Content Matter Discussion
I have two reasons for adding the history element of the study of this novel. First, except for a few history buffs, I find that most of my students hold onto little of their American history taught them in previous years. In efforts to build the body of content knowledge in our students, content at my small site is often interdisciplinary or cross-curricular in nature. Knowledge of their history is empowering and helps them put the conflicts from their world into context. I’ve presented the historical events or issues and related them to the novel in each section below. The second arose in seminar discussion about teaching biography and fiction of other races and cultures than our own. Teachers face the challenge of having equitable and anti-racist classrooms, and many of us face a steep learning curve. We must ask some of the same questions we want our students to ask: Whose stories do we tell? Where do those stories begin and end? What are the best resources? In her introduction, Morrison asks, “How does a reader of any race situate herself or himself in order to approach the world of a black writer? Won’t there always be apprehension about what may be revealed, exposed about the reader?”2 As a white teacher in a very diverse classroom, I run the risk of presenting a set of quirky characters and circumstances that could be considered derisive to my students. Set in the context of their time and struggles imposed by de facto and de jure segregation, the characters have the potential to present as creative and resilient. They represent a community that is and affectionate of its race and culture.
The Novel
Teachers who are reading this unit have probably read Sula, published by Toni Morrison in 1973, a decade after the last scene in the novel takes place. The chapter names are years marking the passage of time through the plot. The first full chapter begins, after an eight-page untitled pre-chapter, in 1919. The last chapter is 1965. Most of the novel, though, takes place between 1919 and 1941. Though it is not quickly apparent, the novel is steeped in history that influences the characters, the setting, and significant themes around struggle. The main and title character is Sula, the third in a line of unusual and powerful women. They are not pillars of the community, but their presence is essential to the lives of the citizens of the Bottom, the all-black community where they live. Their influence—and especially Sula’s—touches the community like the waves from a pebble dropped in water. Sula’s best friend since childhood is Nel, whose mother and grandmother we also get to know and juxtapose with Sula’s. Growing up, Sula and Nel have an intense relationship. As young women, they navigate their relationships with boys; they participate in the death of a child together; they feel like two halves of a whole. But while Sula is wild and untethered, Nel marries, has children, and remains anchored in the Bottom. They are the most important things in each other’s lives, even after Sula is unfaithful with Nel’s husband and he leaves. They are separated for part of their lives when Sula leaves the Bottom, but even after her death they are deeply connected.
As young black women in the middle of the last century, their work and social options are limited, but if they are conventional, they are sustained by the town. For example, Sula’s existing eccentricities are known and tolerated, but when Sula leaves and returns in fancy clothes, they turn on her and attribute their misfortunes to her. The town holds place for other eccentric characters, as well. Sula’s grandmother Eva takes on the town misfits and random orphans. Her mother sleeps with most of the men. Shadrack, a damaged veteran from World War I, marks time in the novel with his annual Suicide Days. Nel’s husband illustrates the frustrations of the limited opportunities for employment and subsequent feelings of emasculation. In 1965 the town seems to be experiencing progress, but at the risk of loss of life, land, and culture.
Black Towns
Sula takes place in the Bottom, an all-black community in Ohio. The narrator calls The Bottom a neighborhood, but it is self-sufficient and geographically separate from the all-white town of Medallion. Oklahoma, where I teach, had 32 black towns around the turn of the 20th century and as many as fifty overall. About thirteen remain; one hosts an HBCU that many of my students have attended over the years. Knowing this and being familiar with Tulsa’s historic, once all-black Greenwood community gives my students a connection with The Bottom. Between the late 1800s and 1915, all-black towns sprung up all over Indian Territory and trans-Appalachian states as far as California and including Ohio, where Sula is set. Many settlers were seeking financial security, but often these towns were developed by speculators seeking profit. Usually the risk of resettlement was great enough that profit wasn’t enough; they waited until they could no longer endure what one historian called “the increasing terrorist attacks, widening disfranchisement, and emerging Jim Crow laws.”3
In Sula A freed slave is given the poorer quality land after being conned by his former owner out of the fertile and more desirable valley below by saying that the Bottom is more precious because it is nearer to Heaven. Many black would-be settlers, like the freed slave in Sula, were victims of scams defrauding them of their money. They may have been sold plats that were never for sale. Sometimes fake land agents created, at a cost, memberships in schemes that would provide transportation and land at unreasonably low costs. Other scams were common.4 Unlike white settlements, black towns tended to be started and promoted with less capital and sought ways to draw residents by trying to induce railroads and factories to move in. I guess being close to Heaven counts. The substandard economy in the Bottom, in contrast to the white Medallion, mirrors these deficits.
