Sula also watched her mother die in flames, conscious only that she wanted the dying dance to go on. It was Eva who had long ago pondered the meaning of love when she used her only food (lard scrapings) to cure her baby boy's bellyache yet when her son was a man, regressing to the womb of drugs, she burnt him to death. Intemperate, restless, Sula had some of the arrogance of her one-legged grandmother Eva. And Sula, who will die, not like "other colored girls" rotting like a stump, but falling "like a redwood." For she is the product of a "household of throbbing disorder" and had learned isolation and the "meaningless of responsibility" early when she accidentally caused the drowning of a little boy. There is mad Shadrach, victim of World War I, who defies death's capricious obscenity by ringing his bell for National Suicide Day every year-and one year he has some takers. But in the closed black community of the high hill overlooking a white Ohio town, there are two who stand outside the defensive webs of familial interdependence. In a neighborhood where pain-"adult pain that rested somewhere under the eyelids"-is as pervasively omnipresent as the loveliness of May's green shade trees, death and its omens can be accepted as another face of God.
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