Searching for grace in a world of change: A review of Morrison’s Sula

Recently, a friend of mine posted a review of Toni Morrison’s novel Sula. I’ve read it several times, but this review was penned nearly a decade ago. What you are reading below is that review; immature at best but thoughtful in its development. Today, when I think about Sula, I have thoughts of Morrison’s ability to develop these diverse characters and make them come alive in opposing hues, Kind of like those spring days when the mornings force your frantic search for gloves. Still, the afternoon leaves you reaching for the contents of an ice chest.

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“...Sula was wrong. Hell ain't things lasting forever. Hell is change. Not only did men leave and children grow up and die, but even the misery didn't last. One day she wouldn't even have that. This very grief that had twisted her into a curve on the floor and flayed her would be gone. She would lose that too. Why, even in hate here I am thinking of what Sula said.”

Those words, Toni Morrison’s own, echo across the pages of Sula like a slow drumbeat at a dawn gathering—soft at first, but resonating with a power that lingers in the body. We hear in them an admission that life itself is a moving current, and any attempt to dam it, to keep our joys and pains static, quickly withers. The transformation—the unrelenting flux—becomes its own kind of inferno, something that consumes us. It’s a lesson that threads throughout the novel. “Hell is change,” Morrison insists, and to birth this notion signals that we, as readers, are treading terrain where comfort is not guaranteed, and where closure may very well be an illusion.

When I think of Toni Morrison, I often envision her not only as the woman shaped by Lorain, Ohio, and later by the cityscapes of New York, but also as the mother of two who balanced the demands of motherhood with the fervor of her literary imagination. There is something in the novel Sula—a certain lived-in authenticity—that emerges from these many roles she occupied. She moved to New York in the late 1960s, began editing books by Black writers, and mothered two sons, all while spinning worlds of fiction that often balanced the fantastic against the everyday. She drew from real people, from oral histories, from the scraps of memory held close by her elders. It’s those unspoken stories, half-forgotten conversations, and intangible experiences that settle into Sula’s pages and give the novel its pulse.

Sula the novel is set in the Bottom, a Black neighborhood perched paradoxically in the hills above the town of Medallion. From the jump, Morrison reorients our senses: what folks often consider “the bottom”—the lower place, the disfavored place—sits physically higher than the rest of Medallion. She flips expectations, using the geography itself to critique systems of oppression, to question the illusions of safety and prosperity. The Bottom becomes less of a place and more of an existential condition, a vantage point from which Morrison’s characters witness the swirl of life’s change.

Central to Sula is the friendship between Sula Peace and Nel Wright—two girls who share the hungry curiosity of youth. They see reflections of themselves in one another. Nel, raised in a house so meticulously kept that its order feels suffocating, is mesmerized by Sula’s unbridled spirit, the swirling energy of her household where anything can happen and where the line between scandal and necessity seems fluid. Their bond is forged early in that precious stage of life where one can wonder, and dream, with few fences.

But if Nel and Sula converge in childhood, they part in womanhood: Nel following a path that tends toward community acceptance—marriage, motherhood, domestic life. Sula, on the other hand, turns away from the rules that govern the Bottom. She leaves and returns on her own terms. In a world where the expectations of Black women often run like a current of necessity—being caretaker, mother, moral anchor—Sula defies the scripts. She questions, she transgresses. And yet Morrison refuses to portray her either as a triumphant rebel or a demonic betrayer. Instead, Sula is an embodiment of possibility and precariousness. She forces those around her to come face to face with their own illusions and boundaries, stepping beyond them in ways that scandalize.

Reading Sula, I’m reminded of how Toni Morrison’s writing style—already distinctive in The Bluest Eye—truly emerges with complexity here. Her prose ebbs and flows, conjuring the rhythms of conversation on the porch or in the living room, while holding a near-biblical authority. One moment, we can hear the steady hush of folks leaning over fence posts, trading stories about who did what. The next, Morrison’s sentences thunder with mythic cadence, reminding us that the day-to-day lives of these women—fierce, flawed, vulnerable—are the stuff of epic literature, worthy of reverence and close study.

It’s a careful balancing act: Morrison employs everyday speech patterns, the colloquialisms of her Ohio childhood, and deeply poetic turns of phrase. She doesn’t just depict a world—she awakens it. That effect, I believe, is intimately bound to the fact that Morrison carried these stories inside her while editing and nurturing the works of other writers in New York City. She once spoke about how, in her role as editor, she understood the importance of rescuing and honoring Black experience. That conviction seeps into Sula. Her own life—mother of two, single parent after her divorce—gave her a vantage point on womanhood, on daily resilience, on the particular shapes of Black love and Black grief. It is no accident that Sula resonates with such emotional ferocity and compassion.

Additionally, the novel’s unsettled question—whether Sula is free or reckless, saint or sinner—owes much to the real-life inspirations that Morrison witnessed and heard about. She once recalled a memory of a woman her mother knew, someone whose name was mentioned only in hushed undertones. Women in the neighborhood both disapproved of and admired her in the same breath, Morrison explained. That tension radiates in Sula. The impetus for Sula’s “outlaw” existence stirs an odd mixture of envy, suspicion, condemnation, and awe among the townspeople.

