The Bottom was a Black neighborhood on a hill above the fictional town of Medallion, Ohio, set to be bulldozed at the beginning of the novel for the creation of a golf course.

The farmer had promised freedom and a piece of valley land to his slave should he complete some difficult chores.

Upon the completion of the chores, the farmer regrets his end of the bargain, no longer wanting to give up the land.

As a way to compartmentalize the unpredictable nature of death, Shadrack invents a National Suicide Day to be held annually on January 3.

Shadrack proposed that Medallion citizens could kill themselves or each other on this day and be free from death for the rest of the year.

In "1920" and "1921," the narrator contrasts the families of the children Nel Wright and Sula Peace, who both grow up with no father figure.

Nel is initially torn between the rigid conventionality of her mother Helene Wright, who dislikes Sula's family instantly, and her inherent curiosity about the world, which she discovers on a trip.

Shadrack lives in a shack by the river's edge, and the girls are uncertain if he witnessed Chicken Little's death.

Eva sees this happening from upstairs and jumps out the window in an attempt to save her daughter's life.

Sula lives a life of ardent independence and total disregard for social conventions.

The rest of the town grows to resent Sula, in part because of her many affairs with married men.

Eva, Sula's grandmother, operates a boarding house and is about the business of her own version of mothering, "directing the lives of her children, friends, strays, and constant stream of boarders" (30).

In Sula, relationships between mothers and daughters do not seem to be predicated on shared affection and a duty to protect one's offspring.

(57) Hannah's comment does gesture toward a sense of duty but differs from Jacobs' as it implies an absence of a desire to mother.

"[6] As McDowell points out, the ambiguity of Sula as a character subverts traditional binary oppositions, and "transcends the boundaries of social and linguistic convention.

The beauty of Morrison's narrative is its complexity and its ability to illustrate the fluidity and valence of the black female subject as captured in the quotidian.

[8] Sula, Ferguson argues, gave black lesbian feminists "a model of alternative subjectivities".

By illustrating alternative social relationships, it provided a way for women of color feminists to imagine new possibilities outside of the constraints of nationalism.