Sula

Sula, written by Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison, was first published in 1973. It was her second novel, following her 1970 debut 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 would go on to win 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.

All told, Morrison (1931-2019) was the author of 11 novels and four works of nonfiction. She also long served as a professor of English at Princeton University. In 2019, a documentary about her life, Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am, opened in theaters.

Plot Summary

A man named Shadrack returns to the Ohio town of Medallion after being discharged from the veteran’s hospital where he recuperated 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) is born in New Orleans, the daughter of a sex worker and the granddaughter of a devout Catholic matron who raises 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, her daughter in tow, to visit 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 sees how Helene adopts a superior manner to disguise the origins she perceives as shameful. When Nel returns to Medallion, she befriends a girl named Sula Peace, whose family is considered disreputable, as an act of defiance.

Nel’s friendship with Sula shifts the story's focus to the Peace family, which also came to Ohio during the Great Migration. Morrison details the curious way in which Sula's grandmother, Eva, lost her leg as well as Eva’s burning of her only son, Plum.

The story continues into Nel and Sula’s adolescence, during which the girls deepen 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 a local boy named Jude Greene and has three children with him. She settles in Medallion while Sula goes to college in Nashville and then lives in various cities around the country. Bored with the uniformity of these cities, Sula eventually returns to Medallion and reunites with her old friend. However, their friendship is disrupted by Sula’s decision to begin a sexual relationship with Jude, who leaves Nel and his children to be with Sula.

Sula ultimately discards Jude, who 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 Nel's 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 grew up.

Sula’s return to Medallion had united the community against her, but with her gone, they no longer have a shared enemy. In 1941, however, they unite in an unusual act of defiance and destroy a tunnel that they are forbidden to work on due to racist hiring practices. They tear the edifice apart and vandalize construction materials. Some of them die 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 in which Sula placed her years before. Eva now has dementia but in a moment of clarity reminds Nel about the death of Chicken Little. She says that both Nel and Sula were responsible, as the girls were 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.