“Girl, I Got My Mind. And What Goes on in It. Which Is to Say, I Got Me”: Artistic Self-Fashioning/Self-Mothering in Toni Morrison’s Sula (1973)

Abstract

This essay highlights how, in lieu of a supportive community, Toni Morrison’s artistic daughter-protagonist, Sula, creates her own safe space within her liberated imagination through self-mothering. Thematic motifs of creative identity, the social role of the artist, and revolutionary self-care are relevant not only to Sula but to how Morrison herself conceived of transformative, safe spaces for Black women writers through her work as a writer and editor. In addition to discussing Sula, I briefly expound on Morrison’s novels, Beloved, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Paradise, and Bluest Eye, showing how audacious self-preservation undergirds the moral, political, and social dimensions of art, leading to personal and communal good. Reflecting on how Morrison flourished as a writer and editor after her divorce, while being the single parent to two young boys, I explicate Morrison’s understanding of motherwork as a complement to her artistic life, instructive of the ways in which carework, including self-care, helps artists and communities thrive. Morrison praised self-mothering in her unconventional artistic characters to reveal how female community and self-love are essential to sustain Black women artists.

1. Preface

This essay traverses the meanings and import of Toni Morrison’s unforgettable character, Sula Peace, the artist without a suitable canvas for the indomitable force of her imagination, radical self-love, and intellectual curiosity. Self-mothering and self-fashioning an artistic identity as a Black woman, despite barriers, underlies Sula’s ongoing appeal. Perhaps an unconventional character requires an unconventional approach, and I take license to combine a variety of methods, including Black feminist criticism and biographical studies, to tease out what Morrison was doing with this experimental would-be artist, and what Sula might have meant for Morrison herself as a single mother, as a part of the flourishing of the Black Women’s Literary Renaissance, and as a writer and editor refusing to center the White gaze. I offer new close readings of how Sula connects to Black feminist criticism, to Morrison herself, and to other Morrisonian characters across an incredible oeuvre. My focus hones in on Sula’s ability to fashion and mother the safe space of her own mind, which elucidates crucial aspects of Black feminist artistic journeys.

I want to extend a road map to what follows, which begins with one novel, and then ripples outward in larger concentric circles to discuss broader implications for mothering the self, especially when it’s an artistic self in a hostile, anti-Black, misogynistic world. Section 2 posits that Sula is a dangerous figure of liberation because she challenges the status quo and loves herself, an icon of audacity and creative freedom within Black feminisms and beyond. Section 3 discusses in greater detail how Sula liberates her mind from the imprint of racism and sexism, and begins to self-fashion/self-mother her artistic identity. Section 4 traces the importance for both Sula and Nel of having a female friend as a collaborator and co-conspirator to enliven creative production and community. Section 5 and Section 6 make broader connections between Sula’s artistic self-mothering and Morrison’s roles as writer, editor, and mother, as well as connections between Sula and other artistic figures in Morrison’s oeuvre like Pilate, Denver, Jadine, and Claudia.

2. A Womanist Artistic Imaginary

Toni Morrison’s titular character Sula Peace, while seen as a dangerous pariah by her community, has a creative energy that embodies a womanist artistic imaginary. I say womanist because of Alice Walker’s manifesto and the significance of Sula’s positionality as an “audacious” Black woman “who loves herself regardless” and who “appreciates and prefers women’s culture” (Walker [1983] 2011, pp. xi–xii); artistic because of Sula’s spontaneity, curiosity, metaphor-making, and verve; and imaginary, as in futurist and utopian, to the extent that Sula’s artistic possibility or potentiality is Morrison’s exploration. Mary Helen Washington excavates Sula as a “hidden artist denied the means to release her artistry” (Washington 1975, pp. xi–xii). According to Hortense Spillers, “Sula is Morrison’s deliberate hypothesis”: “Indeed the possibility of art, of intellectual vocation for a black female character, has been offered as a style of defense against the naked brutality of conditions” (Spillers [1983] 1993, p. 212). That Morrison finds Sula’s existence extraordinary because the community doesn’t kill or destroy Sula (Morrison 1994a, p. 8) indicates how automatically threatening society assumes a Black woman artist—even hypothetically—to be.

Because Sula “live[s] out her days exploring her own thoughts and emotions, giving them full reign, feeling no obligation to please anybody unless their pleasure pleased her” (Morrison [1973] 2004d, p. 118), I can appreciate why James Baldwin wrote to Morrison that Sula “dares us further to dare ourselves” (Baldwin n.d.). Highlighting autonomy, Morrison presents Sula as a self-possessed woman whose mind is her own, and whose life appears to be free of the poison of damaging social constructs, especially those originating from White supremacy. Sula, having survived the ordeal of death, thinks of telling her estranged best friend Nel that death’s not so bad: “Sula felt her face smiling, ‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ she thought, ‘it didn’t even hurt. Wait’ll I tell Nel’” (Morrison [1973] 2004d, p. 149). That is the ultimate bad b****, unafraid of death.

Morrison sets the novel Sula in an insular, Black community in Medallion, Ohio, in a neighborhood called the Bottom, which is a misnomer stemming from a White master promising freedom and land (not unlike the “40 acres and a mule” broken promise post-emancipation) to his slave, and then tricking the enslaved man into accepting hilly, infertile, unsustainable farming land because it’s the “bottom of heaven” (Ibid., p. 5). For generations after, White people lived in the rich valley land, whereas Black people lived in the hills, where farming was backbreaking, yet they had the privilege of looking down on White people for once. Eventually, the small town is bulldozed away to be replaced by a golf course, an event that speaks to the erasure of Black history, the effects of gentrification on Black neighborhoods, and the increasing threats of environmental racism. The book spans the time period of 1919 to 1965, and covers Sula’s coming of age, as well Sula and Nel’s childhood friendship and the rupture of that friendship when Sula sleeps with Nel’s husband Jude. The community views Sula as a pariah, and she dies misunderstood and alone. Nel comes to appreciate Sula after Sula dies, when Nel realizes the centrality of female friendship over heterosexual marriage. As children, Sula and Nel were drawn to each other and rebelled against societal norms, dreaming and imagining their freedoms; they trauma-bonded over the accidental death of a boy named Chicken Little, and their silence over what happened. Nel grows up to be a traditional wife and mother, whereas Sula moves away for college and travel, trying to carve out an identity different from both the traditional female roles and the untraditional female roles of her upbringing. Though Sula’s mother Hannah and grandmother Eva demonstrate the resilience and courage of Black, women-led families, they are also unsettling, uninspiring characters given that Eva murders her son because she cannot face seeing him succumb to addiction after she has struggled and survived for him, and given that Hannah seems unserious in her pursuits of men for fleeting pleasure. In some ways, their lives still reflect the power of men, as Eva’s bitterness is largely shaped by a husband’s abandonment and son’s failure to thrive, and as Hannah’s sexual freedom is perhaps more amusing than empowering. Sula stands quite apart from the female community in that she leaves home, strikes out on her own, and returns quite dramatically with an aura of mystique and confidence. The novel not only asks us about the centrality of women’s lives, relationships, and creative possibilities, beyond patriarchal and racist control and surveillance, but also suggests that Sula could have been a great artist.

Although Sula doesn’t choose an art form explicitly, she lives in the blues mode, embodying “emphatic examples of black female independence” and “a brazen challenge to dominant notions of women’s subordination” (Davis 1998, pp. 20, 22). A figure of liberation and imagination in a society for whom change is to be feared above all else (Morrison [1973] 2004d, p. 92), Sula rejects prescribed, subordinate identities like somebody’s mother or wife. Powerfully choosing herself, she tells her grandmother, “I don’t want to make somebody else. I want to make myself” (Ibid., p. 92). An “outlaw woman” (Morrison 2004a, p. xvi) whose imagination is liberated from gendered confines, Sula’s an artist not of the fine arts yet, but surely an artist of her own life.1 Sula questions permanence and is open to exploration: “hers was an experimental life” (Morrison [1973] 2004d, p. 118).

