Sula (Characters)

Characters

Boyboy

BoyBoy is Eva Peace's husband, who gives her three children, Hannah, Eva (called Pearl), and Ralph (who is called Plum), then disappears. During the time they are together, he is largely preoccupied with other women and drinking, and is rarely home. When he leaves, Eva has "$1.65, five eggs, three beets and no idea of what or how to feel." He returns three years later with a new woman, apparently having heard of Eva's new wealth and seemingly hoping for a handout, but Eva doesn't give him anything, and he disappears again.

Chicken Little

Chicken Little is a small boy who comes to play with Sula and Nel at the river. Sula picks him up and swings him around, and accidentally throws him in the river, where he drowns. His body is found downstream by a white man, who is annoyed at having to deal with it, and after the bargeman, the sheriff, and a ferryman bicker over whose responsibility it is to return to the body to the child's family, it is finally taken to the embalmer four days later.

The Deweys

The Deweys are three little boys whom Eva takes in. Regardless of their original names, she calls them all "Dewey," last name "King," and they're collectively known as "The deweys." Although they look different from each other and come from different families, their individuality is gradually subsumed in their collective identity as "deweys," to the point where they never really grow up, and Morrison writes, "The deweys remained a mystery not only during all of their lives in Medallion but after as well."

Albert Jacks

A. Jacks, or "Ajax" as he's known to everyone, is "a twenty-one-year-old pool haunt of sinister beauty." He is a favorite among women and an accomplished swearer and curser. He advises Jude about women, "All they want, man, is they own misery. Ax them to die for you and they yours for life." Later, when he's thirty-eight and Sula is twenty-nine, they become lovers. She falls in love with him, but Ajax, feeling trapped, leaves her.

Eva Peace

Although Eva is Sula's grandmother, she outlives her granddaughter, and is present during all the events of the novel. She leaves her mark on Sula, helping to shape her character.

Eva is abandoned by her husband while she is still a young mother, and, faced with the problem of supporting her family without resorting to charity, she leaves her children with a friend, saying she'll be gone overnight. She returns eighteen months later on crutches, with one leg missing, but then begins receiving a series of regular checks in the mail. Although she is mysterious about what happened to her leg, the other characters assume that she allowed a train to run over it and cut it off so that she could collect the insurance money. She doesn't let her lack of a leg interfere with her enjoyment of life, or her enjoyment of men; she is famed for her gentlemen callers — although she never makes love with them — and for the fact that her remaining leg, still shapely, is "stockinged and shod at all times." She lives in a huge, rambling house with many rooms and passageways, takes in boarders — some paying, some not — and spends most of her time high up in the house, watching over the assortment of people in it. These include three boys, all of whom she has named "Dewey."

Everyone in the community admires Eva, despite her nontraditional life. Sula is the one person who does not admire her, however, and when Eva jumps from the second story of the house in order to save Hannah, Sula's mother, who is burning to death, Sula doesn't help either her mother or her grandmother. Later, Sula puts Eva in a nursing home.

Eva is a tough woman, a survivor, who is often brutally honest. Near the end of the book, she is visited by Sula's friend Nel, and reminds Nel that Nel, like Sula, was involved in Chicken Little's death; in the end, she forces Nel to contemplate about her and Sula's likeness.

Eva Peace II

Eva, known as Pearl, is Hannah's sister and Sula's aunt. She marries at fourteen, moves to Flint, Michigan, and writes occasional sad letters to her mother about minor troubles.

Hannah Peace

Hannah is Sula's mother. She married "a laughing man named Rekus" who died when Sula was three; after this, Hannah moves back into Eva Peace's big house, "prepared to take care of it and her mother forever." Like Eva, Hannah loves men, and has a steady stream of lovers, most of whom are married to her friends or neighbors. However, despite her promiscuity, she is leery of trusting anyone or becoming committed to anyone. Hannah is disliked by the "good" women in town, who find her morally reprehensible; by the prostitutes, who resent her for cutting into their business by giving her services away; and also by the "middling women" who have both husbands and affairs, because her lack of passion about her affairs seems strange and alien to them. Hannah is similarly detached from her own daughter, Sula; she loves Sula, but says she doesn't like her.

