Sula

Sula Peace’s death was the best news the people in the Bottom had heard since they learned about promise of work on the new tunnel. Her death, they thought, marked the beginning of better days. There was also the renovation of a retirement home, which Black people would be allowed to occupy. Then, one afternoon, ice fell in Medallion. People remained in their homes for days. As the ice began to melt, everyone under 15 came down with a litany of ailments—croup, scarlet fever, rheumatism, earaches, pleurisy, and other troubles. Then, “a restless irritability” overtook those at the Bottom (152). With Sula no longer around as something to pit themselves against, the people lost all pretensions of affection. Teapot’s mother gave up her interest in being maternal and started beating her child again. Daughters-in-law once again resented caring for their mothers-in-law and wives went back to being less affectionate with their husbands.

Then, on January first, it suddenly warmed. Grass began to grow. When the sun came out on January third, Shadrack did, too, with his rope and bell, singing his dirge. The night before, he had noticed that the voices that usually kept him company were disappearing. He still drank a lot, but less often. He missed other people for the first time since he had been in France. He still had the purple-and-white belt that Sula had left behind when she visited him. He gazed upon it and remembered her. When he looked at her face, he saw the skull beneath her skin. He thought that she likely saw it, too. So, to make her less afraid, he had said “always” to comfort her. The word did its work, and she smiled. She ran off, but her belt fell away from her. He kept it “on a nail near his bed,” as a souvenir (157). He had seen her again, recently, when he went to rake leaves for the undertaker, Mr. Hodges. He saw her lying on a table. He recognized the tadpole over her eye. He thought, then, that he had been wrong about “always,” for yet another person he knew had died.

Now, for the first time, he didn’t want to ring in National Suicide Day. He wanted to stay inside with the belt. He decided to do his duty, albeit for the last time. He walked across the bridge and into the Bottom. This time, however, he didn’t care if he helped them.

For years, the people of the Bottom would argue over “who had been the first to go” (158). Some said it was the Deweys, while others said that it had been Dessie and Ivy. Those who thought it had been Dessie said that she had opened her door before anyone else, saw Shadrack, and laughed. Then, Ivy laughed. Soon, everyone in the Bottom began laughing as they never had before. The glee alarmed Shadrack, but he kept ringing his bell and holding his noose. The Deweys ran out of Eva’s house and danced a jig around him. Mrs. Jackson started marching behind him. Others quickly followed. That’s how the parade started.

When they got to the point at which the sidewalk started—the marker of the white side of Medallion—some people stopped and turned back, too self-conscious “to enter the white part of town whooping like banshees” (160). The rest kept moving down New River Road. They reached the entry of the tunnel excavation. They saw the construction materials sitting untouched and suddenly became quiet. All their hopes had lain at the mouth of this tunnel since 1927. The promise was dead.

Suddenly, they leapt over the little gate the erected only too keep out small animals and children, picked up the timber and steel ribs, and smashed the bricks. They then split sacks of limestone they were never asked to mix or haul, and turned over wheelbarrows. They destroyed “the tunnel they were forbidden to build” (161). They became so eager in their desire to kill what they had been deprived of that they went too far inside. Many died there after loose rock fell and trapped them inside. Tar Baby, Dessie, Ivy, Valentine, some of Ajax’s younger brothers, and the Deweys all died there. Shadrack had stood nearby, “ringing his bell” (162).