Sula : Marginalization

 Sula : Marginalization

Dr Manisha Patil 

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. (1)

I. Marginalization

The very first sentence of Sula introduces the reader to the black community, neighborhood (Bottom) and its brutal rooting out by white capitalism. In fact, all the problems of blacks – slavery, displacement, economic exploitation and racial discrimination – have their roots in white capitalism. There is ample evidence to prove that racism is a by-product of capitalism. Walter Rodney refutes the myth that racism was the initial cause of the enslavement of African people, by proving that Africans were enslaved ‘for economic reasons, so that their labor power could be exploited.’ In his words, ‘[After] having been utterly dependent on African labor, Europeans at home and abroad found it necessary to rationalize that exploitation in the racist terms as well. Oppression follows logically from exploitation so as to guarantee the latter.’1

The novel is structurally placed between two displacements – first when the blacks were deprived of the fertile valley land and second when they were evacuated from the bottom to make place for hilltop houses and golf club for the rich white folks. In between, the novel is punctuated with economic exploitation, racial discrimination and psychological trauma. Even the dates are significant – ‘1919’ signifying the end of World War I and ‘1941’ signifying the beginning of World War II frame the text. The books epilogue like last section, ‘1965’ coincides with the year that the United States began regular bombing raids on North Vietnam and was also the year of the well-known Southern California ‘race war’, the Watts Riots. Together all these incidents show that though slavery is abolished, white capitalism and resultant black marginalization are still order of the day. Slave trade displaced the Africans from their original home in Africa and began a long process of serial displacements that became the fate of millions of African Americans. Morrison foregrounds this fact by showing both building and demise of bottom in the very first few pages of the novel and especially through the Nigger joke, which focuses our attention on, how blacks have always faced injustice.

A good white farmer promised freedom and a piece of bottom land to his slave if he would perform some very difficult chores. When the slave completed the work, he asked the farmer to keep his end of the bargain. Freedom was easy – the farmer had no objection to that. But he didn’t want to give up any land. So he told the slave that he was very sorry that he had to give him the valley land. He had hoped to give him a piece of the bottom. The slave blinked and said he thought valley land was bottomland. The master said, “Oh no! See those hills? That’s bottom land, rich and fertile”.

“But it’s high up in the hills”, said the slave.

“High up from us”, said the master, “but when God looks down, it’s the bottom. That’s why we call it so. It’s the bottom of the heaven – best land is there”.

So the slave pressed his master to try to get him some. He preferred it to valley and it was done. The nigger got the hilly land, where planting was back breaking, where the soil slid down and washed away the seeds where the wind lingered all through winter. Which accounted for the fact that white people lived on the rich valley floor in that little river town in Ohio and blacks populated the hills above it, taking the small consolation in the fact that every day they could literally look down on the white folks. (5)

Susan Neal Mayberry comments, ‘Told from the Community’s perspective this joke is Morrison’s analogy for African American ‘signifying’ a rhetorical self-defense which protects the integrity of the black self through a clever inversion of the context in which (white) society defines value. African American children are trained in signifying rituals from an early age as a kind of verbal jujitsu, a black community watch. Like a Shakespearean fool, humorous, frequently prevented only by his or her wit from being insolent, the signifier is allowed license.’2

However, signifyin(g) does not change the material conditions, which are marked by poverty, hardships and violence – both physical and psychological. Eva Peace (Sula’s grandmother) serves as a representative example over here. She was left by her husband Boyboy without a penny and with three children to feed. She had no prospect of earning a decent living with her labor but her sheer will to survive was so great that she cut her one leg under the train to get insurance money from the railway to feed her children. However, her physical sacrifice is also accompanied with the psychological sacrifice. Her hardships made Eva not only tough but insensitive. She physically nourished her children but deprived them of the most essential thing in life – love. Years later in 1923, her daughter Hannah asked her, “Mamma, did you ever love us?” (67) Eva evaded the direct answer by repeating her hardships back in 1895, but failed to realize that it is their lovelessness, which made her children vulnerable and sent them to their premature deaths. Thus vulnerability and violence form a vicious circle. Gurleen Grewal comments, ‘Having sacrificed her life for the well-being of her children, Eva is compelled to burn her son and forced to watch her daughter Hannah burn.’3

