Sula : Community

 Sula : Community

Dr Manisha Patil 

Under such heavy pressures, it is but natural that African Americans huddle together to support each other against the odds of white America. That’s why community becomes such an important aspect of literary works by African American writers. Morrison too places a lot of emphasis on community in her works. Though primary subject of Sula is the lives and friendship of Sula and Nel, it is the community life at Bottom that moulds them. In fact, we cannot understand Sula without understanding the black community. Barbara Christian notes, ‘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.’8

Morrison gives the fascinating picture of Bottom life with ‘a dark woman in a flowered dress doing a bit of cakewalk, a bit of black bottom, a bit of ‘messing around’ to the lively notes of a mouth organ. Her bare feet would raise the saffron dust that floated down on the coveralls and bunion-split shoes of the man breathing music in and out of his harmonica. The black people watching her would laugh and rub their knees.’ (4) This is the community, which both nourishes and destroys its members. It is nurturing because it creates the survival instinct in its members, which gives them the strength to live against all odds of life.

Plague and drought were as natural as springtime. If milk could curdle, God knows robins could fall. The purpose of evil was to survive it and they determined (without ever knowing they had made up their mind to do it) to survive floods, white people, tuberculosis, famine and ignorance. They knew anger well but not despair and they didn’t stone sinners for the same reason they didn’t commit suicide – it was beneath them. (90)

However, it is also a destroyer because it does not provide its members with any positive model of identity, resistance and decolonization. Susan Neal Mayberry gives us the example of Deweys. ‘Individually each Dewey is a lost boy, collectively, as the Deweys or Lost boys, they find an identity. Even their white teacher is astonished at how much the Deweys, who initially look nothing alike, become gradually indistinguishable. While the Dewey system and chain gang serve as a collective self, however, they also consume the individuality of these Lost Boys and prevent their growing up.’9 Similarly, on the surface, Bottom community seems to be united to support each other during the hardships. But internally, this community is fractured. Within the community each individual is as isolated as African American community is in the white America. At Chicken Little’s funeral, this alienation within the community becomes apparent. As Rev. Deal preaches, Bottom people mourn not for the dead child but for themselves. ‘They did not hear all of what he said; they heard the one word or phrase or inflection that was for them the connection between the event and themselves. For some it was the term ‘Sweet Jesus’ and they saw the lamb’s eye and the truly innocent victim: themselves.’ (65) The marginalized community always forces its members to be identical – same thinking, same behavior – thereby creating a ghetto. Those who refuse to do so are outlawed. Like the black community in The Bluest Eye, Bottom community also sensors its own members for not confirming to its social standards. In The Bluest Eye, Bottom community internationalized the white standard of beauty and punished Pecola for being black. In Sula, the Bottom people insisted on the separateness of blacks from whites and the moral superiority of the former and punished Sula for her supposed crime of sleeping with a white man.

[I]t was the men who…said she was guilty of the unforgivable thing – the thing for which there was no understanding, no excuse, no compassion. The route from which there was no way back, the dirt that could not ever be washed away. They said that Sula slept with white man. It may not have been true, but it certainly could have been. She was obviously capable of it…Every one of them imagined the scene, each according to his own predilections – Sula underneath some white man – and it filled them with choking disgust. There was nothing lower she could do, nothing filthier. The fact that their own skin color was proof that it had happened in their own families was no deterrent to their file. Nor was the willingness of black men to lie in the beds of white women a consideration that might lead them towards tolerance. They insisted that all unions between white men and black women be rape; for a black woman to be willing was literally unthinkable. (112-3)

More than anything else, it was Sula’s ‘experimental’ life and her unpredictability (unlike Shadrack) that bothered Bottom people. Sula challenged all the accepted notions of thought and behavior. ‘She was completely free of ambition, with no affection for money, property or things, no greed, no desire to command attention or compliments – no ego. For that reason, she felt no compulsion to verify herself – be consistent with herself.’ (119) Because Bottom people could not guess the reason behind her actions, they watched her with suspicion. She was regarded as a deviant who had disregarded communal commitments. She had broken Nel’s marriage and rejected family when she forcibly institutionalized her grandmother Eva. The woman saw her as sexual threat and men considered her as racial traitor. Not able to understand her at all, they considered her as the incarnation of evil. She was totally isolated. The birthmark on her forehead was no longer seen as a rose, a symbol of passion but a snake, symbol of evil betrayal. Identifying Sula, as a personification of evil relieved them of the burden of their own evil and displaced it onto her. Once she was identified as a total evil she became necessary for Bottom as something like a moral standard, a limit marking off right from wrong.

