A novel about the friendship between two Black girls, Nel Wright and Sula Peace, who grow up in the Bottom, a hillside neighborhood in Ohio. Nel chooses a conventional life, while Sula leaves town and returns years later, unsettling the community with her independence. Spanning several decades from the 1920s, the book examines loyalty, betrayal, good and evil, and the roles women are expected to play. It is a short, intense work that shows Morrison's gift for compressing a whole community into a few lives.
Quotes
In that place, where they tore the nightshade and blackberry patches from their roots to make room for the Medallion City Golf Course, there was once a neighborhood.
Like any artist with no art form, she became dangerous.
I know what every colored woman in this country is doing. . . . Dying. Just like me. But the difference is they dying like a stump. Me, I'm going down like one of those redwoods. I sure did live in this world.
It was a fine cry — loud and long — but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.