Witchy Women: Spiritual and Supernatural Women in Toni Morrison's Sula and Paradise

Before the modern type-written novel, stories were passed down orally, told and re-told for generations. African American folktales started in this oral tradition. The types of stories were based on life experiences; essentially what they knew. Tales involving the flying African stemmed out of a yearning to escape the horrors of slavery. Other stories, such as Charles Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman and similar tales seek to interpret unusual or unexplained phenomena- why there are two types of grapes in the vineyard (see The Goophered Grapevine), why the schoolhouse at the edge of it is 'haunted' (see Po' Sandy). But as literature and language have evolved and modern creative fiction has become the norm, writers deviated from the oral traditions that included mysterious and magical explanations and strange characters with supernatural abilities- but not all of them.

Though there has been some disappearance of this particular type of story and mode of storytelling, in the African American literature circuit, folklore makes at the very least, subtle appearances. The Conjure Woman for example, serves to highlight plantation life in its most authentic sense; true to dialogue, dialect and vernacular. The ever colloquial and genial Uncle Julius serves as native and narrator for the tales of the conjure woman and life in North Carolina. He relays these stories to a man and his wife looking to live and work on the vineyard in question and does so in a manner that changes the couple's point of view.

In his introduction to the text, Richard H. Brodhead notes that our Uncle Julius has his own system of medical expertise, administered not by professional men but by conjure women. He has his own version of religion, involving not decorous Sabbath observance but life-charms, ghosts, and the magical control of natural vitality (Brodhead in Chesnutt 7-8). It is not just Julius who has this version of religion and medicine but it is the migrant workers who work on the vineyards and cotton plantations and it is the people who have heard such tales before they were ever written down. The Conjure Woman story serves a specific purpose; it is to enlighten us to the lifestyle of African Americans living in slavery and recognize them as people with feelings, beliefs and a power all their own, a power that can include magical control of natural vitality.

In terms of folklore, Chesnutt's story is a particular branch that includes women as the key supernatural force. The conjurers are women, women who have the power to utilize nature to their advantage. They have the power to manipulate and change; to make things grow or die, and their power is lasting. The conjure woman of The Goophered Grapevine is asked by the plantation master to bewitch or goopher the grapevine so the slaves will stop eating the grapes. She does so, and a series of bizarre physical changes plague a slave named Henry, who is literally goophered to death, though he is supposed to be the only one the goopher cannot touch. His hair grows when the grapes grow and it even begins to resemble grape bunches; in the growing season, he is soopl en libely (Chesnutt 39) or young and fresh and able to move about and work hard. But in the off-season, during the winter, his hair falls out and his joints become stiff. He becomes the physical manifestation of the growing season, and it becomes too much for him; when the big vine dies, Henry dies with it.

Aun' Peggy, the conjurer in question, was asked to place a spell on the grapes and did so without hesitation. Another conjure woman who shows up in Chesnutt's Po' Sandy, Tenie, also practices her art for the good of someone else, or rather, out of good intentions. Sandy, a slave who gets passed around like a money dish, and has lost one wife, expresses a desire for stability for once, and Tenie grants him that wish. Sandy says I wisht I wuz a tree, er a stump, er a rock, er sump'n w'at could stay on de plantation fer a w'ile (Chesnutt 47). Tenie turns him into a tree, and back again on occasion so they can be together. However, when she is asked to leave, the tree is cut down and made into wood for building, and Sandy is left to haunt the schoolhouse he how has become.

These conjure women begin with good intentions but their actions have dire consequences. They are deemed useful in medical matters when masters refuse to help slaves but are to be feared because of their power. When a conjure woman is at work, it almost always ends badly. But she lives on and has become a facet of African American folklore and literature. She is used to teach a lesson, or as a contrast to others around her. Her placement in folklore and literature gives the text an air of authenticity and in modern literature especially, she represents a throw-back to the oral tradition and her placement there is most often symbolic of the major themes of the novel. And as we can see from Toni Morrison's modern fiction, she has a place in the contemporary African American literary cosmos.

