Introduction

Published in 1973, the novel Sula is Toni Morrison’s second of eleven novels and numerous other creative and nonfiction texts. The omniscient narrator tells the story of three generations of Peace women—Eva, Hannah, and Sula—who live in an all-Black enclave in smalltown Ohio between the late nineteenth century and 1965. While the novel navigates the social, political, cultural, and economic contexts of Black life in the Midwest, at its heart, the story is a bildungsroman, or coming of age narrative, that focuses on the youngest member of the Peace family, Sula Peace. From childhood until her premature death around thirty years old, Sula resists orthodoxy and convention, making her peculiar as a child and loathed as a grown woman. As the protagonist of the novel, Sula reflects Morrison’s training in western Classical Studies and her frequent embrace of West African folk practices as the novel is the story of the hero’s journey. Therein lies the problem scrutinized by the narrative—in western societies, Black Woman and Hero sit in contradiction. Morrison dared to imagine a Black woman heroine during the post-Reconstruction period when both the citizenship and humanity of Black American citizens were being tested and contested in the political arena, in public spaces, and in the privacy of domestic spaces.

At under two-hundred pages, mostly linear in narrative design, and with its coming-of-age focus, Sula could be approached by its readers as a “simple” text or, at least, most certainly more accessible than some of Morrison’s dense, nonlinear, and/or multivocal narratives like Beloved, Paradise, and A Mercy. Rest assured, Dear Reader, although presented differently, Sula requires just as much unpacking, reading between the lines, and deep dives into its contextual grounding as Morrison’s more transparently complex novels. This guide provides a transhistorical and multidisciplinary approach to reading, teaching, and understanding this novel. While attention is heavily on contextual situation, any instruction or the reading of Morrison that overlooks her mastery of language and poetic prose would fail to register her purpose in writing the Black experience. Thus, this guide offers contextualized insight for not only better understanding the novel but for also developing greater appreciation of Morrison’s wonderful finesse of prose language.

Freedom Dreams

The novel is set in Medallion, Ohio, a fictitious small town located near a river. Due to de facto segregation above the Mason-Dixon Line, Medallion, like most interracial northern towns and cities, was socially and geographically segregated. According to the narrator, the Black community was relegated to the “backbreaking” hills while white people occupied the “rich valley floor” as the result of a white slave owner’s trickery after promising an enslaved man freedom and “a piece of bottom land” if he performed difficult chores. Having convinced the freed man that the useless hilly land was the bottom of heaven, the neighborhood atop a hill that came to be called The Bottom is haunted false hopes of freedom in its broadest terms, particularly given some Black residents resided in Medallion prior to the Civil War when the town had no name. The novel addresses freedom as citizenship, the freedom to serve one’s country, the freedom to labor, the freedom of mobility, the freedom to be educated, the freedom to dwell, and the freedom to fully embrace and love one’s self.

Migration, Mobility, and Transportation

Every chapter is titled by a year between 1919 and 1965, but there are references to critical events that occurred prior to 1919. Most importantly, Eva’s life prior to 1919 and the events that enabled her and her descendants who remain in the Bottom not to work outside of their home is central to the narrative. How Eva manages to shift her life circumstances from being a mother of three young children abandoned by her husband to being a homeowner and entrepreneur, enabling her family to want for nothing, is never fully revealed. The narrative, however, references a popular rumor in the Bottom which is Eva intentionally lost her leg in a railroad accident. Whether fact or fiction, the expansion of the railroads produced significant numbers of civil lawsuits against railway companies for negligence. Loss of limbs and life due to the lack of reasonable safety mechanisms on railway systems occurred frequently during the Industrial Age. It is, therefore, reasonable to imagine Eva could have received a settlement from a railway company. What would be unusual would have been the injury calculations for a Black woman in the 1890s being great enough to enable her to live comfortably and even pay for her granddaughter’s college tuition.

The railway plays a significant role in this novel and in African American migration and labor more broadly. Beyond Eva’s loss of a limb, the railway system was a conduit for national commerce, growing particularly strong during the Industrial Age. The railway unified a commerce system built on slavery, as trains hauled raw agricultural goods like cotton and sugar from southern states to textile mills and refineries in northern cities. The nation, as Toni Morrison’s noted in a 1993 Time magazine article, was built on “the backs of blacks.” The Industrial Age in the U.S. was reliant upon the expansion of the railway system. Although many aspects of industrial commerce—like steel, automobile, finance, and oil—that produced immense national wealth and a small class of tycoons excluded Black laborers and union members for many decades, the sweat, brawn, and deaths of enslaved and free Black people were integral to the birth of the Industrial Age.

The railway system also transported people, creating greater mobility for local, regional, and interstate travel. Just one year after Eva was destitute with one beet in a cold one-room cabin, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on a railway passenger segregation case that at that time received little national attention. In 1896, the holding in Plessy v. Ferguson contended that state-mandated segregation did not violate the equal protection close of the Fourteenth Amendment and it legalized de jure segregation in southern states. The Court’s decision in Plessy would torment the lives of Black people and haunt the entire nation until 1954 when the same court corrected their error from nearly sixty years prior.