Ralph Peace

Ralph, known as Plum, is Eva's youngest child, and the one "to whom she hoped to bequeath everything." He goes off to fight in World War I and, like Shadrack, comes home damaged; he has become a heroin addict. When he finally returns to Medallion, his hair is uncombed and uncut, his clothes are dirty, and he is not wearing socks. "But he did have a black bag, a paper sack, and a sweet, sweet smile." He moves back into Eva's house, where he seldom eats or talks to anyone. When Eva realizes that he is an addict, she pours kerosene over him, sets him on fire, and kills him. High on the drug, Plum is unaware of what she's doing.

Sula Peace

Toni Morrison wrote in the Michigan Quarterly Review,

I always thought of Sula as quintessentially black, metaphysically black, if you will, which is not melanin and certainly not unquestioning fidelity to the tribe. She is new world black and new world woman extracting choice from choicelessness, responding intuitively to found things. Improvisational. Daring, disruptive, imaginative, modern, out-of-the-house, outlawed, unpolicing, uncontained and uncontainable. And dangerously female.

Sula, as Morrison notes, is a dark character, not simply because of the color of her skin, but in terms of her soul. She is a strange child, defiant and different from other children. Although this difference seems innate in her, it is exacerbated by two occurrences in her childhood: one when she overhears her mother saying she loves Sula, but doesn't like her, and another when she is inadvertently responsible for the death of a little boy called Chicken Little. As a result of these events, Sula feels unloved and burdened by guilt.

Sula's mother, Hannah, values her independence from others, and Sula follows in her footsteps. The two times that she has a relationship and violates her rule of separateness, she is devastated. She falls in love once, with Ajax, and becomes so obsessed with him that he's frightened away, leaving her miserable.

More long-lasting is Sula's relationship with her best friend, Nel, who is from a very different background and has a very different personality. The two balance each other, and Sula is deeply attached to Nel. After Nel's wedding to a man named Jude, she leaves her hometown of Medallion for ten years. When she comes back, she's changed: she now has a college education and wears expensive clothes. These changes only make the townspeople, who have always regarded her as strange, feel even more alienated from her, to the point where whenever anything bad happens in the town, Sula is blamed.

She also puts her grandmother, Eva, in a nursing home, leading the town to further reject her. A year later, she is very sick with an unspecified but very painful illness. On her deathbed, she thinks about her alienation from all the people she's known: "The deweys, Tar Baby, the newly married couples, Mr. Buckland Reed, Patsy, Valentine, and the beautiful Hannah Peace. Where were they?" She has lost track of them all, and now she lies alone, "upstairs in Eva's bed with a boarded-up window and an empty pocketbook on the dresser." Even Nel, who has visited her and gotten a painkiller for her, has left and closed the door. Sula thinks about Nel:

So she will walk on down that road, her back so straight in that old green coat, the strap of her handbag pushed back all the way to the elbow, thinking how much I have cost her and never remember the days when we were two throats and one eye and we had no price.

She feels that their old, deep kinship is gone, like her connections to the other people she remembers.

She also thinks of life with a sense of futility: "Nothing was ever different. They were all the same. All of the words and all of the smiles, every tear and every gag just something to do." And in the end, just before she dies, she is comforted by the boarded-up window that Eva jumped out of: "The sealed window soothed her with its sturdy termination, its unassailable finality. It was as though for the first time she was completely alone — where she had always wanted to be — free of the possibility of distraction."

However, after she dies, the first thing she thinks is, "It didn't even hurt. Wait'll I tell Nel," showing that despite her feeling of alienation, their friendship is deeper than she realized, continuing on past death.

On her deathbed, she thinks about her mother's comments about her, and about Chicken Little's death, and decides that she has lived a meaningless life.

Later in the book, when her mother's dress catches on fire, Sula watches with calm detachment as her mother is fatally burned. Although some of Eva's friends later rationalize her calm watching as the result of being "struck dumb" with shock, Eva "remained convinced that Sula had watched Hannah burn not because she was paralyzed, but because she was interested."

Pearl

See Eva Peace II

Plum

See Ralph Peace

Cecile Sabat

Cecile is Helene Sabat Wright's grandmother. She takes Helene away from her prostitute mother and raises her in a strict Catholic household.

Rochelle Sabat

Rochelle is Helene's mother. She sees Helene for the first time in sixteen years when Helene's grandmother, Cecile, dies and Helene returns to New Orleans for the funeral. The two look at each other with no recognition or warmth, and similarly, Rochelle is not warm to Nel, her own granddaughter. She is still vibrant and young-looking, and wears a canary-yellow dress and fragrant perfume. Nel is fascinated by her, but Helene is only too eager to get back to Medallion; she has made a break with her past, and she refuses to speak Creole, as Rochelle does, or to teach it to Nel.

