A man named Shadrack declared January 3 National Suicide Day, celebrating it every year except during World War II. In December 1917, he was running “across a field in France,” dodging shellfire (7). He had expected to feel something very strong, but instead, only felt a nail going through his boot. Turning his head away in pain, he saw the head of a soldier nearby fly off, but the soldier’s body continued running across the field. Shadrack woke in a hospital bed. 

Shadrack lifted his arms to eat but grew alarmed at the sight of his hands. His scream brought in a male nurse who ordered Shadrack to eat. The nurse reached under the blanket to pull out Shadrack’s hand. Shadrack pulled it back, accidentally turning over the tray. He then rose up on his knees and tried to fling his fingers away. His movements were so forceful that he knocked the nurse back onto the next bed. Hospital attendants came into Shadrack’s room and bound him into a straitjacket. Alone in his bed, Shadrack wondered why the nurse called him “private”—a name that he associated with something secret. He wondered why the hospital workers referred to him as a secret.

Due to a high demand for more hospital beds, Shadrack was discharged with “$217 in cash, a full suit of clothes and copies of very official-looking papers” (10). The people walking around outside struck him as flimsy, like paper dolls. After walking for a while, Shadrack tried to remove his shoes but struggled to loosen his laces, which the nurse had double-knotted, and began to cry. He was 22 and “didn’t even know who or what he was…with no past, no language, no tribe, no source, no address book” (12). The only thing about which he was sure was the horror of his hands.

A police car drove up. The officers took Shadrack to jail and “booked him for vagrancy and intoxication” (13). In his cell, Shadrack looked at his reflection in the toilet bowl’s water. Seeing this proof of his Blackness satisfied him enough that he dared to look at his hands. He then returned to the cot and fell asleep.

When Shadrack awoke, the sheriff helped him into the back of a wagon. Several hours later, Shadrack was back in Medallion. For the next 12 days, Shadrack struggled with “making a place for fear as a way of controlling it” (14). This practice was what inspired him to institute National Suicide Day. So, on the third day of January, he marched down Carpenter’s Road, ringing a cowbell with one hand and holding a noose with the other, calling everyone to gather. He told them that this was their only day either to murder or to die by suicide.

At first, the people in the Bottom were frightened. Shadrack, with his long, matted hair, looked wild. Each year thereafter when National Suicide Day arrived, people were less concerned. They also knew that “[h]e lived in a shack on the riverbank that had once belonged to his grandfather,” and they bought fish from him on Tuesdays and Fridays (15). Otherwise, he was often drunk and raucous, but innocuous. Soon, people absorbed National Suicide Day into their thoughts and routines.

Helene Wright had been born in the “Sundown House,” but she was raised by her grandmother “under the dolesome eyes of a multicolored Virgin Mary” (17). Then, Wiley Wright arrived in New Orleans to visit his Aunt Cecile and, upon meeting Helene, proposed marriage—partly due to her beauty and partly due to pressure from both his aunt and Helene’s grandmother. Wiley worked as “a ship’s cook on one of the Great Lakes lines” (17). He took Helene to Medallion, where they lived in a house with lace curtains. Nine years later, their daughter, Nel, was born.

Nel gave Helene purpose. She was also grateful that Nel had not inherited her great beauty, as Helene saw it. Nel was darker and had Wiley’s broader nose and lips. Under Helene’s tutelage, Nel “became obedient and polite” (17). She was satisfied with her life and comforts. She was especially happy knowing that she was far away from the Sundown House. So, when a letter arrived from Mr. Henri Martin notifying her that her grandmother was terminally ill, Helene greeted the news with mixed emotions. She didn’t want to return to the South. Then, she thought that if she wore a very elegant dress—coupled with her impeccable manners—it ought to protect her.

On the day of her and Nel’s departure, Helene cooked a ham and left a note for Wiley. She then departed for the train depot with Nel. They searched along the track for the colored coach. Still, they made a mistake and entered a coach that contained around 20 white people. Instead of going back down the steps, Helene decided to walk to the car for Black passengers. Before they could open the door to their coach, a white conductor stopped them. Suddenly, all of Helene’s “old fears of being somehow flawed gathered in her stomach and made her hands tremble” (20). The conductor had called her “gal,” then asked what she had been doing in the white-only coach. Helene told him that they had made a mistake. Indifferent, he told her to get her butt into the colored coach. She stood and stared at him until she realized that he was waiting for her to move out of his path. She then stepped aside and pulled Nel alongside her in front of a seat. Then, for a reason her daughter never understood, Helene smiled “dazzlingly and coquettishly” at the conductor (21). Nel looked away from her mother’s display of her teeth. Two Black soldiers who had been watching the scene appeared shocked and then quietly irate.

