Morrison's Sula - part 6

After Sula’s death, Nel will mourn her but even then she is mourning her own lost girlhood.



“We was girls together,” she said as though explaining something. “O Lord, Sula,” she cried, “girl, girl, girlgirlgirl.”

It was a fine cry – loud and long – but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.

Sula, the character the book is named after, the outlaw, had served her friend and her community merely in defining themselves. For a period of time, she keeps them away from the chaos Shadrack represents. But Shadrack, the real hero of the book, is the one friend of Sula’s who never could become that. Sula, who “cuts out” whenever her path crosses Shadrack’s, is also shown to be undeserving. So do we trust the “madman” in his assessment?


"She had a tadpole over her eye (that was how he knew she was a friend – she had the mark of the fish he loved)"


Sula, though the central character, is denied the opportunity to realize the existence of a friendship through which she could have really transcended her boundaries. On her deathbed, she says of the community in the Bottom,


"Oh, they’ll love me all right. It will take time, but they’ll love me…. 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 the guards have raped all the jailbirds and after all the whores make love to their grannies; after all the faggots get their mothers’ trim… then there’ll be a little love left over for me."


Sula then is about relationships that are frail, mortal… that don’t survive sexual politics. It is about ordinary people who experience loneliness but don’t know how to really cherish each other. Perhaps in a more ideal world it might be possible for agape friendships between people, especially women, to blossom and mature.

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Hope you enjoyed the essay. Would love to know your thoughts....

Morrison's Sula - 5

By the time Sula is on her death bed, they have gone to being foils to each other. For instance, when Sula had returned to Medallion Nel had ruminated, “… talking to Sula had always been a conversation with herself… Sula never competed; she simply helped others define themselves.” And we feel that however genuine her happiness at getting her old friend back, it is about herself – Sula made her laugh, made her see old things in new ways, in whose presence she felt clever... Sure there’s gratitude but there’s also a sense of herself as defined by the other. Sula does slightly better. She, who had drifted back to Medallion partly because Nel is there, defines herself at the expense of Nel only after breaking up the latter’s marriage – “she and Nel were not one and the same thing…. Now Nel was one of them.” Sula feels that now Nel belongs to the town and “all of its ways.” For, by the time Sula is dying, Nel has become the ‘good’ woman. “Virtue, bleak and drawn, was her only mooring”, which “hid from her the true motives of her charity” in visiting her one-time friend. On the other hand, Sula is termed “devil all right” at a social meeting of the women in Medallion. The town had united as a community against the evil Sula represented. After her death, they fall apart.

Morrison asks – how easy is it to stick to the straight and narrow when there is no other who would help the self to reinforce its sense of being virtuous? How much of being good is to do with defining oneself for purposes of gaining social approbation? When one is powerless in society as Sula is, how important is it to be known to have a personality rather than as one who was merely a product of circumstances or “good”?

Morrison undermines Nel – a faithful wife, an adequate mother and a responsible member of the church – by detailing how the thing she mourns most when her husband leaves is the lost sex, how her bear love for her children almost drives them away and how quickly her benign concern for Eva Peace turns sour when the latter probes her on Chicken Little’s death. Before the book closes, Sula’s wronged grandmother asks Nel about Chicken Little’s downing, “Tell me how you killed that little boy…. You. Sula. What’s the difference? .... Just alike. Both of you. Never was no difference between you.” Nel is not spared the exercise of probing her own conscience.

"But it was there anyway, as it had always been, the old feeling and the old question. The good feeling she had had when Chicken’s hands slipped. She hadn’t wondered about that in years. “Why didn’t I feel bad when it happened? How come it felt so good to see him fall?”

All these years she had been secretly proud of her calm, controlled behavior when Sula was uncontrollable, her compassion for Sula’s frightened and shamed eyes. Now it seemed that what she had thought was maturity, serenity and compassion was only the tranquility that follows a joyful stimulation. Just as the water closed peacefully over the turbulence of Chicken Little’s body, so had contentment washed over her enjoyment."

