‘“Shall we gather at the river?”: the folklore and trauma of Toni Morrison’s landscape in Sula’

ABSTRACT

In ‘The Site of Memory,’ Toni Morrison suggests that ‘the act of imagination is bound up with memory’ (98). She goes on to compare the Mississippi River to writers, ‘remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like’ (99). As I demonstrate in this article, it would be a mistake to think of this comparison as a mere metaphor. In this essay, I examine how the characters in Sula rely on and struggle with their communal memories and trauma as they are tied to the river that runs through the Bottom. I argue that Morrison uses the river as a focal point to express the intersection of memory, history, and trauma, both for the individual characters in the book and the Black community at large. Furthermore, I argue that Morrison responds to this violent past by integrating popular folktales and signifying on them in order to help us, and the characters, understand the perils of both the social and natural landscape. Ultimately, I conclude that the presence of the rivers and popular folktales are sites of memory that invoke the histories of oppression that have shaped the lives of the characters in Sula.

KEYWORDS:

• African American literature
• rivers
• Toni Morrison
• ecocriticism
• folktales

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. DuBois’s tone changed dramatically once soldiers returned. In another essay, published in The Crisis in 1919, DuBois highlighted the many issues with the ways Black soldiers suffered both the violence of the war overseas and the racial violence at home.

2. Though the term PTSD was not widely used until the 1980s, many WWI soldiers experienced what was contemporaneously referred to as ‘shell shock.’ Post WWI, a variety of ‘mental disorders resulting from combat stress were originally diagnosed as shell shock,’ and symptoms included a loss of memory, vision, and ‘hysteria,’ among others (Crocq 2000, 50). I use the term PTSD anachronistically because it offers a more nuanced reflection of our contemporary understanding of what would have once been referred to as shell shock. It is also an apt description of what Shadrack experiences post-war.

3. Not only does Shadrack have trouble processing, but as I explain later, he develops a cyclical coping mechanism in which he continually returns to his trauma by repeatedly visiting the river. See Jermaine Singleton’s Cultural Melancholy: Readings of Race, Impossible Mourning, and African American Rituals and Joseph Winters’s Hope Draped in Black: Race, Melancholy, and the Agony of Progress for further discussion of how, for Black Americans, ‘moving forward,’ or processing trauma, often involves a cyclical pattern that requires remembering and revisiting.

4. As we will see later, this moment is juxtaposed with the novel’s ending. Here, men are sweeping across the land, but in the end, people are falling into the river. Both moments result in mass deaths, but in wholly different landscapes.

5. There may be slight variations in how this line appears in different texts; I am referring only to Remarkable Story of Chicken Little because it was published in Boston and is one of the most commonly known, particularly for American audiences.

6. Though the landscape of Ohio is not an exact replica of the Jim Crow south, the racist ideologies and violence still permeate the Ohio setting. As previously discussed, the town of Medallion is racially segregated, and Morrison details the long history of racial discrimination in housing and employment throughout Sula. Furthermore, any brief mention of the white community in Sula exposes its deeply racist roots. For example, when the bargeman finds Chicken’s body, he wants to leave him there until he notices it is a child; he then wonders, ‘will those people ever be anything but animals’ or ‘substitutes for mules.’ Thus, while I do not intend to conflate the Jim Crow south with the Ohio setting, it is important to acknowledge that this landscape is not devoid of similar racial violence and trauma.

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Notes on contributors

Catherine D. Gooch

Catherine D. Gooch recently graduated from University of Kentucky, where she earned her PhD in English. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Florida SouthWestern State College, and her research focuses on the intersections of race, capitalism, and the environment in African American literature and culture.