When Sula returns home, she is unfazed by her grandmother Eva who, threatening God’s judgment, exclaims with the authority of a righteous elder: “Hellfire don’t need lighting and it’s already burning in you” (Ibid., p. 91). Sula asserts herself: “Whatever’s burning in me is mine” (Ibid.). She doesn’t let anyone else, even her grandmother, lay claim to her story. Sula, among all of Morrison’s many unforgettable characters, comes closest to the independent spirit of an artist. In an interview, Morrison identifies the act of writing as liberating the “dead girl” within her, the self who had been submerged under social obligation and family identity. Morrison states, “I used to live in this world…I used to really belong here. And at some point I didn’t belong here anymore. I was somebody’s parent, somebody’s this, somebody’s that, but there was no me in this world. And I was looking for that dead girl and I thought I might talk about that dead girl” (Morrison 2008a, p. 198).

Sula has her own ideas precisely because her inner resources are free from the outside world’s toxicity. In the words of Barbara Christian, Sula “exists primarily as and for herself” (Christian 1985, p. 241). Sula is a powerful Black feminist symbol (Smith 1978; McDowell 1980). By clouding Sula in an element of mystery, Morrison invites the reader to imagine what Sula might do with her liberated imagination. Through Sula’s characterization, Morrison makes visible the notion of a Black female creative who prioritizes herself, suggesting the importance of radical rest for a sustainable creative life. Self-mothering and artistic self-fashioning shouldn’t have to, but seem to risk social relational ties, leaving Sula alone, but Sula doesn’t see it that way, valuing being alone with her brilliance. She even relishes her own death for the solace of finally being alone—“completely alone”—as Sula always wanted to be “free of the possibility of distraction” (Morrison [1973] 2004d, p. 148) Though silence and chosen loneliness are integral to artistic sustainability, creating literature has a broader communal impact so powerful that totalitarian governments seek to control what writers can say. Morrison saw her role as a writer and an editor as a path different from but no less important than marching for social justice; for instance, in supporting and publishing Angela Y. Davis’s autobiography, Morrison was documenting social justice movements (Greenfield-Sanders 2019). When Morrison wrote Beloved, she galvanized a public reckoning with American slavery, and ever since, the book remains one of “the top ten most banned books” (Buksbazen 2019; Griffin 2021). Banned and heralded, misread and scrutinized, Morrison knew deeply how a fearless writer isn’t embraced wholeheartedly.

While it is unfortunate that Sula causes Nel, her best friend, emotional pain by casually sleeping with Nel’s husband, the broader question the book asks doesn’t concern infidelity in a marriage, but rather, infidelity in female friendship. By this measure, Nel is unfaithful to Sula. Nel doesn’t attempt to suture their relationship, confront the situation head-on, or even look to Sula for help during the crisis of identity that ensues. Her friendship with Sula, though it takes her years to realize it, has been the greatest love of her life. Why should Nel’s failed marriage, which was a non-starter to begin with, as the couple added up to one slightly improved man (Morrison [1973] 2004d, p. 83), take precedence over Nel and Sula’s lifelong friendship, which began when the girls had “two throats and one eye” and, outside the marketplace of patriarchy, had “no price” (Ibid., p. 147)? How quickly Nel becomes the wronged wife, Sula the home-wrecker, according to town values. Nel sees Sula through the community’s eyes; therefore, Nel is unable to admit that her marriage had meant so little that Jude didn’t even fight for it. Ironically, a society seemingly run by women is still obsessed with male approval and love. Sula’s logic, at first funny and then profound, is that the primary social relationship in a woman’s life is friendship with other women rather than a heteronormative marriage or casual sexual partner; thus, sex with a man is inherently unremarkable. She tells Nel, “If we were such good friends, how come you couldn’t get over it” (Ibid., p. 145)? Jude’s abandonment of Nel and their family proves he never really cared for or knew Nel. Nel’s premise is wrong to begin with when she imagines asking Jude the searing question: “So how could you leave me when you knew me” (Ibid., p. 105)? The only one who truly shared mutual understanding with Nel was Sula.

Sula flaunts, even from her deathbed, her adventurous identity as paramount in contrast to the local women: “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” (Ibid., p. 143). Morrison insists on Sula’s ancient, ancestral elements, a life-force commensurate to a glorious redwood, so splendid one notices its fall from so great a height in the sky, unlike that of a shriveling stump, which correlates to the slow, living death of most Medallion women living small, safe lives. To continue the metaphor, Sula’s self-valuation as a grandiose redwood speaks to a womanist artistic imaginary that could never really die, but lives on as encouragement, provocation, or dare. Symbolizing a womanist artistic imaginary that is truly legacy-building, Sula prophesies, “Oh, they’ll love me all right. It’ll take time, but they’ll love me” (Ibid., p. 145).

3. Artistic Self-Fashioning/Self-Mothering

Less evil than eccentric, Sula is an artist who “lacks the shaping vision of art” (Spillers [1983] 1993, p. 231). Morrison asserts that we see Sula as a woman without an art form, NOT as a woman without a man, job, or children:

In a way, her strangeness, her naiveté, her craving for the other half of her equation was the consequence of an idle imagination. Had she paints, or clay, or knew the discipline of the dance, or strings; had she anything to engage her tremendous curiosity and her gift for metaphor, she might have exchanged the restlessness and preoccupation with whim for an activity that provided her with all she yearned for. And like any artist with no art form, she became dangerous

(Morrison [1973] 2004d, p. 121).

Sula’s failure to find her niche isn’t a character flaw. Simply, she hasn’t yet discovered her greatest possibility, her potential, which is her artistic craft. Sula’s yearnings are not met with formidable-enough outlets. Significantly, Morrison still calls Sula an artist, regardless.

Sula is not only an artist without an art form, but an artist without a collective or friend to appreciate, engage, and challenge her in her own lifetime. Nel could have been this lifeline for her, but rather than lay claim to her own me-ness and her creativity, Nel aligned with conformist community values which “drove her … imagination underground” and “calmed” her “enthusiasms” (Ibid., p. 18). Across works, Morrison has questioned the pious female code that values obedience, consistency, modesty, austerity, subservience, and politeness2 over values like mercy, autonomy, creativity, inquiry, and othermothering. Morrison’s works have famously affirmed othermothering, the carework and love that non-biological mothers have gifted to those in need of guidance, nourishment, physical and emotional safety, and a connection to the past. Patricia Hill Collins discusses how crucial othermothering has been in African American communities, noting the significance of women-centered caretaking support. Collins further elucidates how motherwork, performed by blood and fictive kin alike, has carved out “safe spaces” in the home, church, and community where Black youth, individuals, and families have been able to “speak freely,” “resist dominant ideology,” resist “objectification as Other,” and nurture positive self-valuation and collective identity (Collins [1990] 2000, pp. 178, 100–1).

Nel and Sula were once the kind of friends who othermothered each other, nurturing each other’s rights to dream. When the two friends part ways, Nel reinforces the dominant ideology, whereas Sula resists it. Thus, Nel, the so-called good woman, sides with the social norms of her milieu, denying Sula her other-half, the meaningful, nurturing friendship essential to women artists, and also denying herself her best friend, her person, the one who mattered most to her over all those years, the one who reminded her of the pleasures of a “rib-scraping laugh” (Morrison [1973] 2004d, p. 98).

