Toni Morrison’s novel Sula, like its title character, defies simplistic interpretation. Both a tale about the intense friendship of its two protagonists, Nel Wright and Sula Peace, and a small, rural black community in Ohio in the throes of economic survival, the novel poses complex and contradictory ideas about identity and self-awareness in the face of violence, death, and change. Rejection, acceptance or even awareness of self is a theme that runs throughout Morrison’s novels, particularly in The Bluest Eye, The Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, and Jazz. Yet a more careful reading of the book’s historical subtext reveals a deeper understanding of how Morrison’s conceptualizations of identity and self-revelation informs much of the novel’s narrative.
The book itself begins with an ending: the death of a community, and it is the literal violence of this ending which evokes its history. “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” (3). The Bottom, the black section of Medallion which is facing this violent dislocation, was nothing more than a “nigger joke,” one in which blacks and whites alike told to brace themselves against the hardships of life. The beginning of this community, in which a white farmer tricks his newly freed slave into accepting hill land as price for having completed difficult work by assuring him that it was the “bottom of heaven,” sets the stage for the rest of the novel. It is out of this community, this “nigger joke,” that the characters, Sula, Nel, Eva, Hannah, Tar Baby, Helene Wright, and others, interact. The city of Medallion, and the Bottom, the small black section of the town, are wholly fictional and yet they are not without historical precedent. In an interview with Robert Steptoe, Morrison stated that Medallion was born out of a story her mother had once told her. “When [Morrison’s mother] first got married, she and my father went to live in Pittsburgh. And I remember her telling me that in those days all the black people lived in the hills of Pittsburgh, but now they lived amid the smoke and dirt in the heart of that city” (Gates, ed. 379). Dislocation is a theme that runs throughout Morrison’s family history. Her maternal grandparents, John Solomon and Ardelia Willis, sharecroppers from Alabama, lost their land to whites, then later settled up north to escape poverty and racism down south. Their movement mirrored that of many African Americans during the first half of the twentieth century, particularly during and following the first World War. This historical pretext offers insight into the influences of Morrison’s themes.
The novel itself spans forty years between 1919-1965. Its structure is similarly dictated by time, with each chapter titled yearly. The first part of the book occurs in the years during and following World War I (Part Two occurs in the years leading up to World War II). This shift toward the past is occasioned by the death of the Bottom. This was Morrison’s purpose, as she says in “Unspeakable Things Spoken”: “In between ‘place’ and ‘neighborhood,’ I [now] have to squeeze the specificity and the difference; the nostalgia, the history, and the nostalgia for the history; the violence done to it and the consequences of that violence’ (qtd. in Galehouse). The dislocation beginning the novel that shifts it to the past parallels the physical shifts occurring for African Americans during that period.
In what became known as the Great Migration, over a million black southerners fled the jim crow south to seek out new opportunities the war in Europe opened up in the industrial north in the form of manufacturing and war production jobs. Natural disasters, such as the boll weevil infestation and the flooding of the Mississippi Delta in 1915-1916, which destroyed cotton crops and left many African Americans without the prospect of work, also greatly contributed to the migration. By 1910, black men and women were filling thousands of jobs in the steel mills, meat packinghouses and rail- and shipyards, as well as domestic and hotel service staff work. When blacks were included in the draft, more than two hundred thousand served in the military during the war. Some, particularly in the 369th, 370th, 371st, and 372nd infantry regiments, served under French command (white officers in the U.S. Army refused to serve with black soldiers), fighting valiantly on the battlefields and earning France’s highest military honor, the croix de guerre. Meanwhile, black women were filling the places of the men in the factories, earning considerably more money and spending more time with their families than they did as domestics (Horton 219-221). These economic and military opportunities, along with the collective political clout of such organizations as the newly formed NAACP, gave black people a hint of what racial equality could achieve, becoming what scholar Alain Locke called the “new Negro.” This “new Negro” was now aggressive and outspoken against the racial hatred he encountered in the north and south.
The response to the changing attitudes of Black Americans was swift and often violent. Tensions ignited over competition for housing and jobs in the north. Returning black soldiers who, having fought to defend democracy abroad, were also demanding racial equality at home. Fears, as expressed by Sen. James K. Vardaman (D-Mississippi) over “arrogant, strutting representatives of black soldiery in every community” (qtd. in Sellman ), were commonplace. Intimidated by this new, aggressive Negro, whites turned to violence. Commenting on the opposition African Americans faced during this period, Du Bois wrote in his autobiography, Dusk to Dawn:
The facts concerning the year 1919 are unbelievable as one looks back on them today. During that year, seventy-seven Negroes were lynched, of whom one was a woman and eleven were soldiers; of these, fourteen were publicly burned, eleven of them being burned alive. That year there were race riots large and small in twenty-six American cities including thirty-eight killed in a Chicago riot in August; from twenty-five to fifty killed in Phillips County, Arkansas; six killed in Washington. For a day, the city of Washington in 1919, was actually in the hands of a Black mob fighting the aggression of the Whites with hand grenades (qtd. in Christian, 315).
