remembering the evening when she had used her last bit of food to loosen her son’s bowels, likely feels betrayed. Unwavering in her belief that she could control the actions of others, she sets Plum aflame, killing him rather than watch him kill himself. Similarly, when she sees Hannah set on fire during a cooking accident, Eva leaps out of her third-floor window to save her daughter, believing that she could use her own body to put out the flame.

Eva spends her remaining years in a retirement home, where Sula has placed her, suffering from dementia. 

Hannah Peace is the eldest child of Eva and Eva’s estranged husband, BoyBoy. She is also mother to Sula—her only child. Hannah was married to a man named Rekus, who died when Sula was three. His death sends Hannah back to her mother’s home. From there, she entertains a steady stream of men, as though she has never gotten over the loss of her husband, using the bodies of strangers to bring her comfort. She usually wears a wraparound dress and goes barefoot in the summer. In the winter, she wears men’s leather slippers. Hannah was beautiful with a curvy figure, slim ankles, smooth skin, and a long neck. She beckons men with “hey sugar.” Unlike her mother, she has no desire to argue with men, only to make them feel wonderful just as they are. She usually meets with her men in the basement in the summer or in the pantry in the winter. Some of them are the husbands in newlywed couples. When the pantry and cellar are unavailable, she takes them into the parlor or her bedroom. However, Hannah seldom allows her callers to sleep over, though she could have sex with anyone. Her reputation wearies all of the women in town, from housewives to sex workers. The latter resent the business that Hannah takes away from them. Women who have both husbands and affairs dislike Hannah’s indifference to relationships. As a result of currying this resentment, Hannah has few women friends, other than Patsy and Valentine.

Hannah’s life comes to an abrupt end when she accidentally sets herself on fire while cooking some Kentucky wonders, or green beans, over an open outdoor flame. Hannah’s death could be read at divine retribution for Plum’s death. Just as the Old Testament God punished Eve for going too far by eating forbidden fruit, this event could be read as a god reminding a controlling Eva that she did not, in fact, have the right to determine life and death for her children. Hannah’s death is so sudden and swift, unlike the contemplative moments leading up to Plum’s death, that the reader could almost be unsure of what happened. The purpose is to show Eva, and the reader, the ease with which her carefully controlled world can be dismantled. The sacrifice of Hannah is also necessary for Sula to achieve selfhood without the burden of her mother’s expectations. 

Jude Greene is Nel’s husband and the father of her three children. He later leaves her for Sula, who discards him. Jude is handsome and well-liked in the Bottom. He was one of eight children and sang tenor in the Mount Zion Men’s Quartet. He had been the favorite among eight to ten girls who went to church services just to hear him sing before he chose Nel. He first worked as a waiter at the Hotel Medallion. He longs, however, for hard, manual labor, which eluded him due to job discrimination.

Jude epitomizes the ways in which white supremacist ideology emasculated Black men by rooting manhood in the ability to support one’s family while then taking away their means to support their families. His act of sleeping with Sula and then running away with her is likely an attempt to escape the strictures of domestic responsibility by being with a woman who expected nothing from him. After Sula leaves him, he moves to Detroit and never returns to Medallion. Neither his wife nor his children ever hear from him again.

Ralph “Plum” Peace is Eva’s only son. Eva hopes to leave everything she owns to her beloved son, whose nickname is an indicator of the sweetness that Eva reserved only for him. In 1917, Plum, like Shadrack, fights in World War I. He returns to the U.S. two years later, but does not go back home until 1920. He arrives in Medallion several days after Christmas in 1920, looking unkempt. It soon becomes apparent to Eva that he is addicted to heroin. Eva kills him by setting him afire when he is 26.

Plum epitomizes Eva’s sense of having a legacy. Initially, she wishes to leave her home and her money to her son. Instead, after he dies, Eva inherits his army pension. Eva grants Sula those funds to go to college. Plum is also symbolic of how neglected many Black veterans were after they returned home from the First World War. This sense of neglect is more apparent in Shadrack’s story. Though he, despite succumbing to madness, still managed to survive. Despite the ruthlessness of her act, Eva’s immolation of her only son could be read as a refusal to allow a racist society to destroy him. 

Born in 1901, Ajax is the lover of Sula, whom she and Nel first encountered at the Time and a Half Pool Hall in their early adolescence. Though his real name is Albert Jacks, resulting in the nickname, “A. Jacks,” Sula confuses it with Ajax. Morrison never specifies if Sula associates his presumed name with the household cleaner or with the warriors, Ajax the Great and Ajax the Lesser from Homer’s The Iliad.

Ajax is graceful in his movements and has a “magnificently foul mouth,” though “he seldom cursed” (50). He handles words, no matter how dull, as though they are sharp. Ajax also likes women very much and is nice to them—a fact that provokes women to fight over him. He is indifferent to this attention, however. Other than his mother, who was a conjure woman, Sula is the only other interesting woman he has ever met. The stories he hears about her, as well as “[h]er elusiveness and indifference to established habits of behavior reminded him of his mother” (126). Aside from hanging out in the pool hall, Ajax’s other main interest is airplanes. He is an easygoing man with a sense of justice, based on his effort to help Tar Baby.

Ajax’s relationship with Sula ends when he realizes that she is becoming more possessive of him and, in the interest of keeping him, pays more attention to domestic matters. Bristling at the idea of being with another nest-builder, he disappears from her life.