Yet for all the talk of Sula’s misdeeds—her refusal to conform to conventional romance, her rumored affairs, her disregard for community judgments—the novel is just as much a story of how communities often scapegoat the person who dares to exist outside their lines. Sula catalyzes a sense of unity in the Bottom, but that unity arises from people’s collective condemnation of her. In condemning her, they reaffirm their values and mores. Fear and moral comfort, ironically, become galvanizing forces. And Sula stands at the center of that swirl, neither fully understood nor cared for. Hell is change. And Sula can be read as the embodiment of that fiery truth, wreaking havoc on illusions and easy moral codes.

We see that Morrison’s sense of motherhood shapes how the novel portrays female bonds—and female burdens. Eva, Sula’s grandmother, is physically imposing yet emotionally wounded. She presides over a house that is at once a sanctuary and a place of trauma. Hannah, Sula’s mother, drifts from man to man but insists that she loves her daughter—even if that love seems short on tenderness. Morrison does not yield to one-dimensional portraits of mothering. She weaves together the complexities of maternal love, frustration, and longing. In that sense, the family dynamic in Sula feels like an echo of Morrison’s own immersion in the wide tapestry of Black communal life. She understood, from memory and from observation, that individuals often carry their own personal storms—and that those storms can swirl into each other until, for better or for worse, transformation is inevitable.

It’s almost too neat to say that Sula is purely the rebel, and Nel is purely the conformist. Morrison’s artistic genius lies in how she refuses to let either woman settle into static categories. Certainly, their friendship is at once the novel’s warm hearth—two girls skipping rope under the sun—and also its heartbreak, tested by tragedy and betrayal. The accidental drowning of Chicken Little shadows them; that moment imprints their bond with guilt, forging an unspoken wedge between them that changes shape over the years.

When Nel loses her husband to Sula—however fleetingly—her heartbreak is as much about her own illusions of belonging as it is about infidelity. She faces the rupture of the dream that if one does everything “correctly”—marry, mother, anchor a family—the community will reward that devotion with a promise of safety. But in Morrison’s universe, we do not arrive at safe harbors. We might piece together fragile moorings, but the storms—racism, misogyny, class division, even random chance—remain. And that is part of the novel’s radical truth: life is precarious, love is uncertain, and we are left to navigate shifting ground.

The novel’s final pages always strike me as an emotional crescendo. The sense that sorrow and self-discovery often coincide, that regrets can surface only when it’s too late, underscores Morrison’s preoccupation with memory and loss. The question she seems to ask: how do we hold onto each other in a world where everything changes? We witness Nel mourning not just her husband but also the absence of her bond with Sula. That final cry—“O Lord, Sula,”—resonates as a lament for a lost piece of herself. Because in the end, they are two halves of the same circle, forced apart by the demands of the Bottom and the illusions each has held. Sula’s death is not the close of any tidy moral arc—it is an open wound that reveals how the community, and Nel in particular, might never fully heal from the separation. The “change” that is hell has come to pass, leaving its scar.

Sula, then, is more than a cautionary tale or a feminist parable—though it is indeed feminist, and it carries a caution against letting fear dictate the community’s moral center. It’s also a testament to Morrison’s belief that Black life cannot be contained by formulaic narratives, that the complexities of mother-daughter relationships, of female friendships, of community ties, all demand a more expansive canvas. She gifts us with that canvas in Sula. We read her language and sense the lyrical intensity of a writer who not only has an ear for the jazz of ordinary speech but also the poetic depth to render heartbreak as a communal phenomenon rather than just private pain.

And so the novel loops back to that opening quote: “Hell ain’t things lasting forever. Hell is change.” We might interpret it as Sula’s personal condemnation of the illusions she sees around her. Or as Morrison’s broader reflection on the tumult inherent in being Black and female in a world shaped by structural inequalities and shifting ground. This worldview is part of what Toni Morrison gleaned from the collage of her life—growing up in Ohio, forging a groundbreaking editorial career in New York, mothering children who had to watch her burn the midnight oil in service of novels that now shape American literature. Her real-life inspirations—the stories of women who refused to be pinned down, the legends told by her neighbors and relatives—these are the raw materials that gave Sula such dimension.

Ultimately, the novel’s lasting power is the same potency that rings through Morrison’s entire oeuvre: it reminds us that the line between wholeness and fragmentation is thin, and that the difference often depends on whether we allow ourselves—and each other—grace in the face of unstoppable change. Yes, in the Bottom, that grace is scarce. Judgments pile up, scapegoats are fashioned, and people flee from the risk of loving too fiercely. But Morrison forces us to linger, to ask how a Sula and a Nel might have forged a different path had the community, or even they themselves, chosen acceptance rather than fear.

In the end, we can only guess how that story would be told. Toni Morrison leaves the question hanging in the air. And perhaps that lingering question is the novel’s enduring gift and challenge: to accept that love, grief, and betrayal come together in the dance of change, and in that dance, we create the shape of our communities—if we are bold enough to let go of our illusions and step forward.