SULA

TONI MORRISON
Toni Morrison, originally Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison, was born on February 18, 1931, Lorain, Ohio,
United States, and died on August 5, 2019, Montefiore Hospital, New York, United States

Morrison grew up in the American Midwest in a family that possessed an intense love of and appreciation for
Black culture. Storytelling, songs, and folktales were a deeply formative part of her childhood. She attended
Howard University (B.A., 1953) and Cornell University (M.A., 1955). After teaching at Texas Southern
University for two years, she taught at Howard from 1957 to 1964. In 1965 Morrison became a fiction editor
at Random House, where she worked for a number of years. In 1984 she began teaching writing at the State
University of New York at Albany, which she left in 1989 to join the faculty of Princeton University; she retired
in 2006. She received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993.

The central theme of Morrison's novels is the Black American experience; in an unjust society, her characters
struggle to find themselves and their cultural identity. Her use of fantasy, her sinuous poetic style, and her
rich interweaving of the mythic gave her stories great strength and texture.

Sula was published in 1973. This was the period of the second wave feminism movement (in the 1960s and
1970s), which and focused on issues of equality and discrimination. Starting initially in the United States with
American women, the feminist liberation movement soon spread to other Western countries.

CONTEXT OF THE NOVEL

The story is set between 1919 and 1965.

Segregation: In the United States, racial segregation was mandated by law in some states and enforced
along with anti-miscegenation laws (prohibitions against interracial marriage), until the U.S. Supreme Court
led by Chief Justice Earl Warren struck down racial segregation. Jim Crow laws included the separation of
white and black people in schools and on public transportation, as well as in movie theatres, parks and
restaurants. This was in an effort to prevent any contact between Blacks and whites as equals.

The period after World War I: a major global conflict lasting from 1914 to 1918. It was fought between two
coalitions, the Allies and the Central Powers. Fighting took place throughout Europe, the Middle East, Africa,
the Pacific, and parts of Asia.

The Great Depression: The Great Depression (1929–1939) was an economic shock that impacted most
countries across the world. It was a period of economic depression that became evident after a major fall in
stock prices in the United States.[1] The economic contagion began around September 1929 and led to the
Wall Street stock market crash of October 24 (Black Thursday). It was the longest, deepest, and most
widespread depression of the 20th century.

World War II: a global conflict that lasted from 1939 to 1945. The vast majority of the world's countries,
including all of the great powers, fought as part of two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis.
Many participants threw their economic, industrial, and scientific capabilities behind this total war, blurring
the distinction between civilian and military resources. Aircraft played a major role, enabling the strategic
bombing of population centres and the delivery of the only two nuclear weapons ever used in war. World
War II was by far the deadliest conflict in history, resulting in an estimated 70 to 85 million fatalities, mostly
among civilians. Tens of millions died due to genocides (including the Holocaust), starvation, massacres, and
disease. In the wake of the Axis defeat, Germany and Japan were occupied, and war crimes tribunals were
conducted against German and Japanese leaders.
The beginning of the Cold War: The Cold War was a period of geopolitical tension between the United States
and the Soviet Union and their respective allies, the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc. The term cold war is
used because there was no large-scale fighting directly between the two superpowers, but they each
supported opposing sides in major regional conflicts known as proxy wars. The conflict was based on the
ideological and geopolitical struggle for global influence by these two superpowers, following their roles as
the Allies of World War II that led to victory against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in 1945.

THE STORY
“Sula” is a novel about Sula and Nel’s friendship, the way they understand friendship and how this relationship
is affected by background.
Part one
INTRODUCTION
In what ways does Toni Morrison’s introduction to Part One subtly establish that racism permeates the
small-town Ohio setting of the novel?
“The Bottom”. → it was up in the hills (“taking in small consolation in the fact that every day they could
literally look down on the whites”). “A good white farmer promised freedom and a piece of bottom land to
his slave if he would perform some very difficult chores.” → the slave did so, but the farmer didn’t want to
give up any land (of course) so he told the slave about the “Bottom”, rich and fertile land. “It’s high up in the
hill for us, but when God looks down it’s the bottom. The bottom of heaven.” - “Planting was backbreaking,
the soil slid down and washed away the seeds, the wind lingered through winter.”

“Lean their heads back on sink trays and doze”.

“It wasn’t a town, anyways”.

“The adult pain that rested somewhere under the eyelids, under their head and in the palm of their hands”.

“Spoon carvers who had not worked in eight years”.

“It got started as a joke, a nigger joke”.

1919
Morrison places a stunning image right at the outset of “1919” (the year, of course, after the end of world
War I): “But stubbornly, taking no direction from the brain, the body of the headless soldier ran on, with
energy and grace, ignoring altogether the drip and slide of brain tissue down its back” (8). This is a memory
Shadrack has from his experience on the battlefield of “the Great War.” How does Shadrack (whose very
name echoes “shellshock”) process his wartime experience? Do we as readers sympathize with him and his
creation of National Suicide Day, or do we derogate him? How about the other members of Medallion?
[NOTE: shell-shock: noun; post-traumatic stress disorder occurring under wartime conditions (as combat) that
cause intense stress]

“With extreme care he lifted one arm and was relieved to find his hand still attached to his wrist. (…) just as
he was about to spread his fingers, they began to grow in higgledy-piggledy fashion. With a shriek he closed
his eyes and thrust his huge growing wrist under the covers.”

“He wanted desperately to see his own face.”

“He didn’t even know who or what he was; he had nothing, nothing, nothing to do.”

He instituted National Suicide Day: “It had to do with making a place for fear as a way of controlling it. He
knew the smell of it and was terrified of it, for he could not anticipate it. It was not death or dying that
frightened him, but the unexpectedness of both.” – “Telling them that this was their only chance to kill
themselves or each other.”

As readers: a bit of both. In my case, I took pity on him.

The other members of Medallion: at first, they were frightened. The next one was less frightening but still
worrisome. On subsequent days, the grown people looked out from behind the curtains as he rang the bell,
increased their speed and ran from him. As time passed, people took less notice of these days (January 3 rd),
or at least they thought they did. They had absorbed it into their lives. “Suicide Day became a part of the
fabric of life up in the Bottom of Medallion, Ohio”.

