Toni Morrison: Sula

“Lonely, ain’t it?”

“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.”

Nel sat back on the little wooden chair. Anger skipped but she realized that Sula was probably just showing off. No telling what shape she was really in, but there was no point in saying anything other than what was the truth. “I always understood how you could take a man. Now I understand why you can’t keep none.”

“Is that what I’m supposed to do? Spend my life keeping a man?”

“They worth keeping, Sula.”

“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 with it.”

“What did?”

“My mind did. That’s all.”

“Well I guess that’s it. You own the world and the rest of us is renting. You ride the pony and we shovel the shit. I didn’t come up here for this kind of talk, Sula…”

“No?”

“No. I come to see about you. But now that you opened it up, I may as well close it.” Nel’s fingers closed around the brass rail of the bed. Now she would ask her. “How come you did it, Sula?”

There was a silence but Nel felt no obligation to fill it.

Sula stirred a little under the covers. She looked bored as she sucked her teeth. “Well, there was this space in front of me, behind me, in my head. Some space. And Jude filled it up. That’s all. He just filled up the space.”

“You mean you didn’t even love him?” The feel of the brass was in Nel’s mouth. “It wasn’t even loving him?”

Sula looked toward the boarded-up window again. Her eyes fluttered as if she were about to fall off into sleep.

“But…” Nel held her stomach in. “But what about me? What about me? Why didn’t you think about me? Didn’t I count? I never hurt you. What did you take him for if you didn’t love him and why didn’t you think about me?” And then, “I was good to you, Sula, why don’t that matter?”

Sula turned her head away from the boarded window. Her voice was quiet and the stemmed rose over her eye was very dark. “It matters, Nel, 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 took her hands from the brass railing. She was annoyed with herself. Finally when she had gotten the nerve to ask the question, the right question, it made no difference. Sula couldn’t give her a sensible answer because she didn’t know. Would be, in fact, the last to know. Talking to her about right and wrong was like talking to the deweys. She picked at the fringe on Sula’s bedspread and said softly, “We were friends.”

“Oh, yes. Good friends,” Sula said.

“And you didn’t love me enough to leave him alone. To let him love me. You had to take him away.”

“What you mean take him away? I didn’t kill him, I just fucked him. If we were such good friends, how come you couldn’t get over it?”

“You laying there in that bed without a dime or a friend to your name having done all the dirt you did in this town and you still expect folks to love you?”

Sula raised herself up on her elbows. Her face glistened with the dew of fever. She opened her mouth as though to say something, then fell back on the pillows and sighed. “Oh, they’ll love me all right. It will take time, but they’ll love me.” The sound of her voice was as soft and distant as the look in her eyes. “After all the old women have lain with the teen-agers; when all the young girls have slept with their old drunken uncles; after all the black men fuck all the white ones; when all the white women kiss all the black ones; when the guards have raped all the jailbirds and after all the whores make love to their grannies; after all the faggots get their mothers’ trim; when Lindbergh sleeps with Bessie Smith and Norma Shearer makes it with Stepin Fetchit; after all the dogs have fucked all the cats and every weathervane on every barn flies off the roof to mount the hogs…then there’ll be a little love left over for me. And I know just what it will feel like.”

She closed her eyes then and thought of the wind pressing her dress between her legs as she ran up the bank of the river to four leaf-locked trees and the digging of holes in the earth.

Embarrassed, irritable and a little bit ashamed, Nel rose to go. “Goodbye, Sula. I don’t reckon I’ll be back.”

She opened the door and heard Sula’s low whisper. “Hey, girl.” Nel paused and turned her head but not enough to see her.

“How you know?” Sula asked.

“Know what?” Nel still wouldn’t look at her.

“About who was good. How you know it was you?”

“What you mean?”

“I mean maybe it wasn’t you. Maybe it was me.”

Nel took two steps out the door and closed it behind her. She walked down the hall and down the four flights of steps. The house billowed around her light then dark, full of presences without sounds. The deweys, Tar Baby, the newly married couples, Mr. Buckland Reed, Patsy, Valentine, and the beautiful Hannah Peace. Where were they? Eva out at the old folks’ home, the deweys living anywhere, Tar Baby steeped in wine, and Sula upstairs in Eva’s bed with a boarded-up window and an empty pocketbook on the dresser.

When Nel closed the door, Sula reached for more medicine. Then she turned the pillow over to its cool side and thought about her old friend. “So she will walk on down that road, her back so straight in that old green coat, the strap of her handbag pushed back all the way to the elbow, thinking how much I have cost her and never remember the days when we were two throats and one eye and we had no price.”

Pictures drifted through her head as lightly as dandelion spores: the blue eagle that swallowed the E of the Sherman’s Mellowe wine that Tar Baby drank; the pink underlid of Hannah’s eye as she probed for a fleck of coal dust or a lash. She thought of looking out of the windows of all those trains and buses, looking at the feet and backs of all those people. Nothing was ever different. They were all the same. All of the words and all of the smiles, every tear and every gag just something to do.

“That’s the same sun I looked at when I was twelve, the same pear trees. If I live a hundred years my urine will flow the same way, my armpits and breath will smell the same. My hair will grow from the same holes. I didn’t mean anything. I never meant anything. I stood there watching her burn and was thrilled. I wanted her to keep on jerking like that, to keep on dancing.”

Then she had the dream again. The Clabber Girl Baking Powder lady was smiling and beckoning to her, one hand under her apron. When Sula came near she disintegrated into white dust, which Sula was hurriedly trying to stuff into the pockets of her blue-flannel housecoat. The disintegration was awful to see, but worse was the feel of the powder—its starchy slipperiness as she tried to collect it by handfuls. The more she scooped, the more it billowed. At last it covered her, filled her eyes, her nose, her throat, and she woke gagging and overwhelmed with the smell of smoke.

Pain took hold. First a fluttering as of doves in her stomach, then a kind of burning, followed by a spread of thin wires to other parts of her body. Once the wires of liquid pain were in place, they jelled and began to throb. She tried concentrating on the throbs, identifying them as waves, hammer strokes, razor edges or small explosions. Soon even the variety of the pain bored her and there was nothing to do, for it was joined by fatigue so great she could not make a fist or fight the taste of oil at the back of her tongue.