From the opening lines of Sula which foreshadows me ultimate deem of me community, Morrison calls attention to me sense of community in the Bottom. In "Eruptions of Funk. Susan Willis says, "The opening line from Sula might as well have been me novel's conclusion, so complete is the destructioni it describes. This is the community Morrison is writing to reclaim" (315). Although, she begins reclaiming the Bottom community by defining it through its destruction, thus forcing me reader to view me community throughout me rest of the novel through this dark screen of a community pulled from its roots, nonetheless she leaves no doubt in the reader's mind mat there was a whole community at one time.

They are going to raze the Time and a Half Pool Hall, where feet in long tan shoes once pointed from rung chairs. A steel ball will knock to dust Irene's Palace of cosmetology, where women used to lean their heads back on sink trays and doze while Irene lathered Nu Nile into their hair. Men in khaki work domes will pry loose the slats of Reba's Grill, where me owner cooked in her hat because she couldn't remember me ingredients without it (1).

Morrison, however, more man presages the destruction of me community in her opening definition of it. She uses the character of Shadrack to both foreshadow me importance of Sula to the community and to help unite me community more clearly in the readers' mind. Shadrack, like Sula, leaves the community and men returns to it changed. He brings outside knowledge and suffering to the community, thus acting like a kind of scapegoat. Morrison details Shadrack's war experience and the subsequent abuse he suffers at me hands of an army hospital. It is this experience which causes Shadrack to create National Suicide Day,

He knew the smell of death and was terrified of it, for he could not anticipate it. It was not me deem or dying that frightened him, but the unexpectedness of both. In sorting it all out, he hit on me notion that if one day a year were devoted to it, everybody could get it out of the way and me rest of the year would be safe and free. In this manner he instituted National Suicide Day (14).

Although Shadrack helps define the community, giving them a common language and a binding experience, he is only a shadow of what Sula will become to the community. Pessoni says of Shadrack, "Shandrack's mythic presence frames the novel, haunting Sula throughout her IHe and leading her to a resurrection after her death" (446). Shadrack and Sula reflect me community in much the same way. The community reacts to both characters in similar ways and they are both outsiders who ultimately help define me community, "They were mighty preoccupied with earthly things - and each other, wondering even as early as 1920 what Shadrack was all about, what that little girl Sula who grew into a woman in their town was all about, and what they themselves were all about, tucked up mere in me bottom" (6).

Sula and Shadrack's roles in me community are similar, but for the community Sula will become the ultimate definer. Shadrack offers the community only Suicide Day as a means of common definition and escape. Sula will-offer them much more man mat. But before Sula defines me larger community, she defines Nell In Nel and Sula's relationship Morrison plays out many of me dynamics that will come to affect the community when Sula is an adult. As a child she doesn't yet have the power to define the larger community. But she does have the power to define Nel and once again Morrison foreshadows what will ultimately come for Sula and the community.

Nel and Sula are young and "unshaped, formless thing" (53) when they meet and become mends. Morrison describes me two of them as basically lacking in definition before they become friends.

Because each had discovered years before that they were neither white, nor male, and mat all freedom and triumph was forbidden to them, they had set about creating something else to be. Their meeting was fortunate, for it let them use each other to grow on. Daughters of distant mothers and incomprehensible fathers, they found in each other's eyes the intimacy they were looking for (52).

Neither me community nor Sula is complete without the other in the same way that as girls, neither Nel nor Sula were complete without me omen The destruction of their friendship foreshadows the ultimate destruction of me community. For their friendship to exist, both must sacrifice themselves to each omen When Nel begins to define Jude, "Jude could see himself taking shape in her eyes," (83) she can no longer define Sula. Sula leaves and upon her return sleeps with Jude, trying to pick up the friendship by sharing with Nel mat which Nel has come to define. Nel however, in defining Jude, has become part of me community. She can no longer sacrifice all of her self definition to Sula and therefore their friendship must end. The destruction of their friendship has a two-fold purpose for Morrison. First, it is a foreshadowing for the community looking forward to me destruction that will come at me end of the novel. Second, it echoes the theme of sacrifice that defines the tension between community and self. Sula must sacrifice her friendship with Nel, who defines Sula in the same way that Sula defines Nel, so mat Sula can operate as the larger definer of me community.

