Sula puts Eva in a rest home because she feels threatened by her. The two women are independent, strong, and concerned with self-preservation. When they love or hate, they do so fiercely and deeply. The two women are too much alike to live amiably within the same household. Eva’s love is the toughest of love. She is consistent and honest in the way she lives. Her name connects her to Eve, the first woman. She is the first and the last, the matriarch of the Peace women. Farmer Eva Peace is Sula’s grandmother. Eva marries young and has three children, but after five years of marriage, her husband leaves. Her children are Hannah, Pearl, and Plum. The baby boy, Plum, quit having bowel movements as a baby at a time when Eva had no food left. Eva uses the last of her lard to lubricate her finger to unclog his bowels. This experience brings her to the realization that she has to do something drastic to get food for her children. a b c McDowell, Deborah E. "Boundaries: Or Distant Relations and Close Kin", in Houston A. Baker and Patricia Redmond (eds), Afro-American Literary Study in the 1990s, Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 1989.

At its core, Sula is the story of two friends, Sula Peace and Nel Wright. The girls come from two completely different homes. Sula Peace is the daughter of Hannah Peace and the granddaughter of Eva Peace. Sula’s grandfather, Boy Boy, abandons the family when her mother is a small child, and Sula’s father dies when Sula is young. As a result, Sula lives in a house dominated by women. From her observations of these women, Sula experiences life as a chaotic mix of different people in a house that has a random and eccentric design, one that mirrors the lifestyle of its inhabitants. As a result of her environment, Sula becomes a bold person, but she is uncertain about whether she is loved and about how to express affection for others. Sarcastically described as a good white farmer, this man promises his slave freedom and a piece of bottom land if the slave will perform some very difficult chores for him. When the slave has completed the tasks, this farmer convinces the slave that the less-than-desirable hilltop land is really better because it is at the bottom of heaven and so the spot comes to be called the Bottom. Hannah PeaceI’m me,” she whispered. “Me.” Nel didn’t know quite what she meant, but on the other hand she knew exactly what she meant. “I’m me. I’m not their daughter. I’m not Nel. I’m me. Me.” Each time she said the word me there was a gathering in her like power, like joy, like fear. The representation of death in this novel is associated with observation; for even here, when there are no witnesses to watch over the dying, the event still registers as spectacle” (186).

Nel has a brief relationship with a bartender at a hotel in Medallion, but the tryst does not develop into anything lasting. Betty (Teapot’s Mamma) Eva is generous with her house and her resources. When abandoned and neglected children arrive at her door, she always takes them in. In 1921, three such boys arrive at the Peace household. Eva names them all Dewey, and the boys start to resemble each other, eventually becoming indistinguishable. Another outcast, an alcoholic white mountain man that Eva calls TAR BABY, also comes to live at the Peace residence. It's a short, hard-hitting story that I would call a bildungsroman if that didn't seem a little trite. But it's essentially about Nel and Sula growing up - surrounded by racism, injustice and segregation - and becoming women, discovering their sexuality in very different ways, and living very different lives. Their close friendship is pulled apart by an act that is at once straight-forward, unforgivable without question, but also complex and multilayered. When Sula is dying, Nel comes to visit her. The visit allows Nel to feel superior and to act as if her motives are selfless. She gets Sula’s medicine from the drugstore and then the two old friends talk about their lives. Sula stresses that even though she is dying alone, it is her choice that she does so— that freedom is not about escaping the inevitability of death but embracing that reality and fashioning it on her own terms. Sula makes a final speech to Nel about the need for breaking down oppositions and categories, something she has tried to do with her life. Then Sula asks Nel why she is so certain of her position as the good one, the right one, a question Nel is not able to answer. Sula dies and her first thought after realizing that she is dead is that she wants to share the experience with Nel. “1941”In this chapter, Sula’s return also profoundly impacts Nel’s life. Sula casually sleeps with Jude. When they are discovered, Jude responds by leaving immediately. Nel blames Sula and begins to define her life in terms of Jude’s absence from it. The fundamental difference between the two women becomes apparent. Nel cannot adapt to the change in her circumstances and sees the changeability of life as the source of the problem. This belief contrasts with Sula’s earlier observation that hell is stasis, permanence without change. Without evaluating whether events are right or wrong, Sula’s outlook is more in line with the reality of life’s perpetual motion and transition. Toni Morrison is not just an important contemporary novelist but a major figure in our national literature New York Review of Books Rekus is Sula’s father. Described as a laughing man, he dies when Sula is three years old, leaving both Hannah and Sula alone. Sula grows up without a father and this childhood loneliness provides part of the basis for her friendship with Nel. Rekus is really significant only because he is absent and therefore the Peace house is comprised mostly of women. Reverend Deal Because each had discovered years before that they were neither white nor male, and that all freedom and triumph was forbidden to them, they had set about creating something else to be. Feminist and Afro-American Literary Criticism have challenged the traditional Western notion of a unified self. Sula…offers us a journey to the epicenter of the human soul, depicting the post-modernist dilemma of multiple incoherent selves” (114).