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1 ContentsTITLE PAGEDEDICATIONEPIGRAPHFOREWORDPART ONE191919201921192219231927 PART TWO19371939194019411965 ABOUT THE AUTHORALSO BY TONI MORRISONACCLAIM FOR TONI MORRISON S SULACOPYRIGHTIt is sheer good fortune tomisssomebody long beforethey leave book is for Ford andSlade, whomI miss although theyhave not left me. Nobody knew my rose ofthe worldbut I had too don t want glory likethatin nobody s heart. The Rose TattooFOREWORDIn the fifties, when I was a student, the embarrassmentof being called a politically minded writer was soacute, the fear of critical derision for channeling one screativity toward the state of social affairs soprofound, it made me wonder: Why the panic? Theflight from any accusation of revealing an awarenessof the political world in one s fiction turned myattention to the source of the panic and the means bywhich writers sought to ease it.

2 What could be so badabout being socially astute, politically aware inliterature? Conventional wisdom agrees that politicalfiction is not art; that such work is less likely to haveaesthetic value because politics all politics isagenda and therefore its presence taints wisdom, which seems to have beenunavailable to Chaucer, or Dante, or Catullus, orSophocles, or Shakespeare, or Dickens, is still withus, and, in 1969 it placed an inordinate burden onAfrican American writers. Whether they were whollyuninterested in politics of any sort, or whether theywere politically inclined, aware, or aggressive, the factwere politically inclined, aware, or aggressive, the factof their race or the race of their characters doomedthem to a political-only analysis of their worth. IfPhillis Wheatley wrote The sky is blue, the criticalquestion was what could blue sky mean to a blackslave woman?

3 If Jean Toomer wrote The iron is hot, the question was how accurately or poorly heexpressed chains of servitude. This burden rested notonly on the critics, but also on the reader. How does areader of any race situate herself or himself in orderto approach the world of a black writer? Won t therealways be apprehension about what may be revealed,exposed about the reader?In 1970, when I began writing Sula, I had alreadyhad the depressing experience of readingcommentary on my first novel, The bluest Eye, byboth black and white reviewers that with twoexceptions had little merit since the evaluationignored precisely the aesthetics only criteria itchampioned. If the novel was good, it was because itwas faithful to a certain kind of politics; if it was bad, itwas because it was faithless to them. The judgmentwas based on whether Black people are or are not like this.

4 This time out, I returned the complimentand ignored the shallowness of such views and,again, rooted the narrative in a landscape alreadytainted by the fact that it existed. Only a few peoplewould be interested, I thought, in any wider approach fewer than the tiny percentage of the fifteen hundredwho had bought the first book. But the act of writingwas too personally important for me to abandon it justbecause the prospects of my being taken seriouslywere bleak. It may be difficult now to imagine how itfelt to be seen as a problem to be solved rather than awriter to be read. James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison,Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston all had beencalled upon to write an essay addressing the problem of being a Negro writer. In that no-winsituation inauthentic, even irresponsible, to thoselooking for a politically representative canvas;marginalized by those assessing value by how moral the characters were my only option wasfidelity to my own sensibility.

5 Further exploration of myown interests, questions, challenges. And since mysensibility was highly political and passionatelyaesthetic, it would unapologetically inform the work Idid. I refused to explain, or even acknowledge, the problem as anything other than an artistic one. Otherquestions mattered more. What is friendship betweenwomen when unmediated by men? What choices areavailable to black women outside their own society sapproval? What are the risks of individualism in adeterminedly individualistic, yet racially uniform andsocially static, community?Female freedom always means sexual freedom,even when especially when it is seen through theprism of economic freedom. The sexual freedom ofHannah Peach was my entrance into the story,constructed from shreds of memory about the waylocal women regarded a certain kind of female envycoupled with amused approbation.

6 Against her fairlymodest claims to personal liberty are placedconventional and anarchic ones: Eva s physicalsacrifice for economic freedom; Nel saccommodation to the protection marriage promises;Sula s resistance to either sacrifice oraccommodation. Hannah s claims are acceptable inher neighborhood because they are nonfinancial andnonthreatening; she does not disturb or deplete familyresources. Because her dependence is on anotherwoman, Eva, who has both money and authority, sheis not competitive. But Sula, although she doesnothing so horrendous as what Eva does, is seen bythe townspeople as not just competitive, butdevouring, evil. Nel, with the most minimal demands,is seen as the muted , Nel, Eva, Sula were points of a cross each one a choice for characters bound by genderand race. The nexus of that cross would be a mergingof responsibility and liberty difficult to reach, a battleamong women who are understood to be least able towin it.

7 Wrapped around the arms of that cross werewires of other kinds of battles the veteran, theorphans, the husband, the laborers, confined to avillage by the same forces that mandated the the only possible triumph was that of job, of course, was summoning thoseperceptions in language that could express stretched my attempts to manipulate language,to work credibly and, perhaps, elegantly with adiscredited vocabulary. To use folk language,vernacular in a manner neither exotic nor comic,neither minstrelized nor microscopically analyzed. Iwanted to redirect, reinvent the political, cultural, andartistic judgments saved for African American writers. I was living in Queens while I wrote Sula, commutingto Manhattan to an office job, leaving my children tochild-minders and the public school in the fall andwinter, to my parents in the summer, and was sostrapped for money that the condition moved fromdebilitating stress to hilarity.

8 Every rent payment wasan event; every shopping trip a triumph of caution overthe reckless purchase of a staple. The best news wasthat this was the condition of every othersingle/separated female parent I knew. The things wetraded! Time, food, money, clothes, laughter, memory and daring. Daring especially, because in the latesixties, with so many dead, detained, or silenced,there could be no turning back simply because therewas no back back there. Cut adrift, so to speak, wefound it possible to think up things, try things, what was known and tried and investigate whatwas not. Write a play, form a theater company, designclothes, write fiction unencumbered by other people sexpectations. Nobody was minding us, so we mindedourselves. In that atmosphere of What would you bedoing or thinking if there was no gaze or hand to stopyou? I began to think about just what that kind oflicense would have been like for us black women fortyyears earlier.

9 We were being encouraged to think ofourselves as our own salvation, to be our own bestfriends. What could that mean in 1969 that it had notmeant in the 1920s? The image of the woman whowas both envied and cautioned against came (in an essay Unspeakable ThingsUnspoken ), I have detailed my thoughts aboutdeveloping the structure of Sula. Originally, Sulaopened with Except for World War II, nothinginterfered with National Suicide Day. With someencouragement I recognized that sentence as a falsebeginning. Falseness, in this case, meant was no lobby, as it were, where the readercould be situated before being introduced to thegoings-on of the characters. As I wrote in that essay, The threshold between the reader and the black-topic text need not be the safe, welcoming lobby Ipersuaded myself [Sula] needed at that time.

10 Mypreference was the demolition of the lobby altogether.[Of all of my books], only Sula has this entrance. Theothers refuse the presentation, refuse the seductivesafe harbor; the line of demarcation us. Refuse, in effect, to cater to the diminishedexpectations of the reader, or his or her alarmheightened by the emotional luggage one carries intothe black-topic [Although] the bulk of theopening I finally wrote is about the community, a viewof view is not from from the point ofview of a stranger the valley man who mighthappen to be there and to and for whom all this ismightily strange, even [In] my new firstsentence I am introducing an outside-the-circle readerinto the circle. I am translating the anonymous into thespecific, a place into a neighborhood and letting astranger in, through whose eyes it can be viewed.