Morrison employs sexual imagery – Nel feels good about herself when someone else is suffering, or worse dying, and her enjoyment is sexual. This is how she assuages her own feelings of powerlessness. Sula, who could be reduced to a mess when Chicken Little drowns, grows into someone who could, despite attempts to transcend powerlessness through education and travel, not escape.

"…hers was an experimental life – ever since her mother’s remarks sent her flying up those stairs, ever since her one major feeling of responsibility had been exorcised on the bank of a river with a closed place in the middle. 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."

Sula, for all her outlaw status, is someone lacking in real strength and courage. Possibly driven away from the higher pursuits she sets out for (on her friend’s wedding day) by a more powerful world which she grapples with for 10 years, she destroys those in her sphere of influence. And she meets with no opposition. When Nel means to but doesn’t ask, “How come you did it Sula?” i.e. take Jude away from her, the latter “looked bored as she sucked her teeth. ‘Well, there was this space in front of me, behind me, in my head. Some space. And Jude filled it up. That’s all. He just filled up the space.” Her head is not full of platitudes and teachings young girls’ heads usually are full of. It is easy for her to take the wide road to hell. (In fact, her grandmother had said to her, “hellfire don’t need lighting and it’s already burning in you…”) She is looking for completion, but looks in all the wrong places.

"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."

Sula harbors some very violent thoughts for Ajax, the man for whom she discovers the meaning of possession. After Ajax leaves her, she ruminates “It’s just as well he left. Soon I would have torn the flesh from his face just to see if I was right about the gold and nobody would have understood that kind of curiosity.” As she is liberated from her feelings for Ajax, she sings to herself, “I have sung all the songs all the songs I have sung all the songs there are.” On her deathbed she asks a startling question in that final conversation with her friend.

“How you know?” Sula asked.

“Know what?” Nel still wouldn’t look at her.

“About who was good. How you know it was you?”

“What you mean?”

“I mean maybe it wasn’t you. Maybe it was me.”

Morrison's Sula - 4

Morrison suggests that Nel’s and Sula’s friendship is complex, with more to it than meets the eye. The boundaries between one person and the other are not clear, even to the friends themselves. Before Nel gets married, we are told “their friendship was so close, they themselves had difficulty distinguishing one’s thoughts from the other’s.” And:

"They never quarreled, those two, the way some girlfriends did over boys, or competed against each other for them. In those days a compliment to one was a compliment to the other, and cruelty to one was a challenge to the other."

The storytelling in Sula, which is mostly linear in structure, becomes non-linear when Morrison talks about what cements the friendship. She starts with sex, then goes to shedding of blood (the episode where Sula slices off the tip of her finger to scare the Irish boys who had harassed Nel) and finally death (Chicken Little’s). All three would be taboo for young girls and they are no less assertive than men for breaking these taboos. It is breaking these societal taboos that cements their friendship. So much so that the friendship doesn’t rupture until personal taboos are broken. Nel is unable to share the father of her children with her best friend, something Sula can’t understand. It is only when she herself gets involved with Ajax in a way unlike she did with other men that possessiveness enters her dictionary.

Sex will play an important part in their friendship till the end. To be gazed at lustfully by men, they had made a bold foray into Edna Finch’s Mellow House like “tightrope walkers, as thrilled by the possibility of a slip as by the maintenance of tension and balance. The least sideways glance, the merest toe stub, could pitch them into those creamy haunches spread wide with welcome.” Their daring is stunning because they are 12-year-old girls living in a small town in the 1920s. When Ajax calls out “pig meat” the two girls guard their eyes “lest someone see their delight.” The young men tease the girls as they do in my culture, both to aggressively set limits to the threatening freedom of “modern women” and to assert their power over them. And these two girls, who had “discovered years before that they were neither white nor male, and that all freedom and triumph was forbidden to them” used “each other to grow on.” This expression of sexuality adds to the intimacy they share. They go on to compare “how a boy kissed, what line he used with one and then the other.” This sharing of the details of their forays into the sexual arena is much alike how men compare the women they’ve “had”.

Morrison creates a world, the Bottom, where the yoke of sexual politics lies light on its women denizens. Unlike Paradise, in which the men of the town attack the Covent where errant women have taken shelter, in Sula, the men enjoy the sexuality of women like Hannah and Sula Peace without condemning them as sluts or assembling as mobs to drive them out of decent society. Morrison’s description of female lust is powerful as her female characters turn their gaze on men and objectify them. Nel, as a 55-year-old woman, remembers the time she had been 11.

