Sula: Reader Response Journal

Toni Morrison's Sula is a novel about the Black community living in the city of Medallion, in an area called the Bottom, which ironically is a giant hill. Why did Morrison place them on a giant hill in the middle of a white community? To show that the African American community was singled out? The story starts with the character Shadrack, who just got home from WWI, and who is seriously suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. He ends up living in isolation, in a run-down shack near the river. He created his own crazy holiday, and "except for World War II, nothing ever interfered with the celebration of Nation Suicide Day. It had taken place every January third since 1920, although Shadrack, its founder, was for many years the only celebrant" (1). What? I don't understand why he made up a holiday called National Suicide Day. Is it foreshadowing that he will kill himself? Anyways the novel Sula primarily focuses on the lives of two young girls, Sula and Nel, whom despite the fact that they were best friends, lived very different lives.

Sula grew up in a very large house that was constantly full of many people. Sula had a very unique look; "Sula was a heavy brown with large quiet eyes, one of which featured a birthmark that spread from the middle of the lid toward the eyebrow, shaped something like a stemmed rose" (52). What significance is this birthmark on her eye, does it matter that it's shaped like a rose? Her grandmother, Eva first built their house and made it bigger as her family grew; she took in many couples of newlyweds, orphans who became known as the "Deweys"(38), brothers, sisters, cousins, her children, and a couple random people all lived in the house. So Sula grew up without a lot of privacy, living in a house where there was always someone around. Sula had no father figure in her life growing up, her grandpa and father had abandoned their wives. Could that have an impact on how she grows up? Because her mom had no husband, and slept around with many men Sula's attitude towards sex was, "that sex was pleasant and frequent but otherwise unremarkable" (44). Does this attitude shape how she acts the rest of her life?

Nel was raised by her mother Helene Wright. I thought it was really interesting how Nel was raised in a similar way to white women who were supposed to grow up to be the perfect wives; "Under Helene's hand the girl became obidient and polite. Any enhusiasms that little Nel showed were calmed by the mother until she drove her daughter's imagination underground" (18). I could tell Helene's strict parenting comes from her mother, when she has Nel meet her grandmother. I was confused when Nel's grandma asked her, "'Comment t'appelle?' 'She doesn't talk Creole.' 'Then you ask her.' 'She wants to know your name, honey.' 'With her head pressed into her mother's heavy brown dress, Nel told her and then asked, 'what's yours?' 'Mine's Rochelle'" (26). Why do they bring up Creole, and what language is it anyways? It seems sort of like French, but i'm not sure. And I found it weird that this is the only time they bring it up.

This book had a lot of death throughout it. The first one was probably the most unexpected; Eva had hopped downstairs one night and entered her son Plum's room. I don't know what was going through her mind or what compelled her to do this but "Eva stepped back from the bed and let the crutches rest under her arms. She rolled a bit of newspaper into a tight stick about six inches long, lit it and threw it onto the bed where the keosene-soaked Plum lay in snug delight" (47). Why does she kill her son, just because he's a wash-out after coming back from the war? Another death in the story that is confusing is that of the little boy named Chicken Little. Sula and Nel were just playing around when he showed up. They played with him for awhile, until Sula swung him around in a circle, and he was laughing and having a good time. He slipped out of Sula's grip and fell into the water. "When he slipped from her hands and sailed away out over the water they could still hear his bubbly laughter" (60-61). He then drowned from being in the water. What I don't understand is why Sula and Nel did nothing to save the boy; if anything they just stood and watched him drown. Speaking of a time when Sula did nothing, She also just stood and watched when her mother caught fire on accident and burnt to death. Eva, who claimed to have never loved her daughter Hannah, risked her life jumping out her fourth story window and almost killing herself to save her daughter.

The other aspect of this book that I found strange was the references to sex. Sula's mother Hannah had sex with many many men, so Sula did the same when she grew up. She even slept with Nel's husband Jude. The book talks a lot about whores, and what they do and how they act. Why such an emphasis on sex? I think the scene where Nel and Sula do some very weird things together. Are they turning things in nature into sex? That's really weird since they are only like twelve years old. Morrison describes the "sex" scene very vividly; "but soon she grew impatient and poked her twig rhymically and intensely into the earth, making a small neat hole that grew deeper and wider with the least manipulation of her twig" (58). Why does she go into this detail on the little girl's interpretation of sex? This part was kind of sick and confusing to me. At the end they fill their holes up with things, "each of them looked around for more debris to throw into the hold: paper, bits of glass, buts of cigarettes, until all of the small defiling things they could find where collected there. Carefully they replaced the soil and covered the entire grave with uprooted grass" (59). What is this supposed to mean? Is it symbolic? I thought that maybe it represented all the junk the put into their lives just to feel like they've filled their life. I think that it is sad that Morrison writes it to show the girls feeling like that at such a young age. Could that be what warps Sula later in her life?

As the book progresses, Nel gets married and Sula leaves town. Why did she leave at a time of her best friend's happiest moment? Was she jealous? Sula then comes back ten years later seemingly rich, and with a terrible new attitude. She sleeps with Nel's husband Jude, ruining their relationship and throwing Nel's life into turmoil. How could she do that to her best friend, doesn't she care at all anymore? She sleeps around with many men just like her mother did, only Sula seems to do it in an even more degrating way. She even puts her grandmother, Eva, into a old folk's home when she doesn't need to be in one just yet. Altogether, the entire town dislikes this "new" Sula and she basically lives in isolation in Eva's old room, her only real romance was with a character named Ajax. When he leaves her and she finds out his actual name was, "Albert Jacks? His name was Albert Jacks? A. Jacks. She had thought it was Ajax. All those years" (135). Sula is torn apart because the only man she ever really loved left her and she realized she never even truely knew who he was. Sula dies one night after a nightmare she had many times where she was engulfed with powder. After her death the town feels grateful at first, but then they feel something like an emptiness once she's gone, "the tension was gone and so was the reason for the effort they had made. Without her mockery, affection for others sank into flaccid disrepair" (153).

The book ends with Shadrack marching out one last time for National Suicide Day, only this time his half-hearted attempt makes the whole town join in, and as they march to the tunnel that was supposed to be built the citizens tear it down and cause a cave-in, which kills many of the characters in the book.
I thought that Toni Morrison's Sula was a very different book. I didn't really care for the book. It was a very dense book to read and I felt that many of the descriptions and added words just distracted the reader from the main part of the book. The plot was hard for me to find and follow, and I was confused most of the time. A good third of the time I spent reading the book was going back and re-reading the section I just read trying to figure out what it meant or why it was in the book at all.