804 Morrison, Toni
later, her children’s needs; in fact, Jude’s proposal to
her is prompted by Nel’s fierce desire to soothe his
pain after his failure to get a more manly job. When
Jude and Nel concur that the racist world humiliates
black men at every possible juncture, Sula retorts
that black women—and children—hang on every
word black men say, making black men “the envy of
the world.”
Sula represents the opposite of what dictates
the lives of the women in the Bottom. When she
returns to the community after 10 years’ absence,
her grandmother Eva tells her to get married and
have children. Sula replies that she would rather
make herself than make babies. She takes numer-
ous lovers, many of them other women’s husbands,
including her best friend Nel’s, but she also dis-
cards them quickly afterward, unlike her mother
Hannah who was generous with her sexual favors.
Lovemaking, for Sula, is a means by which she can
find herself and be alone with herself, despite the
physical proximity to another person. Sula’s radi-
cal independence, defying the black community’s
norm for female behavior, infuriates both men
and women. When Nel tells Sula on her deathbed
that a colored woman cannot act like a man or
act independent, Sula replies that being a colored
woman equals being a man, free to do as one likes.
One man who is attracted to Sula’s individualism is
Ajax, who seeks in her the same quality he admires
in his mother, an evil “conjure” woman worshipped
by her seven sons. But Ajax’s case may highlight
another gender problem common in the black
community: a too strong, often smothering bond
between mother and son, also existent between Eva
and Plum Peace. In admiring Sula for her resem-
blance to his mother, Ajax, like the other characters
in the novel, reinforces traditional and troubling
gender roles.
Tomoko Kuribayashi
parenthood in Sula
Like all other themes found in Sula, the issue of
parenthood cannot be considered in separation from
race and racism. Parent-child relationships in Sula,
both for women and for men, are heavily influenced
by the history of slavery and the racism that poi-
soned 20th-century American society.
Plainly put, Morrison’s male characters fail to be
responsible fathers. For example, after several years
of womanizing, drinking, and spousal abuse, BoyBoy
leaves Eva Peace with three young children and
virtually nothing to her name, which forces Eva, as
rumor goes, to have her leg severed so that she may
collect insurance money with which to support her
family. Jude Greene, Nel Wright’s husband and also
father to three young children, abandons his family
after having a casual affair with Nel’s best friend,
Sula Peace. Both of these men, along with virtually
all other male characters in the novella, seem to
suffer from the sense that they are inferior to white
men and therefore incapable of responsible adult-
hood and meaningful fatherhood; even BoyBoy,
apparently successful and well-to-do upon his brief
homecoming, seems to Eva to harbor defeat in his
posture. Additionally, the practice of not granting
slaves any paternal rights, or even recognition of
biological fatherhood, has left black men unable to
perform the duties of husbands and fathers. Sig-
nificantly, the only responsible father figure in the
novella, Nel’s father Wiley Wright, is noticeable
mainly as an absence. He is usually gone for his job
on a lake ship, which is welcome to his wife, Helene,
to whom sexual intimacy not for the purpose of
procreation is anathema, having been raised by a
devoutly Catholic grandmother.
The black men’s failure to parent leaves the black
women to raise their young single-handedly. Often
that calls for extreme self-sacrifice, as in the case of
Eva who reportedly mutilated herself physically to
earn a living large enough for her family. Nel also
takes on various cleaning jobs to support her chil-
dren after Jude’s desertion. A few black women, like
Teapot’s Mamma in the Bottom or Helene Wright’s
birth mother Rochelle Sabat, who is a New Orleans
prostitute, are deemed guilty of neglecting—if not
abusing—their children, emotionally or otherwise.
Their failure as mothers seems to stem from their
seemingly excessive sexual interest in men, which
implies that black mothers cannot be sexual and
maternal at the same time.
The novella, however, may suggest that even
the most conscientious mother cannot respond
to a child’s every need. For example, Sula Peace
overhears her young widowed mother, Hannah,