Despite legal segregation on trains, there was a group of Black men who had significant access to mobility via the railway system. When George W. Pullman conceptualized luxury sleeping cars for trains, he imagined the best workers to provide service would be Black men who, although then free, had experienced slavery or the Black Codes that followed emancipation. Working with civil rights activist, A. Philip Randolph, Pullman Porters established their own labor union, The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in 1925 in New York City. In 1937, the year of Sula’s return from traveling, the Brotherhood was successful in compelling the Pullman Company to pay higher wages and provide job security and grievance protection for porters.

In addition to the archive related to the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, an unusual primary source document about Pullman Porters is the autobiography of Nat Love, who was born into slavery just prior to Emancipation, became a cowboy as a teenager, and then when the West “closed,” he became a Pullman Porter. The Life and Adventures of Nat Love offers a riveting and hyperbolic account of his numerous lives, and some records documenting those experience remain in the Newberry Library’s Pullman records. For Love, similar to his life as a cowboy, his labor as a Pullman Porter created an opportunity to see first-hand the beauty and grandeur of the American landscape, as he travelled from coast to coast and into Canada. It was not, however, as regal an occupation as Love presented. His own employment records housed in the Newberry collection attest to the disrespect and discrimination he experienced. Railway porters occupied an important space in the circulation of information in Black communities because they delivered Black newspapers across the country.

The novel focuses only on events occurring in Medallion, but the story includes a lengthy account of a train trip Nel and her mother, Helene, take from Ohio to New Orleans, Louisiana, for Helene’s estranged mother’s funeral. Anyone would be humiliated by being treated as less than human, but Helene, who embraces the New Negro politics of respectability, experiences a particularly brutal reality during that trip. It is the only travel of any type that Morrison allots narrative detail. Unlike BoyBoy’s return to Medallion to visit Eva, Pearl’s departure to Flint, Michigan, and subsequent return at some point for her own burial, Jude’s fleeing to Detroit, Plum and Shadrack’s return from military service, or Ajax’s periodic escapes to Dayton, which were all mentioned but not lingered on, the trip to Louisiana receives an entire chapter. The emotional impact of that trip becomes a lens for reading the pride and shame that both disrupts and sustains Nel’s friendship with Sula.

Helene and Nel’s train trip takes place in 1920, the same year that the Nineteenth Amendment is ratified, finally extending women the right to vote. The Progressive Era was a golden age known for national prosperity, peace, and social and political reform, yet it is simultaneously a time a grown woman and her child are forced to urinate on the side of the road due to legalized racial discrimination. During a period of significant Black cultural production, Alain Locke’s concept of a New Negro that had risen above its slave past to be a fully incorporated U.S. citizen fell flat socially, economically, and politically. It is against this backdrop that in Alabama in 1931, nine Black youth would be charged and convicted of raping a white women and a white teenage girl on a freight train in Scottsboro, Alabama. The repeated miscarriage of justice during their repeated trials is emblematic of how the promise of citizenship and the progress of technology often had limitations for African Americans.

The Bottom, with its absence of white people other than perhaps Tar Baby, to some extent, offered protection to its Black residents, even if that protection meant they were socially, politically, and economically restricted. The threat of racial violence and lack of employment motivated millions of African Americans to abandon the Deep South for northern cities on the Atlantic coast and the Midwest. Eva mentions having unwisely left her family in Virginia with BoyBoy due to a promise of employment for him. Morrison provides an interesting facet to Black migration when cities like Akron, Detroit, and Chicago are referenced as locations that Black folks in the Bottom have gone to for better opportunities. Albeit motivated by economics, this is a much different migration than the post-Reconstruction wave of Black migration during the late nineteenth-century or the post World War II second wave of migration referred to as the Great Migration. From Jude’s lament about being unable to find work beyond the service industry to Ajax and the pool hall men’s idleness to the great hope and disappointment around tunnel employment, it was clear that no opportunities for upward mobility occurred in the Bottom.

Employment, Labor, and Education

Just north of the Mason-Dixon Line, Ohio was a free state; but, prior to the Civil War, Ohio had Black Codes that restricted Black people socially, economically, and politically. The reality of a second-class citizenship that lacked substantive equality is evidenced in Sula. For Black women during the first half of the twentieth century, the remnants of antebellum and postbellum Black Codes and institutionalized inequality resulted in very limited employment opportunities. Low-wage domestic labor in white people’s homes was a popular successor to the forced unpaid labor of enslavement. The narrator notes, however, that the white families living in the valley were not wealthy and did not hire domestic laborers. Indeed, the novel offers few examples of Black women working outside of their own homes. They are not living lives of leisure, as even Hannah, who lives in a home that lacks nothing, stays notably busy doing house chores—one such chore resulting in her death. Similarly, Helene is dedicated to making her home a perfect shrine. Perhaps this was deliberate on Morrison’s part because it is a depiction of Black women working for themselves and for their own interests rather than Black women laboring for white people.