Shadrack

Shadrack is shell-shocked from his participation in World War I, and after being released from a veteran's hospital, is arrested by police who assume he's drunk, then released. He drinks to medicate his mental turmoil, and lives in a shack near the river. He is famous in the Bottom as the inventor of "National Suicide Day," which he celebrates every January 3rd, leading a parade through town that most people avoid. Despite this, the holiday becomes part of the town's consciousness, so that people will date events by whether they occurred after or before a particular Suicide Day.

The only person who ever enters Shadrack's cabin is Sula, who runs there to see if Shadrack has seen her accidentally throw Chicken Little into the river and drown him. Shadrack doesn't give her a chance to ask her question, and simply says "always," which Sula perceives as a threat. However, because she is the only person who has ever visited him, Shadrack views her as his friend for the rest of his life. She has no idea that her life has given a sense of love and meaning to Shadrack. After Sula dies, he loses interest in his invented holiday, "National Suicide Day," and has to force himself to go, but the townspeople, who are depressed from the sudden downward turn of events following Sula's death, eagerly join the parade. The ensuing mob heads toward a half-finished tunnel that is being built mostly by white people, and, filled with hatred for the whites, they begin destroying it. They do so much damage that the tunnel caves in, killing the people inside it, while Shadrack stands on a hill above this scene of mass destruction (and inadvertent mass suicide) ringing a bell.

Tar Baby

Tar Baby is one of the boarders in Eva's house, "a beautiful, slight, quiet man who never spoke above a whisper." Most people think he is halfwhite, but Eva thinks he is totally white, and calls him Tar Baby as a joke. He lives simply, and when he loses his job, he scrounges around for odd jobs, buys liquor, and comes home to drink, but he is no trouble to anyone. Eventually it becomes clear that he simply wants a place to die, privately, but not entirely alone.

Helene Wright

Helene Sabat, born in a brothel in New Orleans to a Creole prostitute, was taken away from her original home as a baby, and raised by her grandmother, who told her to be on guard for any evidence of her mother's "wild blood" and brought her up in a strict Catholic household. Helene marries Wiley Wright, and despite his frequent and long absences, is delighted when she has a daughter, Nel, whom she raises as strictly as her grandmother raised her; however, because there is no Catholic church in Medallion, she joins the most conservative black church instead. Helene is famed in Medallion as an impressive, upstanding woman, a pillar of her church. The only battle she loses is over her name; the townspeople, who refuse to say "Helene," simply call her "Helen."

Nel Wright

An only child, Nel is brought up in a strict, quiet, orderly house, but she longs for excitement, variety, and adventure. She finds them in the company of Sula, her best friend. Although Nel has been brought up in a strict and orderly household — or because of her upbringing there — she hates the "oppressive neatness" of her mother's house and loves "Sula's woolly house," where something is always cooking on the stove, Sula's mother never scolds or tells her what to do, there's a constant chaos of people stopping in, and where one-legged Eva presides, handing out peanuts and telling her dreams.

The two of them are inseparable, each finding something in the other to fill a hole in her own life. Morrison writes that Nel's parents "had succeeded in rubbing down to a dull glow any sparkle or splutter she had." Only with Sula did that quality have free reign, but their friendship was so close, they themselves had difficulty distinguishing one's thoughts from the other's. They are also bound together at a young age by their shared knowledge of exactly how Chicken Little drowned.

Eva grows up to be a traditional, quiet, "good" woman; she has a big wedding, to her mother's delight, has three children, and plans to have a quiet, orderly life. This plan is destroyed when she finds her husband and Sula having an affair.

When Sula is dying, Nel visits her for the first time in three years, since Sula's affair with Jude. They are uneasy with each other but pick up the relationship where it left off. Nel tells Sula she should be with someone who can take care of her, but Sula refuses. Nel is also offended by Sula's arrogant talk about how she doesn't need any man, never would have worked for anyone else, and doesn't need anyone now. She asks Sula why she had an affair with Jude, and Sula says it was just because Jude filled up a space in her life; Nel is hurt that she, as Sula's friend, didn't count to fill up any space. She can't get a straight answer from Sula about what their friendship meant to Sula, and realizes, "She can't give a sensible answer because she didn't know." The last thing Sula asks her is, "About who was good. How did you know it was you?" calling into question her identity as a "good" girl and a "good" woman. After Sula dies, however, the first thing Sula thinks is "Wait'll I tell Nel," showing that their friendship has endured past these difficulties, past death.