Medallion, Ohio is full of religious people. They hope, they condemn, they foresee, they judge. But they do not yearn — these post-slavery Black Americans — for any kind of a promised land. They see that the land that they have was promised, and that it is as dry and infertile as the liberating movements that keep getting decimated. Any more promises feel (until the end of the novel) like threats.
All of the action in Toni Morrison’s “Sula” rests in that town of disappointed pilgrims. Right at the start, when the Black community at the top of the hill is being torn down to make a golf course, Morrison names “that place, where they tore the nightshade and blackberry patches from their roots.”
As pretentious and demanding as Modernist novels can get, the fact that “Sula” is not shoved into every high school out there is just plain enraging. Sure, one can microdose on romantasy until they feel like classics aren’t too thick for them anymore, or they can find this book, where every sentence makes sense and I can guarantee them at least one proper sob or their money back.
If Morrison had written a dewy-eyed, nostalgic story about simple living, she would have broken the market with sales from sympathizing white moderates, but instead, the sweet and common parts of life grow with rare poison. The blackberry and the nightshade are together. The whole book resists definition, from racists and bleeding hearts alike.
Take one of the earliest scenes, when Nel (a nice girl from a nice home) and her best friend Sula (a selfish vagabond) drown a neighborhood boy by accident when they’re playing with him by a river. Sula panics and is horrified at what they did while Nel wonders if anyone saw them.
The one person who may have seen them, Shadrack, lost his mind in World War I and represents the apocalypse that the town is about to have, one that it is not willing to foresee. A war-hero lunatic whom the kids fear for his all-seeing authority combines almost half a dozen tropes for one of the weirdest characters that 20th-century reading can offer.
That has to be the most upside-down, screwed up moment in the book, contending with a loving mom who burns her son to death and an annual celebration of National Suicide Day. “The Bottom,” where the Black people have been relegated, is on the top of a hill, where the topsoil goes away as soon as you try to till it. It is a flipped-over novel to every degree.
Morrison also allows for plenty of explosive gossip that, in a town so small with a history so grim, almost turns into folklore. Sula’s grandma Eva, a loving, arrogant steamroller, has lived her entire adult life without a leg. No one knows how she lost it, but the most popular assumption is that she let a train run it over for some insurance money. Guess away.
When Hannah, Sula’s mom, burns to death on her front lawn, Eva can’t stop it, and Sula just watches. So does the whole town. Everyone in Medallion knows that a kind of justice is getting served here, but the unease about what it means for them and their endless faith that they’d just sit and watch like that is at the dead center of the novel’s fears. It asks what happens when a never-quite-free place full of never-quite-perfect people gets cut more and more on-paper liberty while its identity — just like Nel and Sula — gets lost in a long, untraceable line of betrayals and unpaid debts.
The result is a Nel who cries, in the book’s last line, for a friend who can’t hear her. “It was a fine cry — loud and long,” Morrison writes, “but had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.”