In terms of Morrison's work, literary critics tend to overlook these folkloric elements, or else merely state that they may be there while trying to solidify some other point. Because Morrison's work is comprised of a bevy if different themes, countless studies of her work exist and yet, with the varying amount of motifs and topics, much of the criticism is focused on the same subjects, albeit with different approaches. Four major themes are at the center of Morrison's work and thus are the focus of much of the criticism; community foundation, the post-abolition black experience, relationships and/or identity formation and the traumas of slavery. Critics site a number of different devices Morrison uses to convey these themes, including her usage of songs and lyrics, her tendency to write all-black communities and her authenticity in holding nothing back about the horrors of slavery. These are all valid points, but I argue that we should not ignore the spiritual elements Morrison incorporates, nor forget the conjure women she draws up, whom I would argue, illustrate her themes on a completely different level.

In two of Morrison's women-centered novels, spirituality is woven throughout the text; there are women who bear resemblance to Chesnutt's cun'juh woman, bizarre weather patterns and/or strange animal behavior, and literal transcendence. The women of these novels serve a specific purpose and the things that they do, or in some cases, the things that happen to them, illustrate Morrison's themes of the black experience, especially community formation. In Sula, and ParadiseMorrison draws on African spirituality, specifically conjure and spirit children as a framework for illustrating the post-abolition black experience of community foundation.

While the focus of anything supernatural in Morrison's work tends to be on Beloved, I argue that there's a lot more to Sula that makes it a supernatural text than others may acknowledge. Sula is a coming of age story about a girl named Sula Peace (the irony of that name does not go unnoticed) who grows up in an all-black community called the Bottom with her mother and grandmother, sisters, brothers, and a host of odd and inconsistent company in the form of male visitors. The novel however, is completely women centered; Sula lives in a matriarchal household riddled with sexuality and a mother and grandmother who say and do what they wish; Sula chronicles a community in which black women dominate public and private life (Galehouse 339).

Sula's life in the Bottom is anything but ordinary. For example, every January third is National Suicide Day in which the Bottom's resident war veteran-turned basket-case proclaims that each January third those who want to kill themselves or each other were welcomed to do so and easily, quietly, Suicide Day became a part of the fabric of life up in the Bottom of Medallion, Ohio (Sula, 16). A host of other strange instances in the novel that ultimately form Sula and the Bottom occur in the text as well. And Sula definitely has a tendency to make poor choices without hesitation, which is why some in the Bottom declared her evil. But evil perhaps is the wrong word in a town that recognizes Suicide Day; a town that while they are afraid of Sula acknowledge that they need her, that they are better when she is there and thus will not push her away. Evil certainly is the wrong word, but I would argue she could definitely be likened to a witch.

In New World Woman Maggie Galehouse points out that Sula as a character, while she is both black and a woman, is too much of an enigma to be truly representative of either group (339). Galehouse notes that her status as woman is only a small part of how she perceives herself and, ultimately, how she is perceived by readers (339). This suggests then that Sula is something more; someone that transcends race and gender; a person who straddles the line between the physical world and the spiritual realm.

Sula, who as a child visiting her friend Nel, would sit on the red-velvet sofa for ten to twenty minutes at a time-still as dawn (Morrison 29) could at the very least be described as eccentric. Her physical description is seemingly ordinary with the exception of an unusual birthmark:

Sula was a heavy brown with large quiet eyes, one of which featured a

birthmark that spread from the middle of the lid toward the eyebrow,

shaped something like a stemmed rose. It gave her otherwise plain face a

broken excitement and blue-blade threat like the keloid scar of the razored

man . (52)

This birthmark, which Morrison writes, was to grow darker as the years passed (53) acts as a mark; perhaps not the mark of the devil or some other evil force, but simply as a mark of difference. It is a physical sign that compliments her eccentric nature and the strange things that happen when she is (or isn't) around.

Christopher Okonkwo does a reading of Sula that suggests this birthmark, along with her bizarre behavior, implicates Sula as ogbanje abiku those Nigerian/West African spirit children (Okonkwo 651). A term unfamiliar to many scholars, ogbanje abiku are names for a spirit child or spirit children who are said to die early only to be reborn again and again to the same mother (653). The attribution of this term to Beloved is obvious, given that Beloved is read to be the ghost of the infant Sethe killed, but Okonkwo argues that it is a term also befitting of Sula. He is quick to point out that Sula does not explicitly undergo the spirit child's distinctive and ambulatory cycles of 'physical' births, deaths, and rebirths (652) but notes that:

In Sula's overarching eccentricity-for which the Bottom designates her evil and which subsumes and refracts her other ascertained ogbanje-abiku signs, namely her birthmark, insinuated supernaturality Sula collates intrinsically and manifests the features of the spirit child. (652)

Okonkowo's distinction of Sula as a spirit child is different from a conjure woman reading, but it highlights the fact that Morrison created Sula as some kind of other; as a person not just of the physical world.

