Sula
— 1973 —
New York: Vintage International, 2004; with a foreword by the author; 174 pages
FIRST LINES
In that place, where they tore the nightshade and blackberry patches from their roots to make room for the Medallion City Golf Course, there was once a neighborhood. It stood in the hills above the valley town of Medallion and spread all the way to the river. It is called the suburbs now, but when black people lived there it was called the Bottom. One road, shaded by beeches, oaks, maples and chestnuts, connected it to the valley. The beeches are gone now, and so are the pear trees where children sat and yelled down through the blossoms to passersby.
PLOT SUMMARY
Commencing after the end of World War I and carrying through to 1969, Sula covers a great deal of territory—in both time and human passions. Largely set in “the Bottom,” a Black enclave near the fictional town of Medallion, Ohio, the story entwines myth and history, key components of Toni Morrison’s work. But at its heart, Morrison’s novel focuses on the friendship of two women, Nel Wright and Sula Peace, who meet as children and become instant soul mates.
So when they met, first in those chocolate halls and next through the ropes of the swing, they felt the ease and comfort of old friends. 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.
Against a distant but still dominant white world, the story unfolds as the two girls grow up and their families endure tragedies and traumas—including one in which a woman allows a train to run over her leg for insurance money. As children, the girls share a dreadful secret. Then a stunning act of betrayal reshapes their lives, which remain inseparably connected in this compact, often-poetic, and tragic narrative.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: TONI MORRISON
Born in the working-class town of Lorain, Ohio, on February 18, 1931, Toni Morrison grew up Chloe Anthony Wofford. Her father was a ship welder and her mother a homemaker. “Young Chloe grew up in a house suffused with narrative and superstition,” wrote Margalit Fox in the New York Times. “She adored listening to ghost stories; her grandmother ritually consulted a book on dream interpretation, from which she divined the day’s selections when she played the numbers.”
At twelve, Chloe joined the Roman Catholic Church, choosing the baptismal name Anthony—the name from which her familiar nickname, Toni, emerged while at Howard University, where she did undergraduate work in English.
After earning a master’s in English literature at Cornell in 1955, Morrison taught at Houston’s Texas Southern University and then at Howard, where she joined a writing workshop and began writing fiction. In 1958, she married Harold Morrison, an architect from Jamaica, with whom she had two sons, Harold Ford and Slade. The marriage ended in divorce in 1964, and Morrison moved to Syracuse, New York, where she worked as a textbook editor. She later moved with her sons to New York, where she supported the family as a book editor at Random House for two decades, while continuing to pursue her own writing.
Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970 under her college nickname. Clearly, it stuck.
While continuing as an editor, she next published Sula, followed by a breakthrough work, Song of Solomon (1977), which became a Main Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, the first novel by a Black author to be so honored since Richard Wright’s Native Son in 1940.
Following her fourth novel, Tar Baby (1981), Morrison came across the true story of a fugitive enslaved woman who had killed her infant daughter. This slice of history became the seed of her masterwork, Beloved (1987), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. After its publication, she joined the faculty of Princeton University in 1989.
In 1993, Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first African American woman so honored. Her Nobel Prize citation read, in part, that Toni Morrison’s work, “characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality.”
Morrison continued teaching and wrote several more novels, children’s books, essay collections, and a libretto for an opera. In 2000, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal; and in 2012, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, presented by President Barack Obama. A Morrison short story, originally published in 1983, was published in book form in 2022 as Recitatif: A Story.
Toni Morrison died of pneumonia in a Bronx hospital at the age of eighty-eight on August 5, 2019.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ IT
If you have never read Morrison, the first answer is for the pure pleasure of Morrison’s rich, poetic voice. From passages like the following, we immediately know we are in the hands of a master storyteller, gifted literary artist, and distinctive and compelling writer:
Her flirting was sweet, low and guileless. Without ever a pat of the hair, a rush to change clothes or a quick application of paint, with no gesture whatsoever, she rippled with sex. In her same old print wraparound, barefoot in the summer, in the winter her feet in a man’s leather slippers with the backs flattened under her heels, she made men aware of her behind, her slim ankles, the dew-smooth skin and the incredible length of neck.
Sula is a riveting narrative, touching upon the enormous weight of being Black and a woman. As Toni Morrison wrote in a foreword to a later edition of Sula:
Outlaw women are fascinating—not always for their behavior, but because historically women are seen as naturally disruptive and their status is an illegal one from birth if it is not under the rule of men. In much literature a woman’s escape from male rule led to regret, misery, if not complete disaster. In Sula, I wanted to explore the consequences of what that escape might be, on not only a conventional black society, but on female friendship.
WHAT TO READ NEXT
The body of Morrison’s work is broad and deep and there are many treasures to mine. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), could have just as easily been included in this collection. Another great short book, it is the story of a young Black girl who yearns for the blond hair and blue eyes she thinks confer beauty. Song of Solomon and Tar Baby, the works that followed Sula, are longer novels that solidified Morrison’s stature as one of the most consequential American novelists.
Ultimately, one must come to what is widely acknowledged as Morrison’s masterwork, Beloved (1987), which opens in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. Inspired by the actual incident in which a fugitive enslaved woman kills her child, the novel is about Sethe, also a fugitive, forced to make a dreadful decision about what to do when her own baby is at risk of being taken by a slave catcher. In 2006, Beloved was selected by the New York Times as “the Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years.”
Critic A. O. Scott wrote at the time:
With remarkable speed, “Beloved” has, less than 20 years after its publication, become a staple of the college literary curriculum, which is to say a classic. This triumph is commensurate with its ambition, since it was Morrison’s intention in writing it precisely to expand the range of classic American literature, to enter, as a living black woman, the company of dead white males like Faulkner, Melville, Hawthorne and Twain.