Sula, as a poet or philosopher might, questions assumed knowledge and pushes back against the community and Nel’s simplistic definitions of good and evil. For instance, is Sula evil because she supposedly caused the accidental drowning of a little boy though she was simply playing by the river as a child? Is she a sociopath because as a child she witnesses her mother burning to death: was she paralyzed by fear or was she fascinated by suffering? Is she unforgivable because she casually slept with Nel’s husband, not understanding marital possessiveness nor the separate domains of female best friends who in the past shared transient crushes? Deborah Thurman locates the book’s tragedy in the “dissolution of mutual understanding that leaves Nel grieving alone” but ultimately redirects us from the friendship breakup to “a celebration of Sula’s epistemological singularity”: ‘How you know?’ Sula asks Nel in their final exchange. ‘About who was good. How you know it was you?’ It is a moral challenge framed in explicitly epistemological terms. The crux of goodness lies in the ‘how’ of knowing, the mode of perception that will permit moral conduct” (Thurman 2021, p. 8). Rather than co-sign the community’s labeling of Sula as a roach and a b****, we might appreciate how Sula questions and then begins to reconstruct notions of morality based on her lived experience and her own particular, liberated way of thinking. Challenging perceived knowledge and scrutinizing how you know what you know or presume to know is risky, messy, and daring, and as such, signifies an outlaw, poet, or philosopher at work. Not everyone has the courage or independence of mind like Sula to take moral and humanistic inquiry to another level, deconstructing binaries between good and evil, and privileging the dynamics of friendship as more nourishing to creativity and personal freedom than the dynamics of sexual relationships (Morrison 2004a, p. xiii).

Through Sula’s audacity, Morrison reveals that one’s own mind is a potential safe space, an interior space to be cultivated, valued, and loved. Stood up for. Otherwise, the self is corrupted by society that demands women tell little lies, live small lives for others, and repress their creativity. Toni Cade Bambara says, “Revolution begins with the self. The individual, the basic revolutionary unit, must be purged of poison and lies that assault the ego and threaten the heart” (Cade [1970] 2005, p. 133). She goes on to discuss how a poisoned self-concept tarnishes relationships and Black Liberation. What’s both daunting and liberating, in Bambara’s words, is to “start from scratch” (Ibid.). Sula is an embodiment of this freeing process to begin with the self: “What would you be doing or thinking about if there was no gaze or hand to stop you?” (Morrison 2004a, p. xv). What kinds of questions might one ask? In what ways is a female friend more important than a marriage or a sexual partner? Or, how does one make oneself as a woman, and nurture oneself creatively or otherwise, regardless of whether one is a mother, or in a romantic or sexual partnership? How does a woman writer choose herself and choose her art above other obligations? What does self-possession look like for a woman artist? Sula, in her being, questions the devaluing of women in a capitalistic, patriarchal, sexist world, and she asserts the centrality of women’s friendships and of women’s self-determination. Sula evokes Black woman artists following a vocational calling in the arts, seeing in art a pathway to fulfillment, purpose, and social transformation. Sula reminds us of the possibilities within a creative life of carving out psychic freedom, the blank page or canvas where one can experiment and be held back by no one. For Morrison, this held personal resonance as she was understandably disturbed by the fact that Black writers such as Baldwin, Richard Wright, and Zora Neale Hurston had been needled by White literary milieus to explain themselves by responding to the essay prompt of the “problem” of the African-American writer, and she saw her own early work absurdly reduced to sociology, “whether ‘Black people are—or are not—like this” (Morrison 2004a, p. xii). Sula could have been an appealing archetype to Morrison personally, representing the possibilities of art that centers the artist’s concerns, questions, and quandaries, rather than art that panders to a White male audience. Sounding a bit like Sula herself, Morrison reflects on her own self-definition as a Black woman artist who wasn't going to pay much attention to the definitions imposed upon her by the media or critics, “Since my sensibility was highly political and passionately aesthetic, it would unapologetically inform the work I did. I refused to explain, or even acknowledge, the ‘problem’ as anything other than an artistic one” (Ibid., p. xiii).

Sarah Haley takes inspiration from Sula’s avante-garde or experimental lifestyle, suggesting that she represents the speculative elements of Black feminist practice, “rais[ing] questions about the stakes of the affective intellectual work of Black liberatory life-making, incomplete as it is, and to emphasize its ingenuity, creativity, and skill and its production under conditions of extraction and constriction” (Haley 2025, p. 241). Honing in on what she calls fugitive spaces of terrain rather than static sanctuaries for Black and queer Black women, Haley highlights Sula’s aesthetic or worldview as rich terrain for creative composition and political resistance. Thus, Sula’s outlaw archetype and creative potential reflect “the capacity to make prospects for elsewhere, excess, and errancy beyond racial and gendered domination” (Ibid., p. 236).

In crafting a pariah as a would-be artist, Morrison excavates a variety of questions about an artist’s duty to herself vs. her duty to society; about the power of a liberated imagination; and about the sustainability of an artistic life and of female camaraderie. Through Sula’s characterization as an emerging artist, Morrison provokes questions such as these: What societal expectations must an artist resist to protect a safe haven conducive to making meaningful art? How can an artist fiercely protect her psyche from conformity and mediocrity not only for her own sake but for the sake of others—to offer art of moral and social value to her community such as memory, critique, inquiry, or culture-bearing? How does an artist refuse to be owned by anybody, and lay claim to her autonomy untethered to a mother, a grandmother, the church, the town, other women, children, or a man? By contrast, how can a storyteller exist in isolation or, worse, in exile, without the kind of female friend that is celebrated in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), in which Phoebe and Janie both create the story, and in so doing, navigate the healing and cultural work of deciphering values and choices and, through their friendship, understand self and each other? To what extent have women creatives lost the opportunity to make art because they centered their value on a man, and were willing to throw their lives away because of a man? As Morrison points out in an interview, what would have happened if Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina had a best girl friend to talk her off the train tracks? (Morrison 2008d, p. 16). How might artists perform the healing role of the ancestor for others and for the self? Morrison conceives of the ancestor as an “outlaw,” someone who must “defy the system” and yet “provide alternative wisdom and maintain and sustain generations” (Morrison 1985, p. 43). How would an artist reconcile the tensions between the ancestor as healer-advisor in the village vs. the ancestor as outlaw/outlier with her own needs for independence and self-fulfillment? Morrison suggests that Henry Dumas shows the “connection (not conflict) between the ancestor and personal fulfillment” (Ibid., p. 41); how can a woman artist be a guide but also tend to herself?

I see Sula as the subversive, autonomous voice Morrison explores as part of art’s social function. While Sula isn’t “the critical voice that upholds traditional and communal values,” she most certainly is the critical voice “that provides occasion for an individual to transcend and/or defy group restrictions” (Morrison 2019c, p. 267). While the apparent selfishness in Sula obscures traditional values associated with culture-bearing womanhood, her selfishness is also a grace, protecting her from the damaging social constructs all around her. Sula’s “selfish” choices suggest a path forward for future artists, perhaps an aesthetic that borrows from both Nel and Sula’s proclivities, thus balancing self-care and community values. It is a loss to the Bottom community that they label Sula a pariah and miss the opportunity to critically and creatively engage with a potential ancestor-artist.

