With her gone, they no longer had her to position itself against and resumed their old, indifferent ways. Sula’s return to Medallion had united the community against her. Sula dies not long after Nel leaves the house on 7 Carpenter Road, where Sula had grown up.

Unable to get a clear answer from Sula about why she slept with her husband, Nel leaves her friend and never sees her again.

Several years later, Sula falls ill and Nel visits her. That, too, comes to an end when he senses that Sula is becoming possessive of him. Meanwhile, Sula starts a romance with Ajax, a local man she remembered from her youth. After Sula discards him, he buys a bus ticket to Detroit and is never again seen. Their reunion is halted by Sula’s decision to begin a sexual relationship with Jude, who leaves Nel and his children to be with Sula. She settles in Medallion while Sula goes off to attend college in Nashville and to live in various cities around the country.īored with the uniformity that she finds in major cities, Sula returns to Medallion and reunites with her old friend. When she turns 17, Nel marries local boy Jude Greene and has three children with him. The most devastating is the death of Hannah, Sula’s mother, who burns to death. During these years, strange things occur. The story continues into Nel and Sula’s adolescence, in which the girls forge their bond through their similar curiosity, Sula’s fiercely protective instincts, and their shared secret regarding the accidental murder of a local boy nicknamed Chicken Little. Morrison details the curious way in which Eva lost her leg and Eva’s burning of her only son, Plum. Nel’s friendship with Sula shifts the story toward its narration about the Peace family, which was also born from the Great Migration. When she returns to Medallion, she befriends Sula as an act of defiance. The trip to the South is pivotal for Nel, who witnesses her mother’s complicity with racism and how Helene’s superior manner is designed to disguise her shameful origins. However, she arrives too late and encounters her mother instead. Helene returns to New Orleans only once, with her daughter in tow, with the intention of visiting her beloved grandmother before her death. After meeting Wiley Wright, an employee on a Great Lakes liner, she moves to Medallion and gives birth to her only child, Nel. Helene Wright (née Sabat) was born in New Orleans, the daughter of a prostitute, and the granddaughter of a devout Catholic matron, who raised her. The narrative then goes back in time several decades to describe the origins of the Wright family. Not long after going back home, he institutes National Suicide Day. Shadrack returns to Medallion after being discharged from the veteran’s hospital where he recuperates after fighting in France during World War I.

Sula sparknotes