Once she comes face to face with Shadrack, however, she is too frightened of him to say anything. When Sula sees Shadrack, the mentally unstable war veteran who founded National Suicide Day, on the river's far bank, she runs to his house, hoping to find out if he saw Chicken Little drown. Chicken Little disappears under the water and drowns. Immediately following this scene, a young black boy named Chicken Little joins the girls, and Nel watches as Sula playfully swings Chicken Little around in a wide circle until her hands slip, letting the boy's small body sail through the air and into the river. Later in the chapter, the two girls metaphorically explore their inner kindling of early adolescent sexuality by stripping twigs of their bark, peeling out the exposed pulpy center, and then rhythmically digging into the earth with them to create wide, deep holes, which they fill with collected debris and then cover with dirt. When a gang of white, threatening Irish boys confronts Sula and Ned on the girls' way home from school, Sula defiantly cuts off the tip of her forefinger, unnerving the boys and dispersing them. Three events presented in this chapter bond the two girls. Nel's lighter skin is likened to wet sandpaper Sula's skin is heavy and brown. Nel's mother is custard-colored Sula's is sooty. Nel comes from an orderly, tidy home Sula, from disorder and chaos. In one another, the girls discover their other half they seem mystically tied to each other's thoughts and feelings. Nel Wright and Sula Peace have become friends, a friendship that will last throughout their lifetimes. |a The intense friendship shared by two black women raised in an Ohio town changes when one of them leaves to roam the countryside and returns ten years later.The setting of this chapter opens on a cool note - cool weather, a cool wind, and Edna Finch's Mellow House, the town's ice cream parlor - in stark contrast to the ending of the previous chapter, when Plum died in the flames of a kerosene fire, in the heat of Eva's flames of love. But their friendship ends in an unforgivable betrayal-or does it end?-From publisher description. It endures even after Nel has grown up to be a pillar of the black community and Sula has become a pariah. Their devotion is fierce enough to withstand bullies and the burden of a dreadful secret. In this novel, Toni Morrison tells the story of Nel Wright and Sula Peace, who meet as children in the small town of Medallion, Ohio. Two friends who become something worse than enemies. |a Two girls who grow up to become women. |a New York : |b Vintage International, |c 2004.

Sula book cover