Though not pen or brush, Sula wields a knife and joins the company of other Morrisonian women to do so (Pilate in Song of Solomon to protect her daughter Reba from an awful man; Violet in Jazz to assert herself against the dead girl who threatens her own self-worth in an ageist, sexist world). As a young girl, Sula brandishes a knife to protect herself and Nel from White immigrant boys who threaten them on the way to school. In so doing, Sula secures space for herself and Nel, space that was threatened by the intersections of racism and sexism. However, in an act of self-harm, Sula slices off the tip of her finger and scares her friend Nel. A knife is an ambiguous instrument associated with maternal or sororal protection and self-defense but also violence and self-sabotage. If the knife is a tool of creative resistance, however discomforting, Sula picks the knife back up as a young woman scraping beyond the surfaces of a beloved’s body to excite her imagination. Sula imagines chiseling away at Ajax, a lover, digging and excavating his essence. This excavation recalls the creative, spontaneous play by the river, where Sula and Nel collaborated blithely. As children on the cusp of womanhood, Sula and Nel played and interacted with their environment, digging holes and filling them with debris and trash. During sex, Sula paints an image of the beloved as a series of elements like soil, loam, and water, and artistic media like clay, alabaster, gold, animal leather, and mud. She is the artist, using her grandmother’s paring knife, a nail file, a chisel, and a small hammer, in her imagination to get at what is under the surface. There’s an eco-romanticism in Sula’s image-making, scraping away the soil and feeling the changing temperatures (Morrison [1973] 2004d, p. 131), evoking building sandcastles and digging deeper into colder sand. The textures of touching and scratching are provocative, artistic, and also evoke child-like play and curiosity. Sula is the water that blends into this sculpture of her beloved. Ever keeping the focus on Sula’s imagination, rather than on the man, Morrison insists that Sula’s pleasure in sex was the contemplative moment of being alone in her thoughts: “the postcoital privateness in which she met herself, welcomed herself, and joined herself in matchless harmony” (Ibid., p. 124). Sula delves into her own interiority more so than her beloved’s, coming into a deeper understanding of her own transcendence and creativity.

When the relationship with Ajax dissipates due to the confusion between love and possession, Sula’s focus is on the misnaming of the beloved. She thought she knew him. The discovery of her beloved’s name spelled out (as A. Jacks rather than Ajax) seems to be a greater shock than the shock of losing him. All along, she was calling him the wrong name: Ajax, the way she visualized her partner’s nickname, rather than A. Jacks as in Albert Jacks (Ibid., p. 136). Her beloved’s sculpture has no integrity, no title. Her knowing is false. (Nel never came to this understanding, having fraudulently believed that Jude knew her). She washes over her own image-making with blues symbols: “dreams of cobalt blue” (Ibid., p. 137) and a blues song. The last song she’ll sing articulates the end of singing: “I have sung all the songs all the songs I have sung all the songs there are” (Ibid., p.137). The elegiac impulse concerns the end of an art form rather than merely the loss of a man. Whereas this moment feels finite, there’s a limitless cry Nel lets out (Ibid., p. 174) at Sula’s burial that testifies to Nel’s deep love for Sula. As a circle doesn’t end, nor the open-vowel sound of a strong cry, so a great love exists infinitely without end. Her cry speaks to how best friends sometimes understand each other beyond language, and their relationships continues beyond the grave.

Considering Sula as a would-be artist is not merely an intellectual exercise, given the centuries of stolen, enslaved, repressed, exploited, disenfranchised, and/or unknown Black women artists in African American history. Sula’s unmet artistic desires reflect a much broader expressed longing among American Black women writers to make sense of oneself as an artist, within a family and within a people. Forms of explicit and implicit permission and encouragement is something Black women writers have long derived from kin and ancestors, or even gifted for and from their very selves, as when Lucille Clifton celebrates herself precisely because she had no female, culturally relevant models (presumably a literary mother or mothers) yet nonetheless resisted daily violence and erasure (Clifton [1992] 2012, p. 427). Excavating literary foremothers through an ethic of care and necessity is a righteous, avenging love practiced by many Black feminists of the 70s and 80s, like Alice Walker discovering Zora Neale Hurston’s legacy, and Audre Lorde’s offer of timeless, life-affirming sisterhood to Angelina Weld Grimké. June Jordan testifies to unearthing a foremother in a largely unknown Harlem Renaissance poet, “From the terrible graves of a traditional conspiracy against my sisters in art, I must exhume the works of women writers and poets such as Georgia Douglas Johnson (who?)” (Jordan [1978] 1981, p. 145). Jordan further speculates that even if Phillis Wheatley’s missing manuscript of poems were to be found, the nation may not be all that interested in her poetry after manumission, written by a free Black woman (Jordan [1985] 2017). Indeed, Jordan wonders, it seems they aren’t that interested now, in 1977, at the time Jordan wrote the essay, speaking from the abyss of absent criticism on her own published poetry.

Mary Helen Washington argues that despite “two centuries of women who would have painted, or sculptured, or modeled clay, or danced, or written stories,” there existed “hidden artists” who “found a simple way to express creativity in such things as quilting, or cooking, or growing flowers” (Washington 1975, pp. xi–xii). Significantly, traditionally feminine arts have often been adjacent to domesticity and motherwork, so what about a model for Sula who has a rich, imaginative life as well as the independence to nourish and mother her creative spirit, but no form/space/genre to channel her creative proclivities? Perhaps one answer is that Morrison creates a foremother in Sula, a lineage in Black feminist artistry to emphasize the “hidden artist” or would-be artist whose possibilities are not yet legible. Yet, the impulse—or rather the need—to create is no less real. Morrison has commented on this history of African American art as survival:

What I cannot face is living without my art …. I come from a group of people who have always refused to live that way. In the fields we would not live without it. In chains we would not live without it—and we lived historically in the country without everything, but not without our music, not without our art. And we produced giants

(Morrison 2019b, p. 63).

As Morrison argues that within the African American tradition, art has always been absolutely necessary to spiritual and communal survival, evident in the songs of enslaved Africans, Sula, too, demands that art is necessary in the way she reflects that her life has been worth something because she’s had an incredible interior world. She cherishes the liberatory choice to defend her interiority as beautiful and artful and hers. An artist whose crisis is one of structure and form, not having discovered the channel for her creative energies, is particularly striking, given the history of African American art existing in traumatic, diasporic spaces. Perhaps Sula is searching for ancestors, community, and an audience to engage with her, a friend like the person Nel used to be before the patriarchy snatched her up, and this call and response of kinship would have helped Sula find her form.

Sula traveled widely, met a lot of people, went to college, and secured finances and Eva’s house, so it’s not a question of access in the terms we might be used to thinking about when it comes to women writers or artists. Virginia Woolf and other White feminists have spoken about having a level of economic independence and private space (that famous “room of one’s own”), but that is not Sula’s barrier. The fact that Sula’s artistic energies are in some vague way unarticulated is poignant, speaking to the many barriers Black women faced and continue to face in creating art as a viable profession. The path to so-called legitimacy for a Black woman artist is far thornier and more obfuscated than it is for men or White women, not only because the conflict between community demands and autonomy is fraught, but because structural racism, sexism, and classism in the literary world is insidious, evident in how Morrison’s works were trivialized by reviewers and interlocutors.3 There’s something radical about Sula’s independence, creative or otherwise: that Sula had no obligation to please anyone else unless it aligned with her interests. She centers herself. Her gaze is neither White nor male.

4. “A Friend of My Mind”

An artistic path is a calling and an opportunity to forge a safe space that begins but likely doesn’t end with the self. A safe space where artists and writers might utter social critiques, formulate dreams, and exercise limitless possibilities, perhaps in contrast to the agency one has in everyday life. Towards the end of the novel, part of what the reader is mourning is the loss of Sula and Nel as dream-partners. A profound loss. Sula’s death makes one wonder what could have been if these two children had stayed true to their full, authentic selves, to each other, and to their creative capacities into adulthood.

Sula, after all, isn’t just a potential artist, but an inspiration to Nel during childhood: permission for Nel to be more fully herself. During girlhood and adolescence, Sula fanned the flames of her best friend Nel’s creativity. Solidarity is the basis of Nel and Sula’s burgeoning friendship during childhood; in fact, Nel approaches Sula to defy her mother. Having just discovered she is not someone’s child, but herself, Nel realizes, “‘I’m me. Me.’ Each time she said the word me there was a gathering in her like power, like joy, like fear” (Morrison [1973] 2004d, p. 27)4. The first choice she makes as an independent person, as a free individual, is to befriend Sula, someone Nel perceives as freer and more interesting than herself. The girls meet in dreams; out of loneliness, they both “stumbl[e] into Technicolored visions that always included a presence, a someone, who, quite like the dreamer, shared the delight of the dream” (Ibid., p. 51). Whereas Nel imagines a third figure who’s a “fiery prince,” this man never appears, and, instead, Nel finds pleasure in “a someone” who signs off on her fantasy: Sula. Sula delightedly begins “galloping through her own mind” for her intellectual equal, someone who “shared both the taste and the speed” (Ibid., p. 52). Across their lifespans, no one nourishes or keeps up with their imaginations like each other.