"Jesus, there were some beautiful boys in 1921! Look like the whole world was bursting at the seams with them. Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years old. Jesus, they were fine…. The sun heated them and the moon slid down their backs. God, the world was full of beautiful boys in 1921!"

Nel, who had had as much feminine desire as Sula, never transgresses the norm. Is Sula is the doer and Nel the one who wants to do but usually never does? Is Sula only open to suggestion? Morrison’s portrayal of the two girls is complex. While it is Nel who had murmured before she befriended Sula:

“I’m me… Me. I’m me. I’m not their daughter… I’m me. Me… I want… I want to be… wonderful. Oh, Jesus, make me wonderful…” For days afterward she imagined other trips she would take, alone though, to faraway places. Contemplating them was delicious. Leaving Medallion would be her goal.

it is Sula who had travelled “not too long, but maybe too far” before drifting back to Medallion partly because Nel is there. She tells Nel when the latter meets her before her death, “Girl, I got my mind. And what goes on in it. Which is to say, I got me.” While Sula was the one who swung him around and around, Nel is the one who had felt good to see Chicken Little fall.

Morrison's Sula - 3

In this context, what do the two main characters – women – do? Is it now a world that will allow them to express themselves, be themselves? Morrison suggests that when stressful shaping factors are turned off they don’t cease to exert influence on their subjects. In the Foreword, Morrison reveals what she was thinking of when she was writing Sula:

'In that atmosphere of “What would you be doing or thinking if there was no gaze or hand to stop you?” I began to think about just what that kind of license would have been like for us black women forty years earlier.'

With nothing to stop her, Eva gets her leg cut for pecuniary reasons and burns her son alive when he becomes a liability. Her daughter, Hannah beds other women’s husbands. Her granddaughter, Sula, watches her mother burn, gets an education, does some traveling, but returns home to break up her best friend’s marriage and institutionalize her grandmother. She is the woman who for society is an “outlaw”, a free woman. In the Foreword, Morrison sets out what she wanted to explore through such a figure.

"Female freedom always means sexual freedom, even when – especially when – it is seen through the prism of economic freedom. The sexual freedom of Hannah Peace was my entrance into the story, constructed from shreds of memory about the way local women regarded a certain kind of female – envy coupled with amused approbation."

Acting as a foil to Sula, the free woman in the novel, is Nel – the wronged wife and the “good woman”. Morrison says, “…Sula, although she does nothing so horrendous as what Eva does, is seen by the townspeople as not just competitive, but devouring, evil. Nel, with the most minimal demands, is seen as the muted standard.”

Speaking to Betty Jean Parker in 1979, Morrison said the two girls were “like a Janus’ head.” She said:

… there was a little bit of both in each of those two women, and that if they had been one person, I suppose they would have been a rather marvelous person. But each one lacked something that the other one had.[1]

The two girls had started from very similar points as 10-year-old girls in the Bottom. There is a “fallen woman” in both their families. Nel’s grandmother was a “Creole whore” and Sula’s mother Hannah “simply refused to live without the attentions of a man, and… had a steady sequence of lovers, mostly the husbands of their friends and neighbors.” Speaking about why Nel had to have a grandmother with “questionable roots” and how that led to what she later becomes, Morrison, speaking to the Massachusetts Review in 1976, said:

"Nel’s grandmother just means that there’s that kind of life from which Nel comes; that’s another woman who was a hustler; that part is already in Nel and accounts for her attraction to Sula….[2]"

Nel and Sula had become friends when they were “unshaped, formless things”. Nel “seemed stronger and more consistent than Sula, who could hardly be counted on to sustain any emotion for more than three minutes.” The fact is both girls are passive, rendered so by parental words and attitudes. There is a degree of powerlessness in their lives. Sula is sent “flying up the stairs” by her mother’s words, “…I love Sula. I just don’t like her.” And Nel’s parents “had succeeded in rubbing down to a dull glow any sparkle or splutter she had…. During all of her girlhood the only respite Nel had had from her stern and undemonstrative parents was Sula.” The two children first meet in their dreams.

