Sula

Literary form: Novel
First published: 1973
Literary period: Late twentieth-century African American fiction
Region / tradition: The fictional Bottom neighborhood above Medallion, Ohio
Original language: English

What happens in this work?

The Bottom is a Black neighborhood in the hills above the white town of Medallion, Ohio. Its name comes from a cruel story: a white farmer promises a formerly enslaved man bottom land, then gives him hard hillside ground and claims it is the bottom of heaven. By the time the novel opens, redevelopment is erasing the neighborhood. The narrative then moves back through dated sections from 1919 to 1965, reconstructing the community through families, disasters, jokes, rituals, and losses. The Bottom is not a decorative setting for two individual women. Its changing judgments help make Nel Wright and Sula Peace understandable, and their lives in turn reveal what the community demands from women.

Nel grows up in the orderly home of Helene Wright, who values respectability and control. On a train trip south, a white conductor humiliates Helene, and she responds with a smile that wins approval from white passengers. Nel witnesses both the insult and her mother’s accommodation, then privately decides to become distinct. Sula grows up in the crowded Peace household ruled by her one-legged grandmother Eva. People arrive, stay, quarrel, love, and leave. Sula’s mother Hannah openly enjoys men without treating sex as a permanent claim. Nel and Sula find in each other room to imagine selves not entirely defined by either household.

Their childhood contains two deaths that they cannot easily interpret. While playing beside the river, Sula swings a younger boy, Chicken Little, by the hands. He slips, falls into the water, and drowns. Shadrack, a traumatized First World War veteran who created National Suicide Day to contain his fear of unexpected death, sees Sula afterward and tells her ‘always,’ a word she experiences as both threat and possible promise. The girls do not confess their role. Later Hannah catches fire in the yard. Eva throws herself from an upper window trying to save her daughter, while Sula watches. The novel refuses a simple verdict on the watching: fascination, shock, distance, and fear remain possible.

Nel marries Jude Greene, who wants a marriage partly because racist hiring practices exclude him from meaningful work on a new tunnel. The role of husband gives him a way to feel needed. Sula leaves the Bottom, attends college, and lives in several cities. When she returns in 1937, the neighborhood treats her independence, clothing, education, and refusal of conventional family duty as signs of evil. She sends Eva to a care home after a fierce argument and later sleeps with Jude. For Sula, sex does not necessarily promise permanence; for Nel, the affair destroys marriage and friendship at once. Jude leaves. Nel’s pain is real even though the social rules that make Sula’s act legible as betrayal are not neutral.

The community unites against Sula. Parents care more carefully for children, spouses behave more kindly, and neighbors strengthen bonds because they want to distinguish themselves from the woman they blame. Sula’s supposed evil produces temporary public goodness. Her relationship with Ajax seems different because he respects her independence, but when Sula begins imagining permanence, he leaves. She later becomes ill. Nel visits her, and their conversation reveals how differently they understand loyalty, loneliness, and ownership. Sula dies believing death itself is not the final experience and thinking she will tell Nel about it. Afterward the community loses the organizing enemy against whom it had improved its behavior.

On National Suicide Day in 1941, Shadrack begins his usual march and, for the first time, many residents follow. Frustrated by years of exclusion from jobs on the river tunnel, the crowd moves into the construction site. Celebration, protest, destruction, and collective anger blur. The unfinished tunnel collapses and kills many people. The disaster connects racial economic exclusion to the community’s accumulated grief without making the victims responsible for the system that excluded them. It also returns the novel to water, death, and the wish to master fear through ritual.

In 1965 Nel visits the elderly Eva, who forces her to remember Chicken Little and refuses Nel’s belief that only Sula was responsible. Walking away, Nel finally understands that the great absence she has felt is not principally Jude. It is Sula. Her cry for her friend arrives decades after she organized the betrayal as a story about a husband. The recognition does not erase harm or make Sula innocent. It expands the meaning of their relationship beyond the moral categories that separated them. Morrison ends with grief that had been present all along but misnamed.

Students should resist turning Nel into good and Sula into evil, then simply reversing the labels. Nel’s order can sustain life and hide self-deception; Sula’s freedom can expose hypocrisy and wound people. Eva’s fierce survival includes both sacrifice and violence. The community’s need for a scapegoat creates real cooperation and avoids responsibility. The novel’s humor and supernatural suggestions do not soften its tragedies. They form a flexible narrative voice able to hold contradiction, allowing a person to be loving, dangerous, abandoned, and necessary within the same history.

What was happening when it was written?

Sula, Toni Morrison’s second novel, was published in 1973, correcting the blank inherited date. Its fictional Ohio setting draws on the history of Black communities shaped by migration, segregated housing, precarious work, and urban redevelopment. Shadrack returns from the First World War with severe trauma; Jude’s exclusion from tunnel work connects racism to masculine identity and marriage; the Bottom’s later destruction under the language of improvement reflects how Black neighborhoods were displaced. Morrison centers Black women without making white recognition the main measure of their lives. The novel’s dated sections create a community history rather than a continuous biography, and its blues-like movement brings grief, irony, repetition, and survival into the same tonal pattern.

Who matters, and why?

Sula Peace

Sula pursues autonomy without accepting many conventional obligations, which lets her expose social hypocrisy and also makes betrayal possible. The community turns her complexity into one stabilizing label that she sometimes defiantly inhabits.

