40 Fun Facts About Sula

In Sula, a white farmer tricks a freed slave into taking hilltop land as the bottom of what?

Heaven was the pitch: the farmer claimed the rocky hills were the bottom of heaven as God saw it. That is how a Black neighborhood high above the valley came to be called the Bottom.

Which annual holiday does the shell-shocked veteran Shadrack invent in Toni Morrison's Sula?

National Suicide Day falls on January 3. Shadrack reasons that if death is given one day of its own, everyone can live unafraid until the next one comes around.

Which part of her body is Eva missing when she returns after eighteen months away in Sula?

Her leg is gone, and far from hiding the loss she keeps the remaining one in a fine stocking and shoe at all times. Nobody in town ever learns for certain what happened.

How does Eva try to reach her daughter Hannah when Hannah's dress catches fire in the yard in Sula?

Eva jumps out a window of her upstairs bedroom, hoping to drag herself across the yard in time. The fall nearly kills her, and Hannah dies on the way to the hospital.

Which birds descend on the Bottom in huge numbers on the day Sula returns after a decade away?

Robins fill the trees and foul the streets she walks through. The townspeople link the plague to her homecoming and read both as an evil omen.

What is due to be built where the Bottom stood in the opening pages of Toni Morrison's Sula?

A golf course is planned for the bulldozed hillside. The irony is sharp: Black families got that land only because it was thought too poor to farm.

What does the young Sula slice off with a knife to frighten away white boys harassing her and Nel?

Her fingertip drops to the ground, and she tells the boys to think what she would do to them if she can do that to herself. The stunt works, and the boys back off.

Which liquid does Eva pour over her addicted son Plum before setting him alight in Sula?

Kerosene is what she uses, while Plum lies in a drugged haze. She later tells Hannah she did it out of love, wanting him to die as a man.

Where does Sula send her grandmother Eva after gaining guardianship over her, shocking the Bottom?

A nursing home, and a shabby one, is where Eva lands soon after Sula comes back. Nel visits her there decades later and hears an accusation she cannot shake.

In which US state lies the fictional town of Medallion, the setting of Toni Morrison's Sula?

Ohio is the setting, and the author knew it well. She drew on her own small-town Midwestern childhood there to build Medallion and its hillside neighborhood.

Shadrack and Plum both come home to the Bottom badly damaged by which conflict in Sula?

World War I leaves both men shattered. Shadrack returns in 1919 with shell shock, and Plum comes back with a drug habit that his mother cannot bear to see.

Which man marries Nel Wright and later abandons her after she finds him in bed with Sula?

Jude proposes largely to feel like a man after being turned away from work he wanted. When he walks out, Nel loses her husband and her best friend on the same day.

Which pool-hall charmer, a conjure woman's son, becomes the one lover Sula truly falls for in Sula?

Ajax comes to her door with bottles of milk and wants no commitment. Once she starts to love him he feels trapped and goes, leaving her heartbroken.

Each chapter of Sula, from the veteran's return to Nel's final visit, carries what as its title?

A year heads each chapter, starting at 1919 and skipping unevenly to 1965. The reader sees a whole community age across nearly half a century.

To which Southern city do Helene and Nel travel by segregated train to see a dying relative in Sula?

New Orleans is Helene's birthplace, and the trip changes Nel. After seeing her mother humbled by a white conductor, she comes back sure for the first time that she is her own person.

Which single name does Eva give to all three boys she takes into her house in Sula?

Dewey is what she calls every one of them. The three arrive from different families looking nothing alike, yet they blur into one being the town can no longer tell apart.

Eva's son Plum comes back from the war to Medallion addicted to which drug in Sula?

Heroin has hollowed him out: he seldom eats or talks to anyone in the house. He was the child Eva had hoped to leave everything to.

Which item does Sula leave behind in Shadrack's riverside shack, where he hangs it on his wall?

Her belt becomes his keepsake of the only visitor he ever had. When she dies as a grown woman, he is the one person in town who is saddened.

In Sula's 1941 chapter, Shadrack's parade ends with many townspeople killed when what collapses?

A tunnel under construction caves in on the marchers. They had turned on it in fury because the building jobs long promised to the Bottom never came.

Which surname do Sula, her mother Hannah and her grandmother Eva share in Toni Morrison's novel?