1920
In describing Helene and Nel’s relationship, in “1920” the narrator says, “Under Helene’s hand the girl
became obedient and polite. Any enthusiasms that little Nel showed were calmed by the mother until she
drove her daughter’s imagination underground” (18). How does the character Helene seem to operate in
relation to the debatable question on the novel’s thematic handling of motherhood? Is she a traditional,
conservative foil to the novel’s more liberated ideas on motherhood, or is she one version of the
impossibility of “getting black motherhood right”? Try to integrate into your response the scene later in
this chapter when Helene walks through the “white” train car on her way to the “coloured” train car and is
humiliated by the porter for doing so.
Helene is a character that portrays what we can consider the typical characteristics of conservative
motherhood, and also of social roles “appropriate” for women. Helene was born behind “red shutters”,
daughter of a whore who worked there. She moved to Medallion after getting married and found comfort
and purpose in her daughter, Nel. Helene raised Nel in a way considered correct: the little girl had to be polite
and obedient, she had to follow her mother’s rules and shut down any sense of being true to herself. “She
enjoyed manipulating her daughter and her husband”, the narrator says. She felt the need to be perfect,
probably, and she wanted her daughter to be that as well. Helene didn’t want to have her mother’s life, she
wanted to be what a woman had to be.

In the episode on the train, we see that Helene gets confused and enters the “white” train car. To spare herself
some embarrassment, Helene walked on through to the “coloured” train car. There, she is humiliated by the
porter for doing so. The narrator describes Helene’s feelings after being called “gal”: “All the old
vulnerabilities, all the old fears of being somehow flawed gathered in her stomach and made her hands
tremble.” After being allowed to go to their seats, Helene simply smiles (“for no earthly reason she smiled”).
“Like a street pup that wags his tail at the very doorjamb of the butcher shop he has been kicked away from
only moment before”, the author describes. Again, Helene tries to be the “ideal” of what of women had to
be: submissive, polite, obedient.

Nel, however, feels ashamed of her mother—she can feel the hatred directed at her. In this moment, Nel
resolves to “always be on guard”: to make sure no man ever looks at her the way the veterans look at her
mother.

Nel ends the chapter, “1920,” with a kind of epiphany.

“I’m me, she whispered. “Me.”

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.”
Each time she said the word me there was a gathering her like power, like joy, like fear (28).

Does this nascent sense of her own identity, separate and independent from her mother, suggest that
motherhood – certainly the way Helene defines it – has less influence over the formation of children’s
selves? Or is this a subjective experience that Nel is having that actually doesn’t reflect the full picture of
how she is formed? How does all this relate to the third debatable question, on African American
motherhood?
In the case of Nel, I believe that being raised in such a conservative household, with this mother who tried to
be the role model of a flawless woman, was what pushed her to desire to be different. By saying “I’m me.”,
Nel is stating that she would not be a copy of her mother; she wanted to be herself, independent from her
mother. During the episode on the train, we see a picture of this: “She wanted to make certain that no man
ever looked at her that way. That no midnight eyes or marbled flesh would ever accost her and turn her into
jelly.” She wanted to be different, as I mentioned, and find her true self, her own identity as a separate
individual.

In my opinion, the way in which Helene tried to raise Nel is a direct cause of Nel feeling that way, to Nel
desperately desiring to be different. However, when we continue to read, we realize that, despite this
experience, Nel doesn’t grow up to be that different from his mother. She ended up having a model family,
and never left Medallion. She became, just like her mother, the ideal of a woman.

What does change, nevertheless, is that Nel decides to do something her mother didn’t approve of: she
gained the strength to talk to Sula, that girl from her class that Helene didn’t like because of her mother. “Nel
preferred Sula’s household, where a pot of something was always cooking on the stove; where the mother,
Hannah, never scolded or gave any directions; where all sorts of people dropped in…”

Explore the relationship between Nel, her mother Helene, her grandmother Rochelle, and her great-
grandmother Cecile. Why are the women separated? What separates them?
I believe that we can, initially, form two groups: Nel and Rochelle on one side, and Helene and Cecile on the
other. We are immediately told that both Helene and her grandmother wanted to her to be as different as
possible from Rochelle (Helene’s mother). Cecile wanted Helene to grow up to be good, moral, and pious,
and her own mother is held up to her as a “bad example.” Helene tries to raise her child on these same “rules”,
she wants Nel to be that same type of woman, and definitely nothing like Rochelle (we see this on Helene not
liking Sula because her mother Hannah was a free woman). It is after meeting Rochelle that Nel has her
realization about being herself. I believe that, maybe, it was seeing this other reality that pushes her to desire
to be different.

1921
Why does Eva leave her children? Why does she return with only one leg?
Eva had married a man called Boy-Boy and had three children. “He liked womanizing best, drinking alcohol
second and abusing Eva third.” He left them, and Eva didn’t have what she needed to take care of the children.
In the beginning, the neighbours helped; she knew, however, that it wouldn’t last forever and that she had to
do something. It was after Plum’s incident that Eva left all her children and returned eighteen months later,
with a big amount of money and only one leg. We don’t know the exact reason why Eva had only one leg, but
rumours said that she had sold it or had it cut in order to gain money.

Who are the "deweys" and what do they represent?

The “deweys” were three children that arrived at Eva’s house in 1921. They all looked very different, and even
were different ages: “Dewey one was a deeply black boy with a beautiful head and the golden eyes of chronic
jaundice. Dewey two was light-skinned with freckles everywhere and a head of tight red hair. Dewey three
was half Mexican with chocolate skin and black bangs.” However, Eva named them all the same, saying there
was no need to tell them apart. Moreover, the deweys became inseparable, “loving nothing and no one but
themselves”. In Medallion, people thought, at first, that it was easy to tell them apart because of their visible
physical differences; however, as time passed people found that it was impossible to tell one from the other:
“They had one voice, thought with one mind and maintained an annoying privacy”.

This is a representation of Eva not accepting individuality, specifically these kids’ individuality. In addition, it
is also a representation of both Eva’s power and authority, and the way in which something that seems so
simple as a name can change completely the way in which we perceive reality. It was Eva’s treatment towards
the deweys that made them all almost the same person.

Why does Eva set Plum on fire? How does the narrative describe this scene? Why is the description
important?
It is Eva that sets Plum on fire. The narrator describes how Eva went downstair and entered Plum’s room,
gathered him into her arms and started rocking him. They looked at each other for quite some time until Plum
told her he was fine, and that she could go. Eva was crying. Later, Eva poured kerosene over him, rolled a bit
of newspaper into a tight stick, lit it, and threw it onto the bed. Then, as the flames overcame him, she shut
the door and went back upstairs.

