Two characters die in fires—Plum and Hannah. The first is ignited alive after falling into a heroin-induced stupor, while the latter accidentally sets herself aflame while setting a bonfire. The first dies with relatively little pain, while the latter suffers mercilessly. The first dies privately, while the latter becomes a community spectacle. 

Fire, in the novel, is symbolic of sacrifice and renewal, particularly as they relate to The Burden of Legacies. Eva sets Plum on fire to avoid watching her most beloved child kill himself slowly. Shadrack, Plum returned from war with psychic wounds he would not let anyone see. Unlike Shadrack, he was unable to find a way to cope with life and found succor in heroin. Eva’s act, as violent as it is, is an attempt to wrest control from a situation that could have destroyed them both—simultaneously a sacrifice of the son she hoped would inherit her legacy and vengeance against the son who disappointed her. 

Hannah’s burning, and Morrison’s gruesome details about the falling away of her flesh, highlight the fragility of the beauty on which Hannah relied. It is as though Ajax’s calls to Nel and Sula as “pigmeat” has come true. Hannah has been reduced to cooked flesh. However, her immolation also allows Sula to come into being. No longer having a mother whose approval she has to think about, as Nel does, she is free to become whoever she wants.

Sula’s return to Medallion is heralded by the deaths of a slew of robins. Robins have significance in the folklore of various cultures—Celtic, Norse, Indigenous American, and others. Their red breasts have been the inspiration of numerous origin stories. Some claim that the robin got its red mark after piercing itself on one of the thorn’s in Christ’s crown of thorns. During the Victorian era, the robin heralded the arrival of the Christmas season.

In America, the arrival of the bird, which is migratory, often connotes the arrival of spring. Medallion will indeed find itself renewed in numerous ways, many unexpected, by Sula’s return home. However, the fact that the novel’s robins are dead complicates this symbolism of rebirth. In part, this indicates the potential trouble (from the Bottom’s perspective) that Sula will bring to a community that believes it lives in a relative degree of peace. At the same time, the deaths also reveal the Bottom’s weary acceptance of misfortune: “[T]hey let it run its course, fulfill itself, and never invented ways either to alter it, to annihilate it or to prevent its happening again. So also were they with people” (89-90). This attitude of resignation stems from historical trauma, making the birds a symbol related to The Burden of Legacies: For the novel’s marginalized characters, the hope of renewal is always tempered by the recognition of the ongoing realities of racism, sexism, etc., sometimes to a self-defeating extent.