There is a reason why Toni Morrison is the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature; why her celebrated
literary genius has earned her great respect in our country and
abroad. Her poetic, imagery and telling
narrative of historical moments is never more evident than in the emotional
story of Sula.
I once commented that one is truly grown up when they can
read Morrison and delve into the feelings behind her poetic writing.
Sula is a classic, first published in 1973, and at the cusp
of black intellectual thought and progressive movements of the 1970s. Morrison
was a contemporary of Dr. Angelou, each of these strong, black female writers
contributed to the literary discourse we celebrate almost forty years later.
This historical fiction, set in a small Ohio town, a place
in the North, begins in 1919 and ends in 1965 – spanned that crucial time in
American history from the end of World War I to the height of the Civil Rights
and Voting Rights era. It follows the
characters of this small town, set apart, not the integrated North imagined in
the segregated South. The time, the era
is a backdrop to this story that is at once about that time and place, the
limitations it placed on the men and women, the location of their part of town,
the Bottoms in what was then the most undesirable (to the whites) location –
away from the town center, away from the water, the place where rainfall ran
down the hill to the valley, to where the whites lived and prospered. Yet, this book was not about that part of the
story.
This story resonated with me most deeply because I just
returned to my second hometown, the place where I moved to as a little girl,
much like some of the characters in Sula.
The place where the whites had their side of town and rituals and the
blacks had their’s. A place where I met
my first friend, both of us in 3rd grade, formative time, growing
time, as Nel said at the end of the book, “we were girls together.”

Who can know the heart of a woman? Who can know her motives?
Who can know her thoughts? Sometimes it truly is that first friend, that girl
who shared your little girl secrets and giggles at the lake, the one who knew
your thoughts before you spoke them, the bond between you so deep, 45 years in the making.
This book joins the anthology that is Toni Morrison’s
lyrical, poetic, illustrative, probing prose – uncovering emotions and
rendering them in plain view to be examined, evaluated, and endeared.
Sula is a woman we journey with through the wanderings of
her life and quest for selfhood in a time of turmoil, change, upheaval, and
unrest. She went against tradition in more than one way. She held a terrible secret, learned independence by the way she was raised, used men for one purpose only, and even in the end, departed under her own terms, she was a feminist without being called one.
This novel aquaints and reaquaints us with those things we love and loathe about everyone knowing everyone. A small town can be unforgiving if one acts outside the norm and can be protective of its own unusual characters when faced with an onslaught of outsiders. As in this small town in Ohio, like my small town in Missouri, we meet
a cast of characters that make communal living at times funny and at other
times frightening.
We understand the
quirks of certain characters, like Shaddrack out on Suicide Day, and as time
goes on, generations change, and celebrations happen without remembering the
origin, we understand the dynamic that binds us to a place, makes it part of
our identity. The draw back home, even
while exploring the world, sometimes is a matter of the heart being healed and
love being remembered.
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