This period is instructive in the way in which it reveals two patterns of African American social constructs: one from agrarianism to urbanization; poverty to prosperity; unemployment to productivity; passivity to aggression; disenfranchisement to greater political power. Morrison draws on these separate constructs in Sula. The changes that erupt in the Bottom, first, physically in its destruction to the sacrifice of suburban capitalist redevelopment, second, psychologically in the form of Sula, whose indifference to the community’s moral standards forces its residents to protect themselves “against the devil in their midst” (117-118), and third, through the destruction of the New River Tunnel by the Bottom residents over the “leaf-dead promise” of new work, are reflective of the physical and social changes also occurring in the world beyond Medallion. The mass movement of blacks from the south to the north and the collective gains of prosperity and political power required a new way of thinking about self necessary to accommodate these shifting constructs. But what this new way of thinking exactly embodied was a debate largely argued between two of Black America’s preeminent social and political thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century: Du Bois and Booker T. Washington.
Washington, an educator and political leader who, in 1881, headed the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, rose to national renown in 1895 when he delivered a speech at the Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition to a white audience. In his address, he assured his audience of the Negroes’ “fidelity” to white Southerners and his “[readiness] to lay down our lives, if need be, in defence of yours, interlacing our industrial, commercial, civil, and religious life with yours in a way that shall make the interests of both races one” (qtd. in Horton 209-210). He also urged blacks to accept their “second-class citizenship” within the segregated south and build upon their fortunes through “hard work” and “self-reliance” in agricultural, mechanical, commercial, and domestic fields. “No race can prosper,” he stated, “till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem” (209). While Washington quickly won favor among his white audiences, he was criticized by black leaders for pacifying whites and turning his back on seeking “full citizenship, ignor[ing] violence and injustice, or accept[ing] a socially inferior status” (212) for blacks. One of Washington’s fiercest critics was W.E.B. Du Bois.
Du Bois, a New England native and graduate of Fisk University, and author of The Souls of Black Folk, differed greatly from Washington’s beliefs. He believed racial progress could only be achieved by facing head-on the racial inequities besetting America and by demanding full citizenship for African Americans. Part of this progress could be realized, he thought, through what he coined “The Talented Tenth,” a group of professional African American men and women who “carried the responsibility for uplifting their brothers and sisters” (212). Du Bois organized the Niagara Movement in 1905, which sought to challenge racial discrimination in all forms. According to Charles M. Christian in Black Saga, the movement lasted only five years, possibly due to a lack of “widespread acceptance,” but is cited as a “precursor” to the NAACP, which was founded in 1909.
While Washington and Du Bois posed very different constructs of black progress, the events leading up to and following the first World War and the Great Migration, made it apparent that a shift in attitudes among blacks favored Du Bois’s prescriptions for racial justice. Heightened racial tensions over discrimination, lynchings, and white mob violence made it impossible for black Americans to ignore. As more and more blacks fled the south, they also abandoned the agrarian life Washington believed was necessary for economic progress, in favor of the city. In so doing, they became, as James Oliver and Lois E. Horton write in Hard Road to Freedom: The Story of African America, “more urban, more militant, and politically and economically more powerful” (225). Not all African Americans chose to follow in Du Bois’s path. Marcus Garvey, a native Jamaican and Booker T. Washington devotee, formed the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), a black nationalist movement, which called for African migration and greater expression for self pride. At the height of his movement, Garvey had over a million followers (Horton 228).
Within each of these very different prescripts was the idea that progress could only occur if there was a shift or relocation of psychological, moral, and physical constructs within the sphere of self-awareness (while Garvey and Du Bois encouraged migration to Africa and the northern United States respectively, only Washington believed blacks should remain in the south. “You are farmers; stick to your job” (qtd. in Horton, 228)). Morrison, likewise, explores these themes in Sula.
In Sula, characters physically leave Medallion under different circumstances and are all changed, either physically or emotionally, by their journeys. Shadrack and Plum, both “ravaged” victims of the war, return to Medallion as former shadows of themselves. Nel’s trip down south with her mother occasions an awakening of self-awareness that sets the tone for the rest of the novel. “…she had gone on a real trip, and now she was different” (28). After leaving her children in the care of neighbors, Eva leaves Medallion for eighteen months, and when she returns she is missing one leg. After graduating from school and planning her friend Nel’s wedding, Sula leaves for college but doesn’t return to Medallion after ten years. Like her uncle Plum before her, Sula wanders aimlessly from city to city, yet finds in them “the same people, working the same mouths, sweating the same sweat” (120). Her reappearance in the Bottom changes it “in accountable yet mysterious way” (117). While Morrison’s choice to have her characters leave and then return to Medallion might contradict the historical experience of African Americans during this period, a closer examination reveals that her characters share the overall experience of the African Diaspora for a sense of belonging to place. As critic Barbara Christian comments, “Like the ancestral African tradition, place is as important as the human actors, for the land is a participant in the maintenance of the folk tradition. It is one of the necessary constants through which the folk dramatize the meaning of life, as it is passed on from one generation to the next. Setting then, is organic to the characters’ view of themselves” (qtd. in Galehouse). The Great Migration at the beginning of the twentieth century is implicit in the desire of liberation of self, both physically and psychologically, to reconcile the forced dislocation of African peoples within the Diaspora. Morrison’s character, Sula, embodies this desire.