When the exit door slammed behind the conductor, Helene looked for a seat and for someone to help her with her luggage. Not one man moved to assist. Helene and Nel sat down. Nel could look neither at her mother nor the soldiers. It pleased her, though, that these men hated her mother, while her father had long worshipped Helene. She had noticed that “the hooks and eyes in the placket of the dress had come undone and exposed the custard-colored skin underneath” (22). 

They changed trains in Birmingham. After Birmingham, there were no rest stops with toilets for Black people. Helene was desperate to relieve herself. When the train pulled into Meridian, she and Helene squatted in a field, following another Black female passenger and the woman’s children. They went several times again in Mississippi and Louisiana. By the time they reached Slidell, Helene had become expert at folding leaves to wipe herself and no longer cared about the white men who lingered in front of the depots.

Cecile Sabat’s shotgun house was in Elysian Fields and was adorned with a mourning wreath when they arrived. Henri Martin opened the door and said that he was present to help set up for the funeral. Helene walked through the kitchen and toward her old bedroom. A woman walked up from the garden to the back porch and entered the bedroom. Helene introduced the woman to Nel as her grandmother. Nel was confused, having believed that the dead old woman was her grandmother. Helene corrected her.

Nel marveled at the tiny young woman in the “canary-yellow dress” and with the “glare of a canary” (25). She was only 48, she said. The woman then beckoned 10-year-old Nel toward her. Helene tried to prevent Nel from getting close to the woman by saying that they were unclean from having been on the train for three days. The woman, who was named Rochelle, asked Helene if she planned to do anything about the house, which had been paid off long ago. Helene said that she had been thinking about the subject. Rochelle then turned from the mirror, where she had darkened her eyebrows with a burnt match, and hugged Nel. She said goodbye in Creole and disappeared. Nel remarked on how nice the woman smelled and how soft her skin was. She then asked Helene about what ‘voir meant. Helene said that she didn’t speak Creole, and neither did Nel.

When they returned to Medallion, Nel and Helene saw that both the note and the ham had remained untouched. Helene was happy to be home but marveled at all the dust. She then encouraged Nel to pull on her nose. Nel obeyed. She sat on the sofa, thinking about the woman in canary yellow. Later that night, in bed, Nel thought about her trip. She felt different from having traveled. She got out of bed, lit her lamp, and looked in the mirror. She saw “her face, plain brown eyes, three braids, and a nose her mother hated” (28). She declared herself into existence for herself and no one else. She felt power in it and decided that she wanted to be wonderful. She then went to sleep. Her trip to New Orleans was the last time she ever left Medallion.

Still, leaving remained her goal, and Nel always thought of places to go. Then, Nel decided to befriend Sula Peace, whom Helene said had a “sooty” mother. So, Nel had stayed away from the girl. The trip to New Orleans, however, had emboldened Nel to strike up a friendship.

When Sula visited the Wright household, Helene softened toward the girl, noticing that she “seemed to have none of the mother’s slackness” (28). Sula also loved the Wright family’s red-velvet sofa. Nel, on the other hand, preferred the disorder and noisiness of the Peace house. She liked that Hannah never scolded, that all kinds of people stopped by, that there were dirty dishes sat in the sink, and that Eva Peace, Sula’s grandmother, handed her goobers from her pockets or read her dreams.

The Peace home, which took five years to build, had many rooms and many stairways, some connecting to the same floor. Eva lived on the third floor. Many years before, after her abusive husband, BoyBoy, departed, she found herself alone with the children one November, with little money or food and no sense of what to feel. She could not afford to be angry; her children needed her too much. There were not many Black families in the Bottom at that time. Those who were there offered what they could for the Peace family’s sustenance. Eva relied on charity until December but knew that other families—not much better off than she—would not be able to help her for much longer. There was little work in the valley. Eva thought of going back home to Virginia but felt that it would have been an admission of failure.

Eva had left Virginia with BoyBoy who, at the time, had been working for a white carpenter and tool smith, who had invited BoyBoy to accompany him to the West. BoyBoy built them a one-room cabin, where they lived for one year “before they had an outhouse” (33).

Now, it was December, and Plum had stopped making bowel movements. Eva wondered if something was wrong with her milk. The baby shrieked in pain and frustration. When his cries lasted into the night, Eva wrapped him up, ran her finger around the inside of a lard can, and took him to the outhouse. There, she squatted down and turned Plum over, laying him across her knees. She “exposed his buttocks and shoved the last bit of food she had in the world (besides three beets) up his ass” (34). The treatment worked, and Plum’s cries ceased. As though she were rousing herself from a daydream, Eva shook her head and then said, “no” aloud. While Plum slept, Eva began to think.

