Sula
Toni Morrison (1973)
“A story about two Black women who need each other to exist — and what happens to a person when their opposite disappears.”
Short Summary
In the Bottom, a Black hillside community above the Ohio town of Medallion, Nel Wright and Sula Peace grow up as inseparable doubles — one defined by belonging, the other by refusal. When they accidentally cause a child's death, their silence binds them. Sula leaves for a decade, becomes a scandal, and returns to die young. Nel, who believed herself the good one, discovers at the novel's end that she has been grieving Sula, not her husband, for twenty-five years.
Detailed Summary
Toni Morrison's second novel is structured as a series of dated chapters spanning 1919 to 1965, framed by an introduction ('In the Time Before') and a coda. The setting is the Bottom — a Black hillside neighborhood in Medallion, Ohio, whose name derives from a white man's cruel joke: he told a freed...