Sula

 Sula by Toni Morrison (1973) 174 pages

I previously listened to Morrison's Beloved, but didn't grasp much of what it was trying to say. When The Atlantic published a "The Great American Novels" list in 2024 including Sula, I decided I should read another of Morrison's books. I'm from Ohio too. Medallion, Ohio is a fictional town, but I read it could be based on Lorain, Ohio to the west of Cleveland where Morrison grew up. Morrison explores the social changes in a black community called the "Bottom" between 1919 and 1965. There is a good bit in the beginning and end of the novel that does not focus on the title character, Sula. Instead, we meet Shadrack, who is a traumatized WWI veteran. He cannot readjust to living in "normal" society. Morrison's descriptions of the community are vivid. She then traces the lives of four women that are central to the relationships of the "Bottom." Eva is a mysterious figure who has a promiscuous daughter named Hannah amongst many other children. Hannah is the mother of Sula, who dies when Sula is still young. We spend quite of bit of time getting to know Sula and her friend Nel, but also Sula leaves for ten years for college. After college, Sula passes through many big cities, but is unable to find a man that she feels really connected to, so she returns to the Bottom. There is no straightforward plot, but a loose set of occurrences that resist simplistic notions of heroes or villains.

A Little Devil in America

A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance by Hanif Abdurraqib (2021) 301 pages

I listened to the audiobook through Libby narrated by JD Jackson. I listened to it ahead of Kevin's Rhythm & Books bookclub, so I don't want to give too many details. Each essay on different types of black performance (not necessarily related to music) is deeply felt. The author's prose are sometimes a rap of his reflections and feelings. Abdurraqib intricately examines American culture and the Black experience.
 

Homegoing

 Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi (2016) 305 pages

I loved this novel. I listened to the first half as an audiobook then had to switch to print. It is an epic multi-generational saga that in some ways is fourteen separate, but connected, coming-of-age tales. "Two half-sisters, Effia and Esi, are born into different villages in eighteenth-century Ghana" on Africa's southwest coast. One stays in Africa and the other is sold into slavery in America. The chapters alternate between Effia's and Esi's descendents. This is historical fiction through a range of historical time periods. The historical details and variety of lived experiences of the African Diaspora are described with such liveliness. There are stories of love, of suffering, of labor, of grief, of colonization, and of discovering a black person's place in the world. 

The Last Children of Mill Creek

The Last Children of Mill Creek by Vivian Gibson, 145 pages

In 1959, the segregated working class neighborhood of Mill Creek Valley was razed to build Highway 40 through St. Louis. Before being torn down in the name of "urban renewal," this vibrant, if poor, neighborhood was full of hard-working Black families who attended church together, kids who played together in the streets and alleys, and the businesses that catered to their needs. 

The Last Children of Mill Creek presents a look at everyday life in Mill Creek Valley through the eyes of a young girl, the author, who lived there with her parents and seven siblings in a three-room apartment. I found the book to be vibrant, humorous, and an illuminating personal narrative that brings into focus many of the historical bits of American life that are generally taught through statistics and maps (if at all) instead of stories of individuals. Well worth a read. 

The Bluest Eye

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, 215 pages

Pecola Breedlove has what could generously be called a rough life. She lives in a two-room apartment (which is really just a storefront that's been converted, in name only, to an apartment) with her always-fighting parents and her always-running-away brother. She dreams of becoming invisible and of having blue eyes, both of which she believes have the ability to change her life. Told through the eyes of Pecola and one of her classmates, with backstories on some of the adults, Morrison's debut novel illustrates the world of a young black girl in a small Ohio town in 1940. It's a brutal story, beautifully told.

Cane

Cane / Jean Toomer, 245 p.

 A classic of the Harlem Renaissance, Cane is a wonderfully weird combination of prose, poetry, drama and song, which evokes small-town rural Georgia in the 1920s with a gorgeous vividness.  The writing, in all forms, is sensual - that is, it constructs the setting in a way that incorporates all the senses, almost as if the reader could taste the air. 

Difficult to summarize, the work incorporates the author's experiences as a light-skinned urban northerner who moves to Georgia to teach.  One of the members of our Classics Book Group observed correctly, I think, that the poetry is especially strong, as in "Her Lips Are Copper Wire:"

whisper of yellow globes
gleaming on lamp-posts that sway
like bootleg licker drinkers in the fog

and let your breath be moist against me
like bright beads on yellow globes

telephone the power-house
that the main wires are insulate

(her words play softly up and down
dewy corridors of billboards)

then with your tongue remove the tape
and press your lips to mine
till they are incandescent