The citizens of The Bottom do find freedom where they can within tight geographical, economic, cultural, and racial parameters. Their greatest conflicts arise when they encounter the white world outside the Bottom, as soldiers or laborers, for example. Barbara Christian writes about history in Sula. She questions what kind of individuality and individual rights would be available in a community where the power belongs to the “dominant group as defined by race” and how “how much difference would be allowed within powerless groups if they were to be seen as a people?”5 She points out that the Bottom’s citizens “can explore the interior landscape of individual black people in their distinct selfhood rather than focusing only on their beings as seen by the other,” in this case those down the hill in all-white Medallion, a distinctly different community.6 The businesses in the Bottom are self-sufficient and reflect the character of the citizens, often ironically, such as the Time and a Half Pool Hall where the unemployed men hang out. There are also Irene’s Palace of Cosmetology (hardly), and Reba’s Grill “where the owner cooked in her hat because she couldn’t remember the ingredients without it.”7
Black Towns—Resources
I want students to understand the existence and legitimacy of black towns in America to give validity to the Bottom and to help them understand the social, economic, and political challenges—as well as the benefits—of black life in these communities, including Tulsa’s historic Greenwood.
Study of Conditions among the Negro Population of Tulsa by Interracial Committee of Y.W.C.A., 1938. Found in the vertical files in our public library, I used this in a different context in a previous unit. It depicts a part of Tulsa that had an all-black population in 1938, still within the scope of our novel. The document is arranged in four sections. (1) Health and sanitation: includes such details as how many beds were available for Negroes at the white hospitals, the higher-than-average rates of tuberculosis, and the lack of city garbage collection and disposal in some areas of North Tulsa; (2) Education in North Tulsa: documents the students and unexpectedly good standards at the few all-black schools. Of special interest may be some of the areas of study available to students including sign-making and maid school, millenary, and home beautification and Negro history; (3) Recreation: documents the lack of parks and playgrounds but a proliferation of public dance halls, pool halls, night clubs, moving picture houses, and recreational parlors. Very few of these exist in North Tulsa today, just as they disappeared in the Bottom by 1965; (4) Delinquency: the presence and job description of a probation officer is little changed and fairly forward thinking; however, the "Areas of Delinquency" page shows that what were safer areas then are more dangerous now, and vice versa. It ends with the statement that ordinances not enforced in North Tulsa include those at pool halls, dance halls, beer parlors and marble machines.
Excerpt from James Farmer’s Freedom—When? Chapter five investigates the virtues of desegregation and integration and comes out in favor of integration—once all the systems have been balanced: education, real estate, labor. Laws are not enough; white people must work towards it, and it cannot be tokenized by an effort here and an effort there. The essay is just long enough to test my students; they will have to be told that we must read to find out what he prefers, desegregation or integration. They will have their ideas about which is better, and we’ll apply to the novel in its place and time. We may look at this alongside Zora Neale Hurston’s Letter to the Orlando Sentinel mentioned later.
Youtube video, Historic Oklahoma All-black Towns Fight to Survive. This five minute video about Oklahoma’s remaining and dwindling all-black towns discusses their importance in the state’s—and the country’s—history. Towards the end it includes a plea to keep them alive in story and film so they are not forgotten. I’ll use this to begin or a class to see what students know about Oklahoma’s history of all-black towns and movement. Even though it is Oklahoma and not Ohio, the points it makes are worth discussing on the context of the novel.
