Sula by Toni Morrison 1973

“Sula” was Toni Morrison’s second novel, published in 1973, twenty years before Morrison won the Nobel Prize for Literature.  National Book Critic Circle Award, a Pulitzer, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the National Humanities Medal, and other honors followed this incredible talent who began writing when she was working as a single mother at a textbook publisher.  Educated at Howard and Cornell, she came to fiction late in life, and eventually taught literature and creative writing at Princeton. She died in 2019 at 88.

In “Sula” Morrison tells the story of two young girls growing up in Medallion, Ohio, parallel to her own youth in Lorain, OH.  Sula Pearce is the daughter of Hannah and the granddaughter of Eva, two headstrong and powerful women surviving in a hostile world and a chaotic household.  When it becomes clear that her youngest child, a son named Plum, is a hopeless addict, Eva murders him.  Hannah ends up a suicide in the same manner, leaving her daughter, Sula to go off to college before returning to Medallion as an adult.

Nel Wright is the daughter of Helene, whose house and life is in perfect order.  Witnessing an early humiliation of her mother on a ‘whites only’ Pullman car, Nel is sensitive, cautious, responsible and orderly—just the opposite of Sula her best friend since they witnessed a tragic and secret event.  Nel remains in Medallion with her husband and children until Sula returns to town with disastrous results.

While it took some time to sort out the various characters, families, and relationships, I was totally captured by Morrison’s prose by the end of the first page.   Kenneth Davis describes it as rich and poetic. In describing how white flight is about to destroy her hold neighborhood, the narrator writes, “Generous funds have been allotted to level the stripped and faded buildings that clutter the road from Medallion up to the golf course. They are going to raze the Time and a Half Pool Hall, where feet in long tan shoes once pointed down from chair rungs. A steel ball will knock to dust Irene’s Place of Cosmtology, where women used to lean their heads back on sink trays and doze while Irene lathered Nu Nile into their hair.  Men in khaki work clothes will pry loose the slats of Reba’s Grill, where the owner cooked in her hat because she couldn’t remember the ingredients without it.”  That is great writing and skillfully sets the location for the book’s action.

Morrison’s later books, “The Song of Solomon” (1977) and “Beloved”(1987) are better known, but this one is well worth reading as well and at 174 pages, a faster read.