Nel Wright Greene

Nel builds identity through order, marriage, and being needed. Her pain after Jude leaves is undeniable, but her late insight reveals how moral certainty allowed her to misname both responsibility and the deepest loss.

Eva Peace

Eva creates material survival for a crowded household after abandonment and poverty. Her authority includes generosity, manipulation, sacrifice, and lethal control, making motherhood in the novel impossible to idealize simply.

Shadrack

Shadrack invents National Suicide Day to give death a predictable boundary after war trauma destroys his sense of order. The community first fears, then incorporates, and finally joins his ritual with catastrophic consequences.

Jude Greene

Jude’s exclusion from construction work wounds his sense of adult usefulness. Marriage offers him a role in which Nel’s dependence confirms him. His affair and departure show how his need for validation costs both women.

Hannah Peace

Hannah’s casual relationships with men teach Sula that sex need not equal possession, but her question about loving her children wounds Sula deeply. Her fire and Eva’s rescue attempt become a scene nobody can interpret cleanly.

Big ideas to track

Friendship, marriage, and female selfhood

Nel and Sula create identities together before adulthood divides intimacy into approved and forbidden forms. The ending asks whether friendship was the central relationship Nel’s culture taught her to treat as secondary.

Good, evil, and the scapegoat

Residents improve their behavior by defining Sula as evil, then lose that discipline after she dies. The pattern shows how moral unity can depend on refusing to recognize one’s own capacity for harm.

Motherhood, care, and control

Helene, Eva, and Hannah embody sharply different forms of mothering. Care may preserve, discipline, abandon, or destroy. The novel examines difficult maternal action without assuming that sacrifice makes every decision right.

Racism, labor, and place

The Bottom begins in a land fraud and ends under redevelopment. Work exclusion shapes Jude and the tunnel disaster. Personal choices occur within property and labor systems that limit the community’s options.

How the writing works

Dated, nonlinear community chronicle

Dated sections jump across decades and between households, making memory and neighborhood change as important as one protagonist’s continuous development. Narrative gaps require readers to infer what persisted offstage between scenes.

Shifting communal narration

The narrative voice can move rapidly from close individual thought to the neighborhood’s shared judgment. That flexibility shows how reputations are created and how public certainty differs from private experience.

Recurring birds, fire, water, and earth

Robins accompany Sula’s return, fire kills Hannah, water takes Chicken Little, and the Bottom’s unstable ground shapes community history. These repeated images connect events without giving them one fixed moral meaning.

Irony and blues form

The Bottom is high ground, organized goodness depends on an alleged evil woman, and a ritual designed to contain death leads toward mass death. Humor and reversal keep suffering from becoming a single solemn note.

Moments to notice while you read

The Bottom receives its name

What to notice: Follow the farmer’s verbal trick, the geography of the land, and the later language used to describe the neighborhood’s destruction and improvement.

Why it matters: The origin story makes place a record of racial fraud. Language converts injustice into a joke for the powerful and then into community identity for residents.

Helene smiles after the conductor's humiliation

What to notice: Watch the white passengers, Helene’s controlled response, and Nel’s inward decision about who she will become after witnessing the exchange.

Why it matters: Respectability offers Helene a survival strategy while appearing to Nel as surrender. The moment creates a daughterly rebellion that later takes quieter forms.

Chicken Little falls into the river

What to notice: Reconstruct the physical accident, Sula and Nel’s reactions, Shadrack’s position as witness, and the silence that follows.

Why it matters: Shared secrecy binds the girls while distributing responsibility unevenly. Eva’s later accusation forces Nel to reconsider the innocence she built around not touching the child.

Hannah burns and Eva leaps

What to notice: Separate Eva’s immediate rescue attempt, Sula’s watching, the earlier mother-love conversation, and the explanations characters later attach to the scene.

Why it matters: The fire tests easy claims about maternal love and emotional response. Action, feeling, and appearance do not line up in a form the community can judge safely.

Sula returns and sleeps with Jude

What to notice: Compare Sula’s understanding of sex, Nel’s understanding of marital and friendly loyalty, and Jude’s responsibility for his own decision and departure.

Why it matters: Betrayal is real, but its meaning differs for each participant. Refusing to excuse Sula should not make Jude invisible or reduce Nel’s loss to only romance.

The community organizes itself against Sula

What to notice: List the improved acts of care, the stories told about Sula, and what happens to those behaviors after her death.

Why it matters: Public virtue built on a scapegoat remains fragile. The pattern asks whether people are acting from love or from the need to prove difference from an enemy.

Nel recognizes whom she has missed

What to notice: Connect Eva’s challenge, the memory of Chicken Little, the landscape’s changes, and Nel’s final naming of Sula rather than Jude.

Why it matters: The ending revises decades of grief without erasing betrayal. Nel finally recognizes friendship as a central loss that available social stories had taught her to misidentify.

Questions to test your understanding

Answer in your own words. Then point to a specific moment in the work that supports your answer.

How do Nel's and Sula's households shape the kinds of freedom each woman seeks?
What responsibility does Nel bear for Chicken Little's death and the silence afterward?
Why does the community behave better when it treats Sula as evil?
How do racism and work exclusion shape Jude's idea of marriage without excusing his choices?
What different models of mothering do Helene, Eva, and Hannah provide?
Why does the tunnel disaster belong to both Shadrack's personal history and the Bottom's economic history?
What changes when Nel recognizes that her deepest grief was for Sula rather than Jude?

The K.Jung School of Standardized Review (KSSR)