Sula

A neighborhood described as it is being knocked down

Morrison starts with an ending. Before any character appears, the Bottom is already gone or going: the beech trees and pear trees are cut down, the footbridge over the river has been removed, and a steel ball is waiting for the beauty parlor. The reader learns to miss the place before learning who lived there.

The opening also warns that outsiders never saw the neighborhood properly. A white man from the valley, climbing up to collect rent, might hear laughter and watch a woman dance to a harmonica. Morrison says he would miss the pain under the laughter, even though the laughter was part of the pain. The rest of the novel is told from inside the Bottom, where that pain is visible.

The joke about the bottom of heaven makes a similar point in a few lines. A slave is cheated out of good land by a white farmer who calls the hills heaven's bottom. The people who tell the joke know exactly who was cheated. Morrison lets the joke stand and then says the hills really were lovely, which leaves the reader holding both facts at once.

Shadrack, and a war that follows a man home

Shadrack's war lasts a few lines. He is barely twenty, running across a frozen field in France with a nail in his boot, when the soldier beside him is hit and the body keeps running without its head. He wakes up in an army hospital, terrified of his own hands, which he believes are growing. He stays there more than a year.

The hospital lets him go because it needs the bed. He walks to a small Midwestern town, cannot untie his shoelaces, and is jailed for vagrancy and drunkenness. In the cell he covers his head with a blanket, looks into the water of the toilet bowl, and finally sees his own face. Morrison describes it as a grave black face, and seeing it is enough for him.

National Suicide Day comes next. One way to read it is that Shadrack cannot stop death from coming, so he gives it a date on the calendar. The first line of the chapter says the day was held every January third from 1920, though for many years Shadrack was the only one taking part. He is not the only veteran in the book. Eva Peace's son Plum also comes back from the First World War in 1919, addicted to heroin.

Two houses, two girls

Nel's mother, Helene Wright, was born in New Orleans and brought up by her grandmother. In Medallion she keeps a tidy house, takes part in town life, and raises Nel very protectively. When Helene's grandmother falls ill, Helene takes Nel to New Orleans, and they run into segregation on the journey. Back home, Nel has what the novel calls a new found me-ness.

Sula lives with her mother, Hannah, and her grandmother, Eva, in a big untidy house. The house is full of family and taken-in children, including three boys whom Eva names Dewey. Eva has lost a leg, and the town whispers that she let a train run over it to collect the insurance. The publisher's own summary repeats the story. Sula, for her part, loves the neatness of Nel's house.

As girls they are inseparable, and their childhood is not gentle. When four white boys bother them, Sula cuts off the tip of her own finger to show what she is willing to do. Later, while they are playing by the river, Sula throws a small boy called Chicken Little into the water by accident, and he drowns. Nel is with her, and the drowning stays their secret.

Why the town needs someone to fear

Nel marries Jude Greene in 1927, and Sula leaves town. When she comes back ten years later, a plague of robins arrives with her. She has been to college and lived in big cities. She will not go to church suppers or ask after people. The publisher's description puts it simply: Nel belongs, and Sula can never fit in.

Sula puts her grandmother Eva into a home for old people and sleeps with Nel's husband, Jude, which ends the marriage. She sleeps with other women's husbands too. The Bottom decides she is bewitched, and she becomes an outcast.

The publisher's own description ends on this point. Over forty years the people of the Bottom slowly realize that, even more than they feared Sula, they needed her. After Sula dies, things look up for a moment. People talk of work at the new tunnel and a new home for old people. Then an ice storm ruins the crops, and Shadrack's march on National Suicide Day ends when the tunnel caves in.

The last word goes to Nel. In 1965 she visits Eva in the home, and Eva accuses her of drowning Chicken Little and tells her there was never any difference between her and Sula. Walking home, Nel remembers the drowning and Sula's funeral. She speaks to Sula as if her friend were there, and cries loud and long.