Morrison says in Unspeakable Things Unspoken that Sula “is a new world black and new world woman extracting choice from choicelessness, responding inventively to found things. Improvisational. Daring, disruptive, imaginative, modern, out-of-the-house, outlawed, policing, uncontained and uncontainable. And dangerously female” (Galehouse). Sula is a wholly self-created individual, who “lived out her days exploring her own thoughts and emotions, giving them full reign, feeling no obligation to please anybody unless their pleasure pleased her” (118). While Sula is an unusual character – Morrison also eludes to this in her interview with Steptoe: “…I don’t regard her as a typical black woman at all. And the fact that the community responds to her that way means that she’s unusual” (Gates, ed. 384) – her quest for self-reinvention, imagination, and improvisation is very much within the jazz and blues tradition, which also sought to break the rules and stretch the boundaries of what is possible and permissible. Considering that jazz and blues music was coming to full flower and spreading across the states due to black migration during the setting of Morrison’s book further grounds Sula within a jazz/blues foundation. “The blues,” as Ralph Ellison wrote in the essay “Richard Wright’s Blues:
is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy, but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically” (3).
It is this lyrical expression of “personal catastrophe” that informs much of Morrison’s novel. In her work, pain is turned to music. The Bottom is brought back to life by “the living notes of a mouth organ” (4). Tar Baby’s “sweetest hill voice” makes the women weep and think “graphically of their own imminent deaths” (40). When Sula experiences the pain of abandonment by her lover Ajax, she sings: “I have sung all the songs all the songs I have sung all the songs there are” (137). Sula’s need for self-invention is given “full reign” in the Bottom, for its cultural foundation also helped created Sula, as well. Sula, “an artist with no art form,” and therefore made, “dangerous” (121), turns herself into her own canvas, “expressing” her own “personal catastrophe,” and shaping her experiences into art. In this way, Sula is a blues singer, and certainly, her contemporaries, Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, and Billie Holiday, would agree. Interestingly, many black women blues singers bore the brunt of criticism within the black community for their raunchy lyrics and loose behavior. Smith, who was known as the “Empress of the Blues,” was once rejected by Black Swan Records (whose board of directors also included W.E.B. Du Bois) because her “gritty and explicit blues sound was too much…” (Horton 239). A contemporary of Smith’s, Alberta Hunter, once said of her: “[M]y background was poor, but it was humble…but Bessie, hers was a little too fantastic…[W]e never associated with Bessie…I can’t stand a rough woman” (240). Like Smith, Sula, too, is a “rough woman,” who pushes the boundaries of acceptable behavior.
Sula’s identity is as much grounded in the environment which gave birth to her, as the Bottom’s is defined by hers. While she is ostracized by the community, she is no more isolated from it than the Bottom is isolated from the world outside its borders. Each affects the other. Subtly, Morrison reveals how identity is shaped by many factors: family, nature, community. The world events shaping much of Black America at the time also shapes the Bottom, though their effects are as light and subtle as a whisper. It is only through the lens of memory, of the past, of history, that all the pieces can be fitted back into the puzzle, so that readers can discover “what they themselves were all about, tucked up there in the Bottom.
Reference:
- Christian, Charles M. Black Saga: The African American Experience. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1995. Coser, Stelamaris. “Bridging the Americas: The Literature of Paula Marshall, Toni Morrison, and Gayl Jones.”” Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995. Ellison, Ralph. “”Richard Wrightís Blues.”” The Antioch Review. Summer 1999 v57 i3 p263(1). Infotrac Online. Berkeley Main Library, Berkeley. 24 July 2002. Galehouse, Maggie. “”New World Women: Toni Morrisonís Sula.”” Papers on Language & Literature. 339 (Fall 1999): Southern Illinois University. Infotrac Online. Berkeley Main Library, Berkeley. 22 July 2002. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. and K.A. Appiah. Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New York: Amistad Press, Inc., 1993. Horton, James Oliver and Lois E. Hard Road to Freedom: The Story of African American. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001. Morrison, Toni. Sula. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973. Potter Lou, William Miles and Nina Rosenblum. Liberators: Fighting Two Fronts in World War II. Orlando: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992. “”Toni Morrison.”” Prod. and dir., Matteo Bellinelli. Videocassette. SSR-RTSI Swiss Television Production, 1994.
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