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What are the risks of individualism in a determinedly individualistic, yet racially uniform and socially static, community?
Female freedom always means sexual freedom, even when—especially when—it is seen through the prism of economic freedom.
Because each had discovered years before that they were neither white nor male, and that all freedom and triumph was forbidden to them, they had set about creating something else to be.
Daughters of distant mothers and incomprehensible fathers
“Sure you do. You love her, like I love Sula. I just don’t like her. That’s the difference.”
“I don’t want to make somebody else. I want to make myself.” “Selfish. Ain’t no woman got no business floatin’ around without no man.”
Sula sat up. “I need you to shut your mouth.” “Don’t nobody talk to me like that. Don’t nobody…” “This body does. Just ’cause you was bad enough to cut off your own leg you think you got a right to kick everybody with the stump.”
“Hellfire don’t need lighting and it’s already burning in you…” “Whatever’s burning in me is mine!” “Amen!” “And I’ll split this town in two and everything in it before I’ll let you put it out!”
Sula, like always, was incapable of making any but the most trivial decisions. When it came to matters of grave importance, she behaved emotionally and irresponsibly and left it to others to straighten out. And when fear struck her, she did unbelievable things. Like that time with her finger. Whatever those hunkies did, it wouldn’t have been as bad as what she did to herself. But Sula was so scared she had mutilated herself, to protect herself.
Sula was smiling. “I mean, I don’t know what the fuss is about. I mean, everything in the world loves you. White men love you. They spend so much time worrying about your penis they forget their own. The only thing they want to do is cut off a nigger’s privates. And if that ain’t love and respect I don’t know what is. And white women? They chase you all to every corner of the earth, feel for you under every bed. I knew a white woman wouldn’t leave the house after 6 o’clock for fear one of you would snatch her. Now ain’t that love? They think rape soon’s they see you, and if they don’t get the
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Sula had an odd way of looking at things and that her wide smile took some of the sting from that rattlesnake over her eye. A funny woman, he thought, not that bad-looking. But he could see why she wasn’t married; she stirred a man’s mind maybe, but not his body.
Good taste was out of place in the company of death, death itself was the essence of bad taste. And there must be much rage and saliva in its presence. The body must move and throw itself about, the eyes must roll, the hands should have no peace, and the throat should release all the yearning, despair and outrage that accompany the stupidity of loss.
“The real hell of Hell is that it is forever.”
They insisted that all unions between white men and black women be rape; for a black woman to be willing was literally unthinkable. In that way, they regarded integration with precisely the same venom that white people did.
And the fury she created in the women of the town was incredible—for she would lay their husbands once and then no more. Hannah had been a nuisance, but she was complimenting the women, in a way, by wanting their husbands. Sula was trying them out and discarding them without any excuse the men could swallow. So the women, to justify their own judgment, cherished their men more, soothed the pride and vanity Sula had bruised.
The first experience taught her there was no other that you could count on; the second that there was no self to count on either. She had no center, no speck around which to grow.
She had been looking all along for a friend, and it took her a while to discover that a lover was not a comrade and could never be—for a woman.
In a way, her strangeness, her naïveté, her craving for the other half of her equation was the consequence of an idle imagination. Had she paints, or clay, or knew the discipline of the dance, or strings; had she anything to engage her tremendous curiosity and her gift for metaphor, she might have exchanged the restlessness and preoccupation with whim for an activity that provided her with all she yearned for. And like any artist with no art form, she became dangerous.
“Yes. But my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else’s. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain’t that something? A secondhand lonely.”
