Sula, by Toni Morrison.


Sometimes I have to urge to go back to a classic. This week, it was Sula, published by the esteemed Toni Morrison in 1973. The good thing about a classic novel is that you can read it, like it, then read it again ten years later and have a completely different reaction. So whether you have read it or not, let me introduce you to Sula Mae Peace.

Sula is set in the town of Medallion, Ohio. The black folks in this little town live in an area called “the Bottom.” Curiously, the Bottom isn’t located in the Ohio valley. It’s located in the hills above the town, where, at the time, the white people didn’t want to live. The people in this town are interesting and layered, living mostly along the Bottom’s Carpenter’s Road. There’s Shadrack, who invented National Suicide Day in 1920 (its been celebrated by SOMEONE every year since). There’s Tar Baby, a beautiful man who never speaks above a whisper, and is nearly half white or completely white, despite his name. There’s Ajax, a hauntingly beautiful 21-year old man. There’s Helene Wright, a proper, uptight woman who the Bottom residents decide should be called by the more practical and down to earth name of “Helen.” There’s Helen’s daughter, Nel.

And then there is the Peace family. One-legged Eva. (How did she lose that leg? Did she really sell it to feed her family? And who would buy a colored woman’s one leg?) Eva’s children, Pearle, Plum, and Hannah. Eva’s three (extra-legally) adopted children, all named Dewey and impossible to tell apart, even though they are of three different skin tones and birthdates, and, in the beginning, different personalities. Finally, we meet Hannah’s daughter, Sula Mae, a quiet girl with a strange birthmark above her eye that seems to change in shape, color, and meaning as Sula gets older.

Nel and Sula become best friends at Garfield Primary School. In 1922, while they are both 12, there is a lot going on around them. Sula’s mother, Hannah, is the loose woman of the Bottom, sleeping with every man that comes her way. Sula learns that summer that her mother doesn’t like her – loves her, just doesn’t like her much. Sula and Nel witness a younger playmate, Chicken, drown in the river, and they don’t know who is guiltier – the one who mistakenly let his hands go, causing him to fall into the river, or the one who silently watched as he drowned. And Sula’s mother dies in a fire, and one-legged Eva throws herself out of a window to try to save her. Life keeps moving in the Bottom.

Eventually, Nel marries a man named Jude Greene. Sula leaves after the wedding and doesn’t return until 1937, looking like the closest thing to a superstar that anyone in the Bottom has ever seen. She puts Eva into a home and then proceeds to pick up where her mother left off, sleeping with all the men in the town, including Nel’s husband, Jude. Years pass. And sick and on her deathbead, Sula is all alone. She is friendless, and the whole town (probably rightfully) feels wronged by her. The only person who comes to see if she needs anything is her old friend Nel. And after so many years, Sula still can’t apologize. She’s lonely, but she has the courage/gall to see her life a little differently – “my loneliness is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else’s. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain’t that something? A secondhand lonely.” It isn’t until years later, long after Sula is gone, that Nel begins to realize how much and why she misses her old friend.

There is a lot to praise about this book. In my mind, Toni Morrison’s pen must be the smoothest, most amazing writing instrument in the world – it simply oozes poetry and some of the most haunting images. I read this book for the first time ten years ago, and all I remembered of it by 2005 was that I liked it. But this time around, something was missing. Re-reading it, I could not remember at all why I once liked it so. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that my taste in books has probably changed a bit, because I’ve read so much more. I am less patient with literary riddles, and I have almost no patience for poetry that is just meant to prettily take up space. So while I still liked the story in Sula and enjoyed much of the storytelling, there was a lot in this novel that I just don’t have any use for now. At some points, I actually wondered if critics like this book so much simply because it can be so difficult to grasp. The meanings and phrases always just within my comprehension, and then slipping away. But in that last chapter, I remembered what it was that I loved so much.

See, I wouldn’t have liked Sula much – kind of like her mother didn’t like her. But, perhaps like her mother, I love her for what she was. I love that she was. I have to give her credit – Sula had guts! To me, she was a feminist, and she was well before her time. She lived her own sexual freedom. She is the only woman in the novel who leaves the small town – and we never learn what she experienced while she was gone. And she took pride in knowing that no matter what mistakes she’d made, she’d lived on her own terms. So my final thought (this time around) was, “Poor Sula.” She should never have returned to the Bottom. It was just too small for a woman with her big thoughts.