A review by ceallaighsbooks
Sula by Toni Morrison

challenging emotional hopeful reflective sad medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

“‘I'm me,’ she whispered. ‘Me.’ Nel didn't know quite what she meant, but on the other hand she knew exactly what she meant. ‘I’m me. I'm not their daughter. I'm not Nel. I'm me. Me.’ Each time she said the word me there was a gathering in her like power, like joy, like fear. Back in bed with her discovery, she stared out the window at the dark leaves of the horse chestnut. ‘Me,’ she murmured. And then, sinking deeper into the quilts, ‘I want... I want to be... wonderful. Oh, Jesus, make me wonderful.’”

TITLE—Sula

AUTHOR—Toni Morrison 

PUBLISHED—orig. 1973 (reprint 2022)

PUBLISHER—orig. Chatto & Windus (reprint Vintage Classics—Penguin RandomHouse UK)

GENRE—classic literary (~historical) fiction 

SETTING—Medallion, Ohio in the early 1900’s

MAIN THEMES/SUBJECTS—outcast & outlaw women, witch-hunts & scapegoats, Black history, PTSD & mental illness, a plague of robins, relationships between women, family, friendship, love, & infidelity, Edenic allusions & motifs (Eve, snakes, the Fall), & other biblical references (especially character names Shadrack, Hannah, Eva, Sula, etc.), identity & agency, Jim Crow, rootwork & Indigenous realities, memory & legacy, in the distance: the prospect of soul-loss, the many kinds & dynamic nature of Death

“But what I remember most is how the women said her name: how they said Hannah Peace and smiled to themselves, and there was some secret about her that they knew, which they didn't talk about, at least not in my hearing, but it seemed loaded in the way in which they said her name. And I suspected that she was a little bit of an outlaw but that they approved in some way.”

My thoughts:

Morrison writes so insightfully about the human experience, & specifically, Blackness & Black womanhood, in a way that often can make me feel almost like a child eavesdropping on the adults’ conversation, aware that something devastating & significant is happening, but I am not able to grasp the whole significance of what is being discussed.

I haven’t read this book since highschool & was surprised & excited to see how much more of the story I was able to absorb & resonate with on this reading, as well as to rediscover so many allusions to & motifs associated with stories of witches & witch-hunts.

Re: outlaw women & witch-hunts.

First of all the accusations, in all of these stories, always seem to start, at least outwardly, from a place of resentment or jealousy. This quickly snowballs into vindictiveness which catches in the flames of self-righteousness & a sense of manufactured superiority, which is then fanned by the winds of rumor, assumption, & misunderstandings—all of which is born, ultimately & inwardly, out of a place of fear (& of course soul-loss, but not in the Black-centered world of Morrison’s book).

I was particularly interested in the parallels to other famous “outlaw women” stories I’ve read over the past couple of years such as Maryse Condé’s I, TITUBA, Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s THE MERCIES, & the women addressed in LETTERS TO MY WEIRD SISTERS by Joanne Limburg—all of which also have witch & witch-hunt themes. Pages 32-34, 87-89, 112, & 146 of Morrison’s book (the Vintage Classics edition) really stood out to me in regards to this as well.

However what stood out the most to me was how in Morrison’s book, her characters never took that extra step towards punishment & engaging in an actual witch-hunt. There are a few quotes specifically about the “nature of evil”, what it is, who decides what it is, but also how one is meant to react to it both individually & as a community. Morrison never makes a statement about right or wrong here either, it’s all a matter of personal & collective decision-making. So while there’s no message or moral, the implication & exploration of human society in these very specific Black, post-war, Jim Crow-era characters & their community is mind-blowingly insightful & impactful.

The woman, herself.

We barely get to know grown-up Sula before she is cast out, reviled, & slandered, by the folks of her hometown. Nel, who knows her best, tells us that she is someone by whom others define themselves. We see that in the reactions of the various townsfolk to the scandals & rumors surrounding her but the details of her own life, personality, & innermost thoughts are left far off the page save in a few examples of powerful dialogue. And yet it is Sula’s name that graces the cover of the book. Not “Medallion” or “Nel”, not even “The Peace Women”, or  “Children of Eva.” Just, “Sula.”

The clue in that is for the reader to explore what makes a person who they are—their upbringing? where they’re from? what has happened to them? their gender? the color of their skin? their own desires? how they see themselves? what those around them think of them, want from them, & take from them? In the end, of course, it’s all of these things, that is, our identity is shaped both by the things we have control over & those we don’t. 