Sula's true place in me community emerges when she returns after being gone for ten years. Like Shadrack, she has left the Bottom community and experienced the outside world. She returns "accompanied by a plague of robins," (89) and the community reacts to the robins the way they will come to react to Sula,

In spite of me fear, the reacted to an oppressive oddity, or what they called evil days, with an acceptance mat bordered on welcome. Such an evil must be avoided, they felt,and precautions must naturally be taken to protect themselves from it. But they let it run its course, fulfill itself, and never invented ways either to alter it, to annihilate it or to prevent it happening again. So also were they with people(89-90).

But Sula does more than just give them a common unified identity. She changes me community. Rubenstein says, "While people see themselves more clearly through her(Sula) she cannot see herself"(131). In this way she becomes an essential member of the community, allowing others a clearer picture of themselves while at me same time remaining outside of the accepted community. They recognize Sula as evil and "the presence of evil was something to be first recognized, then dealt with, survived, outwitted, triumphed over" (118). In recognizing Sula as evil Morrison says, "Their evidence against Sula was contrived, but their conclusions about her were not. Sula was distinctly different" (118). In recognizing her as different, as evil, as something to be survived, they are recognizing themselves.

Not only does Sula's presence allow the community to define itself, her presence begins to change them, "The conviction of Sula's evil changed them in accountable yet mysterious ways. Once me source of their personal misfortune was identified, they had leave to protect and love one another" (117). Mothers, like Teapot's mamma, who were never good mothers before, who would rather spend time at the Time and a HalF Pool Hall, suddenly become ideal mothers in Sula's presence. Wives suddenly cherish the husbands mat Sula has slept with and tossed aside. She makes people suddenly more attentive to their relationships. She has not only given people means for community definition, she has caused them to become enhanced in their role, "They began to cherish their husbands and wives, protect their children, repair their homes and in general band together against me devil in their midst-(117118). In acting out this role for me community Sula becomes a character that can again be described in negative terms, as she and Nel were as children. But rather than being filled up with Nel, me way she was as a child, she instead becomes a mirror for me community, "Sula provides a negative energy against which members of the community test their own values, a screen upon which they project their needs and fears" (Rubenstein 149). Because Sula is not a mother, nor a wife and has no instincts or desires to fill these roles, she can act as an enhancer to others who must fill these roles. Her self, as might be defined by one of these roles, is sacrificed so that she can operate as me "screen" for the community.

It is perhaps in Sula's death that her importance to the community can be most clearly seen. The people are relieved at her death. It is seen as, "the best news the folks up in me bottom had had since me promise of work at the tunnel" (150). But
after the relief comes a, "restless irritability mat took hold"(153). The roles that Sula's presence enhanced: mother, wife, now crumble without her presence to hold them together. Teapot's mother returns to beating him and

... she was not alone. Other mothers who had defended their children from Sula's malevolence (or who had defended their positions as mother's from Sula's scorn of the role) now had nothing to rub up against. The tension was gone and so was the reason for their effort (153).

Ironically, since it ultimately spells death for both the community and Sula herself, Sula is destroyed when she begins to embrace some of the very values of the community that regards her as evil. She begins to know what it feels like to want to possess. This is the very characteristic that Sula uses to identity Nel as part of the community when she returns. She says of Nel,” they had always shared the affection of other people”(1 19). But once Nel is unwilling to share Jude Sula sees Nel as one of them (120). Sula sees the women of the community as afraid to live, clinging to their roles for fear of the unknown. When Nel is possessive of Jude she has changed in Sula’s eyes,”Now Nel belonged to the town and all of its ways. She had given herself over to them...”(120).