Stories from The Union, an African American newspaper published in Cincinnati in the first part of the 20th century, a newspaper that our characters might have read. The first piece is a letter to the editor called “Rotten Eggs.” A reader rhetorically asks the editor if something cannot be done to fix the problem of loose women of his race “allowed to stand on the streets day and night and grab every man that comes along, white or black, and try to entice them in.” The letter resonates with the characters of both Hannah and Sula as well as the town’s tolerance of and frustration with them. The second piece, which seems to be an editorial, criticizes the changing roles and behaviors of men and women. The writer says that men are becoming weak and effeminate, and their wives are taking control of the households. They insist on headship households, where husbands and fathers “should look after the morals of the whole family.” Of course, in the novel, few men are to be found and the women do their best to take care of their own children and others’. The letter ends in hyperbole describing how effeminate men have become: “. . .so, some day, we may read in ‘The Union,’ William Smith is now the mother of a bouncing baby boy.” The last piece from The Union is an advertisement for homesteads that we will assume are for and all-black community of some means. We will briefly contrast it with what we’ve learned about how many black towns were started and the origin story of the Bottom.
Black Soldiers in World War I
The Ninety-Third National Guard Division of black soldiers came together after months of confusion and conflict. The 15th Regiment came from New York, the 8th from Illinois, and the 9th from Ohio, where Sula takes place. Secretary of War Newton D. Baker was from the South but had spent his career in Ohio. While still harboring some racist notions from his upbringing, he had ideas of fairness and thought that the black men he knew would make excellent soldiers. The process of recruiting, organizing, and training these soldiers was problematic: there were concerns about black leadership; white Southerners did not want black soldiers training in the South; and when they ended up doing so anyway, the soldiers had to follow Jim Crow laws. But men flocked to recruiting stations, many seeing an opportunity to advance their progress in equality and freedom. Surely, once they’d sacrificed themselves for their country they would earn some of both. At their training camp in South Carolina where they were not welcome, white troops instigated conflict with black troops, who with restraint managed to avoid becoming entangled. They arrived in France in December of 2017 but were not allowed to fight; white soldiers didn’t want to fight alongside them, either. Instead, they were sent away from the front lines to work as stevedores. A deal was made with the French, who had lost hundreds of thousands of troops and needed supplement, and the black Divisions went into battle with them in the spring of 2018. In fact, “the 372 Regiment, containing the Ohioans, won the French War Cross.8 The 15th Battalion from New York became famously known as the Harlem Hellfighters.
The first chapter opens with the character Shadrack running with his bayonet, ducking fire, on the edge of a frozen stream in France. It is December of 1917. He witnesses an explosion that removes the head of a fellow soldier, and he is badly wounded himself. He regains consciousness and suffers hallucinations and severe mental trauma. He doesn’t know where he is until he is prematurely released, spends a night in jail and is passed off to a farmer to get him home—22 miles away. The military hospital sends him off with 217 dollars, a suit, and his official papers.
Shadrack is not a main character, but he is an essential one. Chapters that feature him provide the bookends to the main narrative. He establishes crazy as a norm in the Bottom, and he is witness to Sula’s darkest misdeed, tying him intimately to her, unknown to her. He marks time in the novel with his National Suicide Days, an invention of his unsettled mind to help cope with death by thinking that he can manage or control the unexpected nature of it. On January 3 of that and each subsequent year, he parades through town telling the citizens that “this was their only chance to kill themselves or one another.”9
One other character, Plum, is also a WWI vet who faces his return with a heroin addiction and infantile dependence on his mother. He spent a year hitting the big cities—the Harlem Renaissance hot spots—before returning to the Bottom after the war. Jackson points out that he returns not as a renaissance man or city sophisticate, but a scarred soldier still, and once home, his uniform is “traded in for clothes that are ‘pointless.’” He is rendered so childlike and incompetent that his own mother murders him with fire. Plum is a less essential character. His presence and relationship with Eva tell us more about her. But his presence does seem symbolic of the perils of serving in the war and staying too long in the world outside of the Bottom.