However Sula’s particular triumph (insofar as one can be possible under colonialism) isn’t in the choices those around her make, but in her own choices—whatever those are, however few of them are truly available to her—& that is what she claims for herself & allows to define her in her own eyes, which ultimately, & in spite of everything, is what allows her to keep her innermost soul intact & firmly in her possession. Everyone else is free to choose likewise or elsewise, which, often tragically but sometimes upliftingly, by the end of this book, they all do.

I would recommend this book to readers who love stunning literary historical fiction with strong femme characters in the vein of Janie Crawford, Xuela Claudette Richardson, & Noenka (see Further Reading, below). This book is best read on audiobook actually! Morrison’s narration is ✨flawless.✨

Final note: The fact that SULA was written 36 years *after* THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD, & set in the same-ish time-period makes for a wild & honestly somewhat heart-breaking comparsion… if y’all have seen any discussion of these two books together anywhere please lmk! 🫶🏻

“‘You think I don’t know what your life is like just because I ain’t living it? I know what every colored woman in this country is doing.’
‘What's that?’
‘Dying. Just like me. But the difference is they dying like a stump. Me, I'm going down like one of those redwoods. I sure did live in this world.’
‘Really? What have you got to show for it?’
‘Show? To who? Girl, I got my mind. And what goes on in it. Which is to say, I got me.’”

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

CW // child death, death by immolation, filicide, infidelity, racism & colorism (Please feel free to DM me for more specifics!)

Season: Spring/Summer

Further Reading—

• THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD by Zora Neale Hurston
• ANNIE JOHN, & AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MY MOTHER by Jamaica Kincaid
• ON A WOMAN’S MADNESS by Astrid Roemer 
• I, TITUBA by Maryse Condé
• PERMA RED by Debra Magpie Earling
• MRS DALLOWAY by Virginia Woolf (I thought there were a lot of similarities between Morrison’s writing of the Bottom community & society, & Woolf’s treatment of London in her novel.)
• THE SCARLET LETTER by Nathaniel Hawthorne—TBR

Favorite Quotes—

from the Foreword:

“But the act of writing was too personally important for me to abandon it just because the prospects of my being taken seriously were bleak. …my only option was fidelity to my own sensibility.”

“Other questions mattered more. What is friendship between women when unmediated by men? What choices are available to black women outside their own society's approval? What are the risks of individualism in a determinedly individualistic, yet racially uniform and socially static, community? …Hannah, Nel, Eva, Sula were points of a cross—each one a choice for characters bound by gender and race.”

“…there could be no turning back simply because there was no 'back' back there. Cut adrift, so to speak, we found it possible to think up things, try things, explore. Use what was known and tried and investigate what was not. Write a play, form a theater company, design clothes, write fiction unencumbered by other people's expectations. Nobody was minding us, so we minded ourselves.”

“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 1969, in Queens, snatching liberty seemed compelling. Some of us thrived; some of us died. All of us had a taste.”

from the Text:

“For several days they had been marching, keeping close to a stream that was frozen at its edges. At one point they crossed it, and no sooner had he stepped foot on the other side than the day was adangle with shouts and explosions. Shellfire was all around him, and though he knew that this was something called it, he could not muster up the proper feeling—the feeling that would accommodate it.”

“Like moonlight stealing under a window shade an idea insinuated itself…”

“Shadrack rose and returned to the cot, where he fell into the first sleep of his new life. A sleep deeper than the hospital drugs; deeper than the pits of plums, steadier than the condor's wing; more tranquil than the curve of eggs.”

“Shadrack began a struggle that was to last for twelve days, a struggle to order and focus experience. It had to do with making a place for fear as a way of controlling it. He knew the smell of death and was terrified of it, for he could not anticipate it. It was not death or dying that frightened him, but the unexpectedness of both. In sorting it all out, he hit on the notion that if one day a year were devoted to it, everybody could get it out of the way and the rest of the year would be safe and free. In this manner he instituted National Suicide Day.”

“On Tuesday and Friday he sold the fish he had caught that morning, the rest of the week he was drunk, loud, obscene, funny and outrageous. But he never touched anybody, never fought, never caressed. Once the people understood the boundaries and nature of his madness, they could fit him, so to speak, into the scheme of things.”

“Sula made the enjoyment of his attentions keener simply because she seemed always to want Nel to shine. 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.”

“She didn't even know she had a neck until Jude remarked on it, or that her smile was anything but the spreading of her lips until he saw it as a small miracle.”

“‘Whatever's burning in me is mine!’”

