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Sula, Toni Morrison
Can hate, contempt and fear – that un-holy trinity – ever be good for a community? Well, yes, if you believe a woman born as Chloe Anthony Wofford in her short, powerful novel, Sula.
You’ll know this writer better as Toni Morrison, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, the first black American woman so honored. Her complex, layered novels are relentlessly honest and soul-searching, not only of the African-American world that is her primary subject, but of the white frosting all around it.
Toni Morrison was born in 1931 in Lorain, Ohio, a town at the end of the Underground Railroad. Lorain must have been a lot like the fictional town of Medallion, the setting of Sula. In the hills above Medallion floats its black quarters, ironically named Bottom since it may be the bottom of Heaven itself. Working-class blacks live there in a little community largely independent of the white folks below.
Here grow up two girls, Nel Wright and Sula Peace.
Nel comes from the comfortable, careful black middle class. Her mother, Helene, has lived a judiciously conventional life as a means of dealing with an embarrassment from her past – her own mother in New Orleans was a loose woman with little interest in the rules of society. Helene makes sure daughter Nel grows up in a careful, circumspect household, well ordered, always by the book.
Sula? Her household is an ever-turning kaleidoscope of personalities and events, men coming and going, three adopted kids, a white alcoholic boarder, a proud and domineering matriarch, Eva Peace, ruling over it all like a queen. Sula has a birthmark over one eye. Depending on who sees it, the mark is a stemmed rose. Or a snake.
Nel and Sula’s world, rendered here by its Ohio Yankee author, is as southern Gothic as it gets. Morrison’s black characters might have stepped straight out of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County. Bottom is a place where little kids drown. Drunken sons are burned up by their mothers. An amputee woman stumps around to rule households like Captain Ahab. A shell-shocked war veteran parades the streets to commemorate his own personal holiday, National Suicide Day.
In this unpredictable world, Nel and Sula share an intense adolescent friendship. Morrison writes here about how the girls first met … in their dreams:
They were solitary little girls whose loneliness was so profound it intoxicated them and sent them stumbling into Technicolored visions that always included a presence, a someone, who, quite like the dreamer, shared the delight of the dream. When Nel, an only child, sat on the steps of her back porch surrounded by the high silence of her mother’s incredibly orderly house, feeling the neatness pointing at her back, she studied the poplars and fell easily into a picture of herself lying on a flowered bed, tangled in her own hair, waiting for some fiery prince. He approached but never quite arrived. But always, watching the dream along with her, were some smiling sympathetic eyes. Someone as interested as she herself in the flow of her imagined hair, the thickness of the mattress of flowers, the voile sleeves that closed below her elbows in gold-threaded cuffs.
Similarly, Sula, also an only child, but wedged into a household of throbbing disorder constantly awry with things, people, voices and the slamming of doors, spent hours in the attic behind a roll of linoleum galloping through her own mind on a gray-and-white horse tasting sugar and smelling roses in full view of someone who shared both the taste and the speed.
This seemingly predestined friendship gets a test when Sula and Nel one day play by the river. A neighborhood boy called Chicken Little gets a swing-around-the-rosey from Sula, but her hands lose their grip and Chicken Little flies into the water. He never comes up again.
The accidental death remains so – accidental. Apparently, no one witnesses the event but Nel and Sula. Still, the secret forks their friendship onto separate paths. Nel puts her head down and sets off to live a conventional life, doing for others, marrying a man named Jude Green, always coloring – like her mother – strictly inside the lines.
Sula’s path is different. She goes whirlwinding out into the world, ignoring every rule and breaking every commandment. She’s sexually free, uninhibited, wild at heart, out to battle the ennui of the world through pleasure or pain, whatever it takes.
Sula leaves Bottom for a decade, and her reappearance is a mortal blow for her friendship with Nel. Sula has a careless affair with Nel’s husband, who then leaves Nel. A wall of pain rises between the two great friends, and a wall of spite grows up between the town itself and Sula. The worst of her immorality, the village believes, is that she sleeps with white men, as entertainment. That’s a special abomination in her community of color. Her sins give Bottom a common cause, a binding agent, a reason to hold together.
But what is good? What is evil? Nel realizes, as time drags by, that she bears a silent complicity in the drowning of Chicken Little – an accident she always placed on Sula alone. And Nel suddenly sees her life, with its petty conventions, its limits, as a kind of self-imprisonment, a life sentence.
And guess what? When Sula is gone at last, Bottom simply flies to pieces. The Devil it lived to defend against … she’s gone. The spite-filled center does not hold. Things fall apart.
Toni Morrison’s great subject is black Americans in a white world. But so much in Toni Morrison’s pages is pure gray. Gray as the smoke from things burning, where only ashes are left behind.
The book is Sula, by Toni Morrison.
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Related Links
Buy Devil in a Blue Dress
Buy Things Fall Apart
Buy Sula
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