Even more relevant to the characters in the novel is the treatment black soldiers received back home after their service. In addition to the trauma Shadrack and Plum face in the war itself, black soldiers also faced a new and vicious kind of discrimination back on their own soil, from elected leadership on down. As one historian notes, “Sen. James K. Vardaman of Mississippi demanded that white southerners defend their wives and daughters against ‘French-women-ruined Negro soldiers’. . . Instead of marching bands and grateful citizens to welcome them, black soldiers encountered mobs, complete with Ku Klux Klan members, who frequently beat them and stripped them of their uniforms.”10 In Europe, black soldiers had a taste of what life might be like outside of the Jim Crow establishment back home; however, having risked their lives and sanity for their country, they returned to find that many whites were as determined as before to keep them segregated and oppressed. The number of black lynchings increased; some black veterans were even hanged in their uniforms.11
In the novel, on the train to New Orleans, upon being reprimanded by a white conductor, a symbol of Jim Crow, Hannah gives him a coquettish smile. The faces of the two soldiers who witness go from “blood to marble.” They are reminded of their vulnerability, their faces “bubbling with a hatred. . .that had not been there in the beginning but had been born with the dazzling smile.”12 Neither would have been able to find a place to accept them outside of the Bottom. Except for Plum’s mother, the town sustained them without adding further conflict to their lives.
Black Soldiers in WW I—Resources
From these resources, I want students to understand the sacrifices made by black soldiers. While they were fighting for American security, they were also fighting the war on Jim Crow at home. Risking everything, they deserved to return home with the respect due all American soldiers.
First is W.E.B. DuBois’s brief essay “Returning Soldiers.” He notes the mission of black soldiers as they fought for our allies with shared values of liberty and against Germany. He also points out the irony of returning to a country that flouts the same high values with Jim Crow laws, lynching, and disenfranchisement. In an English classroom, the essay is also worthy of a quick rhetorical study.
An excerpt from Horace Pippin’s 1918 memoir. Pippin served with French troops in World War I. This excerpt is in his own hand (which confirms its authenticity to some extent) and includes a transcript. He describes German snipers and his own injury at the hand of one. After a day alone he is pulled to safety by French troops. He describes having little sustenance, constant rain, and another soldier falling dead on him in his trench. “After that I felt good and I trided to get up a gan. But I were to week to do so. Night were coming on. And it began to Rain. then I tried to get the Blanked from my dead comrad. That I could not do. And I could not get him off me. The rain came more and more ontell I were in water” (Pippin). The language is rough; words are misused and misspelled, but his description is clear-headed.
Excerpts from Colored Soldiers, by W. Irwin MacIntyre, published in 1923. This fictional set of narratives is framed by the story of a white man who recruited 300 soldiers to serve in World War I. MacIntyre apparently had a hobby of writing books in African American dialect—or what he supposed it to be. There is a stark contrast between the grammatically correct prose narration of the frame; several stories are introduced with the white narrator. The dialect of the “soldiers” will be interesting to contrast with that of Horace Pippin. The tone is humorous, mostly at the expense of the soldiers. The frontispiece of the book is a photograph of an unnamed young black man missing one arm. We understand him to be a veteran of the war. He is smiling at the camera and smoking a cigarette. We will discuss how we perceive the photo in the context of Colored Soldiers and how we would if it accompanied a collection of Horace Pippin’s memoir.
World War I poster: Colored Man Is No Slacker. This is at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library online. The poster is an idyllic image of a young black soldier saying goodbye to his girl. His platoon is marching behind him, upright and proudly carrying the American flag. The Beinecke has another World War I poster by the same artist. Titled True Blue, it depicts a black family looking longingly at a picture of their father in uniform over the mantle, bordered by American flags. On the wall are also pictures of Presidents Washington and Lincoln. These images suggest the heroism and patriotism of the soldiers—stark contrast to the treatment they are likely to receive upon returning.
Freedom Soldiers: African Americans and World War I, contains several photographs we will use in class. The book is easy to find in libraries and online. The first image on page 120 is of French children posing with and celebrating a group of black soldiers. The children have brought flowers and are posing affectionately with the men. The second image, on page 132, is of a black soldier being treated at a hospital by a French nurse. White American soldiers are staring at him hatefully. These two photographs illustrate the contrast between the men’s treatment at home and in France. Many soldiers fought hoping their service would advance their equality and respect at home. The final image, page 234, is of a painting by Horace Pippin, whose memoir excerpt we’ll use also. It is titled Mr. Prejudice. The image suggests that the equality and respect sought by the soldiers was not found. It has a large V in the middle, indicating the victory they hoped to find on the battlefield and at home. On one side of the V is a white-robed Klansman; on the other is the Statue of Liberty. Other figures represent the complex situation and challenges the men faced.