Similar to Black women, employment opportunities for Black men during this period were scarce. Outside of preacher, teacher, and barber (see DuBois), the low-wage service industry was also a primary source of employment for Black men. The Pool Hall men, like Ajax, and “family” men like Jude, were closed out of skilled trades and higher paying union jobs. It is this exclusion and its production of a low morale that likely compels the Bottom residents to join Shadrack’s National Suicide Day, marching to and abusing the tunnel that they were not allowed to build. The tunnel represents the development of infrastructure supported by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. While certainly some Black Americans benefited from New Deal initiatives, many found access was restricted by institutionalized mechanisms of oppression.

Many more also did not have access to academic education and particularly not higher education. Sula is the only character who is described as having attended college. It occurs during the ten-year period in which the narrative pauses, disallowing the reader much beyond imaginative speculation about her life in the various cities in which she lived. The reader knows she attended college in Nashville, Tennessee, using money from Eva’s legal settlement. Sula mentions college very nonchalantly in a discussion with Nel. The Bottom community expresses no great pride in Sula’s academic prowess. It is as earning a degree was of no consequence for Sula or the Bottom. This is a peculiar response given how few Black women had opportunities to attend college. The one “out” that could create a path for work rather than labor fails to produce the expected outcome, as Sula returns to the Bottom stating she had nowhere else to go.

Patriotism and the Armed Services

Sula is set during both World War I and World War II. Black men voluntarily signed up for both wars, many of them believing there was no greater evidence of patriotism than armed service for your country. Military service provided an alternative path for upward mobility when an academic education was either inaccessible or undesired—a path that could bring about property ownership through VA home loans or an alternative path to education through the GI Bill. What Black men quickly discovered was their service was not respected and the benefits of service was often withheld from them or very restricted. In 1948, President Harry Truman’s Executive Order 9981 officially desegregated the military which disbanded segregated units like the infamous Buffalo Soldiers. The order would have limited impact on eliminating racism within the various branches of the military or in the lived experiences of veterans as they returned home, where some were beat in the street, spat upon, and had their metals of valor ripped from their chests.

In Sula, both Shadrack and Plum served in World War I. Both returned to Medallion exhibiting behaviors suggestive of PTSD. The novel is epynomously titled for Sula but it begins with Shadrack’s military experience that ultimately led to his inauguration of National Suicide Day. He returned to Medallion burdened by hallucinations produced by battlefield trauma. Plum returned to Medallion seemingly without physical injuries his addiction to opiates rendered him completely dysfunctional. Morrison chose to begin a coming of age narrative about a Black girl with the story of a Black man’s convergence of racial and battlefield trauma. Shadrack’s narrative of social isolation and the town’s reluctant limited inclusion of him circumscribes Sula’s life in Medallion. He is present when she accidentally drowns Chicken Little and again, after her death, when presumably everyone left in her household drown when the tunnel collapsed. Thus, Shadrack and the failed promises of military service should be read alongside Sula’s intra-racial relationship with the Bottom.

Civil Rights to Black Power

Perhaps next after military service, suffrage is the next most symbolic action attesting to patriotism and national belonging. The novel necessarily skips World War II due to Sula’s passing in 1940, with only a mention of Nel dating a sergeant stationed nearby during WWII. That war was equally brutal for Black men, and it is often recognized as a political and social catalyst for the escalation of activism on the home front. The novel’s final chapter is told from Nel’s point of view and is dated 1965. The Bottom has changed. The Bottom had experienced an exodus in which young people, who could now be employed in Medallion, abandoned the hills for the valley. Reflecting a national urban trend that was often spurred by school system busing to integrate southern and northern public schools, wealthy white people found hill land overlooking the river valuable, making property in the Bottom unaffordable for most Black people.

Typical of generational differences, Nel scoffs at the changed young people. Her sentiment reflects a national political shift in 1965 which is a year often considered to mark the end of the civil rights movement due to the passage of two pieces of legislation: The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Both legislative acts reinforced the often-violated Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. In her nostalgic dismissal of contemporary social “progress” reflected in employment opportunities and upward mobility of the younger generation, there is an absent narrative about the political gains and turmoil during the mid-1960s. The novel is ending in 1965, a tumultuous year. Both Dr. King and Senator Robert F. Kennedy are assassinated in 1965 as well as the mayhem of Bloody Sunday and the escalation of the Vietnam War. The civil rights movement was in full force in the decade leading up to 1965, with the desegregation of public education in Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka in 1954 and the Montgomery Bus Boycott and murder of Emmett Till in 1955 often considered catalysts for an inter-state strategical approach to equality and full inclusion. Like 1965, the year 1963 was marked by significant agitation and turmoil with Dr. King’s March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and civil rights activist Medgar Evers. When the novel ends in 1965, the optimistic buzz of the youth that is viewed by Nel as indifference and complacency is not cognizant of the realities of 1965, and it does not reflect the impending events of the second half of that decade. The shifting attitudes Nel notes in the youth is reflected in Stokely Carmichael’s 1966 “Black Power”speech and foreshadows that decade closing shocked by the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy. This ending, then, speaks loudly to the time period of its publication and Morrison’s concern about Black power and community in a rapidly changing nation and world.