Sula disrupts Helene’s poisonous inheritance to her daughter Nel; in the words of Althea Tait, “Black women’s struggles with injurious Eurocentric beauty norms have produced an inheritance passed down between mothers and daughters as faithfully as a treasure of pearls or fine china” (Tait 2017, p. 215). Like many Black Southern women displaced during the Great Migration and alienated from extended family, Helene upholds White beauty standards; she straightens Nel’s hair and insists her daughter pull her nose with a clothespin.5 However, Sula empowers Nel as a pubescent woman to reject the damaging Eurocentric beauty pathologies and smashes the heirlooms of internalized racism and patriarchy. Because of the “safe harbor” (Morrison [1973] 2004d, p. 55) that Sula and Nel’s friendship is, Nel begins to love and accept herself as a Black woman:

After she met Sula, Nel slid the clothespin under the blanket as soon as she got into bed. And although there was still the hateful hot comb to suffer through each Saturday evening, its consequences–smooth hair–no longer interested her (Ibid., p. 55).

Disinterested in the outside world, the girls depend on each other. Chosen family heals the ruptures of mother–daughter trauma: “In the safe harbor of each other’s company they could afford to abandon the ways of other people and concentrate on their own perceptions of things” (Ibid., p.55). Cultivating one’s own opinions, especially in spite of controlling or emotionally distant mothers, becomes a source of comfort and strength for Nel and Sula. Sula embraces improvisation alongside her best friend at the time when they realize they’re neither “white nor male” and therefore “all freedom and triumph was forbidden”: thus, the girls “set out creating something else to be” and found in each other’s eyes, the “intimacy” they longed for” (Ibid., p. 52). Creativity and friendships are gifts that each girl gives the other, without price or jealousy. Adding to existing scholarship about othermothering and self-mothering (see Satz 2017; Hinton 2017), I see Sula and Nel’s friendship as the kind of nurturing female friendship that enlivens, supports, or makes possible creativity.

The two young women are friends of each other’s minds. Their companionship recalls what Sixo says of the Thirty-Mile Woman in Morrison’s Beloved: “She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It’s good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind” (Morrison [1987] 2019a, pp. 272–73). As Paul D. recalls Sixo’s words, it occurs to him as if for the first time just how much he loves Sethe and wants to “put his story next to hers” (Ibid., p. 273): similarly, Sula and Nel befriend each other’s dreams. After Nel marries Jude, and Sula leaves town for college and adventure, it turns out there is no substitute for the nurture they provided each other. Sula comes to this realization after having tried to recreate what she had with Nel in her adult sexual relationships with men:

Whenever she introduced her private thoughts into their rubbings or goings, they hooded their eyes. They taught her nothing but worry, gave nothing but money. She had been looking all along for a friend, and it took her a while to discover that a lover was not a comrade and could never be—for a woman. And that no one would ever be that version of herself which she sought to reach out and touch with an ungloved hand (Morrison [1973] 2004d, p. 121).

Intellectual intimacy and radical care are profound in female friendships, and perhaps because intra-female friendships are freer than heteronormative marriage or romantic relationships, which tend towards possessiveness. Being seen and loved by other women is especially crucial to women artists who need to water the seeds of independence, creativity, self-love, and emotional belonging in order to thrive. (All without being owned, doubted, gas-lit, emotionally splintered, or subdivided, as is more common in heteronormative romantic relationships.)

Sula and Nel were, for each other, “the closest thing to both an other and a self” (Ibid., p. 119). What Sula says of Nel’s utter, total acceptance of her is Morrison’s homage to a rare, great friendship: “Nel was the one person who accepted all aspects of her…Nel was the first person who had been real to her, whose name she knew, who had seen as she had the slant of life that made it possible to stretch it to its limits” (Ibid., pp. 119–20). The safe space of friendship empowers the young girls to feed their beautifully wild imaginations. Similarly, in Morrison’s Song of Solomon, Pilate recognizes the immense power of women’s love. In her eulogy of her granddaughter Hagar, Pilate insists that the meaning of life stems from being loved—not by a man—but by the women who understand us, who see us as we want to be seen (Morrison [1977] 2004c, pp. 315–19). Pilate lays claim to the truth that Hagar was “loved” (Ibid., p. 319). It’s not Milkman’s love or love from any man that Hagar was lacking, but the kind of self-love that is often nourished and validated by othermothering and female friendship. What Hagar needed, Morrison writes, is what most young Black girls need: “a chorus of mamas, grandmamas, aunts, cousins, sisters, neighbors, Sunday school teachers, best girl friends, and what all to give her the strength life demanded of her– and the humor with which to live it” (Ibid., p. 307). In a later novel, Love (2005), Morrison explores another strong female friendship that begins in childhood, that between Heed and Christine who “belong[ed] to” each other, and who “shared stomachache laughter, a secret language, and knew as they slept together that one’s dreaming was the same as the other one’s” (Morrison 2005, pp. 105, 132). A reader of Morrison’s novels would be hard pressed to find an intellectualand emotional bond between a female character and a sexual partner, perhaps briefly between Son and Jadine (Tar Baby) because it’s “very hard to forget the man who fucked like a star” (Morrison [1981] 2004e, p. 292), even more briefly between Milkman and Sweet (Song of Solomon), aspirationally between Paul D. and Sethe (Beloved), and potentially in the settling of Bride and Booker’s “tumultuous bond” (God Help The Child) (Montgomery 2020, p. 106). Guitar warns Hagar that love shouldn’t be possessive: just as the clouds embrace a mountain, but don’t ever cover the mountain’s head (Morrison [1977] 2004c, p. 306). Although Guitar is suggesting that Hagar is the cloud to Milkman’s mountain, the passage can be read as a warning about protecting one’s peace and inner life. Manifesting the mountain whose head is free of clouds, Hagar should assert and prioritize herself over a man: keep her head clean of patriarchy’s noxious air. Throughout Morrison’s work, daughter figures have to protect their self-concept not only from men, but from the inherited traumas of the motherline. Moreover, the imprints of slavery, diaspora, and migration have a rupturing, fissuring effect on mother–daughter love in Morrison’s work.6 More compelling are the female friendships, othermothering, and self-mothering across Morrison’s corpus, because these are wellsprings of emotional support for Morrison’s fictive daughters. Othermothering is why seemingly minor characters like Queen in God Help the Child, Thérèse in Tar Baby, or Pilate in Song of Solomon play major, substantial roles in strengthening their transient, fictive kin, coming closer to “unorphan[ing]” them “completely” (Morrison [1981] 2004e, p. 229) than Son might have actually done for Jadine. I don’t know of a more beautiful girlhood friendship than that between Sula and Nel, made more poignant by a friendship breakup and seemingly resurrected by Sula’s death.

When the friendship ruptures between the best friends, at least Sula has herself. Nel has nothing, because her selfhood was built upon a man. Shocked at how quickly Nel becomes judgmental and parochial, Sula thinks, “Now Nel was one of them” (Morrison [1973] 2004d, p. 120). Trained to be a victim, Nel refuses and even fears change and personal rebranding: she can’t start over without Jude, it would seem. Sula is the only one daring enough to leave the community of her own volition. When she returns in quirky attire and with a worldly suitcase, she’s viewed as a progenitor of evil. Sula is distinct from the town women who resemble a spider more terrified of uncertainty than of certain death: “But the free fall, on no, that required– demanded– invention: a thing to do with the wings, a way of holding the legs and most of all a full surrender to the downward flight if they wished to taste their tongues and stay alive” (Ibid.). Creativity is survival. The creative urge proliferates, unguided, in Sula, while in Nel, patriarchy smothers its embers.

