Sula is a 1973 novel by American author Toni Morrison, her second to be published after The Bluest Eye (1970). Plot summary The novel begins when the construction of a golf course is announced, the site being the destroyed remnants of what used to be the Bottom. The Bottom is a black neighborhood on the hill above the fictional town of Medallion, Ohio. In the first section of the novel, the origin story of the Bottom is revealed as well as how it got its name: a white farmer promised freedom and a piece of Bottom land to his slave if he would perform some difficult chores for him. Upon completion, the farmer regrets his end of the bargain. Freedom was easy, the farmer had no objection to that, but he did not want to give up the land. He tells the slave he was very sorry that he had to give him valley land, for he had hoped to give him a piece of the bottom land. The slave said he thought valley land was bottom land, to which the master said land on the hill, not the valley, was bottom land, rich and fertile" (Morrison 5). This is obviously untrue, but it is the story that black people told to illuminate the fact that white people's racism and lies have created this topsy turvy world in which up is down and down is up. "The white people lived on the rich valley floor... and the blacks populated the hills above it, taking small consolation in the fact that every day they could literally look down on the white folks" (5). The story is organized by chronological chapters labeled with years. In "1919," the first named character, handsome Shadrack, a previous resident of the Bottom, returns from World War I a shattered man, suffering from shell shock or PTSD and unable to accept the world he used to belong in. Living in the outskirts of town and attempting to create order in his life, he develops methods such as keeping his shack in hospital-grade neatness. Another method is the invention of National Suicide Day, which exists on January 3 to counter and compartmentalize the constant death he saw at war, and is essentially invitation for anyone that plans to die within the next year, to die on that day. Never assimilating, he curses even at children and whites, has