A white farmer tricks a freed slave into taking rocky hilltop land, and the Black community there calls it the Bottom.

After returning home from WWI, Shadrack marches through Medallion ringing a cowbell and establishes National Suicide Day.

On a train to New Orleans, Helene Wright smiles submissively at a white conductor who has just humiliated her.

After returning from New Orleans, Nel befriends Sula Peace as an act of defiance against her mother's wishes.

Eva Peace burns her heroin-addicted son Plum alive in his bedroom rather than watch him destroy himself.

Sula slices off the tip of her own finger with a paring knife to frighten Irish boys who have been bullying them.

Sula swings Chicken Little by his hands, accidentally releases him, and the boy plunges into the river and drowns.

Hannah Peace catches fire while cooking over an open flame in the yard and dies before reaching the hospital.

Nel Wright marries Jude Greene in a church ceremony, with Sula serving as bridesmaid.

Sula returns to Medallion after a decade away and arranges for Eva to be placed in a retirement home.

Nel walks in on Sula and Jude together naked; Jude collects his things and leaves the family permanently.

Sula begins a romance with Ajax, who eventually disappears after sensing she is growing possessive of him.

Nel visits the bedridden Sula, demands to know why she slept with Jude, and leaves without resolution.

Sula dies alone at the Peace house on Carpenter Road shortly after Nel's final visit.

Shadrack leads Bottom residents in a National Suicide Day parade that ends with their destruction of the forbidden tunnel.

Sula traces the founding of the Bottom, a Black community built on land stolen through racial deception, and the lives that unfold there across several generations. The Peace and Wright families anchor the story, shaped by Eva's fierce sacrifices and Helene's obsession with respectability. Nel and Sula form a bond sealed by the accidental death of a child named Chicken Little, but their paths diverge when Nel marries Jude and Sula leaves Medallion. Sula's return ten years later disrupts everything: she sends Eva away, sleeps with Jude, and becomes the community's shared enemy. Her death leaves a vacuum that the Bottom fills with its own destruction at the forbidden tunnel. The story closes with Nel finally understanding who she has truly been grieving.

The headline events that drive Sula's story from the founding of the Bottom to Nel's final reckoning.

The narrator describes the Bottom neighborhood as a vanished community whose buildings have been razed for a golf course.

Shadrack wakes in an army hospital, panics at the sight of his own hands, and is restrained in a straitjacket.

Shadrack is jailed for vagrancy and finds calm by looking at his own Black face reflected in a toilet bowl.

Helene and Nel arrive too late for Cecile's funeral and Nel meets her grandmother Rochelle for the first time.

BoyBoy returns to visit Eva dressed in fine clothes and accompanied by another woman; Eva resolves to hate him forever.

Eva takes in three neglected boys of different backgrounds and names them all Dewey, erasing their individual identities.

Plum returns from WWI looking unkempt and hollow; the Peace family discovers he has become addicted to heroin.

Ajax calls the adolescent Sula and Nel 'pig meat' as they pass the Time and a Half Pool Hall.

Hannah tells friends Patsy and Valentine that she loves her daughter Sula but simply does not like her.

After Chicken Little drowns, Sula visits Shadrack's shack; he startles her by saying the single word 'Always.'

Chicken Little's body is recovered from the river after three days and his funeral is held at the church.

Jude Greene stands in line for six days watching white laborers get hired while he is denied construction work.

The Bottom community spreads rumors about Sula and protects their homes with salt and broomsticks against her supposed evil.

Ajax begins courting Sula by arriving at her door with practical gifts such as blackberries, milk, and comic pages.

Nel visits Eva in the retirement home and Eva, in a moment of clarity, accuses both girls of killing Chicken Little.

This pool follows the quieter events and supporting characters that give Sula its moral complexity and historical weight. Shadrack's broken return from war, Plum's addiction, and BoyBoy's abandonment of Eva establish a world shaped by men who leave and women who survive. The adolescent friendship between Nel and Sula is built in small moments — overhearing Hannah's confession, visiting Shadrack's shack, attending Chicken Little's funeral. Jude's exclusion from construction work explains the wound that makes him seek an escape, while Ajax's courtship of Sula reveals her one genuine romantic attachment. Together, these events show how individual histories, small cruelties, and quiet choices accumulate into the tragedy the main plot delivers.

The secondary moments and supporting characters that give Sula its depth and moral texture.

Shadrack is discharged from the army hospital with money and papers but stands outside feeling entirely lost and nameless.

After returning from New Orleans, Nel stares into her bedroom mirror and declares her own identity into existence.

Eva leaves her three starving children with a neighbor and returns eighteen months later with one leg and enough money to build a house.

Hannah rushes to Eva's bedroom door after Plum catches fire and reads her mother's guilt in Eva's expression.

Sula overhears Hannah tell friends she loves but does not like her daughter; Sula feels a sudden sting in her eye.

Sula and Nel lie in the riverbank grass digging holes and burying small objects just before Chicken Little approaches them.

Hannah tells Eva about a dream of a wedding in a red bridal gown on the morning before she catches fire.

Hannah asks Eva directly whether she ever loved her children and why she set Plum on fire.

Lying in her hospital bed after the fire, Eva recalls watching Sula observe Hannah burn with apparent fascination.

Sula walks away from Nel's wedding reception in a blue dress and does not return to Medallion for ten years.

Sula opens a drawer and finds Ajax's driver's license, learning for the first time that his real name is Albert Jacks.

After Nel leaves, Sula lies back alone and thinks about the days when she and Nel were 'two throats and one eye.'

After Sula's death, the Bottom community loses its shared enemy and reverts to neglect, resentment, and self-destruction.

Nel visits the colored cemetery and reflects on how only white people attended Sula's burial and prepared her body.

Nel stops suddenly outside the park and breaks into grief, realizing it has been Sula she mourned all along, not Jude.

This pool focuses on the hidden turning points — the moments of self-discovery, secret guilt, and unspoken revelation that shape every character's fate. From Shadrack's terrifying loss of self after the war to Nel's declaration of identity in a mirror, these are the internal hinges on which the story turns. Eva's sacrifice, Hannah's prophetic dream, and Sula's overhearing of her mother's confession each plant seeds of grief and defiance that bloom across decades. Sula's departure from Nel's wedding and her discovery of Ajax's real name mark the outer limits of her self-sufficiency. The pool closes with Nel's belated, devastating recognition that the friendship she lost — not the husband — was the love of her life.

The decisions, discoveries, and emotional shifts that quietly reshape every character's fate.