"…they had already made each other’s acquaintance in the delirium of their noon 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... Nel … 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… 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 a someone who shared both the taste and the speed."

This passage is reminiscent of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex in “The Young Girl” chapter of which she talks about the passive eroticism and narcissism of young girls who, doomed to immanence, day-dream about a romantic, mysterious male.

[1] From Complexity: Toni Morrison’s Women in Sturdy Black Bridges, Ed. Roseann Bell et al. Garden City: Doubleday, 1979:251-57; In Conversations with Toni Morrison


[2] From Intimate Things in Place: A Conversation with Toni Morrison by Robert Stepto in the Massachusetts Review 18 (1977): 473-89; Conversations with Toni Morrison

Morrison's Sula - 2

"What is friendship between women when unmediated by men? What choices are available to black women outside their own society’s approval?"

These, as Morrison explains in her Foreword, are some of the questions she set out to explore in Sula. The story focuses on Nel and Sula – what stuff they’re made of and what they do with their lives after making each other’s acquaintance in a small, black town in the 1920s, the only children of distant mothers and absent fathers. The context is complex and important, even if at least one of the two girls goes on to transcend her background (in that she goes to college and travels around the country for 10 years). In Morrison’s other novels – The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon and Jazz – part of the context is white violence or at the very least the internalized white gaze. In all these books, there are violent exposures to the white-dominated politics of the day which can surely corrode anyone. In Morrison’s first novel The Bluest Eye, two young girls had exhibited violent reactions against the white “norm” which their friend Pecola Breedlove aspired to. But Sula has more to do with the aftermath of stressful events, the nature of evil, personality and boundaries in relationships. Morrison explores these themes by placing the political question secondary to the “aesthetics only” criterion of merit. She says in the Foreword to the novel:

"In 1970, when I began writing Sula, I had already had the depressing experience of reading commentary on my first novel, The Bluest Eye, by both black and white reviewers that – with two exceptions – had little merit since the evaluation ignored precisely the “aesthetics only” criteria it championed. If the novel was good, it was because it was faithful to a certain kind of politics; if it was bad, it was because it was faithless to them. The judgment was based on whether “Black people are – or are not – like this.” This time out, I returned the compliment and ignored the shallowness of such views and, again, rooted the narrative in a landscape already tainted by the fact that it existed."

The worst is not now. Eva Peace says “Just ‘cause you got it good now you think it was always this good? 1895 was a killer, girl.... Niggers was dying like flies” The characters are living in the aftermath of the time when “Things was bad.” While the characters in Sula are constrained and pained by the larger politics that dominate their lives –

“a neighborhood where on quiet days people in valley houses could hear singing sometimes, banjos sometimes…. A valley man… might see a dark woman in a flowered dress doing a bit of cakewalk… and it would be easy for the valley man to hear the laughter and not notice the adult pain that rested somewhere under the eyelids, somewhere under their head rags and soft felt hats, somewhere in the palm of the hand, somewhere behind the frayed lapels, somewhere in the sinew’s curve....”

unlike Beloved or Song of Solomon where violence from whites wreaks havoc in the lives of the victims and their generations, the white presence in Sula is more thwarting in nature and life-threatening only potentially. Other factors have the upper hand in the residents’ lives.

"The black people… were mightily preoccupied with earthly things – and each other, wondering even as early as 1920 what Shadrack was all about, what that little girl Sula who grew into a woman in their town was all about, and what they themselves were all about, tucked up there in the Bottom."

The characters are also dominated by factors like their innate characteristics, their families and above all their friendships. Morrison creates a world, stressed post-traumatically, where active white violence is not a factor for the main characters – two young women. They experience racial politics twice removed through male characters who abdicate, leave.

As for patriarchy, the homes of the girls are dominated by women. The male gaze comes filtered through other characters. Nel had vowed never to let any man look at her the way the black soldiers looked when her light-skinned mother had ended a humiliating exchange with a white conductor with a coquettish display of pretty teeth. Sula was aware of how a woman like her mother, who managed to get “some touching every day” was perceived “outside the house.”