The description of Eva pouring kerosene over Plum is amazingly beautiful, which is weird because of what’s
happening. The author writes that it seemed to be some “wet light” travelling all over his body and that Plum
thought it was some kind of baptism or blessing. He fell asleep then, knowing that everything was going to
be all right.

What are some possible reasons for Eva's decision to go downstairs and light the fire, "the smoke of which
was in her hair for years"? How does this make you feel about her character? Was this an act of sacrifice or
selfishness? Can Eva be described as 'good' or 'bad’?
Eva had a weird way of loving, I believe. She loved through acts and thought that killing Plum was what she
had to do in order for him to be better. Plum had gone to WWI and came back as a miserable person. Later
on the novel, Eva says that Plum wanted to “come back to her womb” and that she had to kill him, basically,
for his own good. As a reader, I first thought about this episode with quite an anger towards Eva, as I didn’t
understand her reasoning behind it. However, it was reading what happened when Hannah died that made
me realise that Eva did love her children and that setting her son on fire was definitely a big sacrifice for her.
I don’t think that it was because of selfishness, I believe it was her strange way of loving that made her do it.
In addition, I don’t believe Eva can be categorized into a “good” or “bad” side. In real life, people aren’t just
good or bad, we are a mixture of both sides. And Eva is such a great example of this: she was a mother who
thought she knew which was the correct way of raising her children, and she loved Plum so much that she
did what she did. This doesn’t mean that I agree with her decision, nor that I think it was the correct thing to
do, but I do believe that it was the best she could do given her history and personality. Sula’s characters are
an amazing representation of real-life people, so dividing them into good and bad sides is not possible, in my
opinion.

1922
How are Nel and Sula becoming aware of their sexuality in this chapter? How do we sense this awareness?
Do we also sense a threat of violence?
“Nel and Sula walked through this valley of eyes chilled by the wind and heated by the embarrassment of
appraising stares.” In Medallion, old men and young ones had the habit of watching girls and women. Literally.
Women and young girls would pass by, and the men would call them names and other violent things, sadly.
Nel and Sula, and probably other girls as well, wanted the attention, becoming aware of their sexuality.

Nel and Sula become aware of their sexuality because of the looks they received, and the comments they
were told. “Nel and Sula passed, they guarded their eyes lest someone see their delight.”
In this awareness, however, there is a threat of violence. We can name two examples of this:
1. Ajax says “Pig meat” when they walk past them (misogynistic, violent, obscene). Sula and Nel are secretly
delighted to have attracted the attention of the men. They enjoy walking through town and exciting the
men—whom they still don’t entirely understand.
2. The incident with the Irish boys: four Irish boys tease Nel. Sula, who is standing near Nel, pulls a knife out
of her coat and points it at the boys. Instead of trying to attack the Irish boys, however, Sula cuts the tip
of her own finger, spurting blood everywhere. Sula whispers, “If I can do that to myself, what you suppose
I’ll do to you?” Sula’s tactic works, and the Irish boys run away.

Sula and Nel’s differences:

“Nel, an only child, sat on the steps of her back porch surrounded by the high silence of her mother’s
incredibly orderly house, feeling the neatness pointing at her back, she studied the poplars and fell easily into
a picture of herself lying on a flowered bed, tangled in her own hair, waiting for some fiery prince.”

“Sula, also an only child, but wedged into a household of throbbing disorder constantly awry with things,
people, voices and the slamming of doors, spent hours in the attic behind a roll of linoleum galloping through
her own mind on a gray-and-white horse tasting sugar and smelling roses in full view of a someone who
shared both the taste and the speed.”

“Daughters of distant mothers and incomprehensible fathers (Sula’s because he was dead; Nel’s because he
wasn’t), they found in each other’s eyes the intimacy they were looking for.”

“Their friendship was as intense as it was sudden. They found relief in each other’s personality.”

“In the safe harbour of each other’s company they could afford to abandon the ways of other people and
concentrate on their own perceptions of things.”

What does Hannah say to upset Sula?

One day, Sula hears her mother saying that she loves her but doesn’t like her, which was not the same.

“She only heard Hannah’s words, and the pronouncement sent her flying up the stairs. In bewilderment, she
stood at the window fingering the curtain edge, aware of a sting in her eye. Nel’s call floated up and into the
window, pulling her away from dark thoughts back into the bright, hot daylight.”

This episode definitely has an enormous effect on Sula and her perception of her relationship with her mother,
which we can see in the description of Hannah’s death and Sula’s possible implication on it.

Why does Sula go inside Shadrack's shack? What does Shadrack tell her and what does it mean?
Sula and Nel are playing on the beach when Chicken little arrives. They started playing with him, actually, it
was Sula that tried to play with the younger kid. She grabs him, climbs to a tree and helps him come down,
being nice and tender to him. Then, Sula picked him up by his hands and swung him outward around. At some
point, he slipped from her hands and sailed away out over the water. Sula and Nel waited for him to come
back up, but he doesn’t. Nel thinks that someone viewed it, and since the only house over there was
Shadrack’s the girls assumed that it was him that saw what happened.

For that reason, Sula ran up to the plank bridge that crossed the river to Shadrack’s house, with fear crawled
into her stomach, and arrived at Shadrack’s home. She knocks on the door, and no one answers, so she enters
the house by herself. She can’t believe her eyes, because the nice cottage was nothing like she had imagined.
“Everything was so tiny, so common, so unthreatening.”

Suddenly, Shadrack entered his shack. He smiles, and Sula tries to find some strength to ask him if he’s seen
what just happened out on the river. Before she can even make her question, however, Shadrack says,
“Always.” Sula panics and runs outside, back to Nel. In this chapter, we don’t have a specific reason for what
Shadrack said; however, we can say that Sula interpreted that Shadrack was always watching. From Sula’s
perspective, Shadrack has witnessed her drop Chicken Little into the water and says “always” to mean that
he always sees what happens on the river. By the end of the novel, nevertheless, the author comes back to
this episode from Shadrack’s perspective, and in that way, we can see how the interpretation (or
misinterpretation) of a single word can shape someone’s life.

In chapter “1941” we have Shadrack’s perspective of Sula’s visit to his shack: He remembers when Sula came
into his house that day, with the mark of a tadpole on her eyelid. He remembers her crying and the word he
said to her. “So he had said “always,” so she would not have to be afraid of the change—the 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.”

