Sula

“A shucking, knee-slapping, wet-eyed laughter that could even describe and explain how they came to be where they were.” 

The narrator describes the myth of how Medallion’s Black community—the Bottom—earned its name. The amount of truth in the origin story is unclear. What is clear is that the Black inhabitants likely inherited their land through some unjust exchange. They laugh over this likelihood to keep from acknowledging the pain of being constantly cheated and unrewarded for hard work and service.

“It was not death or dying that frightened him, but the unexpectedness of both. In sorting it all out, he hit on the notion that if one day a year were devoted to it, everybody could get it out of the way and the rest of the year would be safe and free. In this manner he instituted National Suicide Day.” 

This passage describes how Shadrack invented National Suicide Day. It was a chance to give people a sense of control over their own mortality. He had seen during the war how fragile life was and how eagerly it could slip away. Though Shadrack had returned home mentally unstable, he was very methodical about how he had instituted the holiday.

“Any enthusiasms that little Nel showed were calmed by the mother until she drove her daughter’s imagination underground.”

The narrator describes the manner in which Helene raised Nel. To make her more compliant, and better prepared for the demands of womanhood and wifedom, Helene gave Nel an early sense of how limited her world would be. She suppressed any creativity or ambition the girl might have had, which was not an unusual rearing method for mothers at the time.