“Talking to Sula had always been a conversation with herself. Was there anyone else before whom she could never be foolish? In whose view inadequacy was mere idiosyncrasy, a character trait rather than a deficiency? Anyone who left behind that aura of fun and complicity? Sula never competed; she simply helped others define themselves.”

“But Sula was so scared she had mutilated herself, to protect herself.”

“‘I mean, everything in the world loves you. White men love you. They spend so much time worrying about your penis they forget their own. The only thing they want to do is cut off a nigger's privates. And if that ain't love and respect I don't know what is. And white women? They chase you all to every corner of the earth, feel for you under every bed. I knew a white woman wouldn't leave the house after 6 o'clock for fear one of you would snatch her. Now ain't that love? They think rape soon's they see you, and if they don't get the rape they looking for, they scream it anyway just so the search won't be in vain. Colored women worry themselves into bad health just trying to hang on to your cuffs. Even little children-white and black, boys and girls-spend all their childhood eating their hearts out 'cause they think you don't love them. And if that ain't enough, you love yourselves. Nothing in this world loves a black man more than another black man. You hear of solitary white men, but niggers? Can't stay away from one another a whole day. So. It looks to me like you the envy of the world.’”

“And there must be much rage and saliva in its presence. The body must move and throw itself about, the eyes must roll, the hands should have no peace, and the throat should release all the yearning, despair and outrage that accompany the stupidity of loss.”

“‘The real hell of Hell is that it is forever.’ …Sula was wrong. Hell ain’t things lasting forever; Hell is change. Not only did men leave and children grow up and die, but even the misery didn't last.”

“They would no more run Sula out of town than they would kill the robins that brought her back, for in their secret awareness of Him, He was not the God of three faces they sang about. They knew quite well that He had four, and that the fourth explained Sula. They had lived with various forms of evil all their days, and it wasn't that they believed God would take care of them. It was rather that they knew God had a brother and that brother hadn't spared God's son, so why should he spare them?”

“Their evidence against Sula was contrived, but their conclusions about her were not. Sula was distinctly different. …she felt no compulsion to verify herself—be consistent with herself… And like any artist with no art form, she became dangerous.”

“He smiled and said, ‘I been lookin' all over for you.’”

“Virtue, bleak and drawn, was her only mooring.”

“‘I like my own dirt, Nellie. I'm not proud. You sure have forgotten me.’”

“‘Why? I can do it all, why can’t I have it all?’

‘You can’t do it all. You a woman and a colored woman at that. You can’t act like a man. You can’t be walking around all independent-like, doing whatever you like, taking what you want, leaving what you don’t.’

‘You repeating yourself.’

‘How repeating myself?’

‘You say I'm a woman and colored. Ain’t that the same as being a man?’”

“‘Oh, they'll love me all right. It will take time, but they'll love me.’ The sound of her voice was as soft and distant as the look in her eyes. ‘After all the old women have lain with the teenagers; when all the young girls have slept with their old drunken uncles; after all the black men fuck all the white ones; when all the white women kiss all the black 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; when Lindbergh sleeps with Bessie Smith and Norma Shearer makes it with Stepin Fetchit; after all the dogs have fucked all the cats and every weathervane on every barn flies off the roof to mount the hogs... then there'll be a little love left over for me. And I know just what it will feel like.’”

“Others came to see that nothing went awry, that the shallow-minded and small-hearted kept their meanness at bay, and that the entire event be characterized by that abiding gentleness of spirit to which they themselves had arrived by the simple determination not to let anything—anything at all: not failed crops, not rednecks, lost jobs, sick children, rotten potatoes, broken pipes, bug-ridden flour, third-class coal, educated social workers, thieving insurance men, garlic-ridden hunkies, corrupt Catholics, racist Protestants, cowardly Jews, slaveholding Moslems, jackleg nigger preachers, squeamish Chinamen, cholera, dropsy or the Black Plague, let alone a strange woman—keep them from their God.”

“…to help them open further this slit in the veil, this respite from anxiety, from dignity, from gravity, from the weight of that very adult pain that had undergirded them all those years before. Called to them to come out and play in the sunshine—as though the sunshine would last, as though there really was hope. The same hope that kept them picking beans for other farmers; kept them from finally leaving as they talked of doing; kept them knee-deep in other people’s dirt; kept them excited about other people's wars; kept them solicitous of white people’s children; kept them convinced that some magic “government” was going to lift them up, out and away from that dirt, those beans, those wars.”

“Eva’s refusal was not due to pride or vengeance but to a plain unwillingness to see the swallowing of her own flesh into the dirt, a determination not to let the eyes see what the heart could not hold.”

“…just circles and circles of sorrow.”