Sula

1940

“I heard you was sick. Anything I can do for you?”

She had practiced not just the words but the tone, the pitch of her voice. It should be calm, matter-of-fact, but strong in sympathy—for the illness though, not for the patient.

The sound of her voice as she heard it in her head betrayed no curiosity, no pride, just the inflection of any good woman come to see about a sick person who, incidentally, had such visits from nobody else.

For the first time in three years she would be looking at the stemmed rose that hung over the eye of her enemy. Moreover, she would be doing it with the taste of Jude’s exit in her mouth, with the resentment and shame that even yet pressed for release in her stomach. She would be facing the black rose that Jude had kissed and looking at the nostrils of the woman who had twisted her love for her own children into something so thick and monstrous she was afraid to show it lest it break loose and smother them with its heavy paw. A cumbersome bear-love that, given any rein, would suck their breath away in its crying need for honey.

Because Jude’s leaving was so complete, the full responsibility of the household was Nel’s. There were no more fifty dollars in brown envelopes to count on, so she took to cleaning rather than fret away the tiny seaman’s pension her parents lived on. And just this past year she got a better job working as a chambermaid in the same hotel Jude had worked in. The tips were only fair, but the hours were good—she was home when the children got out of school.

At thirty her hot brown eyes had turned to agate, and her skin had taken on the sheen of maple struck down, split and sanded at the height of its green. Virtue, bleak and drawn, was her only mooring. It brought her to Number 7 Carpenter’s Road and the door with the blue glass; it helped her to resist scratching the screen as in days gone by; it hid from her the true motives for her charity, and, finally, it gave her voice the timbre she wanted it to have: free of delight or a lip-smacking “I told you so” with which the news of Sula’s illness had been received up in the Bottom—free of the least hint of retribution.

Now she stood in Eva’s old bedroom, looking down at that dark rose, aware of the knife-thin arms sliding back and forth over the quilt and the boarded-up window Eva had jumped out of.

Sula looked up and without a second’s pause followed Nel’s example of leaving out the greeting when she spoke.

“As a matter of fact, there is. I got a prescription. Nathan usually goes for me but he…school don’t let out till three. Could you run it over to the drugstore?”

“Where is it?” Nel was glad to have a concrete errand. Conversation would be difficult. (Trust Sula to pick up a relationship exactly where it lay.)

“Look in my bag. No. Over there.”

Nel walked to the dresser and opened the purse with the beaded clasp. She saw only a watch and the folded prescription down inside. No wallet, no change purse. She turned to Sula: “Where’s your…”

But Sula was looking at the boarded-up window. Something in her eye right there in the corner stopped Nel from completing her question. That and the slight flare of the nostrils—a shadow of a snarl. Nel took the piece of paper and picked up her own purse, saying, “OK. I’ll be right back.”

As soon as the door was shut, Sula breathed through her mouth. While Nel was in the room the pain had increased. Now that this new pain killer, the one she had been holding in reserve, was on the way her misery was manageable. She let a piece of her mind lay on Nel. It was funny, sending Nel off to that drugstore right away like that, after she had not seen her to speak to for years. The drugstore was where Edna Finch’s Mellow House used to be years back when they were girls. Where they used to go, the two of them, hand in hand, for the 18-cent ice-cream sundaes, past the Time and a Half Pool Hall, where the sprawling men said “pig meat,” and they sat in that cool room with the marble-top tables and ate the first ice-cream sundaes of their lives. Now Nel was going back there alone and Sula was waiting for the medicine the doctor said not to take until the pain got really bad. And she supposed “really bad” was now. Although you could never tell. She wondered for an instant what Nellie wanted; why she had come. Did she want to gloat? Make up? Following this line of thought required more concentration than she could muster. Pain was greedy; it demanded all of her attention. But it was good that this new medicine, the reserve, would be brought to her by her old friend. Nel, she remembered, always thrived on a crisis. The closed place in the water; Hannah’s funeral. Nel was the best. When Sula imitated her, or tried to, those long years ago, it always ended up in some action noteworthy not for its coolness but mostly for its being bizarre. The one time she tried to protect Nel, she had cut off her own finger tip and earned not Nel’s gratitude but her disgust. From then on she had let her emotions dictate her behavior.