When Sula begins to feel possessive of Ajax, she ultimate drives him away, “Sula began to discover what possession was. Not love perhaps, but possession or at least the desire for it. She was astounded by so new and alien feeling”(1 31). Ajax recognizes these possessive feelings in her and leaves, afraid of Sula trying to catch him in the same manner that all the other girls have. Sula is starting to become one of them. In the way that Nel came to belong to the town, if Sula begins to feel what others feel she will become part of the town as well. She has always been, “completely free of ambition, with no affection for money, property or things, no greed, no desire to command attention or compliments-- no ego. For that reason she had no reason to verify herself-- be consistent with herself” (119). She loses this when she starts to feel possession for Ajax. She is evolving into a being with an ego, with a center, something she has never had before. This ultimately has to be her destruction, not because Ajax leaves her, although that is what appears to make her sick, but because as a being with an ego, as someone who is “part of the town” she can no longer serve as definer of the community. It is only by not having a self that Sula can
allow others to have one.

In Sula, as in Song of Solomon, Morrison does not pass any straightforward or certain judgment on the two opposing forces at work in the community. It perhaps seems, that in identifying Sula as evil, Morrison is passing judgment on her. But Morrison sets Sula up as the sacrifice that must be made for a strong community. The community must live with her evil in their midst and she must sacrifice any type of self in order for the larger community to exist. Morrison reclaims the Bottom community by defining it through Sula. She tells the story of the Bottom and how it came to be destroyed, but in doing so, she reclaims its identity, an identity that would not have been possible without Sula. All in all, Morrison seems to suggest, as she does in Song of Solomon that it is only the joining of two parts that make a whole. Neither part is complete without the other and no judgment can be passed on the individual parts. In the community is stronger when Sula is a part of it. It is complete and it has roots, and it is when she is divided from the community in death that the community no longer has the definition she offered and is swallowed up.

In Song of Solomon Morrison works to expose what defines self. Whereas in Sula she looked at the defining of community and the sacrifices that "self" made in order to hold the larger community together, in Song of Solomon she works towards identifying how self is defined within the community. Morrison goes beyond this however, deals with the tension between self and community and with the larger question of the role that history prays in defining both self and community.

Like in Morrison opens the novel with an event that will cast light on the rest of the novel. The novel begins with an insurance man, who is later identified as a member of the Seven Days, jumping off a building trying to fly. He fails and winds up dead. Milkman Dead, who comes into the world right after this, is forever influenced by this event, "Mr. Smith’s blue silk wings must have left their mark, because when the little boy discovered at four, the same thing Mr. Smith had learned earlier- that only birds and airplanes could fly-he lost all interest in himself (9). The end of the novel reveals that Milkman, unlike the insurance man, will learn to fly.He will find a renewed interest in himself as well. It is this journey that Morrison uses to explore the question of self and its role within community. The beginning of the novel, with this failed attempt to fly, is the first signal that Milkman does not belong in this community where people can not fly.

In this community Milkman is caught between his father and his friend Guitar as they each struggle to define what Milkman will become in the Southside community. They each become, in their own way, some of the ushit that weighs you down,”(1 80) holding Milkman back from flight and true self definition. These two characters who seem superficially opposite, have driving forces that are similar. As Theodore 0. Mason, Jr. says in “The Novelist as Conservator: Stories and Comprehension in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon,” Both characters remain infected by a nearly single-mindedly rigid pursuit of informing the goals of their fictions- property and revenge”(1 78). It is this single-minded pursuit of each character’s own set of values that forces them to pull Milkman along toward false definition. Milkman’s father, perhaps more than anything, sets him apart from the Southside community. Guitar fights to pull Milkman in to the Southside ghetto community, whereas Macon pulls him toward self definition through possession.