Morrison’s implied thesis is that women give each other access to their creativity, life-force, and inner strength. Female friendship is a primary source of nurture and understanding, a wellspring of love, personal growth, and laughter: as one of my students mentioned in class, “Sula was Nel’s person. They were each other’s person.”7 For many women, when a special best friend reappears in one’s life, even after a decade or more, the connection is seamless, energizing, and passionate. This is especially the case for Nel, who is reawakened when Sula appears at her door after a decade of separation:

It was like getting the use of an eye back, having a cataract removed. Her old friend had come home, Sula. Who made her laugh, who made her see old things with new eyes, in whose presence she felt clever, gentle, and a little raunchy. Sula, whose past she had lived through and with whom the present was a constant sharing of perceptions. Talking to Sula had always been a conversation with herself. Was there anyone else before whom she could never feel foolish? In whose view inadequacy was mere idiosyncrasy, a character trait rather than a deficiency? (Morrison [1973] 2004d, p. 95).

Nel feels accepted, known, and more interesting as a person when she is in Sula’s aura. Sula helps Nel see herself through a more compassionate, creative lens and encourages her to be herself. The novel’s dramatic revelation at the very end is that it takes Sula’s death to show Nel the depth of what she lost: all that time, Nel thought she was missing Jude; it was Sula she was grieving.

5. “My Imagination, Where Nobody Tells Me What to Do” or, Sula, Morrison, and the Black Women’s Literary Renaissance

Nel’s strong feelings about Sula evoke a larger literary renaissance that centered the stories and creativity of Black women writers. As scholars and writers like Mary Helen Washington were anthologizing Black women writers in the 70s, undergirding such efforts8 is the acknowledgment of what Black women mean to each other, across time:

When I think of how essentially alone black women have been–alone because of our bodies, over which we have had so little control; alone because the damage done to our men has prevented their closeness and protection; and alone because we have had no one to tell us stories about ourselves; I realize that black women writers are an important and comforting presence in my life. Only they know my story (Washington 1975, p. xxxii).

The powerful ending of Morrison’s novel highlights Nel’s intense attachment that not even a shared girlhood can entirely explain, and not even death can separate. Evoking Alice Walker’s discovery of Zora Neale Hurston’s gravestone and the ensuing renaissance, Nel claims Sula’s importance in her life, a touchstone of creativity and deep connection. It’s as if Nel is learning what the reader already knows about Sula: that a creative life can be lonely, but in the end, at least it’s a chosen loneliness, rather than one that is doled out to women by male abandonment or frustrated motherhood, a “secondhand lonely” (Morrison [1973] 2004d, p. 143). Thinking about Morrison’s own path to writing, the way divorce liberated her to fill her loneliness with stories and to reinvent herself as a writer, even as one of her sons was toying with her earring or spitting up on her yellow legal pad, it’s poignant and daring to risk a different loneliness than the one you might accept by default as somebody’s wife or mother.

While Morrison did say that the things her sons loved about her as a mother were the things she most loved about herself (Morrison 1994c, p. 270), motherhood can be a battlefield of time and resources. Morrison, while not presenting Sula as a mother, dedicates the novel to her two sons, and perhaps the characterization of Sula represents the possibility that, regardless of one’s motherhood status, women writers must free their minds and nourish their creativity. In an oft-quoted interview, Morrison refers to herself as being both a stable presence and a free spirit in her motherwork: “I tried hard to be both the ship and the safe harbor at the same time, to be able to make a house and be on the job market and still nurture the children” (Morrison 2008a, p. 197). Although Morrison is speaking to her multifaceted and beautiful mothering that transcends gendered confines, I also read this statement as a recasting of the mothering self. A mother writer still needs to go on creative adventures, to be that ship through her imagination, and not dock at maternal guilt, indebtedness, or responsibility. She shouldn’t disappear under the mothering title, but find ways to assert and sustain her creative voice. First, she must give herself permission to create art. Morrison speaks about the habit she developed when her sons were young, of rising before dawn to write and being there to greet the sunrise, of keeping farmer’s hours, and of writing with No. 2 pencils on yellow legal pads. She wrote novels in the pre-dawn hours and between things, as she had children and a 9–5 job (Morrison 1993). While many White second-wave feminists cite a canon of other White women writers (Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore) who didn’t have children, it’s worth noting that all of the major women writers of the 1970s Black Women’s Literary Renaissance were mothers. Several Black women writers of this iconic time were not only mothers, but many were single parents, and many were queer. Audre Lorde raised two children after her divorce and while having support from her partner Frances; Alice Walker had a daughter and had already divorced her husband before her most iconic writings; Maya Angelou had one son; from a brief marriage, Sonia Sanchez had two children; and June Jordan was a single mother after divorcing her husband. More often associated with the Black Arts Movement, the poet Nikki Giovanni expressed how she wanted to have a child but not be in a traditional marriage, and had a son. Publishing in a long span from the 70s to the 2000s, Lucille Clifton famously composed short poems at her typewriter at the kitchen table between tasks, yet her six children knew it was no hobby, and didn’t disturb their mother, whose taut language contained the universe.

Sula is always in good company with herself, and beyond that, as fictive kin with a coterie of Black women artists. She embodies the ambitions of the Black Women’s Literary Renaissance of the 70s, of which Morrison was a part: a flourishing time period of works by and about Black women. This renaissance touts Morrison, Walker, Angelou, Lorde, Jordan, and Sanchez, literary geniuses at the threshold of illustrious careers. Sula with her inordinate need for metaphor is a kind of world-building metaphor for the literary community that Morrison herself was a part of. Morrison edited and mid-wifed into existence at Random House works such as Angela Y. Davis’s autobiography (1974) and Gayl Jones’s Corregidora (1975), and, later, gathered Toni Cade Bambara’s fiction, short stories, and conversations into the posthumous Deep Sightings & Rescue Missions (1999). Morrison published Clifton’s poetry collection, An Ordinary Woman (1974), and memoir, Generations (1976), for which she encouraged Clifton to use a tape recorder to get a feel for the language (Clifton 1999, pp. 56–57). She published June Jordan’s Things That I Do in the Dark: New and Selected Poems (1977). In the foreword to Sula, Morrison expounds on the female friendships so integral to artistic and personal sustainability, exclaiming:

The things we traded! Time, food, money, clothes, laughter, memory– and daring…We found it possible to think up things, try things, explore…Write a play, form a theater company, design clothes, write fiction unencumbered by other people’s expectations. Nobody was minding us, so we minded ourselves

(Morrison 2004a, pp. xiv–xv).

By displacing Sula, a young woman who is a dangerous seed of truth-telling and has the fierceness of the 60s liberation movements, into an earlier era, Morrison creates a literary friend who time-travels. When Sula asserts in reverie from her sick bed, “I sure did live in this world,” and Nel responds, “Really? What have you got to show for it?,” Sula crafts a womanist artist manifesto: “Show? To who? Girl, I got my mind. And what goes on it. Which is to say, I got me” (Morrison [1973] 2004d, p. 143). Her imagination turns out to be immortal, and not only that, but loved, by her estranged best friend Nel, who finally understands the significance of her eccentric friend decades after the friendship breakup. Years after their estrangement, at Sula’s burial, Nel has a newfound grasp on the beauty of their sororal love. To be best friends with Sula is to appreciate the beauty and capaciousness of a liberated imagination. A woman who wanted to be defined by the quality and range of her mind is such a compelling reflection of what Morrison herself was striving for, a life whose measure was language: “We die. That is the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives” (Morrison 2008c, p. 203). Towards the end of her life, in an interview with Terry Gross, Morrison emphasizes the paramount importance of the mind as a palace of safety and free reign: “It’s the place where I live; it’s where I have control; it’s where nobody tells me what to do; it’s where my imagination is fecund and I am really at my best. Nothing matters more in the world or in my body or anywhere when I’m writing” (Morrison 2015b).