She could hear Nel’s footsteps long before she opened the door and put the medicine on the table near the bed.

As Sula poured the liquid into a sticky spoon, Nel began the sickroom conversation.

“You look fine, Sula.”

“You lying, Nellie. I look bad.” She gulped the medicine.

“No. I haven’t seen you for a long time, but you look…”

“You don’t have to do that, Nellie. It’s going to be all right.”

“What ails you? Have they said?”

Sula licked the corners of her lips. “You want to talk about that?”

Nel smiled, slightly, at the bluntness she had forgotten. “No. No, I don’t, but you sure you should be staying up here alone?”

“Nathan comes by. The deweys sometimes, and Tar Baby…”

“That ain’t help, Sula. You need to be with somebody grown. Somebody who can…”

“I’d rather be here, Nellie.”

“You know you don’t have to be proud with me.”

“Proud?” Sula’s laughter broke through the phlegm. “What you talking about? I like my own dirt, Nellie. I’m not proud. You sure have forgotten me.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. But you a woman and you alone.”

“And you? Ain’t you alone?”

“I’m not sick. I work.”

“Yes. Of course you do. Work’s good for you, Nellie. It don’t do nothing for me.”

“You never had to.”

“I never would.”

“There’s something to say for it, Sula. ’Specially if you don’t want people to have to do for you.”

“Neither one, Nellie. Neither one.”

“You can’t have it all, Sula.” Nel was getting exasperated with her arrogance, with her lying at death’s door still smart-talking.

“Why? I can do it all, why can’t I have it all?”

“You can’t do it all. You a woman and a colored woman at that. You can’t act like a man. You can’t be walking around all independent-like, doing whatever you like, taking what you want, leaving what you don’t.”

“You repeating yourself.”

“How repeating myself?”

“You say I’m a woman and colored. Ain’t that the same as being a man?”

“I don’t think so and you wouldn’t either if you had children.”

“Then I really would act like what you call a man. Every man I ever knew left his children.”

“Some were taken.”

“Wrong, Nellie. The word is ‘left.’”

“You still going to know everything, ain’t you?”

“I don’t know everything, I just do everything.”

“Well, you don’t do what I do.”

“You think I don’t know what your life is like just because I ain’t living it? I know what every colored woman in this country is doing.”

“What’s that?”

“Dying. Just like me. But the difference is they dying like a stump. Me, I’m going down like one of those redwoods. I sure did live in this world.”

“Really? What have you got to show for it?”

“Show? To who? Girl, I got my mind. And what goes on in it. Which is to say, I got me.”

“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.

Several times she tried to cry out, but the fatigue barely let her open her lips, let alone take the deep breath necessary to scream. So she lay there wondering how soon she would gather enough strength to lift her arm and push the rough quilt away from her chin and whether she should turn her cheek to the cooler side of the pillow now or wait till her face was thoroughly soaked and the move would be more refreshing. But she was reluctant to move her face for another reason. If she turned her head, she would not be able to see the boarded-up window Eva jumped out of. And looking at those four wooden planks with the steel rod slanting across them was the only peace she had. The sealed window soothed her with its sturdy termination, its unassailable finality. It was as though for the first time she was completely alone—where she had always wanted to be—free of the possibility of distraction. It would be here, only here, held by this blind window high above the elm tree, that she might draw her legs up to her chest, close her eyes, put her thumb in her mouth and float over and down the tunnels, just missing the dark walls, down, down until she met a rain scent and would know the water was near, and she would curl into its heavy softness and it would envelop her, carry her, and wash her tired flesh always. Always. Who said that? She tried hard to think. Who was it that had promised her a sleep of water always? The effort to recall was too great; it loosened a knot in her chest that turned her thoughts again to the pain.

While in this state of weary anticipation, she noticed that she was not breathing, that her heart had stopped completely. A crease of fear touched her breast, for any second there was sure to be a violent explosion in her brain, a gasping for breath. Then she realized, or rather she sensed, that there was not going to be any pain. She was not breathing because she didn’t have to. Her body did not need oxygen. She was dead.

Sula felt her face smiling. “Well, I’ll be damned,” she thought, “it didn’t even hurt. Wait’ll I tell Nel.”