Perceived as a generalized evil, Sula served to make other people appear relatively good. Teapot’s mamma, called this ‘because being his mother was precisely her major failure’ (113-114), suddenly becomes a devoted mother when she can blame Sula for hurting her son. When Teapot falls down, Teapot’s mama ‘told everybody that Sula had pushed him’ and then ‘immersed herself in a role she had shown no inclination for: motherhood. The very idea of a grown woman hurting her boy kept her teeth on edge. She became the most devoted mother: sober, clean and industrious’ (114). Once an ‘indifferent mother’, Teapot’s mamma becomes a good mother in order to be different from Sula. Sula becomes what Teapot’s mamma was formerly – ‘a grown woman hurting her boy’ – and Teapot’s mamma, displacing her own evil on to Sula, becomes perfectly good. The space of difference here is occupied by Sula who is used by others to realize and define the difference between good and evil.10 

Bottom people rationalized that ‘The presence of evil was something to be first recognized, then dealt with, survived, outwitted, triumphed over.’ (118) Accordingly, they ‘recognized’ Sula as evil, then ‘dealt with’ her not by obstructing her but by integrating her in the community as a center, a mass of negation. By becoming devoted spouses and caring parents, they thought that they could survive the evil influence of Sula. Indeed they did survive her because Sula took to bed and they were sure that they had outwitted her. When Sula died, they developed ‘a strong sense of hope’ (151) over their triumph. However, this triumph is short lived. Maggie Gale house says, ‘The anger and passion that Sula generated kept the Bottom up and running. In this way, Sula nurtured, even sexualized her community. Ironically, in the community’s collective hatred of her, Sula enforces the very roles they accused her of abusing: mother and lover. Her death renders the town socially impotent, as citizens are moved to undo the good that her alleged evil provoked.’11 As a result, what followed Sula’s death was not prosperity but self-destruction. First there were illness and ice, then dislocation, then indifference to each other (“Without her mockery, affection for others sank into flaccid disrepair” [153]) and finally death by water.

On the National Suicide Day (3rd January) of 1941, for the first time since it’s beginning, Shadrack was unwilling to go on his parade. His intention behind celebrating the National Suicide Day was to come to terms with death and its suddenness. But death of Sula made him doubt the usefulness of his actions. ‘He had said ‘always’ to convince her [Sula] assure her of permanency... [But] he had been wrong, terribly wrong. No ‘always’ at all. Another dying away of someone whose face he knew. It was then he began to suspect that all those years of rope hauling and bell ringing were never going to do any good.’ (157-8) On the other hand, death of Sula made Bottom people doubt the usefulness of life. For years, Bottom people had scorned Shadrack and his parade on National Suicide Day, shutting their doors, pulling down the shades and calling their children out of road. But on 3rd January 1941 they were happy to see Shadrack coming with his rope and bell. They were unafraid of death and their fearlessness made them laugh. By the time Shadrack reached the first house, he was facing a line of delighted faces... It frightened him, this glee, but he stuck to his habit – singing his song, ringing his bell and holding fast to his rope... Everybody, Dessie, Tar Baby, Patsy, Mr. Buckland Reed, Teapot’s Mamma, Valentine, the Deweys, Mrs. Jackson, Irene, the proprietor of the Palace of Cosmetology, Reba, the Herrod brothers and Hocks of teen-agers got into the mood of laughing, dancing, calling to one another, formed a pied piper’s band behind Shadrack.’ (159) For years Bottom people had hoped for a magic government which would alter their lot for good. Back in 1927, they had seen such chance in the form of building the river tunnel and road. But racism kept black people out of jobs and their dreams out of reality. Today (3rd January, 1941), they were feeling the same excitement, which they felt when the river work started in 1927. But it was of a different quality. When they reached the river site, they saw their promise leaf-dead. Excitement turned into rebellion and ‘Old and young, women and children, lame and hearty, they killed, as best they could, the tunnel they were forbidden to build.’ (161) Unfortunately, due to landslide, many of them got trapped inside the tunnel and met a tragic death.

Thus, the absence of positive role model of rebellion (like Sula) culminates merely into self-destructive frenzy. Sula’s death coincides with the destruction of Bottom and Morrison laments the fragmentation of a community into ‘separate houses with separate televisions and separate telephones.’ (166)

Eva Birch says, ‘In Sula, Morrison points to what can be lost when community disappears. Technological progress had brought isolation; a distancing of individuals from the emotion nutrition which had characterized the Bottoms, where once the air had ‘got heavy with peeled fruit and boiling vegetables. Fresh corn, tomatoes, string beans, melon rinds’. Morrison suggests that in striving to acquire he artifacts of twentieth-century America, black Americans will only survive ‘whole’ if they nourish and are in turn nourished by, their own community.’12 

Yet as Morrison reflects at the end of The Bluest Eye, ‘This soil is bad for certain kind of flowers. Certain seed it won’t nurture, certain fruits it won’t bear’ (The Bluest Eye: 164) and this is especially true about those black women who like Sula aspire to absolute freedom

Dr Manisha Patil