Oh 1 A Changeable Constant: Peripheral Encounters in Toni Morrisons Sula Sula commences with a doggedly evocative prologue about a place

called the Bottom that is now no more. In that place, where they tore the nightshade and blackberry patches from their roots to make room for the Medallion City Golf Course, there was once a neighborhood (Morrison 3).1 The author refers to the perspective in this prologue as coming not from within () but from the point of view of a stranger (Morrison, Unspeakable Things Unspoken 32). Although Morrison has explained that the stranger would most likely be a white man looking into the foreign landscape of black society for the first time (Unspeakable Things Unspoken 32), the nostalgic intimacy coupled with the estrangement in her stance compels the reader to experience the periphery both as an alien and as one who watches the center cope with life and its wealth of anguish. The peripheral quality of the prologue, as well as its symbolic reference to the novels protagonists Sula Peace and Nel Wright through of the nightshade and blackberry patches, carries on into the final chapter of Sula. The last scene of the novel more than rivals its opening narrative for evocative spirit. In it, Nel mourns the loss of her childhood companionwhose death constitutes the first in a series of occurrences leading up to the disintegration of the Bottomwith a cry that has no bottom and () no top, just circles and circles of sorrow (174). The circular image of Nels grief, evoked close to the sequestered domain of Medallions colored cemetery, hearkens back to the center versus periphery dynamic of the prologue. In this instance, the emblematic nightshade and blackberry patches of the former periphery have been personalized to a point that the friendship between Sula and Nel becomes a center of attention in its own right. Similarly, Shadrack, the first member of the Bottom community introduced in full-

1. Toni Morrison, Sula, New York: Vintage International, 2004. Subsequent in-text citations refer to this edition of the novel and will therefore be identified by page number alone.

Oh 2 bodied terms, communicates himself as a boundary figure. His existence is initially blithe and nonthreatening to the communitythat of [a] young man of hardly twenty, his head full of nothing and his mouth recalling the taste of lipstick (7). Shadracks ignorant bliss soon shatters along with the brain of a fellow soldier as he and his comrades run across a battlefield in France under fire (8). Death has exploded in front of him and taken his face as well as that of the headless man. Accordingly, Shadracks stint in the hospital is a prolonged nightmare during which he has no control over his body or his identity, his hands having seemingly swollen to monstrous proportions and his name having been reduced to the army epithet Private. Only after Shadrack discerns his dark countenance in the depths of a toilet blackened by a blanketan unexpected moment of illumination in the midst of a pervasive lack of lightdoes his peace of mind return to him (13). Shadrack continues to push himself into the shadows upon returning to the Bottom. His house lies isolated from the rest of the community; his sole companions are the frogs and the fish that live in the pool beside his abode. His grim commemoration of National Suicide Day is yet another attempt to keep the centrality of life divided from the terror of death by confining his horrors to the outskirts of society. The respective peripheral positions of Shadrack and of Sula and Nel overlap twice throughout the novel. The first intersection occurs in Nel and Sulas girlhood when Chicken Littles drowns, the second after Sulas presence has become a memory of the past present merely in the context of Nels longing as she passes Shadrack on the road outside Sulas gravesite. Both encounters further elucidate the role and significance of periphery. In a particularly poignant moment of the first meeting, Shadrack gives Sula an inexplicable reassurance laden with hidden meaning. [S]he turned () to look at him [Shadrack], to ask himhad he? He was smiling, a great smile, heavy with lust and time to come. He nodded

Oh 3 his head as though answering a question, and said, in a pleasant conversational tone, a tone of cooled butter, Always. () Always. He had answered a question she had not asked, and its promise licked at her feet. (62-63) Much later, the narrator reveals that Shadracks always was meant as a verbal ward against the destruction that is death. [W]hen he [Shadrack] looked at her [Sulas] face he had seen also the skull beneath, and thinking he saw it tooknew it was there and was afraidhe tried to think of something to say to comfort her, something to stop the hurt from spilling out of her eyes. So he had said always, so she would not have to be afraid of the changethe falling away of skin, the drip and slide of blood, and the exposure of bone underneath. He had said always to convince her, assure her, of permanency. (157) Ironically, almost everything in Nel and Sulas lives changes after Chicken Littles passing. Nel marries Jude Greene; Sula leaves the Bottom, returns, sleeps with Nels husband, and is branded a fallen woman and half-witch; complete reconciliation between the two refuses to take place. The events following Shadracks assurance of permanency appear to be the antithesis of intransienceexcept, perhaps, for the fact that Sula remains just as much a boundary figure as Shadrack regardless of where she is or what she is doing, perhaps best exemplified when her mirroring of non-peripheral desires annihilates her relationship with Ajax. Though Chicken Little is not the direct cause of the two girls rift, his accident carries enough weight to disturb Nel years after both Chicken Little and Sula are gone and drive her to quarrel with Eva Peace over her role in the incident. As denoted in Evas

Oh 4 accusations toward NelYou watched, didnt you? Me, I never wouldve watched (168) the import of Chicken Little derives from the element of interested observation presented in the prologue, made incarnate in Sula, and sustained in the strange gray ball of guilty pleasure hovering in the corner of Nels eye. Thus, the act of mutual watching unites Nel and Sula despite the fact that their temperaments are vastly unalike, the one endlessly impulsive and the other willing to stand quietly on her feet. [T]heir friendship was so close, they themselves had difficulty distinguishing ones thoughts from the others (83). Eva also sees Sula and Nel as one and the same: You. Sula. Whats the difference? You was there (168). These enigmatically intertwined and observant beings are validated because they exist in and perpetuate the periphery. Even after Nel has given herself over to them [the community] (120), even after Nels heart hardens against Sula for stealing away her husband, the bond between the two childhood friends remains tenuous but present. Morrisons periphery, unlike the rigid and regulated social center of the Bottom, can withstand change. It makes no demands on individual selfhood, for when it bonds Sula and Nel, it enables them to be both an other and a self (119) as they navigate a shared loneliness () so profound it intoxicate[s] and sen[ds] Technicolored visions (51). Molded by nothing more than adventuresomeness () and a mean determination to explore everything, the two girls abandon the ways of other people and concentrate on their own perceptions of things (54). Hand in hand, they form one Nel, one Sula, and are simultaneously one Nel and Sulaa selfdistinctive merger in stark contrast with Judes marriage to Nel, intended to make [t]he two of them together () one Jude (83) and one Jude alone. Such is the always which blossoms from the juxtaposition of Shadracks and Sula and Nels peripheral existences. Granted, it is a bottomless always which eventually gives way to Nels circles and circles of sorrow, but it is also a fair stab at a humanly conceivable form of equality where the racial hierarchy between the white people and the

Oh 5 black people, the sexual and gendered hierarchy between man and woman, and the moral hierarchy between social expectation and free will are mere pictures passing by the eyes of the liberated if marginalized observer. Sula and Nel do not need each other because of familial obligations or bodily gratification; they want each other because they themselves choose to dream dreams that have room enough for two. Betrayal may come and life may go, yet the peripheral being can still say Im me. Im not their daughter. Im not Nel. Im me. Me (28) and be heard, can die and still smile a triumphant smile knowing that she has truly lived and not choked on death. Consequently, when Nels gray ball breaks and scatters in the wind before she weeps for the lost Sula, her sadness resonates with something other than miserya rediscovery of a place where nothing is fixed, nothing is final, and everything is inexorably beautiful.

Oh 6 Works Cited Morrison, Toni. Sula. New York: Vintage International, 2004. . Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature. The Tanner Lectures on Human Values. The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. 7 October 1988.