Peace is the family name, a dry joke for a household that sees two deaths by fire and bitter quarrels between mothers and daughters.

Townspeople in Sula believe Eva let a train maim her so that she could collect what?

Insurance money is the town's theory, since regular checks begin arriving once she is back. Eva uses them to build the rambling house where she takes in boarders and strays.

What does Sula do during her decade away from Medallion that sets her apart from her neighbors?

Sula attends college and travels, then comes back in expensive clothes. To neighbors who had always found her strange, the polish only widens the gap.

How do the people of the Bottom behave once they have decided that Sula is evil?

They treat each other better: wives soothe their husbands and mothers take more care of their children, all to be unlike her. Once she is dead, the harmony dissolves.

Which language, spoken by her own mother, does Helene refuse to speak or teach to Nel in Sula?

Creole belongs to the mother Helene was taken from as a baby. She wants no trace of that past in her own strict, respectable household.

What job does Nel's husband hold while longing for heavier work on the road crew in Sula?

A waiter is all he is allowed to be, because the road crew will not hire Black men however strong they are. The slight leaves him bitter, and he proposes soon after.

Which noisemaker does Shadrack carry as he leads his lonely January parade through the Bottom in Sula?

A cowbell announces him, and most neighbors keep well away. The quiet boarder Tar Baby is the first ever to join the march.

Which rumor, spread by husbands in the Bottom, turns the town against Sula for good?

She sleeps with white men, the husbands claim, and the town calls it the one thing it cannot forgive. From then on every accident and illness is laid at her door.

To which Northern city does Nel's husband move, never to return, once his affair with Sula ends?

Detroit swallows him for good. Nel never remarries and pours her whole life into raising the children he left behind.

What does Sula do on the porch while her mother Hannah burns in the yard, to Eva's lasting horror?

Sula simply watches. Neighbors say the girl was frozen by shock, but Eva never stops believing she looked on out of curiosity.

Which debut novel by Toni Morrison appeared in 1970, shortly before she published Sula?

The Bluest Eye grew out of a short story she wrote for a campus writers' group. It was turned down many times before a publisher finally took it in 1969.

For which major American literary honor was Toni Morrison's Sula nominated without winning?

National Book Award judges shortlisted what was only her second novel. Reviewers had praised its vivid imagery, strong characters and terse, lifelike dialogue.

Sula's author Toni Morrison became in 1993 the first Black woman to win which honor?

Nobel Prize in Literature judges praised the visionary force and poetic quality of her novels. The award came two decades after her slim book about two friends in Medallion.

At which New York publisher was Toni Morrison working as a fiction editor when Sula came out?

Random House made her its first Black woman senior editor in fiction. There she edited writers such as Toni Cade Bambara, Gayl Jones and Angela Davis.

Which talk-show host chose Sula for her television book club in 2002, decades after it appeared?

Oprah Winfrey picked four of the author's novels within six seasons of her club. Every title she chose in that era went on to reach the national bestseller lists.

Which singer released a 2020 song named after the novel Sula, with a video cut subtitled Hardcover?

Jamila Woods based the track on the novel and released it in Paperback and Hardcover versions. Her 2019 album Legacy! Legacy! had already named songs after writers such as Zora Neale Hurston and James Baldwin.

Which critic's 1977 essay Toward a Black Feminist Criticism famously read Sula as a lesbian novel?

Barbara Smith argued that the bond between the two women raises lesbian and feminist questions whether or not the author meant it to. The essay helped launch Black feminist literary criticism.

After finding her husband with Sula, Nel senses which strange object hovering just out of her sight?

A gray ball of fur and muddy string floats beside her all that summer. It scatters only at the novel's close, when she grasps that it was her friend she had been missing.

After BoyBoy walks out, Eva and her children in Sula have only three of which vegetable to eat?

Beets, just three of them, are all the food in the house for five days. Eva later throws the memory at Hannah as proof of what she gave up for her children.

Nel's father Wiley Wright is often away from Medallion in Sula because he works as what?

A ship's cook on a Great Lakes line, he is gone for long stretches. That leaves Helene to raise their only daughter by her own strict rules.

Which network was reported in 2022 to be adapting Sula as a limited television series?

HBO named Shannon M. Houston as creator and writer of the planned adaptation, with Stephanie Allain's Homegrown Pictures attached to produce.