Chicken Little’s death is one of the most tersely described in all of American literature. “When he slipped
from [Sula’s] hands and sailed away out over the water they could still hear his bubbly laughter. The water
darkened and closed quickly over the place where Chicken Little sank” (61). Sula and Nel don’t try to save
him – though they also probably do not realize he is drowning until it is too late – and they also express
much more fear that they will have been seen than they do sorrow over the boy’s death. They think
Shadrack is the only witness, and before they can ask him if he saw the incident, and if he will keep it quiet,
he says one word, “Always” (62). This episode has some similar and some parallel qualities to the Plum’s
incineration. What are they? What is the novel’s attitude toward the incident, and Nel and Sula’s role in it?
How does the novel want the readers to feel about it?
I believe that similarities between Plum’s incineration and Chicken little’s death are related to childhood and
motherhood. First of all, in both episodes the one who dies had just been described in some childish and also
tender way. In the case of Plum, it is described how his mother was rocking him in her arms, how he giggled
and came back to sleep after thinking he was being splashed by some “wet light”. In the case of Chicken little,
he was playing as a kid, laughing and being really happy, when he dies; it is even described how the girls could
still hear his laughter when he sank.

Second, in both episodes we have their mothers’ reactions. On the one hand, Eva is the one who kills her son,
crying and feeling like he has sacrificed an important part of her life. On the other hand, Chicken little’s mother
at first wasn’t even sure that it was her son, until she saw his clothes lying on the table: “her mouth snapped
shut, and when she saw his body her mouth flew wide open again and it was seven hours before she was able
to close it and make the first sound.”

We could also compare how the people involved on their death behaved. Sula and Nel were frightened that
someone could have seen what happened, so they never speak about it and just hide it. Eva, even though she
later admits to Hannah that it was her the one to do it, also decides to never address what happened.

I believe that in this episode, described as it is in this chapter, we, as readers, tend to think that Sula is
somehow worst than Nel, with a darker personality. However, we are then said that during the kid’s funeral
Nel is more worried that she'll get caught, even though she wasn't the one who accidentally threw Chicken
into the river. And that Sula just cries and cries, without making a sound. In addition, later in the novel, we
learn that she was thrilled when she saw Chicken Little sailing through the air. She remained calm while Sula
became distraught. It is likely that she feels guilty about her lack of reaction, or her lack of the socially
approved reaction, to the accident.

1923
"1923" opens with the line, "The second strange thing was . . ." What are the other strange things that
happen? How does this line establish a tone for the chapter?
In this chapter, the author describes a list of strange things that lead to Hannah’s death. Every one of those
strange things that happen set a mysterious environment around death through the whole chapter.
1. The first strange thing: the wind, which “tore over the hills rattling roofs and loosening doors”.
2. The second strange thing: Hannah coming to her mother’s room with an empty bowl and saying
“Mamma, did you ever love us?” She said the words like “a small child saying a piece at Easter”.
3. The third strange thing: Hannah’s dream of a wedding in a red dress. Neither Hannah nor Eva looked what
it meant; they knew it was number 522. Later on, Eva would realise that weddings always meant death,
and that the red of the dress was fire.
4. The fourth strange thing: Sula was acting up, fretting the deweys and meddling the newly married couple.
“The birthmark over her eye was getting darker and looked more and more like a stem and rose.”
5. The fifth strange thing: Eva couldn’t find her comb, nobody moved stuff from Eva’s room except to clean
and then they put everything back in the same place.

Why does Hannah ask Eva if she loves them, if she loved them as children? What is Eva's answer? Does Eva
love her children? What do we learn about the characterization of both Hannah and Eva through this
dialogue? How does this dialogue help to balance (present reasons on both sides) the question about the
novel’s motherhood thematic meaning?
Hannah and Eva have a conversation around love after Hannah asks her if she had ever loved them as children.
Hannah asks that question, I believe, because she felt that Eva never loved them, and probably she was led
to believe that with more force after she knew it was Eva that killed Plum.

During the conversation, Hannah says that she knows that Eva fed them and took care of their health, but she
doesn’t recall her mother ever playing with them. Eva, however, says that taking care of them was exactly
loving them: “Yeah? Well? Don’t that count? Ain’t that love? You want me to tinkle you under the jaw and
forget ’bout them sores in your mouth? Pearl was shittin’ worms and I was supposed to play rang-around-
the-rosie?” Eva explains that there wasn’t time to do such as things as playing with them, she had to stay alive
and take care of her children because she loved them and wanted them to live.

I think that Eva did love her children, in her own way. What she did to Plum was a sacrifice she had to do for
him to be in a better place, she thought. And we clearly see that she truly cared about Hannah when the
latter was burning up and Eva did everything she could to save her. In addition, at the beginning of the novel
we see that Eva left and lost a leg so that she could keep her kids healthy and, most important, alive.

Hannah and Eva definitely have different conceptions of what love and motherhood are. Eva thinks
motherhood has to do with taking care of the kids through actions, showing love by being a “good” mother
and keeping them alive. Hannah, as we see in what she said about Sula, thinks of motherhood as a duty as
well, something that she had to do (probably because she was a woman); however, she had a different view
of what being a good mother and showing love was. She would have wanted Eva to play with them when
they were kids, to be with them and show them love in that way.

What is the reason Eva gives for killing Plum?

“What’d you kill Plum for, Mamma?” Hannah asked. Eva is quiet at the beginning, remembering how when
Plum was only a baby, and very sick, she had to take care of him by giving up her own food. How she had to
stick her finger up his asshole because the kid wouldn’t stop screaming and crying in pain.

Then she answers: “He give me such a time. Such a time.” Eva explains that it seemed Plum didn’t had much
desire to even be born. As an adult, after coming back from the war, he behaved like an “overgrown baby”,
he showed all the signs of wanting to return to Eva’s womb. Eva concludes, “I birthed him one. I couldn’t do
it again.” Eva begins to cry as Hannah watches her. Hannah turns and leaves the room without saying a word,
and Eva, now sitting alone, calls Plum’s name.
Eva’s explanation is consistent with the imagery surrounding Plum’s death, particularly the cup of blood and
water and Plum’s childlike, drugged state. Eva couldn’t stand to see Plum the addict regressing to infancy: she
loved him so much that she didn’t want him to go through pain for years, especially because she would be
going through pain, too.

How does Hannah catch on fire? What does Eva do? What does Sula do? What do the characters actions
reveal about their feelings for Hannah? What are the moral implications of this episode in the novel?
Eva was looking for her comb when she looked out of the window and saw Hannah burning. She is standing
outside, and her dress is on fire. Eva immediately rushes, in her wooden frame, to push herself out of the
window, onto her daughter: “Eva knew there was time for nothing in this world other than the time it took to
get there and cover her daughter’s body with her own.” She pushes herself out and falls to the ground below,
twelve feet away from where Hannah is burning. Eva, cut and bleeding, drags herself toward Hannah with the
necessity to help her daughter. She can’t manage to do so, and Hannah dies.

