Sula

In the foreword to Sula, Toni Morrison notes that she wrote while a single mother trying to work and write and raise her children – among other single mothers who were in the process of doing the same. As they struggled, they shared everything from money to food to time … and especially daring. They dared to do and create and perhaps, simply, be - having seen with frightening clarity through the bloodshed, banishment and stifling - of people and ideas and especially dreams – marking the late sixties, “there could be no turning back simply because there was no ‘back’ back there." In some ways, in the collapse of the before and the erasure of the tomorrow that once seemed promised, they were let loose – cut adrift, she says – to construct and craft and fashion a new reality – writing plays, designing new fashions, crafting fiction – no longer re-making, but simply, making - themselves. Because the foundation on which they’d previously staked their hopes had not only crumbled, but dissolved, they were left unnoticed, disregarded and thus unencumbered (ah the ingredients for making every (r)evolutionary): “Nobody was minding us, so we minded ourselves.” And so, in the midst of that ethos, she began wondering, “What would you be doing or thinking if there was no gaze or hand to stop you?” And then she began to imagine how those same freedoms and lacks of constrain, which she had unexpectedly been granted, would have been manifested for black women like them forty years earlier.

“We were being encouraged to think of ourselves as our own salvation, to be our own best friends. What could that mean in 1969 that it had not meant in the 1920s? The image of a woman that was both envied and cautioned against came to mind.” And so, Sula was born, to explore what might happen for a woman, a black woman, that structured her life outside the bounds of men, what the consequences might be for that escape – for the community of folk, but particularly on female friends - the very ones who in the midst of birthing Sula, had served as her mooring and lifeblood.

Forty years after Sula’s writing, Morrison’s question remains, “What would a life, a colored woman’s life, unconstrained, look like?” I’ve been privileged to live a life that has rarely been walled or forbidden or denied to unfold as it may. I have lived a life of my mind and heart, a life in which the unimaginable happens – often. In this world, I have had the luxury of being able to be a woman/girl that mainly – goes. And, should I choose, I have the freedom to keep being so. I have not been *solely* responsible for having to care for and manage no one before myself, been fairly unbound by the responsibilities of women – children to take care of, houses to run, bills to manage, the church to uphold and always, some him to love – I have lived the freedom of a man’s life, or perhaps, that of an anti-woman. And yet, today, the question lingers, still pressing and vital and urgent: what would a black woman unconstrained look like today? What would she look like – not only among the folk in the community or even in the space carved out by life-sustaining presence of women – but what would a unconstrained colored woman look like, today, standing in love? Is there a way to remain unconstrained, to escape the demand – and expectation – to defer her needs & desires & dreams to some other and to still be in union?

My mind is churning … something… something powerful this way comes. Until then…

~JJB 2011




Outlaw women are fascinating – not always for their behavior, but because historically women are seen as naturally disruptive and their status is an illegal one from birth if it is not under the rule of men.
~Toni Morrison, Foreword to Sula

[Excerpts]

She lived out her days exploring her own thoughts and emotions, giving them full reign, feeling no obligation to please anybody unless their pleasure pleased her. As willing to feel pain as to give pain, to feel pleasure as to give pleasure, hers was an experimental life...

*


The men who took her to one or another of those places had merged into one large personality: the same language of love, the same entertainments of love, the same cooling of love. Whenever she introduced her private thoughts into their rubbings or goings, they hooded their eyes. They taught her nothing but love tricks, shared nothing but worry, gave nothing but money. She had been looking all along for a friend, and it took her a while to discover that a lover was never a comrade and could never be – for a woman. And that no one would ever be that version of herself which sought to reach out to and touch with an ungloved hand. There was only her own mood and whim, and if that was all there was, she decided to turn the naked hand toward it, discover it and let others become as intimate with their own selves as she was.


*


She was a pariah, then, and knew it. Knew that they despised her and believed that they framed their hatred as disgust for the easy way she lay with men. Which was true. She went to bed with men as frequently as she could. It was the only place where she could find what she was looking for: misery and the ability to feel deep sorrow… particles of strength gathered in her like steel shavings dawn to a spacious magnetic center, forming a tight cluster that nothing, it seemed, could break. And there was utmost irony and outrage in lying under someone, in a position of surrender, feeling her own abiding strength and limitless power. But the cluster did break, fall apart, and in her panic to hold it together she leaped from the edge of soundlessness and went down howling, howling in a stinging awareness of the ending of things: an eye of sorrow in the midst of all that hurricane rage of joy. There, in the center of that silence was not eternity but the death of time and a loneliness so profound the word itself had no meaning. For loneliness assumed the absence of other people, and the solitude she found in that desperate had never admitted the possibility of other people. She wept then …

When her partner disengaged himself, she looked up at him in wonder trying to recall his name; and he looked down at her, smiling with tender understanding of the state of tearful gratitude to which he believed he brought her. She waiting impatiently for him to turn away and settle into a wet skim of satisfaction and light disgust, leaving her to the postcoital privateness in which she met herself, welcomed herself, and joined herself in matchless harmony.


*
But it was not the presents that made her wrap [Ajax] up in her thighs… her real pleasure was the fact that he talked to her. They had genuine conversations. He did not speak down to her or at her, nor content himself with puerile questions about her life or monologues of his own activities. Thinking she was possibly brilliant, like his mother, he seemed to expect brilliance from her, and she delivered. And in all of it, he listened more than he spoke. His clear comfort at being in her presence, his lazy willingness to tell her all about fixes and the power of plants, his refusal to baby or protect her, his assumption that she was both tough and wise – all of that coupled with a wide generosity of spirit only occasionally erupting into vengeance sustained Sula’s interest and enthusiasm.


*


Sula: You think I don’t know what your life is like just because I ain’t living it. 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.
Nel: Really? What have you got to show for it?
Sula: Show? To who? Girl, I got my mind. And what goes on in it. Which is to say, I got me.
N: Lonely, ain’t it?
S: Yes. But my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else’s. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain’t that something? A secondhand lonely?


*


N: But what about me? What about me? Why didn’t you think of me … What did you take him for if you didn’t love him…We were friends.
S: Oh yes. Good friends…
N: And you didn’t love me enough to leave him alone. To let him love me. You had to take him away.
S: What you mean take him away? I didn’t kill him. I just fucked him. If were such good friends, how come you couldn’t get over it?

*


N: I was good to you, Sula, why don’t that matter…
S: It matters, Nell, but only to you. Not to anybody else. Being good to somebody is just like being mean to somebody. Risky. You don’t get nothing for it.


*


Nel: I always understood how you could take a man. Now I understand why you can’t keep none.
Sula: Is that what I’m supposed to do? Spend my life keeping a man?
N: They worth keeping, Sula.
S: They ain’t worth more than me. And besides, I never loved no man because he was worth it. Worth didn’t have nothing to do wit h it.
N: What did?
S: My mind did. That’s all.
[I must say, I am marked and deeply sorrowful about the fact that Nell assumes it’s the men that are discarding Sula … it never even crosses her mind, that it was Sula who didn’t want them!]

*


Nel: "All that time, all that time, I thought I was missing Jude." And the loss pressed down on her chest and came up into her throat. "We was girls together," she said as though explaining something. "O Lord, Sula," she cried, "girl, girl, girlgirlgirl."

It was a fine cry - loud and long - but it have no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.