Sula

by Toni Morrison

“Nobody knew my rose of the world but me…. I had too much glory. They don’t want glory like that in nobody’s heart.” —The Rose Tattoo

“Nobody knew my rose of the world. but me…. I had too much glory. They don’t want glory like that in nobody’s heart.” —The Rose Tattoo

It was not death or dying that frightened him, but the unexpectedness of both. In sorting it all out, he hit on the notion that if one day a year were devoted to it, everybody could get it out of the way and the rest of the year would be safe and free. In this manner he instituted National Suicide Day.

Any enthusiasms that little Nel showed were calmed by the mother until she drove her daughter’s imagination underground.

She would fuck practically anything, but sleeping with someone implied for her a measure of trust and a definite commitment.

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.

Eva said yes, but inside she disagreed and remained convinced that Sula had watched Hannah burn not because she was paralyzed, but because she was interested.

“I don’t want to make somebody else. I want to make myself.”

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.

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.