Sula: 1922–1927

Every passerby, every motorcar, every alteration in stance caught their attention and was commented on.

Nel and Sula walked through this valley of eyes chilled by the wind and heated by the embarrassment of appraising stares.

Pig meat. The words were in all their minds. And one of them, one of the young ones, said it aloud. Softly but definitively and there was no mistaking the compliment.

Graceful and economical in every movement, he held a place of envy with men of all ages for his magnificently foul mouth.

In fact he seldom cursed, and the epithets he chose were dull, even harmless.

Years later their own eyes would glaze as they cupped their chins in remembrance of the inchworm smiles, the squatting haunches, the track-rail legs straddling broken chairs.

Years later their own eyes would glaze as they cupped their chins in remembrance of the inchworm smiles, the squatting haunches, the track-rail legs straddling broken chairs.

Similarly, Sula, also an only child, but wedged into a household of throbbing disorder constantly awry with things, people, voices and the slamming of doors, spent hours in the attic behind a roll of linoleum galloping through her own mind on a gray-and-white horse tasting sugar and smelling roses in full view of a someone who shared both the taste and the speed.

Similarly, Sula, also an only child, but wedged into a household of throbbing disorder constantly awry with things, people, voices and the slamming of doors, spent hours in the attic behind a roll of linoleum galloping through her own mind on a gray-and-white horse tasting sugar and smelling roses in full view of a someone who shared both the taste and the speed.

The birthmark was to grow darker as the years passed, but now it was the same shade as her gold-flecked eyes, which, to the end, were as steady and clean as rain.

Yet there was one time when that was not true, when she held on to a mood for weeks, but even that was in defense of Nel.

What they found was a strange accent, a pervasive fear of their religion and firm resistance to their attempts to find work.

With one exception the older residents of Medallion scorned them.

It was in that summer, the summer of their twelfth year, the summer of the beautiful black boys, that they became skittish, frightened and bold—all at the same time.

He would have left him there but noticed that it was a child, not an old black man, as it first appeared, and he prodded the body loose, netted it and hauled it aboard.

Later, sitting down to smoke on an empty lard tin, still bemused by God’s curse and the terrible burden his own kind had of elevating Ham’s sons, he suddenly became alarmed by the thought that the corpse in this heat would have a terrible odor, which might get into the fabric of his woolen cloth.

Eva couldn’t see Hannah clearly for the tears, but she looked up at her anyway and said, by way of apology or explanation or perhaps just by way of neatness, “But I held him close first."

Hens strutted by with one suspicious eye on the deweys, another on the brick fireplace where sheets and mason jars were boiled.

She missed and came crashing down some twelve feet from Hannah’s smoke.

She lay there on the wooden sidewalk planks, twitching lightly among the smashed tomatoes, her face a mask of agony so intense that for years the people who gathered ’round would shake their heads at the recollection of it.

A real wedding, in a church, with a real reception afterward, was rare among the people of the Bottom.

So it was rage, rage and a determination to take on a man’s role anyhow that made him press Nel about settling down.

Nel’s indifference to his hints about marriage disappeared altogether when she discovered his pain.

“Now,” Eva looked up across from her wagon at her daughter.

In a state of euphoria, with a hunger for more and more, die council of founders cast its eye toward a future that would certainly include trade from cross-river towns.

He needed some of his appetites filled, some posture of adulthood recognized, but mosdy he wanted someone to care about his hurt, to care very deeply.

More than anything he wanted the camaraderie of the road men: the lunch buckets, the hollering, the body movement that in the end produced something real, something he could point to.

The tea roses above her left breast had slipped from the brooch that fastened them and were hanging heads down.

She thought it was the perfect thing to do following their graduation from general school.

In fact, she handled most of the details very efficiently, capitalizing on the fact that most people were anxious to please her since she had lost her mamma only a few years back and they still re-membered the agony in Hannah’s face and the blood on Eva’s.