Sula

Where the Medallion City Golf Course now sits, “there was once a neighborhood” (3). This lost community went from the hills to the river. Now, they call it the suburbs. When Black people lived there, it was the Bottom. The buildings that sat in that community have long been razed: the Time and a Half Pool Hall, Irene’s Palace of Cosmetology, and Reba’s Grill. It wasn’t really a town, but it was a community where, if a valley man went up to collect rent or insurance fees, he would have heard some singing or banjo music. He might have seen “a dark woman in a flowered dress doing a bit of cakewalk, a bit of black bottom, a bit of ‘messing around’” in response to the sounds of a mouth organ (3).

The neighborhood’s origin was a joke. It was the kind of knee-slapper that white people told each other when the mill closed down and they were out of work. It was also the kind that Black farmers told when the rain didn’t come. The story was that “[a] good white farmer” promised his slave freedom if he completed some difficult chores (4). The slave finished the chores. When the time came for the farmer to fulfill his end of the bargain, he balked at giving up arable land.