“1920” introduces the Wrights, Nel’s family. National Suicide Day, like Shadrack himself, becomes a point of reference in their lives. Although the people of the Bottom at first fear Shadrack and National Suicide Day, they grow accustomed to it and him. Shadrack celebrates National Suicide Day by holding a noose and ringing a cowbell and admonishing the townspeople that this is their one annual opportunity to kill themselves or each other. For sustenance, he sells fish to the people of the Bottom. Through his belief that he has artificially controlled death, Shadrack is able to contain his fear and to begin a new life on the outskirts of the Bottom in a shack once owned by his grandfather. More than anything else, Shadrack fears death, and so, in an effort to contain his fears, he invents a holiday entitled National Suicide Day, the only day, according to his perceptions, on which death will occur. After he is released, his perceptions of the out-of-control growth of his hands stop when he finally sees that his face, unlike that of the soldier he saw die in France, is still attached and intact. This rootless man is haunted by his hands, which, in his delirium, continue to grow monstrously large every time he looks at them. “1919” tells the story of the shell-shocked African-American soldier, known as Shadrack, who returns from combat without any memory of who he is or where he comes from. The deceptive farmer called the land in the hills the bottom of heaven, and thus the neighborhood acquired its name. The neighborhood was called the Bottom because a white farmer, rather than give his freed slave the land he had been promised, lied to the man and told him that the land in the hills was more valuable. The story of the neighborhood unfolds years after it has ceased to exist. Sula begins with the story of an African-American neighborhood that once existed on the periphery of a town called Medallion. Sula confronts issues of loyalty, family, assimilation, innocence, gender, and sexuality, but is at its heart an examination of the priorities that determine the character, quality, and relationships of a woman’s lifetime. As children, the two girls in question, Sula Peace and Nel Wright, function as two halves of a whole, often seeming to complete each other in opposition.Īs they reach and achieve maturity, the differences in the girls’ responses to the pressure to conform to the norms of their community separate them and split their bond, which is not reconciled until the end of the novel. Like The Bluest Eye, the novel is a story of two girls coming of age. Sula (1974) is Toni Morrison’s second published novel.
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