Sula 805comment that she loves Sula but does not like her,
which sends the young girl on a self-destructive path
while it also frees her from certain obligations of
black womanhood, including motherhood. Devoted
mothers like Eva and Helene can be labeled as dom-
ineering, suffocating, and/or manipulative, possibly
doing what they do for their own satisfaction rather
than for the well-being of their children. Helene
focuses her energy on suppressing Nel’s wilder
inclinations to shape her in the mold of respectable
black femininity. Eva provides for her children, both
biological and adopted, but the children regard her
with fear and anxiety. Asked by her daughter Han-
nah whether she ever loved her children when they
were young, that is, whether she coddled and played
with them, Eva angrily replies that she helped them
survive amid extreme deprivation. Another question
asked by Morrison’s novella is how much control
mothers should have over their children’s lives.
When her son Plum comes back from the World
War a broken man and heroin addict, Eva chooses to
burn him to death in his drug-induced stupor. The
same Eva, however, almost kills herself trying to save
Hannah from a fire.
Sula rebels against the sociocultural injunction
that black women be good mothers, or at least be
mothers. When Eva tells her that as a woman she
needs to have babies, Sula replies that she wants to
make herself, not babies. This refusal to give herself
over to motherhood, coupled with her random sam-
pling and callous dismissal of the community’s men,
leads to her ostracism in the Bottom. Paradoxically,
Sula’s selfish, unwomanly behavior ends up con-
solidating the parent-child bonds as well as marital
relations in the black community.
Tomoko Kuribayashi
race in Sula
Toni Morrison’s novel opens with the description of
a linguistic manifestation of racism in the United
States. A slave was promised freedom and a piece of
bottom land—considered the best farm land—by a
white farmer in exchange for several difficult feats.
When the tasks were completed, the farmer made
the slave believe that hilly land, less fertile and back-
breaking to farm, was indeed the bottom land, being
the bottom of heaven. Thus, the novel’s first episode
shows how racist society manipulates language to
deprive and oppress black people while also pointing
out that emancipated slaves were given little to no
financial means to improve their lives. When Sula
opens in 1920, the novel’s main characters live in
“the Bottom,” near the town of Medallion, Ohio, in
extreme poverty and in a state of general oppression.
A drowned black child’s body, dragged through the
water by a white bargeman afraid that the corpse’s
smell might rub off on his gear, is unrecognizable
by the time he is returned to his mother. Conflicts
with the police are considered “the natural hazards
of Negro life” by local young men. Even respectable
black women like Helene Wright and her daugh-
ter Nel are subjected to racist treatment on their
train ride south to Helene’s grandmother’s funeral.
Accustomed to such mistreatment by fellow human
beings, the residents of the Bottom accept evil as
part of life. For them God has four faces, not the
three of the Holy Trinity; the fourth face is the face
of the devil.
Another major way race and racism affect Mor-
rison’s black characters’ lives is through gender roles
and expectations. The black men suffer from the
sense that their masculinity is inferior to that of
white men: For example, they are not given jobs for
local road construction, which would allow them
to prove their manhood. Much other desirable
work, including the privilege of flying airplanes,
is exclusively reserved for white men. Plum Peace
and Shadrack both come home from World War
I, never to become wholly functional again due to
the racism experienced by black soldiers in the army
and on their homecoming. The debilitating lack
of confidence in their manhood, possibly coupled
with the denial of paternal rights in slavery, leads to
black men’s failure to become husbands and fathers.
BoyBoy, Eva Peace’s husband, deserts her and their
three young children, forcing Eva to make great
sacrifices to feed her family. Nel Wright’s husband,
Jude Greene, also ends up abandoning his family
after his affair with Sula Peace, Nel’s best friend,
is discovered. Given men’s diffidence and inability
to parent, black women must shoulder the double
burden of nursing the men’s hurt—or enduring their
abuse—and raising their children single-handedly,
as Eva Peace and Nel Greene are forced to do.