‘Sula’ by Toni Morrison

Fiction – paperback; Vintage Classics; 208 pages; 2022.

“Begging you to read Sula by Toni Morrison,” my niece Monet said in a WhatsApp message in mid-January. “Finishing that book felt like a break-up… it’s my new favourite book.”

With such high praise, I put in a reservation request at my local library and a few weeks later the book was available for me to read.

When I was about a third of the way through it, I sent Monet a message: “OMG. This book. The mother burning her son. The two girls drowning that little boy.”

It was a story that was full of jaw-dropping moments, most of which I didn’t see coming. It gave the story a compelling and powerful edge.

Sula comes in at less than 200 pages, but it contains a lifetime of angst, love, joy, death, tragedy and humour. Every page contains something surprising or revelatory.

I filled it with Post-It tabs, which I use to mark passages I like or think important to the story, and writing this review now, I’m not quite sure how to summarise the book except to say it’s a powerful yet unconventional tale about friendship, identity, betrayal, systematic racism and the consequences of societal expectations in a small American town in the early to mid-20^th century.

The tension between tradition and rebellion, conformity and individuality, are central themes.

It was Morrison’s second novel, first published in 1973, and is largely regarded as being integral to the formation of black feminist literary criticism.

But I didn’t read the book through that lens, nor, I’m sure did Monet.

I read it as a compelling tale about a Black community framed around the unlikely friendship between two girls, the titular Sula Peace and Nel Wright, from opposite sides of the social spectrum who become super close as children but choose different paths to follow as adults. In the end, their friendship disintegrates spectacularly but leaves both feeling lonely and misunderstood.

My thoughts

👍🏽 I loved the way Morrison paints such an evocative portrait of the town known as Bottom and then fills it with intriguing and flawed characters, including

• Sula, a complex and rebellious figure who defies societal norms and expectations and has a birthmark on her face which might be a sign of the devil
• her friend Nel, who represents conformity and tradition in contrast to the way Sula lives her life
• Helene, Nel’s mother, who strives for respectability and acceptance
• Hannah Peace, Sula’s mother, known for her beauty, promiscuity and carefree attitude
• Eva Peace, Sula’s grandmother, a strong and resilient woman who raises her grandchildren after their mother’s abandonment.

👍🏽 I was taken aback by the shocks that come one after another, but they make the book compelling and page-turning. There’s death by burning (twice), death by drowning, adultery and personal confrontations.

Morrison sets the scene pretty early on by having Shadrack, a seriously traumatised Great War veteran, discharged from hospital far too early. Left to his own devices with just “$217 in cash, a full suit of clothes and copies of very official looking papers”, he has nowhere to go and is too weak to walk steadily along the gravel shoulder of the road he heads out west on.

Passengers in dark, square cars shuttered their eyes at what they took to be a drunken man. […] The police took him to jail, booked him for vagrancy and intoxication, and locked him in a cell. (pages 12-13)

👍🏽 I appreciated the way Morrison integrates casual and systematic racism into the narrative to show that this is the way Black people were treated but makes no commentary on the injustice of it; she just lets the examples sit there and if you weren’t looking for it or lack lived experience, it’s so subtle you might not even notice.

As an example, when Helene takes Nel on a train journey, she is shocked to discover the restrooms are reserved for white people only. When she asks a fellow passenger where the toilet is, she’s told it’s over “yonder” and is directed to a field of long grass.

And when a bargeman tells the sheriff that he’s found a young Black boy’s body in the river, the sheriff is completely disinterested because “they didn’t have no niggers in their country” and is advised to “throw it on back into the water” as if the boy was a piece of rubbish.

Monet’s thoughts

👍🏽 This is an absolutely gorgeous book. The prose is beautiful and flawless in its entirety. The twists are so unexpected; the way it’s written you have no idea what’s going to happen next. And the relationships between the characters are magnificent.

👍🏽 I was instantly hooked by the retelling of Nel on the train. The racism was shocking to read about — especially considering that this was the average life of an African-American woman in the 1920s. The fact that the train carriages were segregated, then the toilets, made me verbally say, “WTF”.

👍🏽 The fact that Morrison’s writing could make me fall in and out of love with characters throughout the book was inspiring. I loved Sula in the beginning and admired her confidence and aura, but by the end, I had accepted her fate and longed for her misfortune.

My rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Monet’s rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Monet and I have previously written joint reviews for James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk and Yuko Tsushima’s Territory of Light.