Later on, Eva recalls seeing Sula just standing there, looking: “Inside she disagreed and remained convinced
that Sula had watched Hannah burn not because she was paralyzed, but because she was interested.” We
don’t know what exactly happened to Hannah: if it was an accident, if she lit herself on fire or even if Sula
was involved.

We do see, however, how far Eva is willing to go to save her daughter from fire (even after killing her other
child with fire), Eva’s desperate actions show that no matter her feelings of affection she does truly care about
her children deeply and fiercely. She killed one of her children because he had nothing else to do but to live
in pain; and she didn’t want her daughter to die because she was going to have a different future, probably.

On the other hand, Sula’s strange fascination with Hannah’s burning body is another kind of “sign” that can
be interpreted in different ways—and it starts to distance Sula from Eva and the rest of the community.

1927
In chapter “1927,” Nel marries Jude. “The two of them together would make one Jude.” It’s Nel’s friendship
with Sula that seems to be the deeper, more fulfilling personal relationship for her. “They themselves had
difficulty distinguishing one’s thoughts from the others.” At the height of their friendship and their
closeness, what does Nel and Sula’s friendship mean to each other?
Jude longs for a challenging physical job, he wants to work on the New River Road. He also craves the
camaraderie of working alongside people who are like him. Even though Jude doesn’t succeed in getting work
on the road, his ambitions compel him to get married to Nel. Jude imagines growing old with Nel, as he tells
himself, “The two of them together would make one Jude.”

In the months leading up to his marriage, Jude thinks about what Ajax had told him at the Pool Hall: all women
want to die for their men. Now that he’s newly married, Jude believes this to be true of Nel—she’s very gentle
and submits to him at all times. Jude notes that when he was wooing Nel, he was struck by how close she
was with Sula. Nel and Sula acted as if they were one person, not two. In this way, Jude was able to flatter Nel
by paying attention to her and only her.

“Her parents had succeeded in rubbing down to a dull glow any sparkle or splutter she had. Only with Sula
did that quality have free rein, but their friendship was so close, they themselves had difficulty distinguishing
one’s thoughts from the other’s.”

“Nel’s response to Jude’s shame and anger selected her away from Sula. And greater than her friendship was
this new feeling of being needed by someone who saw her singly. She didn’t even know she had a neck until
Jude remarked on it, or that her smile was anything but the spreading of her lips until he saw it as a small
miracle.”
Sula and Nel had grown so close to each other that they behaved as if they were one person. Friendship
sustains Sula and Nel, despite the momentary break in their relationship. When it comes down to it, Nel and
Sula are equally devoted to each other. As kids, they cling to each other, learn from each other, and balance
each other out. Without each other's friendship to count on, neither woman is as happy and secure as when
they do have each other.

Nel breaks her promise to define the boundaries of her own identity by choosing to marry young just as her
mother had. A marriage is supposed to be a happy event; however, Jude chooses marriage as the inferior
alternative to what he really wants: a man's job. Nel basically fulfills Helene's expectations by getting married
rather than fulfilling her own original plan to live a wonderful and exciting life on her own terms. In the end,
Helene succeeded in filing away the rough, unconventional edges from Nel's personality.

Part 2
1937
Ten years later, in Part Two, Sula and Eva have an agitated argument. Eva begins it.

“Don’t let your mouth start nothing that your ass can’t stand. When you gone to get married? You need
to have some babies. It’ll settle you.”
“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.”
“You did.”
“Not by choice” (92).

Analyse the full conversation. What do we learn about the characters?

With this conversation we come to understand that Eva wants Sula to have a conventional lifestyle; she wants
her granddaughter to behave as the ideal woman should. She has still some resentment over Sula for the way
in which she reacted when her mother died, for the way in which the girl simply stayed there and looked,
without even trying to help. Eva doesn’t like Sula nor the way in which she is living, but Sula doesn’t seem to
care for that. Sula wants to live for herself, to be who she wants to be without being questioned by her family.
She doesn’t want to settle down, like Eva said, because it wasn’t who she wanted to become. Settling down,
marrying someone and having kids would lead to a life similar to the one that her mother and grandmother
had, and she didn’t want that. She wanted to have her own life, make it all by herself.

In addition, it is a bit odd that Eva criticizes Sula for not following the conventional path considering Eva’s own
unconventional life: she criticizes Sula for remaining unmarried when she and Hannah never remarried; and
she and Hannah were fiercely independent, yet she criticizes Sula for her independence. However, Eva’s
criticism is probably related to two things. First, that Hannah and Eva didn’t initially chose to have that type
of life; they did get married and have children, they tried to have and behave as a woman had to. However,
they couldn’t comply for different reasons (their husbands left, in the case of Eva, and died, in the case of
Hannah). Second, Eva's attitude towards Sula might derive from her need to contain what she perceived as
Sula's influence in Hannah's death. Eva and Hannah were not considered serious threats to the social fabric
whereas the entire community, including Eva, considers Sula a threat.

What do these short passages from the narrator tell us about Sula’s character.

* Sula never competed; she simply helped others define themselves. Other people seemed to turn their
volume on and up and Sula was in the room (95).

* 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 (101).
Do these descriptions agree with each other, or do they show us contradictions in Sula’s character?
I believe that these descriptions do not agree with each other, yet they aren’t contradictions either. On the
one hand, the first statement shows Sula's desire to create and control her own identity, her own life. She
doesn't care about what she should do, and she doesn't want anyone else determining who she is. That is
way she didn’t compete; she didn’t need to. The others, that is the people in Medallion, disliked Sula so much
that they didn’t want to be like her. It was like by being with Sula people could understand more about
themselves, decide what they wanted and what they didn’t about themselves.

On the other hand, the second quote shows the other side of Sula’s personality. She wasn’t just that
apparently strong woman who didn’t care about what others did or thought. She was also that fragile girl
who wasn’t able to control her feelings, who didn’t know what to do when the situation got more and more
complicated. Sula was scared, so frightened to get hurt that she would isolate herself, or even hurt herself
first) to protect herself. And I think that this has a lot to do with what Sula heard Hannah saying (“I love her,
but I don’t like her”).