6. Morrison’s Oeuvre

Sula is hardly alone in the Morrison corpus when it comes to artistic figures, and looking even briefly at similar female characters with artistic sensibilities, proclivities, or practices affirms that the artist was a crucial, recurring archetype for Morrison. The focus often is on the artist herself, the conflicts and contexts that reveal why artists have to nourish their right to dream and to protect their interior landscapes. Another consistent emphasis in Morrison’s rendering of artist figures is the question of who else they love and care for, through the healing, liberatory, and guiding powers of their art. Various Morrisonian characters engage with the archetype of a womanist artist, free to tell her stories. I think of Denver in Morrison’s Beloved, the quiet daughter of a formerly enslaved mother, who liberates her family. How she comes of age throughout the novel, reclaiming the education that shame precluded, and how she activates a living monument of singing women to end the psychic grip-hold of intergenerational trauma. Denver, previously ashamed by social judgment about her mother’s traumatic past, such that she stopped attending Lady Jones’s school and became non-speaking for two years, is healed when she speaks up, reinforcing the old dictum, “closed mouths don’t get fed.” When she seeks help from Lady Jones, breaking silence and telling her about Beloved’s suffocating, avenging presence threatening to kill Sethe, she opens herself to a broader female network of love and care. Denver draws from Lady Jones’s empathic response to her pain, “Oh, baby” the othermothering and strength she needs (Morrison [1987] 2019a, p. 248). Denver suddenly realizes, as if for the first time, she “has a self to look out for and preserve” (Ibid., p. 252). Lady Jones’s words empower Denver, and the elder’s empathy is backed up by communal care and action such as homemade casseroles, prayer, and singing. Denver orchestrates the healing power of art to save herself, her mother, and the community. The women’s singing exorcises Beloved’s ghost, saves Sethe’s life, and allows the community to begin to heal from the intergenerational trauma of slavery.

Once Denver reclaims her self-worth and receives the care of Lady Jones and the community, she commences learning again, able not only to read but memorize fifty pages of text. She comes of age as a self-possessed, liberated young woman, capable of mothering her mother, and saving her from Beloved’s haunting. Through the course of the novel, Denver blossoms from an ashamed girl who was non-speaking to a young woman whose bold words saved her mother’s life. She plans to leave home and spread her wings further, maybe go to Oberlin. Would we be surprised if she became a writer?

Denver (lovingly) tells off her mother’s partner, Paul D., and resembles a Morrisonian ancestor. Rejecting Paul D.’s awkward gesture to man-splain—“Well, if you want my opinion”—Denver asserts herself, “I don’t. I have my own” (Ibid., p. 262). Denver’s newfound assertiveness signifies that Morrisonian fictional daughters, to become grown, must know what is worth hearing and what is not, and know how to tell their own truth. Know their worth enough to share their stories, have the confidence to fight for their values. Paul D. validates Denver immediately for being “grown,” but likely doesn’t anticipate that Denver, a teenager, is about to school him on how to talk to her mother. Denver assumes the role of protector for her mother, and takes on an otherworldly fierceness of locution: “her face looking like someone had turned up the gas jet” (Ibid., p. 267). At this critical juncture, Denver is no longer the sulky, insecure girl the novel opens with, but rather a confident, articulate, and sensitive woman. She “steps off the edge of the world” (Ibid., p. 243), resonant of the spiritual ferocity of her grandmother, Baby Suggs, holy.

Baby Suggs, holy in Morrison’s Beloved, is an orator, a visionary, a healer, and a poet, whose words in the Clearing testify to the power of radical self-love. Her call to love one’s body is revolutionary, given the traumas of slavery and displacement among generations of African Americans. After Beloved’s death, Baby Suggs, holy compassionately refuses to judge Sethe for infanticide, and as it becomes very clear she’ll never see her son again, the spiritual healer retires to her bed to think about colors. Whereas her art had served a social and moral purpose, strengthening a community of self-emancipated people who were grappling with the implications of freedom, now at the end of her life and in the throes of an unspeakable family grief, art is what she salvages as a balm. No longer everyone else’s healer, this grandmother ponders colors alone in her bedroom. She had never had the time to do so before. Art as radical self-love, as a much-needed retreat. Whereas she used to extol the whole community about loving their bodies, reclaiming their wholeness, their sexuality, and their mindsets, by the novel’s close, the self-ordained preacher rests, dreaming of nearly all the colors in the rainbow. She considers all the colors except those that evoke her granddaughter Beloved’s blood.

Showing art’s potency as creative resistance, Claudia McTeer in Morrison’s The Bluest Eye rejects White supremacist pathologies of beauty. Of the White baby doll, Claudia thinks: “I had only one desire: to dismember it” (Morrison [1970] 1994d, p. 20). That Claudia even sickens her family by dismembering a White baby doll shows how deeply ingrained Eurocentric expectations of femininity and beauty are. As a child, Claudia does what no one else around her can: she rejects nefarious definitions of beauty that are rooted in the violent systems of colonialism, slavery, and racist, sexist mass media. Claudia is sensitive to the poetic cadence of her exasperated mother Frieda’s tirades; the fluttering tones of female gossip surround Claudia with a kind of music. Claudia builds upon the literary expressions around her while also rejecting toxic messaging from the outside world, seen in popular movies: a Shirley Temple craze, Mary Jane candy wrappers, and Dick and Jane primers. Claudia is unharmed by misogynoir, unlike her neighbor Pecola Breedlove’s mother Pauline, who succumbs to “the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought” (Ibid., p. 122): physical beauty and romantic love.

Morrison suggests that Claudia is closer to the ideals of womanism, particularly the freedom and creativity associated with Black girlhood and womanhood that is untinged by White male control. Not only is White domination and surveillance evident in enslavement, violence, disenfranchisement, media representation, and assimilation but also in the daily performance of Black women’s domestic obsequiousness in White households. Whereas maternal characters like Pauline and Geraldine lose their Southern roots and cultural identities as Black women, and become unable to enjoy and love their bodies, Claudia shows an appreciation of what Morrison terms the “funk”: the “funkiness of passion, the funkiness of nature, the funkiness of the wide range of human emotions” (Ibid., p. 83). Claudia glories in the ink marks and dirt on her body, sad to see the creations of a day well-lived dissipate in a bath (Ibid., p. 21). The ink marks on her body evoke the artistic and literary proclivities of this precocious child. Claudia doesn’t care to appear polite, prim, or acceptable. Claudia loves herself regardless, whereas the grown woman around her, due to intersectional oppression and displacement, don’t. Pecola, at the center of Morrison’s story, thinks having blue eyes will make her worthy of love. By contrast, Claudia is a moral conscience, highlighting the danger of using another’s supposed ugliness against which to feel superior.

Of Song-of-Solomon fame, Pilate seems a fuller, more mature version of Sula, and is clearly a special character to Morrison who “env[ied] her” (Morrison 1994b, p. 184). Morrison points to Pilate’s “wide-spiritedness” as well as the blending of “fierceness” and “nurture,” traits that bespeak traditional masculine and feminine traits (Ibid.). Pilate has an artistic outlook that holds onto the “wonder of childhood” while possessing a “sage” wisdom (Ibid., p. 185). Pilate is a further iteration of the daring quality of Sula, but with a greater moral or social concern. Like Sula, Pilate is “so clear about herself” and has a “total trust of her own instincts” and inspires others to be that self-possessed (Ibid.). Whether in supporting her nephew Milkman by being the only person in his life to ask him questions and listen to him; protecting her daughter Reba from the wrong man (at knife-point); speaking truth to Hagar about her worth; or preserving her parents’ legacies, Pilate is a touchstone in many characters’ path to self-realization. Pilate is the proud, Black, female head of multiple generations, a mother of her large family and of her beloved community. A mother who is transcendent yet rooted, she is perceived by her nephew as knowing how to fly without ever leaving the ground. That Pilate has no navel seems to raise her to the level of self-made, an iteration of Sula’s mission to make no one but herself. In fact, Pilate relays that she birthed herself from her deceased mother’s body. However, Pilate isn’t self-sufficient to a fault. She has a closeness with the dead, especially her parents, and helps to ground other characters to their ancestral legacies through story and song. Pilate is a remarkable character who blends traditionally masculine and feminine qualities, and who could be seen as an amalgam of the safe harbor and the ship, the model of Black mothering that Morrison herself speaks of. Showing compassion for others and for herself, and mothering others and her own mind, Pilate is an iteration of Sula who can reconcile nourishing the self and family.

