Sula

Sula, written by Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison, was first published in 1973. Morrison was the author of 11 novels and four works of nonfiction. Sula was her second novel, following her 1970 début The Bluest Eye. Morrison published both novels while still working as an editor at Random House, where she edited books by Angela Davis, Muhammad Ali, and Gayl Jones. Morrison was the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Song of Solomon (1977) and the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Beloved (1987). The latter was turned into a film in 1998, starring Oprah Winfrey and Danny Glover. Morrison was also twice nominated for the National Book Award. Her first nomination was for Sula. Morrison, who long-served as a professor of English at Princeton University, died in 2019. In the same year, a documentary about her life, Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am, opened in theaters.

Plot Summary

Shadrack returns to Medallion after being discharged from the veteran’s hospital where he recuperates after fighting in France during World War I. Not long after going back home, he institutes National Suicide Day.

The narrative then goes back in time several decades to describe the origins of the Wright family. Helene Wright (née Sabat) was born in New Orleans, the daughter of a prostitute, and the granddaughter of a devout Catholic matron, who raised her. After meeting Wiley Wright, an employee on a Great Lakes liner, she moves to Medallion and gives birth to her only child, Nel. Helene returns to New Orleans only once, with her daughter in tow, with the intention of visiting her beloved grandmother before her death. However, she arrives too late and encounters her mother instead. The trip to the South is pivotal for Nel, who witnesses her mother’s complicity with racism and how Helene’s superior manner is designed to disguise her shameful origins. When she returns to Medallion, she befriends Sula as an act of defiance.

Nel’s friendship with Sula shifts the story toward its narration about the Peace family, which was also born from the Great Migration. Morrison details the curious way in which Eva lost her leg and Eva’s burning of her only son, Plum. The story continues into Nel and Sula’s adolescence, in which the girls forge their bond through their similar curiosity, Sula’s fiercely protective instincts, and their shared secret regarding the accidental murder of a local boy nicknamed Chicken Little. During these years, strange things occur. The most devastating is the death of Hannah, Sula’s mother, who burns to death. When she turns 17, Nel marries local boy Jude Greene and has three children with him. She settles in Medallion while Sula goes off to attend college in Nashville and to live in various cities around the country.

Bored with the uniformity that she finds in major cities, Sula returns to Medallion and reunites with her old friend. Their reunion is halted by Sula’s decision to begin a sexual relationship with Jude, who leaves Nel and his children to be with Sula. After Sula discards him, he buys a bus ticket to Detroit and is never again seen. Meanwhile, Sula starts a romance with Ajax, a local man she remembered from her youth. That, too, comes to an end when he senses that Sula is becoming possessive of him.

Several years later, Sula falls ill and Nel visits her. Unable to get a clear answer from Sula about why she slept with her husband, Nel leaves her friend and never sees her again. Sula dies not long after Nel leaves the house on 7 Carpenter Road, where Sula had grown up.

Sula’s return to Medallion had united the community against her. With her gone, they no longer had her to position itself against and resumed their old, indifferent ways. In 1941, however, they united in an unusual act of defiance and destroyed a tunnel that they had been forbidden to work on due to racist hiring practices. They tore the edifice apart and vandalized construction materials. Some of them died in the process.

Twenty-four years later, Nel finds herself settling unhappily into middle age. She decides to pay Eva a visit in the retirement home to which Sula had sent her years before. Eva is now senile but, in her feeble-minded state, has a moment of clarity and reminds Nel about the death of Chicken Little. She says that both Nel and Sula were responsible, for the girls had been one and the same during their girlhood.

While leaving the home, Nel finds herself missing her friend. She stops suddenly in the street, halted by a burning in the corner of her eye. She calls out for Sula and speaks to no one about her sudden sorrow. Long unable to cry after the loss of her husband, she suddenly finds herself deeply sorrowful.