Nel is initially torn between the rigid conventionality of her mother Helene Wright, who dislikes Sula's family instantly, and her inherent curiosity with the world, which she discovers on a trip. Nel, the product of a mother knee deep in social conventions, grows up in a stable home. In '1920' and '1921,' the narrator contrasts the families of the children Nel Wright and Sula Peace, who both grow up with no father figure. Never assimilating, he curses even at children and whites, has regular acts of indecency, but also does odd jobs and sells fish to the townspeople and is begrudgingly woven into the urban fabric, which is this town's version of acceptance. Another method is the invention of National Suicide Day, which exists on January 3 to counter and compartmentalize the constant death he saw at war, and is essentially invitation for anyone that plans to die within the next year, to die on that day. Living in the outskirts of town and attempting to create order in his life, he develops methods such as keeping his shack in hospital-grade neatness. In '1919,' the first named character, handsome Shadrack, a previous resident of the Bottom, returns from World War I a shattered man, suffering from shell shock or PTSD and unable to accept the world he used to belong in. The story is organized by chronological chapters labeled with years. and the blacks populated the hills above it, taking small consolation in the fact that every day they could literally look down on the white folks' (5). 'The white people lived on the rich valley floor. This is obviously untrue, but it is the story that black people told to illuminate the fact that white people's racism and lies have created this topsy turvy world in which up is down and down is up. The slave said he thought valley land was bottom land, to which the master said land on the hill, not the valley, was bottom land, rich and fertile' (Morrison 5). He tells the slave he was very sorry that he had to give him valley land, for he had hoped to give him a piece of the bottom land. Freedom was easy, the farmer had no objection to that, but he did not want to give up the land. Upon completion, the farmer regrets his end of the bargain. In the first section of the novel, the origin story of the Bottom is revealed as well as how it got its name: a white farmer promised freedom and a piece of Bottom land to his slave if he would perform some difficult chores for him. The Bottom is a black neighborhood on the hill above the fictional town of Medallion, Ohio. The novel begins when the construction of a golf course is announced, the site being the destroyed remnants of what used to be the Bottom. Sula is a 1973 novel by American author Toni Morrison, her second to be published after The Bluest Eye (1970).

Sula sparknotes