Sula was both strong and scared, independent and vulnerable. But people in Medallion, even Sula’s own
family, didn’t know that she was both these things. Only Nel did.

Jude leaves his new wife Nel for Sula, a woman he earlier indicated (104) he wasn’t even sexually attracted
to. What is the novel’s attitude toward and judgment of this affair?
By the end of this chapter, the narrator reveals that Nel has caught Jude having sex with Sula one afternoon.
Nel is hurt by the look Jude gives her when she discovers him with her best friend because it reminds her of
the look of contempt her mother received during their trip to New Orleans years earlier. After being found by
Nel, Jude packs his things and leaves Nel and the children.

Sula's total disregard for the social rules governing marriage nearly destroys Nel. Although Sula's actions could
be seen as selfish, it is important not to be seduced by the community's need to define her as an evil person,
as their decision to place all the blame for the failure of Nel's marriage on Sula is rather facile. After all, Jude
also chose to take part in the affair, and it was he who chose to leave his family. In addition, we should
remember the environment in which Sula grew up: her mother was free when sex was involved, and it was
known that she slept with her friend’s husbands. We can think that Sula didn’t know better and that she was
taught (not because someone told her, but because of what she saw) that it wasn’t off limits to do such things.
Moreover, we have to take into account Nel and Sula’s relationship, and how they behaved as if they were
one person. That doesn’t mean that Sula had the right to sleep with Nel’s husband, of course not. But it is
important to remember it because of Sula’s strange way of doing things.

“She had clung to Nel as the closest thing to both another and a self, only to discover that she and Nel were
not one and the same thing. She had no thought at all of causing Nel pain when she bedded down with Jude.
They had always shared the affection of other people: compared how a boy kissed, what line he used with
one and then the other. Marriage, apparently, had changed all that, but having had no intimate knowledge of
marriage, having lived in a house with women who thought all men available, and selected from among them
with a care only for their tastes, she was ill prepared for the possessiveness of the one person she felt close
to.” (From chapter “1939”)

Finally, we might say that Nel's devastation is partly due to her weak sense of self. She always viewed her
marriage as a combination of two halves of the same self. Nel cannot even cry after the end of her marriage.
She did everything that social convention demanded, but she was still abandoned by her husband. Besides,
Nel wants more than anything to be able talk to Sula about what happened, and we see this in the fact that
Nel’s thoughts continue to go back to the other woman again and again. We realize that, while Nel is sad to
have lost Jude, losing Sula has been worse. It's clear that most of her grief is for the loss of her friend.
“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. That was too much. To lose Jude and not have Sula to talk to about it because
it was Sula that he had left her for.”

1939
The people of Bottom had a surprising reaction to the highly active sexuality Sula brought back with her.
“They began to cherish their husbands and wives, protect their children, repair their homes and in general
band together against the devil in their midst” (117).

How does Sula (an “artist with no art form” 121) in her sexuality – and the reactions of others – develop
the sexual liberation theme in the novel?
In Medallion, there is a lot of criticism against Sula. This is partly due to the fact that she put Eva in Sunnydale,
and partly to the fact that she slept with Jude. Everybody in town vividly criticised Sula’s sexual liberation,
and they hated that she had, according to rumours, slept with white men: “They insisted that all unions
between white men and black women be rape; for a black woman to be willing was literally unthinkable.”

Sula knew that they despised her because of her easy way to lay with men. “Which was true. She went to bed
with men as frequently as she could. It was the only place where she could find what she was looking for:
misery and the ability to feel deep sorrow.”

The narrator notes that if Sula had known how to make art—to paint or dance—then she would have found
an outlet for her frustration. But instead, Sula can only bounce from one sexual partner to the other, never
finding the relief she craves. Sula continues to sleep with men because she craves sadness. Her favorite
moment of sex is the moment after, when her lover turns away from her and she can be alone with her
feelings.

Sula changes behaviours after meeting Ajax. “Sula began to discover what possession was. Not love,
perhaps, but possession or at least the desire for it” (131). How does her relationship with Ajax inflect the
sexual liberation thematic meaning of Sula?
The narrator describes Ajax as a man who only loved his mother and airplanes. In the ten years of Sula’s
absence, he had heard many stories about her, and how she was famously elusive and unpredictable. Thus,
when Sula returns to town, he can’t resist paying her a visit. Ajax suspects that Sula will be just like his mother:
uninterested in other people, and thus uninterested in having sex with him.

Sula does decide to sleep with Ajax. She’s been charmed by his gifts, but the real reason that she is attracted
to him is that he “talked to her,” and seems genuinely interested in what she thinks. Ajax was a good listener,
the narrator notes: he had lots of practice, growing up with five siblings and a mysterious mother.

Sula's relationship with Ajax opens her to new feelings; she discovers the possessive nature of love. Earlier,
she condemned Nel for conforming to the web of conventional social expectations, yet she herself is seduced
by the promise of security that her love with Ajax seems to offer. All of sudden, Sula starts wondering when
Ajax is going to show up, and she pays more attention to her appearance; she "ties a green ribbon in her hair"
and cleans the house and makes them dinner. Ajax realizes that things have changed between them. He
suddenly notices her ribbon and the fact that the house is now spotless. He realizes that soon she will start
to act like a possessive girlfriend or wife. He sleeps with her with the knowledge that it will be for the last
time, which it is.

We jump forward a bit here and find Sula trying to find something, anything to prove that Ajax was once part
of her life. Everything in the house reminds her of him, but there is no "tangible evidence of his having ever
been there”. But then she finds his driver's license and she sees that his name is actually Albert Jacks (A.
Jacks), not Ajax. When she realizes that she never even knew his name, it becomes clear that she never really
knew him at all, and she blames herself for his leaving.

1940
In Sula’s serious illness, Nel brings her medicine, and the two have a very meaningful, resonant
conversation.

“I sure did live in this world,” [Sula says].

“Really? What have you got to show for it?”
“Show? To sho? Girl, I got my mind. And what goes on in it. Which is to say, I got me.”
“Lonely, ain’t it.”
“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” (143).

Which side of this spat does the novel come down on?
The differences between Sula and Nel become clearer in this scene. In a way, both friends have found their
own ways to make peace with the world. Nel adopts a strategy of rigid control, while Sula continues searching
for freedom and independence, even if doing so involves hurting other people. Sula refuses to embrace the
self-hatred and pessimism that infects the rest of the Bottom. Yes, Sula is lonely; but because she wants to be
lonely. She is lonely because she stayed true to herself, not because someone left her (like Nel); she is lonely,
but she has herself to rely on.

