Sula

by Toni Morrison

Other questions mattered more. What is friendship between women when unmediated by men? What choices are available to black women outside their own society’s approval? 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.

In 1969, in Queens, snatching liberty seemed compelling. Some of us thrived; some of us died. All of us had a taste.

It is called the suburbs now, but when black people lived there it was called the Bottom.

Her bare feet would raise the saffron dust that floated down on the coveralls and bunion-split shoes of the man breathing music in and out of his harmonica.

Authors dont WRITE like this anymore, the imagery!

So the slave pressed his master to try to get him some. He preferred it to the valley. And it was done. The nigger got the hilly land, where planting was backbreaking, where the soil slid down and washed away the seeds, and where the wind lingered all through the winter.

taking small consolation in the fact that every day they could literally look down on the white folks.

A young man of hardly twenty, his head full of nothing and his mouth recalling the taste of lipstick,

His hair was parted low on the right side so that some twenty or thirty yellow hairs could discreetly cover the nakedness of his head.

Lol

That is, he let his mind slip into whatever cave mouths of memory it chose.

Okay the way they write the classics does hit a little different haha sry fantasy authors

It was not death or dying that frightened him, but the unexpectedness of both.

Shadrack was crazy but that did not mean that he didn’t have any sense or, even more important, that he had no power.

The tetter heads tried goading him (although he was only four or five years older then they) but not for long, for his curses were stingingly personal.

Easily, quietly, Suicide Day became a part of the fabric of life up in the Bottom of Medallion, Ohio.

Her daughter was more comfort and purpose than she had ever hoped to find in this life.

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

She lost only one battle—the pronunciation of her name. The people in the Bottom refused to say Helene. They called her Helen Wright and left it at that.

All in all her life was a satisfactory one. She loved her house and enjoyed manipulating her daughter and her husband.

An eagerness to please and an apology for living met in her voice.

Then, for no earthly reason, at least no reason that anybody could understand, certainly no reason that Nel understood then or later, she smiled.

All of them, the fat woman and her four children, three boys and a girl, Helene and her daughter, squatted there in the four o’clock Meridian sun.

Nel didn’t know quite what she meant, but on the other hand she knew exactly what she meant.

“I’m me. I’m not their daughter. I’m not Nel. I’m me. Me.”

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

Lol

emerge looking precisely as she did when she entered, only happier, taught Sula that sex was pleasant and frequent,

“One thing I can’t stand is a nasty woman”

Nel and Sula walked through this valley of eyes chilled by the wind and heated by the embarrassment of appraising stares.

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.

Nel seemed stronger and more consistent than Sula, who could hardly be counted on to sustain any emotion for more than three minutes.

feel the oldest and most devastating pain there is: not the pain of childhood, but the remembrance of it.

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.

So it was rage, rage and a determination to take on a man’s role anyhow that made him press Nel about settling down. He needed some of his appetites filled, some posture of adulthood recognized, but mostly he wanted someone to care about his hurt, to care very deeply. Deep enough to hold him, deep enough to rock him, deep enough to ask, “How you feel? You all right? Want some coffee?” And if he were to be a man, that someone could no longer be his mother. He chose the girl who had always been kind, who had never seemed hell-bent to marry, who made the whole venture seem like his idea, his conquest.

And they're still pickin them like this today smh

Her parents had succeeded in rubbing down to a dull glow any sparkle or splutter she had.

simply because she seemed always to want Nel to shine.

In those days a compliment to one was a compliment to the other, and cruelty to one was a challenge to the other.

It would be ten years before they saw each other again, and their meeting would be thick with birds.

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

“Pus mouth! God’s going to strike you!” “Which God? The one watched you burn Plum?”

Her old friend had come home. Sula. Who made her laugh, who made her see old things with new eyes, in whose presence she felt clever, gentle and a little raunchy.

Talking to Sula had always been a conversation with herself. Was there anyone else before whom she could never be foolish? In whose view inadequacy was mere idiosyncrasy, a character trait rather than a deficiency? Anyone who left behind that aura of fun and complicity? Sula never competed; she simply helped others define themselves.

with a distance, an absence of a relationship to clothes which emphasized everything the fabric covered.

But he could see why she wasn’t married; she stirred a man’s mind maybe, but not his body.

So how could you leave me when you knew me?”

And you did but you left your tie.

Think. But who could think in that bed where they had been and where they also had been and where only she was now?

“The real hell of Hell is that it is forever.”

Hell ain’t things lasting forever. Hell is change.” Not only did men leave and children grow up and die, but even the misery didn’t last. One day she wouldn’t even have that. This very grief that had twisted her into a curve on the floor and flayed her would be gone. She would lose that too.

like Sula, for Sula would know or if she didn’t she would say something funny that would make it all right. Ooo no, not Sula. Here she was in the midst of it, hating it, scared of it, and again she thought of Sula as though they were still friends and talked things over.

O my sweet Jesus what kind of cross is that?

So the women, to justify their own judgment, cherished their men more, soothed the pride and vanity Sula had bruised.