Sula by Toni Morrison: A Summary of the Novel and What It Means
What Sula is about
Sula is Toni Morrison's second novel, published in 1973, three years after The Bluest Eye. It follows two girls, Sula Peace and Nel Wright, from childhood into adulthood in a Black neighbourhood in Ohio. The friendship is the spine of the book. Everything else, including death, marriage, war and the slow destruction of a community, hangs off it.
The setting is called the Bottom, a hillside district above the fictional town of Medallion. Its name comes from a joke at a Black man's expense. A white farmer promised his slave freedom and a piece of valley land in return for finishing a set of hard chores. When the work was done, the farmer did not want to give up good land, so he talked up the hill instead, calling it bottom land because it sat closer to the bottom of heaven. The community that grew there carries that trick in its name.
Morrison organises the book in chapters titled with years, running from 1919 to 1965. The opening pages announce that the Bottom is to be bulldozed to make a golf course, so the reader knows from the start that the world being described is already gone. The first figure named is Shadrack, who comes home from the First World War badly damaged by what he has seen. Unable to live with the randomness of death, he invents National Suicide Day on 3 January, a single day each year when the people of Medallion may kill themselves or each other and be free of death for the rest of the year. The town finds him alarming and absorbs him anyway.
The main characters
Nel Wright grows up in a tidy, conventional house. Her mother Helene is deep in social respectability and dislikes the Peace family on sight. A journey away from Medallion wakes Nel's curiosity about the wider world and she promises herself she will see more of it. She never leaves the Bottom again.
Sula Peace grows up in the opposite kind of household, run by her grandmother Eva and her mother Hannah. The town considers both women loose and eccentric, yet Hannah is genuinely loved by the men and Eva is respected by the women. Their house takes in boarders and three informally adopted boys. The relationship between Eva and Hannah is badly strained.
The girls become inseparable as adolescents and share everything, including a secret. While playing with a neighbourhood boy called Chicken Little, Sula swings him by the hands, loses her grip and he drowns in the river. Neither girl tells anyone. Sula carries guilt. Nel decides the blame is mainly Sula's and feels relief. Shadrack lives in a shack by that river, and the uncertainty about what he saw brings Sula to his door.
Around them stand Eva, who makes a terrible choice when Hannah's dress catches fire, and Jude, the man Nel marries. As an adult Sula leaves for ten years, attends college, takes many lovers and returns to a town ready to turn against her.
The themes
Friendship is treated as a form of identity rather than a comfort. Nel and Sula divide one personality between them, one choosing the settled life and one choosing freedom, and neither is complete alone.
Morality in the novel belongs to the community rather than to any individual. The Bottom's hatred of Sula is useful to it. Her affairs with married men give wives a reason to tend their husbands. Her childlessness shames other women into being better mothers. The town becomes kinder to itself by having someone to despise. Morrison lets the reader see the machinery of that arrangement.
Freedom is what Sula insists on and what it costs her. She lives with complete disregard for convention and is punished for it, while Nel's obedience to convention quietly costs her a life she once wanted.
How it ends
Skip this section if you want the novel to surprise you. The friendship breaks when Sula sleeps with Jude, Nel's husband. The two women do not speak properly again for years. Shortly before Sula dies in 1940 they manage a half-hearted reconciliation. The frame set up on the first page closes around the Bottom itself, a place marked for clearance so that a golf course can be built on it.
Why it still matters
Sula is short, and it covers forty-six years without hurrying. The year-stamped chapters give it the feel of a community record rather than a single life story. Morrison refuses to make either woman the good one, which is why readers still argue about them. It suits anyone drawn to novels about female friendship, to American fiction that treats a neighbourhood as a character, and to readers coming to Morrison before the later books.
