Toni Morrison: Sula

It was on that train, shuffling toward Cincinnati, that she resolved to be on guard—always. She wanted to make certain that no man ever looked at her that way. That no midnight eyes or marbled flesh would ever accost her and turn her into jelly.

For two days they rode; two days of watching sleet turn to rain, turn to purple sunsets, and one night knotted on the wooden seats (their heads on folded coats), trying not to hear the snoring soldiers. When they changed trains in Birmingham for the last leg of the trip, they discovered what luxury they had been in through Kentucky and Tennessee, where the rest stops had all had colored toilets. After Birmingham there were none. Helene’s face was drawn with the need to relieve herself, and so intense was her distress she finally brought herself to speak about her problem to a black woman with four children who had got on in Tuscaloosa.

“Is there somewhere we can go to use the restroom?”

The woman looked up at her and seemed not to understand. “Ma’am?” Her eyes fastened on the thick velvet collar, the fair skin, the high-tone voice.

“The restroom,” Helene repeated. Then, in a whisper, “The toilet.”

The woman pointed out the window and said, “Yes, ma’am. Yonder.”

Helene looked out of the window halfway expecting to see a comfort station in the distance; instead she saw gray-green trees leaning over tangled grass. “Where?”

“Yonder,” the woman said. “Meridian. We be pullin’ in direc’lin.” Then she smiled sympathetically and asked, “Kin you make it?”

Helene nodded and went back to her seat trying to think of other things—for the surest way to have an accident would be to remember her full bladder.

At Meridian the women got out with their children. While Helene looked about the tiny stationhouse for a door that said COLORED WOMEN, the other woman stalked off to a field of high grass on the far side of the track. Some white men were leaning on the railing in front of the stationhouse. It was not only their tongues curling around toothpicks that kept Helene from asking information of them. She looked around for the other woman and, seeing just the top of her head rag in the grass, slowly realized where “yonder” was. All of them, the fat woman and her four children, three boys and a girl, Helene and her daughter, squatted there in the four o’clock Meridian sun. They did it again in Ellisville, again in Hattiesburg, and by the time they reached Slidell, not too far from Lake Pontchartrain, Helene could not only fold leaves as well as the fat woman, she never felt a stir as she passed the muddy eyes of the men who stood like wrecked Dorics under the station roofs of those towns.

The lift in spirit that such an accomplishment produced in her quickly disappeared when the train finally pulled into New Orleans.

Cecile Sabat’s house leaned between two others just like it on Elysian Fields. A Frenchified shotgun house, it sported a magnificent garden in the back and a tiny wrought-iron fence in the front. On the door hung a black crepe wreath with purple ribbon. They were too late. Helene reached up to touch the ribbon, hesitated, and knocked. A man in a collarless shirt opened the door. Helene identified herself and he said he was Henri Martin and that he was there for the settin’-up. They stepped into the house. The Virgin Mary clasped her hands in front of her neck three times in the front room and once in the bedroom where Cecile’s body lay. The old woman had died without seeing or blessing her granddaughter.

No one other than Mr. Martin seemed to be in the house, but a sweet odor as of gardenias told them that someone else had been. Blotting her lashes with a white handkerchief, Helene walked through the kitchen to the back bedroom where she had slept for sixteen years. Nel trotted along behind, enchanted with the smell, the candles and the strangeness. When Helene bent to loosen the ribbons of Nel’s hat, a woman in a yellow dress came out of the garden and onto the back porch that opened into the bedroom. The two women looked at each other. There was no recognition in the eyes of either. Then Helene said, “This is your…grandmother, Nel.” Nel looked at her mother and then quickly back at the door they had just come out of.

“No. That was your great-grandmother. This is your grandmother. My…mother.”

Before the child could think, her words were hanging in the gardenia air. “But she looks so young.”

The woman in the canary-yellow dress laughed and said she was forty-eight, “an old forty-eight.”

Then it was she who carried the gardenia smell. This tiny woman with the softness and glare of a canary. In that somber house that held four Virgin Marys, where death sighed in every corner and candles sputtered, the gardenia smell and canary-yellow dress emphasized the funeral atmosphere surrounding them.

The woman smiled, glanced in the mirror and said, throwing her voice toward Helene, “That your only one?”

“Yes,” said Helene.

“Pretty. A lot like you.”

“Yes. Well. She’s ten now.”

“Ten? Vrai? Small for her age, no?”

Helene shrugged and looked at her daughter’s questioning eyes. The woman in the yellow dress leaned forward. “Come. Come, chere.”

Helene interrupted. “We have to get cleaned up. We been three days on the train with no chance to wash or…”

“Comment t’appelle?”

“She doesn’t talk Creole.”

“Then you ask her.”

“She wants to know your name, honey.”

With her head pressed into her mother’s heavy brown dress, Nel told her and then asked, “What’s yours?”

“Mine’s Rochelle. Well. I must be going on.” She moved closer to the mirror and stood there sweeping hair up from her neck back into its halo-like roll, and wetting with spit the ringlets that fell over her ears. “I been here, you know, most of the day. She pass on yesterday. The funeral tomorrow. Henri takin’ care.” She struck a match, blew it out and darkened her eyebrows with the burnt head. All the while Helene and Nel watched her. The one in a rage at the folded leaves she had endured, the wooden benches she had slept on, all to miss seeing her grandmother and seeing instead that painted canary who never said a word of greeting or affection or…

Rochelle continued. “I don’t know what happen to de house. Long time paid for. You be thinkin’ on it? Oui?” Her newly darkened eyebrows queried Helene.

“Oui.” Helene’s voice was chilly. “I be thinkin’ on it.”

“Oh, well. Not for me to say…”

Suddenly she swept around and hugged Nel—a quick embrace tighter and harder than one would have imagined her thin soft arms capable of.

“’Voir! ’Voir!” and she was gone.

In the kitchen, being soaped head to toe by her mother, Nel ventured an observation. “She smelled so nice. And her skin was so soft.”

Helene rinsed the cloth. “Much handled things are always soft.”

“What does ‘vwah’ mean?”

“I don’t know,” her mother said. “I don’t talk Creole.” She gazed at her daughter’s wet buttocks. “And neither do you.”

When they got back to Medallion and into the quiet house they saw the note exactly where they had left it and the ham dried out in the icebox.

“Lord, I’ve never been so glad to see this place. But look at the dust. Get the rags, Nel. Oh, never mind. Let’s breathe awhile first. Lord, I never thought I’d get back here safe and sound. Whoo. Well, it’s over. Good and over. Praise His name. Look at that. I told that old fool not to deliver any milk and there’s the can curdled to beat all. What gets into people? I told him not to. Well, I got other things to worry ’bout. Got to get a fire started. I left it ready so I wouldn’t have to do nothin’ but light it. Lord, it’s cold. Don’t just sit there, honey. You could be pulling your nose…”