Black Labor Challenges
Leading up to and during the World Wars, black workers struggled to find equitable jobs in most industries. Government and military occupations were just often just as exclusive in hiring, though they should have been the most accommodating as accountable to the spirit of the law. Nationally and in more local settings, individuals and organizations fought for opportunity for black workers. In 1913 Frank Quillin published The Color Line in Ohio: A History of Race Prejudice in a Typical Northern State. He spent decades interviewing all socioeconomic groups of people of color and then of white citizens to gain their perspective on the lives of their black counterparts. He concluded that the law did not parallel or dictate the freedoms and experiences of Ohio’s black citizens by 1908-9, a decade before Sula’s opening scene. Regardless of legal opportunity, Quillin documents these facts: in Cincinnati there were no men of color in the medical school, on the fire department, on the health department staff. Many were able to work at jobs at the amusement parks, but had to ride on the cold, uncomfortable deck of the ferry for six miles to get there; they were not allowed to be visitors.13 More relevant to the men in Sula, who spent much of the duration of the story trying to secure labor alongside white teams but without success, black men were excluded from labor unions. “The bricklayers’ union, the carpenters’, the lathers’, the carpenters’, the barbers’, the bartenders’, the printers’ unions, and many others refuse admission to negroes.”14 Their mechanical skills went to waste. White men didn’t want to work with blacks. If there were not enough laborers of color, then they must all be white so as not to be mixed. According to Quillen, even if a white superior wanted to hire black workers, his hands were tied by convention. Some federally funded jobs like those with the post office were the exception. These labor challenges affected not only incomes, but workers’ dignity and sense of self-worth and masculinity, as well.
These same issues play out in the novel. In 1927 Nel’s young husband Jude can get work as a waiter at the Hotel Medallion, not making enough to support Nel. He risks his sense of self-worth and masculinity on the possibility of being hired with white laborers on a new road through Medallion and a bridge across the river. “He wanted to swing the pick or kneel down with the string or shovel the gravel. His arms ached for something heavier than trays. . .” and “that in the end produced something real, something he could point to. ‘I built that road,’ he could say.”15 For six days he inquires about jobs, losing out to thin, older white men. Motivated by rage and a need to define his manhood, he presses Nel for marriage. His motivation for marrying does not provide the foundation for a long-lasting marriage. Beginning in 1937, for three years rumors circulate that black labor will be hired to build the river tunnel. “The craftwork—no they would not get that. But it was a major job, and the government seemed to favor opening up employment to black workers.” Finally, most of the town following Shadrack’s 1941 Suicide Day parade for the first time, they dance and march on to the tunnel site. Like the layer of ice and melt covering everything, their bottled-up frustrations and anticipation of such desired work crystalize, and they pause before charging into their deaths as the tunnel collapses. “A lot of them died there. The earth, now warm, shifted; the first forepole slipped; loose rock fell from the face of the tunnel and caused a shield to give way.”16 They have been consumed, literally and figuratively, by their untended dreams of more lucrative, dignified work.
Ironically, 1941 is also the year that President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802 which stated, “There shall be no discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries or government because of race, creed, color, or national origin.” The order established the Fair Employment Practices Commission to enforce the policy. The product of the order was the Federal Employment Practice Committee. One intention was to get minorities to work in industries that would benefit the war cause. In 1943 the FEPC was buoyed by the office of the President and the policies were expanded to include all federal agencies, providing more and better-paying jobs to many black men, especially. By this time, many of those in the Bottom likely to have benefited from the new policies have died in the tunnel.
Black Labor Challenges—Resources
Young men in the bottom face their own kind of de facto discrimination, just as those did who fought in the war. Labor discrimination was a national problem, and nationally, black citizens and labor unions were organizing to improve opportunities for all black laborers.
