5
May
2009
Sula by Toni Morrison
What I love about Toni Morrison, is the way she flirts with Magical Realism without losing the grit of her characters. Is it wrong of me to say, as a white person, of an older African-American that she “keeps it real?”
Sula, the title character, is one half of a complicated, on-again-off-again friendship. The other half is Nel. Nel is the good one, from the good family. Sula comes from a line of women who, while strong, don’t care a lot about each other and the process of raising their children, leaving them to themselves much of the time. Nel clings to Sula during their childhood despite her mother’s warnings.
There are several supporting characters, most notably Shadrack and the Bottom. Shadrack has been emotionally scarred by WWI, and celebrates National Suicide Day every January third.
The Bottom is the community of blacks uphill from Medallion, Ohio. The community itself seems to me a character because of how they interact with Sula, as a whole. Sula solidifies the community in their dislike for her. They see her as an example of what not to be.
The Bottom is so named, because legend has it that a slave received it from his former (white) owner, who claimed it was the best land as it was hilly and closer to heaven. As farmland it in fact sucked, but decades later the white elite of Medallion want to raize the community and build themselves a golf course.
The economy of the Bottom is crappy. Repeatedly blacks are not given jobs that are given to lazier white men (turns the stereotype on its head, huh?). It is in the determination to reverse this trend one National Suicide Day that a mystical sort of tragedy strikes the town, where Morrison’s penchant for Magical Realism comes in.
The book may be named for Sula, but I’d contend that she’s only one piece of the puzzle.
If you like this book/author, you might like:
The Secret Life of Bees (F) by Sue Monk Kidd
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (F) by Lisa See
Their Eyes Were Watching God (F) by Zora Neale Hurston
Invisible Man (F) by Ralph Ellison
The Color Purple (F) by Alice Walker
Passing (F) by Nella Larsen
The Feast of All Saints (F) by Anne Rice
A Raisin in the Sun (D) by Loarraine Hansberry
A Streetcar Named Desire (D) by Tennessee Williams
The Street (F) by Ann Petry
Woman Hollering Creek & Other Stories (F) by Sandra Cisneros
Uncle Tom’s Children (F) by Richard Wright
Slaughterhouse Five (F) by Kurt Vonnegut
Catch-22 (F) by Joseph Heller
Middle Passage (F) by Charles Johnson
Other works by Toni Morrison:
Beloved (F)
The Song of Solomon (F)
The Bluest Eye (F)
Tarbaby (F)
Love (F)
Jazz (F)
A Mercy (F)
The Black Book (NF)
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (NF)
Birth of a Nationhood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O.J. Simpson Trial (NF) (editor)
What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction (CNF)
Remember: The Journey to School Integration (CNF)
With Slade Morrison:
The Big Box (F)
The Book of Mean People (F)