America’s double standards are reflected in its war policy. Like the white farmer in the nigger joke, America calls upon its black men to ‘perform some very difficult chores’ but while giving the rewards, skillfully sidelines them. As a result, when America entered World War I, blacks were also involved in and destroyed by a European war from which they would not reap any benefit. Patricia Hunt writes, ‘Black men participated in US wars from the Revolution forward, in a military that remained segregated until after the Korean War. During World War I, nearly 400,000 black men were drafted, half of them serving in France. The black 369th Infantry were under continuous fire for a record of 191 days, for which they won the Croix de Guerre and the honor of leading the victorious Allied armies to the Rhine in 1918. The French had treated black soldiers as equals, but the American military authorities issued orders prohibiting them from conversing with or associating with French women attending social functions or visiting French homes.’4 Morrison’s Shadrack survived the ‘fire’ of the World War I battlefield, but in doing so lost his mind. Shadrack, the shell-shocked war veteran, was so much traumatized by the human carnage that when he looked at food, he only saw ‘the lumpy whiteness of rice, the quivering blood of tomatoes, the grayish brown meat’ (8). To contain his horror of unexpectedness of death or dying, Shadrach decreed a National Suicide Day, as an invitation to all who desire to commit murder or suicide. Plum Peace, another war veteran, who was a young and dynamic boy before the war, came back as a totally devastated and depressed man. Unable to pull himself together, he withdrew into the oblivion of drugs. When all the attempts to cheer him up or to bring him back to normalcy failed, finally Eva, his mother, set him on fire. She justified her action saying, “I did everything I could to make him leave me and go on and live and be a man but he wouldn’t and I had to keep him out so I just thought of a way he could die like a man, not all scrunched up inside my womb, but like a man”. (72)

Though blacks fought abroad as American citizens, at home, they still did not have full right to citizenship. America had equal but separate policy which is nothing but another form of institutionalized racism. Especially in South, this discrimination is more acute. John Callahan has written, ‘The heroism of black regiments is well-known, perhaps less well-known are the humiliations and terrors these soldiers faced back home, especially in the South.’ Black soldiers returning from World War I were reminded that they were no longer in France, that they would no longer be treated as equals. Mary Frances Berry and John Blassingame write that, ‘Returning black soldiers were insulted, stripped of their uniforms and beaten by white Russians and police.’ The years 1919 and 1920 saw extraordinarily violence against African Americans in the form of lynching and beatings of the scores lynched in 1919, many were veterans still in uniform.’5 Though the novel does not depict direct picture of lynching (it is out of the novel’s scope), the train episode throws a flash light on the treatment black men and women get in American South. Helen Wright (Nel’s mother) who had dignified manners and impressive personality was humiliated in the train, simply because of her custard color skin. There were separate compartments for blacks but no toilets for black women at all. By mistake, Helene boarded a white coach and was called ‘gal’ i.e. prostitute by the white ticket collector, which brought the smile of a street puppy on her face and hatred in the eyes of black soldiers and white passengers.

Like the street pup that wags its tail at the very doorjamb of the butcher shop he has been kicked away from only moments before, Helene smiled...The two black soldiers, who had been watching the scene with what appeared to be indifference, now looked stricken. Behind Nel was the bright and blazing light of her mother’s smile, before her the midnight eyes of the soldiers. She saw the muscles of their faces tighten under the skin from blood to marble. (21-2)

According to Susan Neal Mayberry, ‘the ‘po’ white’s’ unchecked disrespect of a ‘dictie’ black woman furiously strips the soldiers of any claim to the white upper-class knighthood they resent yet covet and simultaneously ashamed of her white damsel-in-distress behavior, they make no effort to be gallant to Helen even after the conductor’s disappearance. The ‘white m[a]n period’ has used Helen to emasculate the black soldiers and Helene has been reduced by both white and black men from a thoroughbred to ‘de mule of the world’. The animosity between the African American women and men in this situation is created not by gender conflicts but by complex issues of race and class.’6

In North, this institutionalized racism was more subtle but not less damaging. Especially when it came to money matters, blacks were deliberately discriminated against. Even though blacks were suited for better paying and respectable jobs, they were not hired.

Along with a few other young black men, Jude had gone down to the shack were they were hiring...Jude himself longed more than anybody to be taken. Not just for good money, more for the work itself. He wanted to swing the pick or kneel down with the sting or shovel the gravel. His arms ached for some-thing heavier than trays, for something dirtier than peelings; his feet wanted the heavy work shoes, not the thin-soled that the hotel required...”I built that road”, he could say... It was after he stood in lines for six days running and saw the gang boss pick out thin-armed white boys from the Virginia hills and the full-necked Greeks and Italians and heard over and over ‘Nothing else today. Come back tomorrow’ that he got the message. (81-82)

Thus, blacks were forced either to be unemployed or were underpaid so that they remained perpetually poor. The fate of black people in America has been always dependent on the policies and requirements of white Americans. During the slavery, black labor was forced to ‘perform some very difficult chores’ free of cost. But when after emancipation, black people expected to be paid at least decent wages (if not equal to white laborers doing the same job) for their sweat and blood, they were kept out of the work force altogether. In this way, the white capitalism reduced the black labor to the level of an object to be used and discarded whenever and wherever it wanted. Patricia Hunt rightly comments. ‘The fates of the Bottom-dwellers represent a political system which has enslaved a people, emancipated a people, enfranchised them, disenfranchised them, then simultaneously demanded their military service and denied them citizenship through civilian lives of poverty and terror.’7

Dr Manisha Patil