Two days later, Eva left her three children with her neighbor Mrs. Suggs and said that she would return the next day. She returned 18 months later “with two crutches, a new black pocketbook, and one leg” (34). She gave Mrs. Suggs $10. Then, she set about building a house on Carpenter’s Road, just 60 feet away from the shack BoyBoy had built, which Eva rented out.

When Plum was three, BoyBoy returned to visit Eva, dressed in fine, colorful clothing. Eva offered him some lemonade. As he took a glass, she noticed that “[h]is nails were long and shiny” (35). Eva looked out the screen door and saw a woman leaning against her pear tree.

Eva caught BoyBoy up on all the latest gossip. He avoided mentioning anything about her leg. After some time passed, he rose to leave. As he walked away, Eva “saw defeat in the stalk of his neck” (36). Then, she saw him whisper something to the woman under the pear tree. The woman laughed, and after so many years of not knowing what to feel, Eva resolved to hate BoyBoy. The hatred gave her pleasure and strength. Not long after BoyBoy’s visit, Eva retreated to her third-floor bedroom.

Meanwhile, many tenants streamed in and out of the house. In 1921, she encountered three neglected children whom she nicknamed “Dewey.” The first Dewey was a dark-skinned Black boy whose eyes appeared jaundiced. The second was a light-skinned Black boy with red hair and freckles. The third was half Mexican and had black bangs. The boys formed a trinity, “loving nothing and no one but themselves” (38). If one Dewey got into mischief, they all got whipped for it. When the eldest Dewey was ready for school, they were all enrolled at once. At school, the boys spoke in one voice and were fiercely private.

The year before the Deweys came, Eva rented a room to Tar Baby—“a beautiful, slight, quiet man who never spoke above a whisper,” but sang beautifully during Wednesday-night prayer meetings (39). When he first arrived in Medallion, his fair skin and blond hair earned the nickname Pretty Johnnie. Eva insisted that he was white and gave him the mocking nickname Tar Baby. He worked in a poultry market at first, killing chickens. When he returned home, he drank until he passed out. Then, he lost his job, resorting to panhandling, before returning to the house to drink. He sent the Deweys out to buy his liquor. It was clear that Tar Baby would drink until he died and wanted nothing more than “a place to die privately but not quite alone” (40). Along with the Deweys, Tar Baby became the first one to join Shadrack on National Suicide Day.

Meanwhile, Pearl married at 14, moved to Flint, Michigan, and occasionally sent her mother letters with $2 folded inside. Plum returned home from World War I several days after Christmas in 1920, though he had been in the states for about a year already. He wrote Eva from Chicago, Washington, DC, and New York, always promising that he would be home soon. When he arrived, his hair looked as though it “had been neither cut nor combed in months, his clothes were pointless and he had no socks” (45). He carried a paper sack. Everyone welcomed him home but left him alone until he was ready to speak. Eva gave him a room next to Tar Baby’s.

The family noticed that his habits were like Tar Baby’s, though he left no bottles around. Sometimes, he was upbeat. Soon, he began to steal. He took trips to Cincinnati and then returned and slept for days. He got thinner. Finally, Hannah “found the bent spoon black from steady cooking,” a sign that Plum was addicted to heroin (45).

One night in 1921, Eva got herself up and went downstairs. She arrived at Plum’s door and opened it. She sat on his bed and held him in her arms. He was passed out but was roused to semi-consciousness by her touch. Eva rocked him and looked around the room. Plum spoke drowsily to her. She saw the empty bottles and wrappers that he left around the room after consuming their sweet contents. Holding him, she remembered the time she had bathed him when he was a baby. Giggling, he had reached up and dripped water into her bosom. Eva remembered and tried to stop herself from crying. Having seen what she thought was a glass of strawberry crush on the floor, she reached for it. When the liquid touched her lips, she realized it was blood. She tossed the glass to the floor. Plum woke and urged her to go to bed, assuring her that he was all right. Eva agreed to leave. She stepped away from the bed, threw kerosene over her son, rolled some newspaper into a stick, lit it, and tossed it onto the bed. After the flames engulfed him, she closed the door and climbed the stairs back to her room.

When Eva got to the third floor, she heard Hannah and a child crying out in alarm. Hannah ran upstairs, opened her mother’s door, and told Eva that Plum was on fire, but they couldn’t open his door. Eva looked at Hannah in fake wonder. Hannah found the truth in her mother’s eyes and closed her door, running toward the neighbors who called for water.