Sula,_Analysis

3. Jude was among the many young black men of The Bottom who yearned for validation. During that time period, the higher paying jobs, such as construction of the New River Road, were reserved for whites. In The Bottom, Jude was desired by the young women, and admired by the men. But in the Valley of Medallion, he was just another young black man who would be denied a higher paying job. The job he worked, a waiter at the local hotel, was not physically challenging. It did not cement his masculinity like building that tunnel could. Being a waiter at the hotel would not give him an injury that he could be proud of. It did not allow him to toil long hours, and feel as if he had done “work.” Most of all, it would not leave behind a useful, tangible, long lasting legacy as building a tunnel would leave..or that of being married. So, in his “determination to take on a man’s role”, Jude decides to marry. He has his pick among the women in the town, but he chooses Nel, who is kind, and not too eager to marry. This makes Jude feel as if something belongs to him, as if it were something that he built, because he would not have the opportunity to build that tunnel. The decision to marry was “his conquest” when it came to Nel. Most importantly, she actually cares about him, and is not just attempting to quell her own desire for marriage. She wants to fix his pain of emasculation. This is still common in the black community. In my experience, my mother’s experience, my grandmother’s experience, and my great-grandmother’s experience, either divorced, unmarried, or abandoned black women, we often juggle the tasks of being strong and being feminine. Marriage is a dream for us black women. In my personal experience, my femininity is sometimes affected. It has to be turned on and off. Because of institutionalized racism such as high incarceration rates, high death rates, disproportionate educational disparities between black men and women, etc., black men tend to be fragile creatures. Black women are conditioned to work hard for a man, put aside their pride, and do anything and everything for their men in order to stroke the men’s egos and keep them; yet we are simultaneously trained to be fiercely independent, in the event that the man that we have bent over backwards to win from droves of other unmarried black women, does not provide for us. This reasoning harkens back to the days of Jude Greene. Jude knew he could marry whatever woman he chose, because black women were and still are experiencing a shortage of marriageable men, and are therefore eager to marry whoever seems to be a willing candidate. Jude was confident that Nel would “care about his hurt,” take care of his needs, make him “One Jude.” 4. When Sula returned to Medallion after a ten year absence, her dress was more “citified”, and she did what she wanted to do, including continuing her mother’s legacy of sleeping with the married men in town. But, unlike Hannah, Sula did it without love, never taking care of the men she had trysts with as her mother had done. She put her grandmother away in an old folks’ home and took over the Peace house. Sula made the people of the Bottom feel uncomfortable. One of the ways she did so was to have consensual sex with white men. In the 30’s this was almost unheard of. Blacks almost expected that black men and white women would have trysts, out of either the mutual desire to cross boundaries, or the black man’s desire to avoid a charge of rape by rejecting the white woman’s advances. But, any sexual act that took place between a white man and a black woman was surely rape, whether or not both parties were willing. Why would a woman who had been part of a legacy based on the molestation of her kind engage in a willing sexual encounter with one who was part of the legacy of molester' Especially, as Sula pointed out in my favorite passage of the book, if her counterpart is “the envy of the world,” the highly demanded black man' I believe that the charge of a consensual interracial relationship between a black woman and a white man can have those implications today. How can one tell that a black man is successful' He has: a beautiful home, a beautiful car, and a beautiful wife, who is not black. For decades now, successful black men have dated and married women of other ethnic backgrounds as a symbol of their success. For previously mentioned reasons, black women were too loud, too bossy, too strong, not feminine enough, not demure enough to bring into high society. Now that women are beginning to close the education, work, and wage gaps, black women are disproportionately affected. Over 45% of us will never be married. Our answer to this is to date outside of our race. This sense of loyalty to black men has been engrained into black women. No matter what we are expected to be there holding the towel at the finish line, even if the man never crosses it. Those of us who do leave our posts at black men’s sides, can be subject to criticism, just as one of my close friends has been. She is dating a white man, and is the happy her. He treats her with reverence and fairness, and the fact that this is commendable is sad to me, because we do not always expect Our men to do the same. Despite the way he treats her, we do have friends who don’t support her relationship, somehow believing that my friend is feeding into the stereotype of the sexualized black woman or killing the possibility that another successful black family can be created from a youthful union. But, I think in some cases there is a resentment of my friend’s courage which is what the people in the Bottom felt towards Sula. She left the Bottom and traveled more places than any of those people could dream. They were resentful and fearful of someone who had belonged both in the Bottom and outside the Bottom. Sula had the perspective to be able to critique the way those people lived. She stirred things up a little bit. She scared people. She defined herself by rejecting convention. But the Bottom was a convention in itself. Everyone knew the town’s history because they had all been there when it happened. Everyone knew one another because they had been there all their lives. Sula was free of a husband, free of children, free from obligation. Just as freely as she had drifted back into the Bottom, she could drift out. Su