Letter from A. Philip Randolph to Walter White, secretary of the NAACP proposing a march on Washington by thousands of African Americans to protest inequalities in labor opportunities, especially for defense jobs and the armed forces. After White met with President Franklin Roosevelt, the President agreed to sign Executive Order 8802, described above. I include this letter to show that change has specific sources, specific people doing specific tasks to make things happen. The letter also backs up the labor problems for the men of the Bottom.
Political cartoons by Theodor Seuss Geisel. The first is titled “The Old Run-Around.” In the center of a maze is an industrial building called U.S. War Industries. The entrance to the maze says,” Negro job-hunters enter here.” A steady stream of men enters the maze, but only a few find their way to the building. On the following page, the second untitled cartoon shows Uncle Sam poking an organist on the back and saying, “Listen, maestro. . .if you want to get real harmony, use the black keys as well as the white. The black and white organ keys are labeled “black labor” and “white labor” respectively. The first cartoon indicates the challenge that black workers face in finding war industry jobs. The second suggests that the war industry could be better served by employing black laborers along with white.
Civil Rights Era
One final chapter takes place in 1965, 24 years after the tunnel collapse. The first sentence of the chapter is “Things were so much better in 1965.” Black people had jobs with responsibility handling money, teaching school. But the following sentence, “Or so it seemed,” suggests that the past is still in control. Resilience can come from memory. White citizens come to value the beautiful but less fertile hills of the Bottom for their luxury homes and golf course, giving that property more value; black citizens settle into the valley. Gone are the Time and a Half Pool Hall, Irene’s Palace of Cosmetology, and Reba’s Grill. “It was sad, because the Bottom had been a real place.”17 In 1965 Eva’s ugly power still reigns over Nel, and industrial progress has led to the poisoning of the fish that Shadrack depended on. But the community seems more lively and complete during Sula’s time.
There is another side to the progress of desegregation. In 1955, speaking out about the Brown decision to desegregate schools, Zora Neale Hurston in her Letter to the Orlando Sentinel “argued that White schools were not inherently better because they had White students. Hurston advocated for Black self-association. Self-association would promote the ‘self-respect of [her] people’.”18 Hurston, trained as a folklorist and anthropologist, was a preservationist of black heritage and culture. She had affection for the “sealed black world in which she had grown up.”19 At all-black schools students can be their authentic, culturally indoctrinated selves; at white schools, they are questioned about the deviation from norms and measured by stereotypes. One can broaden the scope from schools to communities. Hurston’s take on school desegregation is a model for what happens in the Bottom with some of the most beautiful writing in the book:
“Jesus, there were some beautiful boys in 1921! . . .They hung out of attic windows, rode car fenders, delivered the coal, moved into Medallion and moved out, visited cousins, plowed, hoisted, lounged on the church steps, careened on the school playground. The sun heated them and the moon slid down their backs. God, the world was full of beautiful boys in 1921.”20
The Bottom is an inverted picture of what it was. With a new nursing home, new roads, employed black citizens, it seems improved, but for a few generations of its citizens it was a haven from the battles they fought as black mid-century Americans, a place for the displaced.
Conclusion
The historical events and issues that frame Sula—institutional segregation and disenfranchisement on the battlefield, in the workplace, and on their home territory—have always shaped the lives of black Americans. In the novel we see the outcomes play out in the setting, themes, and especially the characters.
The novel’s characters, like many of Morrison’s characters are eccentric and face complex challenges that often stem from their racial heritage. The varied and sometimes bizarre character traits and unique methods of facing these challenges are just part of being black in their particular time and place in America. In Sula, Shadrack manages his relationship with death by holding his National Suicide Day and living alone by the river. Eva manages her economy by cutting off her leg for insurance money, and fills her house with personally chosen misfits, like the white man she calls Tar Baby and the three Deweys. Sula escapes the predictable, minimal lives of the other black women in the Bottom by separating herself physically, sexually, and emotionally. She leaves the community without word, she has a prolific and indiscriminating sex life, she distances herself emotionally from Hannah and Eva, and, except for Ajax and Nel, she eschews personal relationships—and neither of those is conventional. She has created her own sense of agency where her county has denied it, especially to a black woman. In doing so, the community endows her with supernatural powers that are responsible for problems of weather, bad relationships, and deaths. Their limited options lead them to death and destruction in most cases.
Comments: