The Peace and Wright households are products of the Great Migration and the dreams of renewal that brought both Black migrants and European immigrants to major cities in the Northeast and the Midwest in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Both families are also products of communal and familial legacies, which they struggle with and against to figure out who they are and what they need. In this way, the novel ties the characters’ efforts to escape their familial traumas to the long shadow of racism, which continues to shape their existence in the supposedly more egalitarian Midwest.

The entangled lives of the Wright women demonstrate the difficulty of breaking with the past. Helene Wright needs to distinguish herself from her sex worker mother, Rochelle. The Bottom helps her with this, stripping her of her Creole lineage by renaming her and calling her “Helen.” Similarly, Nel’s need to distinguish herself from her mother results in her befriending Sula. Before Nel befriends Sula, the only women she knows intimately are her mother and, peripherally, her grandmother, Rochelle. The latter woman serves as an embodiment of shame and ignobility, though Nel doesn’t yet know why, while her mother’s influence is a restrictive one, as Nel learns during their trip to New Orleans. Helene is an influence who works to undermine who Nel is. Hence, Nel’s declaration in the mirror, after they return home: “I’m me. I’m not their daughter. I’m not Nel. I’m me. Me” (28). The repetition of “me” is Nel’s attempt to liberate herself from her mother’s expectations, born from Helene’s own determination not to become like Rochelle, and to find a self uniquely hers and not the result of someone else’s creation. This is why she also rejects her name. In the end, Nel lives up to her mother’s expectations and those of her community while never learning what her own are. She, thus, accepts her mother’s legacy. 

Eva’s relationship with her children presents another perspective on the theme. While it is Sula who ends up being the only member of the Peace family still living at the house on 7 Carpenter Road, it is Plum whom Eva wants to take over the house. Believing it is a man’s place to inherit property, despite Eva being the one who establishes it, she intends to leave everything to him. His addiction to heroin hurts her partly because, as she sees it, he has failed to become a man. This awareness, and her pain over the losses of both her son and her hopes, causes her to rock him gently in her arms while he lies in a stupor. As she explains later to Hannah, she kills him because “he wanted to crawl back [into her] womb” (71). Ironically, his very inability to detach himself from her makes him incapable of carrying forward her legacy, which she finds an unbearable burden. 

The Bottom’s reaction to these events reveals its own relationship to the past. While the entire community witnesses and pities Hannah’s death by fire, Plum’s remains a family secret—enclosed within the walls in which he burned to death. The people at the Bottom, if they know the truth, never speak of it. This silence comments on the wider community’s inability to deal with the traumas that Black veterans endured after returning home from the international wars of the early- to mid-20th century, from World War I to the Vietnam War. 

It also speaks to the community’s struggle with the legacy of racism more broadly. The Bottom, a Black neighborhood geographically separated from the rest of Medallion, is a community born out of segregation and injustice and undone by the uneven promises of the New Deal and the Great Society: As much as it symbolizes its residents’ dreams of a better future, it also reflects the intractability of racism. The destruction of the tunnel is a cathartic confrontation with this legacy but also one with disastrous consequences for several participants, revealing an ambivalent message about the possibility of moving beyond historical traumas. In the years that follow, the community does achieve greater racial equality, yet the cost is steep.