Sula didn’t want to spend her life trying to be a good woman, trying to keep a man for herself and complying
what society wanted her to do. She did what she felt correct, what she desired to do; she was free and curious,
having always been independent and done what she wanted for her own pleasure. And, maybe, that was the
reason why people in Medallion hated her so much: they wanted to do just what Sula did, but couldn’t.

The conversation Nel has with Sula raises the ambiguity of terms like "good" and "evil." Sula claims her
loneliness and her sickness as her own. She has always remained true to her personal desires rather than
those of society. Sula does not deny her actions, but refuses to accept total responsibility for the rupture of
their friendship. She also refuses to accept total responsibility for the end of Nel's marriage. Sula states that
she slept with Jude, but Jude chose to abandon his marriage. In contrast to Nel, who relies on a sense of
herself as being "good" to make her way in the world, Sula can acknowledge the negative consequences of
her decisions.

Before she dies, Sula has reflective thoughts about crucial events in her life (and in the novel) – why she
had an affair with Jude, her looking on as Hannah burned alive, her death itself (144-149). How do these
final, death-bed reflections affect the reader’s view and understanding of Sula as a character?
Just before dying Sula has a dream about the “Clabber Girl Baking Powder Lady.” Proximity to the woman
brings her to ruin and leaves Sula scrambling to collect an unattainable powder. The dream directly follows
Sula’s memories about watching her mother die in the fire. She remembers being fascinated by the fire death
dance but says she did not mean any harm and that “I never meant anything”. Sula awakes from the dream
choking and smelling smoke.

Just before Sula dies, she gets the urge to tell Nel about how death doesn't hurt. This passage is reminiscent
of Nel's thoughts earlier in the novel when Jude first leaves her for Sula. Even in extreme anger, she still
thought about what Sula would say about her feelings and how they would talk about them. Even as the
friendship dissolves, there are solidities that never fade, no matter the difficulties of maintaining them
through time. The urge to talk with each other, to share experience, is still there, even at the moment of
death.
“Sula felt her face smiling. “Well, I’ll be damned,” she thought, “it didn’t even hurt. Wait’ll I tell Nel.”

This final part of the chapter made me, as a reader, understand a bit more about Sula. She was a free soul,
she wanted to be herself. But she was deeply hurt from everything that happened to her as a child. I don’t
she meant to harm people through her actions; honestly, I believe that she just didn’t know what to do. That,
maybe, the only thing she did know was that she wanted to be herself, and she let her emotions take over
her and her life. Her emotions and her strong desire for free willed her to take bad decisions. And she is
human. Unlike even the other people of the Bottom, she has no strong community to support her: she’s
always tried to figure things out for herself, moving from one lover to the next. However, at her end she comes
back to the only person that she had ever loved: Nel.

1941
After Sula’s death:
- We are told that Sula’s death was one of the best announcements that people in the Bottom had had.
They’re so accustomed to interpreting signs to fit their biased outlook that they’re grateful for such a
seemingly unambiguous piece of good fortune immediately after Sula’s death.
- There was, however, something wrong: people become angrier and sadder. Without her "evil" influence
to rally them together, the moral righteousness Sula inspired in the townspeople begins to crumble.
- On January 3, Shadrack conducts his usual fanfare, although it lacks the significance it once held for him.
This time, however, people begin to follow her as she follows him, and in time, a parade of people is
marching behind Shadrack down Carpenter’s Road. In the chaos, the tunnel collapses and kills many of
those who marched down behind Shadrack. Dessie, Tar Baby, and some of Ajax’s brothers die in the
collapse. It is said that the Deweys also died that day, since they were never seen again. Shadrack, who
has stopped singing and ringing his cowbell, watches the entire incident from above.

1965
Eva ends her life seemingly with some meanness and venom.

“After the way Eva had just treated her, accused her, she wondered if the townspeople hadn’t been right
the first time. Eva was mean. Sula had even said so. There was no good reason for her to speak so. Feeble-
minded or not. Old. Whatever. Eva knows what she was doing. Always had. She had stayed away from
Sula’s funeral and accused Nel of drowning Chicken Little for spite (171).”

How does Eva’s ending affect the novel’s thematic ideas on motherhood?
Eva is forgetful and confused, thinking she is doing the visiting and then mistaking Nel for Sula. She accuses
Nel of killing Chicken, but Nel tells her it's a lie. Eva won't believe her, and then Nel realizes that Eva is wavering
between recognizing her and thinking she is Sula. Nel is still scared, wondering who told Eva that she stood
by and watched Chicken drown without doing anything. Eva tells her it was Plum, her dead son. He "tells her
things" now.

Each mother had a different behaviour in this novel. In the case of Eva, her perception of motherhood had to
do with providing to her children. Throughout several episodes, we realize that despite not saying it, Eva truly
loved her children. By the end of her life, Eva is still angry at Sula for the way she reacted when Hannah dies;
and we may believe that her accusation of Nel killing Chicken little is a parallel of the way she resented Sula.
For Eva, Sula and Nel were the same person, and she disliked both. The accusation from Eva about Chicken
brings to light a connection Sula and Nel had: they both felt a sense of satisfaction watching a person die.
They focused on aspects of the incidents that helped them feel something other than fear. For Nel, the
peacefulness of the gently flowing river took away any awful feeling she might have had watching it swallow
up the little boy; for Sula, seeing her mother dance wildly as fire consumed her was more interesting than the
fact that she was being burned alive. Nel now realizes that what she thought was a mature, compassionate
reaction to the drowning was actually the calm that can occur after experiencing great excitement.

Nel ends the novel with an epiphany: she has been mourning the loss of her best friend, and the most
important person in her life, Sula, ever since she ran away with her husband. What does this revelation
mean for our interpretation of Sula?
Sula isn’t merely about Sula. It is about Sula and Nel’s friendship, and how important they were in each other’s
lives. At different points in the novel, we realize that Nel and Sula were the most important person in the
other’s life; the person they had loved the most. In the case of Sula, it is when she is dying that she thinks
about Nel. In the case of Nel, it is the way in which her thoughts always end up involving the other girl.

