white farmer, who bargained with his slaves to give
them their freedom and a piece of rich and fertile
bottom land after they performed certain chores,
reneged on his promise after emancipating them.
Explaining his reasons for giving them the land at
the top (the worse land) instead of at the bottom,
the farmer said that although the land was high up
from the center of town, “when God looks down,
it’s the bottom.... It’s the bottom of heaven—best
land there is” (5).
In Sula Morrison is concerned, argues BARBARA
CHRISTIAN, with the community’s “philosophy of
survival” as much as she is with that of her main
characters. Confirming this, Morrison told Robert
Stepto in an interview that when she wrote Sula
she “was interested in making the town, the com-
munity, the neighborhood, as strong a character
as [she] could” (214). The members of the com-
munity are killed when, instead of adhering to
their own convictions, they follow Shadrack to a
construction site, ignore the “do not enter” sign,
and are killed when a faulty bridge collapses. In
the end, the Bottom also collapses when urban re-
newal demands its relocation, leaving only its his-
tory as place.
During the Bottom’s heyday, three indepen-
dent-minded women who comprise the Peace
family, who refuse to relinquish their subjectivity
to the community or its values, challenge the Bot-
tom. Driven to provide economic sustenance for
her family, Eva, the community gossip, kicks out
her husband and goes in search of work. She re-
turns with crutches and a missing leg that she lost
in an accident with an oncoming train, intention-
ally placed there, it is further rumored, to collect
insurance. Eva builds a family home on Carpenter
Street and, from her thronelike bedroom at the
top, attempts to run the life of each member of
her family. When Plum returns from World War
I addicted to heroin, which he uses to numb the
psychologically damaging experience of war, Eva
burns him to death to release him from his suffer-
ing. Eva’s action suggests her empowerment as the
giver of life and death, as her name also implies.
Eva and Hannah model for free-spirited Sula,
whose friendship with Nel, her alter ego, comple-
ments and balances Sula after she overhears her
mother, Hannah, telling her friends that, although
she loves Sula, she does not like her. Throughout
her adolescence, during which Sula grows to view
and treat sex with casual disregard and develops a
more self-reliant life, she also develops an intrepid
personality and her life becomes experimental.
Inevitably, she has become the more compliant
community’s scapegoat—a pariah. As a young
adult, Nel settles for the prescribed domestic role
of mother and wife, and Sula goes off to college.
When she returns from college, Eva asks Sula why
she does not conform, marry, and raise a family.
Sula responds, “I don’t want to make somebody
else. I want to make myself ” (92).
Two men, Shadrack and Ajax, affect Sula’s life to
some degree, however. When she falls in love with
gift-bearing Ajax, Sula confuses love with posses-
sion, becoming totally willing to sacrifice the sanc-
tity of herself for him, although he never asks her
to do so. Sula realizes how dangerously foolish her
behavior has been when she realizes she did not
even know Ajax’s real name, Albert Jacks. Shadrack
teaches Sula about permanence and change. When
she stumbles into Shadrack’s cabin in the woods,
Sula discovers that, unlike the insanity and inap-
propriate behavior he displays publicly, Shadrack,
a veteran like Plum, has successfully ordered his
private civilian life, although he had been injured
in a life-threatening conflagration. Upon return-
ing home to the Bottom, he founded National Sui-
cide Day to address once a year his greatest fear,
death, freeing himself to exercise complete agency
over his life.
Ultimately, however, Sula is about the sanctity
of true friendship between women. After Sula dies,
Nel comes to the realization that she treasured
their friendship and that Sula’s death has left a void
in her life, one that is greater than the one left by
her husband, who, after sleeping with Sula, left her.
Aware of her sense of loss, Nel cries out at the end
of the novel: “We was girls together... O Lord Sula... girl, girl, girlgirlgirl” (174).
Despite reviews that suggested that the novel
fell short in some respects, Sula garnered acco-
lades for Morrison, who was, critics agreed, an
Sula 485