His father is Macon Dead, a man who cares more about making money than about the people of his community. He is willing to turn people like Mrs. Bains, a grandmother struggling to feed her grandchildren, out on the street if they can’t pay their rent on time(68) because it will not benefit him to help her. Smith says of Macon’s self-centered greed, He believes that the ends justify any means; as a result, he excuses his own corruption by considering only the financial profits it brings him. He feels no need to offer Mrs. Bains charity because charity will not increase his wealth”(280-281). When Empire State, a character who is later found out to be part of the Seven Days, an organization that symbolizes Northern ghetto life, is threatening to kill himself by jumping off of a building, Macon comes to the scene simply to collect rent money, “I ain’t aiming to get him down. I’m aiming to get my money down”(24). Macon is clearly not part of this community. As Smith says, “Milkman appears doomed to a life of alienation from himself and others because, like his parents, he adheres to excessively rigid, materialistic Western values...”(278). He has defined himself through possessions and money. He tries to pass this same type of definition on to Milkman who ultimately rejects it, choosing instead to trace a family definition that transcends Macon’s narrow view of self.

The rides the Dead family took through the middle of town in their Packard, a car no other family could afford to own, perhaps symbolize the difference between Macon and Milkman best. For Macon they were part of his self definition, part of the way of allowing his money and possessions to reflect his self,” These rides that the family took on Sunday afternoons had become rituals and much too important for Macon to enjoy. For him it was a way to satisfy himself that he was indeed a successful man”(31). These rides, however, make Milkman uneasy, “But riding backward made him uneasy. It was like flying blind, and not knowing where he was going- just where he had been- troubled him”(31 -32).

It is perhaps with Guitar that the taint that Milkman’s father gives him in the community can most clearly be seen. Guitar is Milkman’s link to the community. He is a fully accepted part of the Southside community and is enmeshed in its life. When Guitar finds out about events that have escaped his notice he is shocked and skeptical, “...a habitual street roamer, believed he knew every public thing going on in the city”(45-46). When he tries to draw Milkman into this community Milkman is rejected based upon his family and his father’s outsider status in the community. This is the most striking when Guitar tries to take Milkman into a bar with him. The two boys are kicked out because Milkman is, “Macon Dead’s boy.” Guitar defends him as his friend and tries to give Milkman his own identity by saying to Feather, “He can’t help who is Daddy is,” to which Feather can only reply, “Neither can I. Out”(57). It is Macon’s power over Feather, as his landlord and holder of his operating license, that causes him to kick out Milkman. Milkman is an outsider because Macon is an outsider that has power over the people of the community.

Guitar remains Milkman’s who link to the Southside community throughout the novel. owever, as they become older, and Guitar becomes more involved in the ghetto life, their differences begin to drive them apart. When Guitar becomes involved in the Seven Days there is a wedge driven between him and Milkman that is not repaired until the end of the novel. They begin arguing and Guitar begins to point out to Milkman that he is not part of the community. Guitar says to Milkman, “You got your high-tone friends and your picnics on Honore Island.. .“(1 03) At first Milkman doesn’t understand. He points out to Guitar that he has invited him to Honore Island to which Guitar replies, “The only way I’ll go to that nigger heaven is with a case of dynamite and a book of matches”(1 04). Furthermore, Guitar points out to Milkman that Milkman doesn’t have a home, “You don’t live nowhere. Not Doctor Street or Southside”(1 03). The differences between Milkman and Guitar begin to divide their friendship. Initially, Guitar linked Milkman to the community, but now the community is tearing apart their friendship.

The turning point in the friendship of Milkman and Guitar comes when Guitar finally tells Milkman about his participation in the Seven Days. Guitar makes the decision to trust Milkman, to include him in knowledge of the society. Guitar once again is Milkman’s only link to the true community. But in deciding to tell Milkman about the society, Guitar helps to further define Milkman’s difference from the community in which he lives. Milkman can’t understand Guitars's need to participate in the Seven Days and he can’t understand how it can make a difference in his life. He says to Guitar, “...none of that shit is going to change how I live or how any other negro lives. What our oing is crazy” (161-162). At the end of this conversation, when Guitar tells an he is scared for him, Guitar realizes what Milkman is only starting to realize, Milkman has no identity in this community. He can not relate to Guitar’s way of life. From the time he was a child he has been isolated because of his family. He is not a part of this community and he has no history or community to look back to for a sense of identity. Guitar has Alabama in his past and Southside as his present. Milkman has only Honore Island as his past and nothing as his future.