Morrison describes Nel's cry when she realizes what she has lost as having "no bottom and it had no top, just
circles and circles of sorrow." All Nel's memories circle around to those moments when Sula was important
to her, and then they return to the present, her best friend gone. The tragedy of Nel’s life is that she’s been
taught that she needs to find a husband—that she can only be happy if she finds a man and has children. And
yet the search for a husband hasn’t brought her any happiness and has only left her feeling frustrated and
purposeless. The only relationship that seemed to bring Nel real happiness—her friendship with Sula—is gone
now, thanks to years of betrayal and jealousy. This final scene, however, is a kind of reconciliation for the
two—as Sula died thinking of Nel, and Nel finally seems to forgive Sula. By the end, Nel realizes that her
friendship with Sula was much more meaningful than her marriage with Jude.

GENERAL QUESTIONS
Readers often love, hate, or love-and-hate this book. Some examples of the scenes in Part One that tend
to inspire strong reactions are:
- Eva's lost leg (pages 29-31 ff.)
- Plum's death (45-48)
- Nel and Sula playing with sticks (58-9)
- Nel and Sula playing with Chicken Little (60-61)
- Eva's response to Hannah's question about love (67)
- Hannah and the yard fire (75-78)

Why would these scenes inspire such a strong response? Think about each one of these scenes. What is
disturbing or provocative about it? What does it make you think about? What is its relationship to the
novel's important themes, plots, and characters? What is your own response to or your own ideas about
each of these scenes?
I believe that these scenes have a such a strong impact, whether it is love or hate, in the readers because
they are hard scenes to read. These scenes make the readers uncomfortable; they are disturbing scenes with
a lot of details that make you want to stop reading, but at the same time you feel as if it were impossible to
take your eyes out of the novel. These scenes play with morality, with what we, as a society, consider to be
good or bad. For that reason, when we read them, we find ourselves judging the characters for their actions.
But soon we find out that we cannot group them into good or bad, because they are so human. Sula’s
characters are so close to real life people that it is uncomfortable to read; it makes you think and reconsider
your own thoughts.

Track down the biblical origin of as many of the names as you can. Some will be obvious, others less
obvious. Which names seem appropriate to their biblical origin? Which names don't seem to fit? If any
biblical name doesn't seem appropriate, why do you think Morrison uses it in Sula. Have you been able to
spot any other Christian or biblical symbolism? If so, what are some examples?
Jude: his name makes us think of Judas Iscariot, the infamous disciple who betrayed Jesus for 30 pieces of
silver. In the bible, Judas was a traitor. In Sula, Jude betrayed Nel by sleeping with her best friend.

Eva: it's related to Eve, the first woman on earth and the mother of humankind in the Jewish bible and the
Christian bible's Old Testament. We can think that Eva was the first of these women, the one that started it
all in the novel.

Shadrack: in the Bible, Shadrach was one of the three captives who came out of the fiery furnace miraculously
unharmed.

The bottom: heaven / hell

The birth mark: “looking like a snake” – Jude describes Sula’s birthmark in that way, before feeling attracted
to her and betraying Nel (just like, in the Bible, the snake made Adam eat the apple and betray, somehow,
God’s wills).

Sula seems to be a novel that's filled with symbolic references: place names, character names, repeated
images (mirrors, skin colour, fire, water, wind, birds, etc.). Choose any one symbol or repeated image and
track it through the novel. Think about the meanings of this symbol in relationship to the novel's plot,
characters, and themes. Can you think of other symbols that are important to the story?
Birds: The plague of robins that appears in the Bottom at the same time Sula returns is a symbol of evil. In
this case it is too much of a good thing; their arrival is a welcome sign of spring, but a plague of them creates
a huge mess. Everything is covered in excrement, and dead robins lie rotting on people's lawns. Eva is sure
the plague is an omen; Sula will soon inflict her evil on the community. The narrator describes evil as a
necessary part of life, synonymous with all the difficult aspects of life the community endures. As an evil,
Sula's behaviour is lumped in with disease, white people, and too many robins: possible or likely but
survivable, nevertheless.

Birds are everywhere in Sula, and they are often associated with specific characters. When we meet Rochelle,
she wears a "canary-yellow dress" and has the "glare of a canary". And we already know that a "plague of
robins” arrives in Medallion just before Sula does. Birds invoke the idea of flight, which makes sense when
we consider that Cecile and Sula both flee at some point in the story. And robins are often associated with
the spring, the season of rebirth and growth. Although Sula brings with her a lot of pain and destruction, we
learn that her presence also generates a renewed sense of purpose in the Bottom, even if it is directed against
her.

Fire: Fire symbolizes the destruction of family bonds. Eva, rather than watch her son Plum fade away from
his heroin addiction, chooses to sever ties with him by burning him to death. She soaks him in kerosene and
lights him on fire. However, this is not the only bond destroyed by fire. Hannah accidentally sets herself
alight and burns to death. Sula loses her mother, but the tie between them has already been broken when
Hannah says to her friends that she doesn't like Sula. Sula watches her mother burn and doesn't make a
move to help save her. Hannah's death also severs the bonds between Eva and her daughter, but Eva
survives and must live out the rest of her life in misery.

Sula’s birthmark: Sula has a birthmark above one eye, from the middle of her eyelid to her eyebrow.
Depending on the person describing the birthmark, it is either a beautiful thing or a mark of evil. The mark
symbolizes the opinions of other characters about Sula: people see what they want to see. Nel sees it as a
rose on a stem, which "gave her glance a suggestion of startled pleasure." However, Nel's children see it as
a "scary black thing over her eye," and Jude sees it as a venomous snake. He thinks "her wide smile took
some of the sting from that rattlesnake over her eye." Shadrack, who considers Sula as his only visitor and
friend, sees the mark as "a tadpole over her eye (that was how he knew she was a friend—she had the
mark of the fish he loved)."
Water: Water is often associated with death in the novel. For Sula (and Nel, to a lesser degree), it represents
Chicken's horrible drowning. Fire might be a cleansing force, but water engulfs and consumes the young boy.
Water doesn't comfort Sula but rather agitates and upsets her because of her responsibility for Chicken's
death. At the end of the novel, one of the townspeople who die in the tunnel slides and hits the ice below.

Flowers: We can again turn to Rochelle and Sula for this one. When Nel meets Rochelle, she notices that she
smells like gardenias. Sula has a birthmark shaped like a rose, and "The Rose Tattoo" is the source of the
novel's epigraph. These particular flowers are beautiful and fragrant, even intoxicating. Rochelle intoxicates
the young Nel, and Sula intoxicates the many men around her. These characters are also a little dangerous
in that they disrupt the lives of the people they encounter. But the thing about flowers is, once they're picked,
they don't live for very long. Just as the flower's beauty is fleeting, so too is the presence of both of these
women in the novel.