29 September 2003
Shadrack’s Dirge: Sula in Brief
by Jason Preu
In Toni Morrison’s Sula, the character Shadrack, and the moments that lead up to, comprise, and directly follow the instance when he looks at his reflection in the toilet, offer to the reader an encapsulation of the entire novel. A close reading of the language Morrison uses to describe Shadrack’s experience serves to parallel particular characters and the situations they must face. Morrison uses Shadrack as a comparative study for these other characters’ composition and actions.
“Like moonlight stealing under a window shade an idea insinuated itself: his earlier desire to see his own face. He looked for a mirror; there was none” (13). This instance is the reader’s first within the novel of a character desiring evidence of self. As the story progresses Morrison plays with the motif of the reflection as a means of self-delineation, searching for oneself. The first and most obvious examples are Nel and Sula, who strike out in very different ways in their efforts to define their own senses of self. Nel explores a more traditional path, turning away from Sula (and her own needs), to become both wife and mother. Sula rebels, turning away from Nel, the community, and focuses in on her whims. Interestingly, the two women lose themselves by turning away from the other. Their action as women in the novel consists of their desire to again find “in each other’s eyes the intimacy they were looking for” (52) and as grown women they are each looking to see their self that is the other.
Shadrack, after realizing his desire for a sense of self, makes an effort to see himself and Morrison writes that “finally, keeping his hands carefully behind his back he made his way to the toilet bowl and peeped in” (13). Again, this is a somewhat condensed version of what both Sula and Nel do later in the novel. Sula is the first to actively court her reflection in Nel. As the two women’s initial conversation as adults progresses, both notice a marked change in the other (100). Still later, Nel seeks Sula in order to quench the desire to look upon her reflection (142, 143) yet, throughout the rest of the novel, such recognition eludes them both.
Shadrack, to the contrary, sees his reflection and uses it to affirm his existence:
Returning to his cot he took the blanket and covered his head, rendering the water dark enough to see his reflection. There in the toilet water he saw a grave black face. A black so definite, so unequivocal, it astonished him…he wanted nothing more. (13)
Shadrack finds himself in himself, a feat of humble acceptance that the novel’s other characters never quite accomplish. Nel and Sula are unable to achieve this. The deweys only form a whole from three parts (38), Plum and Tar Baby lose themselves in a narcotic haze, and Ajax remains always aloof, apart from anyone except his fancies of flight.
It is interesting to note Morrison’s word choice in rendering Shadrack’s reflective moment. She uses the words “dark, “water”, and “grave”, which seem to foreshadow the girls’ accidental killing of Chicken Little. Throughout the novel, this event itches at the women in a mostly unconscious manner (168, 169) and Morrison seems deliberate in using this particular language to suggest that had the girls looked more intently at that experience, as Shadrack intently looks at his own reflection, they, like Shadrack, might find the reflection they so desperately need to achieve any sense of wholeness.
Continuing, we are told that once Shadrack sees himself as a person, as a black man, he considers himself whole (13). Not well, by any means, but whole. After this moment, Shadrack falls “into the first sleep of his new life. A sleep deeper than the hospital drugs; deeper than the pits of plums (13, 14, italics mine). I draw attention to these two words because again, as Morrison uses Shadrack’s introduction to encapsulate the novel as a whole, the reader can catch allusions here to the character Plum and his crippling drug problem.
After the war, Plum finds himself in almost the exact same situation as Shadrack; 1920 – back in the Bottom. Much like Shadrack, the war makes Plum a markedly changed man (45). The difference comes in how the two men deal with the crisis they encounter upon their return to “normal” life. Shadrack is a whole person again after seeing his reflection. Plum never quite gets that far. He prevents himself from wholeness by indulging his addiction. Whether he tries to come to terms with his post-war self, Morrison never really explores. We do, however, get Eva’s assessment of Plum on page 71, which describes him as stunted in maturation and actually wanting to regress in personal development by returning to the womb.
In this assessment Eva explains why she had to kill Plum. In my reading, her reasoning amounts to: because he could not accomplish what Shadrack was able to accomplish. Plum was unable to acknowledge himself as a person, with wounds, love, hopes, and fears. Shadrack, conversely, does acknowledge these things, and sleeps, sleeps “deeper than the pits of plums” and beyond any drug-induced stupor. Shadrack’s sleep is rejuvenating and healing. Plum’s sleep is clouded, pitiful and ultimately detrimental. Plum’s situation Morrison alludes to in these early lines of character development.
Finally, and most overarching in connection to the novel overall, is the paragraph that begins “In the back of the wagon” (14). This paragraph highlights Shadrack’s (and every person’s) existential dilemma. Shadrack, having thus faced the fact of his existence, his real-ness, must now face the fact that at some point all existing things must necessarily end. Morrison writes of how Shadrack learns to control his fear of death’s unexpectedness in much the same way as she writes of how the people in the Bottom deal with the presence of “evil” amongst them. Compare Shadrack’s method of having to make “a place for fear as a way of controlling it” (14) with the people of the Bottom who deal with
an oppressive oddity, or what they called evil days, with an acceptance that bordered on welcome. Such 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 its happening again. (89, 90)
So why does Morrison use Shadrack’s introduction as a device for laying out the ideas with which her novel wrestles? My assumption is that Shadrack is the only whole character, and not in any traditional, one-sidedly, positive sense (Morrison does not allow us this simple out). Shadrack is wholly flawed, but he is also wholly complete. I think Morrison wants to use Shadrack as a model, an exemplar, of wholeness, a characteristic that most of the novel’s characters lack. For instance, at novel’s end, Nel finally realizes just how much of her self was lost along with Sula. Shadrack, however, does not necessarily lose anything once he returns from the war. He even survives the first (and probably only) major community involvement with National Suicide Day.
Shadrack’s introduction is a microcosm of the novel itself. In telling us how Shadrack came to be, Morrison alludes to most of her novel’s major characters and themes such as making a place for evil rather than trying to expel it and a person’s attempt to achieve self-awareness. That Shadrack is the container for this micro-verse is important when one considers that he is the only character to see his reflection, recognize the need for that reflection, and then takes steps to work the implications of that reflection into his life. Shadrack is not well, but he does seem a whole person, and not actively seeking himself in someone else. The language Morrison uses to convey Shadrack’s back-story seems to hold within it the novel itself. Shadrack’s existential accomplishment is Morrison’s technical accomplishment.