Milkman begins to realize that something is missing in his life. He doesn’t fully comprehend the importance of this discovery, but he senses that something is not right. He tells his father that he wants to leave for a year, “I just want to be on my own. Get a job on my own, live on my own” (163-164). When he tells Macon this, Macon replies, “You’ll be free. Money is freedom, Macon (Milkman). The only real freedom there is... (163). But at this point, Milkman has enough self realization to know that for him, money is not freedom. He is beginning to make the break from his father. Milkman can no longer allow himself to be lulled into letting his father, or Guitar, define him. He has long been without a self in the community, but his separation from Guitar emphasizes this for him. He can not look to the future of his father’s money and business as a replacement for self. He realizes that, “His life was pointless, aimless, and it was true that he didn’t concern himself an awful lot about other people.”(107)

Ironically, it is money that Milkman sets out to find when he travels to the South where ultimately finds his roots. He begins this journey by betraying Pilate, something his father and Guitar persuade him to do. He does not yet have enough self definition to realize that Pilate is a link to his history, and ultimately his ‘self’. Nor does he realize yet that the gold he is searching for can never hang from the ceiling in someone’s house. He still believes he is searching for money, to buy his freedom from Guitar and Macon and thus begins his journey for self through an act of betrayal.

When Milkman initially involves Guitar in the plan to steal the gold from Pilate’s house, he is making his last attempt to find himself within the Southside community. He believes the gold hangs in Pilate’s house, waiting for him. He asks Guitar to help, although he could easily steal the gold from Pilate himself, “He wondered if that’s why he had let him in on it. Obviously he could pull it off alone, but maybe he wanted to see Guitar warm and joking again, his face open and smiling...”(176) He is again trying to hold onto the identity that Guitar gives him. But even while they are planning stealing the gold together, the distance between Guitar and Milkman is haunting Milkman. He can’t stop wondering whether Guitar has killed someone yet as part of the Seven Days, “...the question was there. Has he done it? Has he really killed somebody?”(1 77) Milkman holds back from asking Guitar however, afraid to raise their differences, “maybe he could ask him one day, but not this day when it was so much like old time “(177).

Milkman is making his final attempt to be part of this community. He is involving Guitar, the symbol of Northern ghetto life for Milkman, in his search for him self. He swallows the doubts he has, the recurring questions for fear that the facade will be broken. To ask Guitar the question would be to expose once and for all Milkman’s isolation from Guitar’s life. As Richard Heyman says in “Universalization and Its Discontents: Morrison’s Song of Solomon- A (W)hol(e)y Black Text” Guitar’s self is radically different from what Milkman’s self will become. Guitar, “in the midst of this chaos, decides to impose a system of meaning on his life, so he constructs his Self around the radical Seven Days group... “(390) Heyman goes on to say that Guitar’s, “self, contradictory to Milkman’s at the end, is totally divorced from the past, and concentrates on the immediate present, politicized, and violent life in and of the ghetto”(390).

Milkman finally must sacrifice his life in Southside. He must leave behind his family and Guitar in order to search for himself and his history. He must construct his self in his past and he can not remain in the “immediate, present, politicized and violent life of the ghetto,” and still search for his past. He ultimately must break from Guitar and the present of his family life in order to reach his destination.

Although he must break from his family, from “all the shit that weighs him down” in Southside, he can not completely sever his link to his father and Pilate because they are the ones who hold the links to his past. It is the search for the that gold provides him the means to both escape and his first link to his past through his father’s story:

A long time ago, I told you about when I was a boy on a farm. About
Pilate and me. About my father getting killed. I never finished the story;
I never told you all of it. The part I left out was about me and Pilate(166).