Fictive daughters, Denver, Claudia, and Pilate, stand in stark contrast to a Morrisonian character like Jadine, the cultural orphan in Tar Baby (1981), who’s alienated from cultural pride and ancestral knowledge. Although Jadine sketches her sometime lover Son, she has absorbed the ideologies of the colonizer-patron. Jadine’s own aunt fears that Jadine won’t even have the decency to bury the only family she has. Furthermore, Morrison’s solemn dedication of the book to the elders in her family who knew their “true and ancient properties” (Morrison [1981] 2004e) points to Jadine’s serious lack of familial and cultural understanding.9 Nevertheless, Jadine refuses to play a secondary role to Son as the wife and mother archetype. Morrison reflects on her personal life, that she wasn’t the traditional wife that her ex-husband expected of her, a choice that resonates in Jadine’s refusal to be a provincial, subservient figure.10 Jadine refuses to accept secondary status as a caretaker to the aunt and uncle who worked themselves to death for a White philanthropist-patron-colonizer. However, Jadine’s dreams of “making it” appear soulless like her Eurocentrism, symbolized by the grotesque sealskin fur coat made from 90 baby seals (another present from a White man). Resembling Alice Walker’s character Dee in “Everyday Use” (1973), Jadine is a cautionary tale of a woman who loses connectivity to her roots because she never learned how to be a daughter. As an elder tells Son about Jadine, “There is nothing in her parts for you. She has forgotten her ancient properties” (Morrison [1981] 2004e, p. 305).

At the same time, there’s something compellingly unwritten about Jadine’s future: perhaps she has time to discover her ancient properties. Maybe Aunt Ondine’s poignant words, about having no child to bury her and her husband, like the recurring dream of a buxom African woman in a yellow dress and carrying eggs, will inspire Jadine to connect with her motherline. But the question remains if Jadine can be a daughter without doing so at the expense of being her full authentic self; understandably, she is horrified by Son’s Southern, parochial views of womanhood. Possibly, Jadine is an exploration of the motif of the expat Black writer in Paris; the Black writer with a rich White patron; the writer of color who is entrenched in the White, male-dominated literary world; or African American writers who feel alienated from the motherland and long for cultural rootedness. I feel there’s a tenderness rather than judgment in Morrison’s rendering of Jadine, as if the last chapter of her journey hasn’t been written yet, and is latent in her recurrent dreams of the African woman. Having been a model, art history student, photographer, and portrait-sketcher, can and will Jadine one day move more fully into an artist unmediated by male or European power, and connect to her “ancient properties”? If Sula is a Morrisonian hypothesis of an “artist without an art form,” might Jadine represent a culturally-barren or exiled artist? Jadine’s situation resonates with the barriers that Black women artists have faced concerning cultural assimilation through White patrons and philanthropists, as well as Eurocentric education and White, male gatekeeping through editors, curators, presses, and artistic institutions. Because Jadine is beckoned to in her dreams and her Aunt’s words, Morrison shows the power of her cultural heritage to speak to her past the noise.

I want to emphasize an image in Morrison’s work that praises the healing power of art as it is nested within female community. In Morrison’s Paradise (1997), Seneca discovers art in relation to other women and replaces self-harm with artistic expression. Seneca used to be a cutter, driving safety pins through her veins, making intricate intersections in her body as a coping mechanism. For a while, self-cutting became a way of surviving sexual abuse, foster-home neglect, and parental abandonment. The bleeding lines seemed to Seneca a kind of poetry: “She entered the vice like a censored poet whose suspect lexicon was too supple, too shocking to publish. It thrilled her. It steadied her. Access to this under garment life kept her own eyes dry” (Morrison [1997] 2004b, p. 261). After an older woman, Consolata, outlines Seneca’s body and the bodies of the women in the convent, Seneca comes to appreciate not only paints and chalks but the healing power of art. The visual arts replace self-harm by providing a safe space to process trauma; additionally, drawing creates a shared language among survivors and deepens community bonds. Morrison describes a ritualistic healing through the arts, as Consolata tells the Convent women stories by candlelight: “She told them of a woman named Piedade, who sang but never said a word. That is how the loud dreaming began. How the stories rose in that place” (Ibid., p. 264). Later, Seneca draws a representation of her blue wounds on her silhouette. Eerily, the visual arts cure the Convent women from being “haunted” but not from being “hunted” (Ibid., p. 266), revealing how art is a transformative safe space, all the more necessary when threatened.

The silhouette evokes visual artist Kara Walker’s work and the collaboration between Walker and Morrison, Five Poems (Walker and Morrison 2002). Scholar Anna Ioanes offers a unique reading of Sula, alongside Walker and Morrison’s collaboration, to explore a literary silhouette aesthetic that paradoxically elicits and forecloses responses to violence like disgust, fascination, psychic distancing, empathy, or moral outrage. Attending to the unfigurable and the unresolvable in response to spectacles of anti-Black violence, Ioanes notes that “Morrison and Walker reimagine the silhouette form to create uncertainty” and to defamiliarize audiences’ emotional responses (Ioanes 2019, p. 124). Building on this argument, I contend that Sula’s silhouette forces an exceptionally definitive affective response, which has been reflected in Black Feminist writers and critics’ embrace of and respect for Sula, who however mysterious and experimental, is nonetheless certain of herself. Sula’s courage, self-definition, social and moral questioning, and artistic proclivity make for a striking figure. One doesn’t have to approve of her entirely to respect her singular way of moving through the world. The figuration or silhouette of Sula as a Black woman artist reveals an artist of her life; a curator of her own mind; a disrupter of the status quo; and a creative spirit who is unafraid of the free fall, of risk, and even of loneliness. In keeping with a silhouette concept, Sula is ultimately less defined by, hewn by, or cut by others than by her own imagination, and consequently, she cuts quite the figure.

7. Coda

Overall, in a variety of Morrisonian characters and especially foregrounded in Sula herself, we confront the significance of an artist’s liberated imagination. Rather than emphasize mother–daughter rupture as has been discussed at length in Morrison scholarship, I shed light on the value of self-mothering for artistic figures like Sula: the practice of giving oneself the permission and nourishment to think freely and divergently, to love oneself radically, and to follow the impulse to create dangerously. Just as Morrison’s novels can feel at times like overheard speech and have a spoken quality, I think one of the things Sula needed in order to fully fledge out her artistic calling was who Nel represented, a sister-participant in the artistic dream or journey. In analyzing artistic characters like Sula, Denver, Claudia, Pilate, and Jadine, I hope to unravel how artistic identity and the craft itself were sustaining preoccupations in Morrison’s life. As she wrote novels that centered Black girlhood and womanhood, Morrison resisted dominant ideology and asserted the viability of Black women writers’ professions and stories. In curating the works of Black authors at Random House, where she worked as an editor (Williams 2025), and in reinscribing the power of motherwork to complement rather than compete with literary productivity, Morrison altered artistic spaces into safe spaces. Ultimately, Sula’s artistic canvas may be her mind itself, limitless, capacious, brave, adventurous, risk-taking, confident, and self-mothering.