Overcome with grief and love for her child, Eva doused Plum with kerosene while he was sleeping and set him on fire, burning him alive. When he returned, he was ragged-looking, and seemed to have become addicted to heroin.
(It’s rumored that Eva allowed a train to cut off her leg in order to collect an expensive insurance policy.) Eva’s youngest child, Plum, went off to fight in World War I. One winter, she left town for months, and when she returned she had only one leg, but plenty of money. Eva devoted herself to raising her children. Eva was married to a man named BoyBoy, who left her after she’d given birth to three children: Hannah, Pearl, and Plum. Sula is largely raised by her grandmother, Eva Peace, an old, one-legged woman, and her mother, Hannah Peace. Sula lives in a house that’s nearly the opposite of Nel’s: big, chaotic, and full of people.
Instead they briefly meet Rochelle, Helene’s mother, who is a prostitute and shows no affection or concern for Helene or Nel.Īnother resident of the Bottom in the early 1920s is Sula Peace, a girl with a strange birthmark, shaped like a stemmed rose, on her face. In New Orleans, Nel and Helene arrive too late-Cecile is already dead. Nel resolves never to let any black man look at her this way. Nel notices that the black people sitting in the train are glaring at Helene for her deferential behavior. On the train ride to New Orleans, a racist train conductor shouts at Helene, but Helene only responds by flashing him a dazzling smile. When Nel is a young girl, Helene takes her back to New Orleans to visit her grandmother Cecile (Nel’s great-grandmother). Helene quickly acquired a reputation for being a highly respectable woman, and she raised her daughter to behave the same way. Wright brought Helene to live in the Bottom, and together they had a daughter named Nel. As a young woman, she married Wiley Wright, a cook. Helene was born in New Orleans, and raised by her grandmother, who taught her to be pious and moral. At first, the people of the Bottom ignore Shadrack, but eventually, National Suicide Day becomes an accepted part of the calendar.Īnother resident of the Bottom is Helene Wright. Every year, he walks through the streets, ringing a bell and yelling. Shadrack then proposes a holiday for the people of Bottom: National Suicide Day. He witnesses great violence in Europe, and returns to the Bottom a broken man. In 1917, he goes off to fight in World War I. In the 1910s, there is a man living in the Bottom named Shadrack. The novel takes place in the neighborhood of Bottom, in the city of Medallion, Ohio-a place which, at present, is a golf course for rich white people, but which used to be a thriving black community.
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