This act of betraying Pilate is the final signal that Milkman must leave Southside to recapture his past. Caught between Guitar and Macon, stuck in a community where he does not belong, Milkman must leave to find his true “self.” He has momentary regrets, looking back to his life with Guitar, but he is beginning to, “get rid of the shit that weighs him down”(180).

Only one small thought troubled him- that Guitar was not there too. He would have loved it-the view, the food, the stewardesses. But Milkman wanted to do this by himself, with no input from anybody. This one he wanted to go solo. In the air, away from real life, he felt free, but on the ground, when he talked to Guitar just before he left, the wings of all those other people’s nightmares flapped in his face and constrained him (222).

Milkman’s sensitivities are abruptly awakened when, trudging through the woods, he is scratched by branches, bruised by rocks and soaked in a stream. As all of his commodified possessions fall away- his watch, his Florsheim shoes, and his three- piece suit - he comes to realize a full range of sensual perceptions (along with some human social practices-like sharing) he had never before experienced (317).

Both Song of Solomon and Sula make a statement about wholeness achieved through the unity of parts. The community in Sula is whole only when she is part of it and Milkman creates a sense of wholeness by tracing his roots and embracing Guitar in his leap from the cliff. But where Sula seems to suggest the need for a scapegoat figure, Song of Solomon’s conclusion is much more ambiguous. In Sula, the character of Sula must sacrifice her “self” completely in order to define the community. In Song of Solomon Milkman’s embracing of Guitar symbolically links him to the community he has sacrificed in his search for self. Furthermore, Milkman’s search for self introduced him to a new community, the community of Shalimar, which is the community of his father’s family, again symbolically offering a sort of reconciliation between Milkman and his father. There is not an utter sacrifice of self for community or vice versa in Song of Solomon. As in Sula, Morrison suggests that the whole, whether self or community, is made up of individual parts. But the picture of the whole in of Song of Solomon is more encompassing than in Sula. There is no recapturing of sacrifices made in Sula and the novel ends with Nel’s cry for the friendship that was sacrificed for the good of the community, “It was a fine cry- loud and long- but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow(174). Song of Solomon on the other hand, ends with Milkman recapturing part of his sacrif ice, Guitar, and resolves Milkman’s life long search for both flight and self,” As a fleet and bright as a lodestar he wheeled toward Guitar and it did not matter which one of them would give up his ghost in the killing arms of his brother. For now he knew what Shalimar knew: If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it”(341).

Davis, Cynthia A. “Self, Society and Myth in Toni Morrison’s Fiction.” Modern Critical Views: Toni Morrison. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1990. 7-26.

Dixon, Melvin. “Like an Eagle in the Air : Toni Morrison.” Modern Critical Views: Toni Morrison. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1990. 115-142.

Heyman, Richard. “Universalization and Its Discontents: Morrison’s Song of Solomon-A (W)hol(e)y Black Text.” African American Review 29 (1995): 381-392.

Mason, Theodore O. Jr. “The Novelist as Conservator: Stories and Comprehension in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.” Modern Critical Views: Toni Morrison. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1990. 171-188.

Morrison, Toni. Song of Solomon. New York: Signet, 1977.

—.  Sula. New York: Plume, 1973.

Pessoni, Michele. “‘She was laughing at their God.’: Discovering the Goddess Within Sula.” African American Review 29 (1995): 439-451.

Rigney, Barbara Hill. The Voices of Toni Morrison. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1991.

Rubenstein, Roberta. “Pariahs and Community.” Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and K. A. Appiah. New York: Amistad Press, Inc., 1993. 126-1 58.

Smith, Valerie. “Song of Solomon: Continuities of Community.” Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and K. A. Appiah. New York: Amistad Press, Inc., 1993. 274-283.

Willis, Susan. “Eruptions of Funk: Historicizing Toni Morrison.” Toni Morrison : Critical Perspectives Past and Present. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and K.A. Appiah. New York: Amistad Press, Inc., 1993. 308-329.