This spirit child exists also in Chesnutt's conjure tales. In Sis Becky's Picanniny Becky is a slave who at one point loses everything. Her husband gets sold off, leaving her and her infant son alone. When the master, Pendelton, trades Becky for the racehorse Lightening Bug, Becky is forced to leave her son Mose behind. One the baby realized his mother was gone, he des cried en cried 'tel he cried hisse'f ter sleep (Chesnutt 87). Mose continues to get sicker and so Aunt Nancy brings him to see the conjure woman. The conjure woman turns the infant into a hummin'-bird and he flewed, en flewed, en flewed away (87). He visits his mother in this fashion and both of them feel better. On another occasion, Aun' Peggy turns Mose into a mocking bird and he sings for his mother. Mose is going through a kind of rebirth to the same mother each time he is turned into something else and returns to his mother, much like a spirit-child.

The fact that Mose is turned into birds is further evidence of a reading of Sula as a spirit-child, though she is a grown woman. Morrison writes accompanied by a plague of robins, Sula came back to Medallion nobody knew why or from where they had come (Morrison 90). And though she's not specifically returning to her mother, she returns to her grandmother Eva. The birds also suggest a particular omen; this is not the first time Medallion witnessed an influx of birds, and it also implies Sula having some sort of control over them, much like Aun' Peggy sent a sperrer w'at had a nes' in one er de trees close ter her cabin (Chesnutt 90) to place a bag of herbs at Becky's door. Sula embodies then, in some way, both spirit-child and conjure woman and thus possesses the ability to influence and manipulate the Bottom community in a mysterious way.

Having established Sula as a supernatural and spiritual being, it is important to talk about what effect her presence has on her family, her relationships, the Bottom and particularly on what Morrison is trying to achieve with the novel. Sula is a key figure in her community, even when she leaves and especially when she comes back. During her childhood, some strange things happen that affect the community, the first being Shadrack's Suicide Day. Another was the death of Chicken Little, a small boy living in the Bottom with whom Nel and Sula like to play with and tease. During on such instance, Sula picked him up and swung him around; his knickers ballooned and his shrieks of frightened joy startled the birds and fat grasshoppers (Morrison 60). Morrison describes what happens next by writing that he slipped from her hands (60) and was thrown into the water. Whether he really slipped or Sula loosened her grip we cannot know for sure, but based on later events where Sula was present, I would argue that the latter is probably true. Though initially shocked that the water darkened and closed quickly over the place where Chicken Little sank, (61) the girls' fear then becomes about whether or not someone saw what happened. They do not try to save him, and though Shadrack probably saw what happened, Sula and Nel did not try to get help, but instead left him to be found days later. This spirit-child has potentially created another in Chicken Little.

A series of strange things happen to the community in the novel and they are directly or indirectly related to Sula. Morrison writes before the second strange thing, there was the wind, which was the first. The very night before the day Hannah had asked Eva if she had ever loved them, the wind tore over the hills rattling roofs and loosening doors (73). It was wind without a storm and it was unusual. The second strange thing is a dream that Hannah has about a red wedding gown. Upon mentioning it to Eva, neither one bothered to look it up for they both knew the number was 522. Eva said she'd play it when Mr. Buckland Reed came by. Later she would remember it as the third strange thing (74). Sula has a part as well in these strange things; Sula was acting up because she was thirteen, everybody supposed her nature was coming down, but it was hard to put up with her skulking and irritation. The birthmark over her eye was getting darker and looked more and more like a stemmed rose (74). The most bizarre thing however, suggests Sula has a role in all of the strange things that happen in the community, and it involves the death of another Bottom member.

Sula's mother Hannah catches on fire while in the yard outside, and Eva, who sees her daughter from the window, struggles to hurl her crippled self out to the yard to save Hannah. Eva and the other townspeople do not reach her in time and she dies. Eva recalls at the hospital that she had seen Sula standing on the back porch just looking (78). Similar to the Chicken Little incident, Sula does nothing to help and Eva remained convinced that Sula had watched Hannah burn not because she was paralyzed, but because she was interested (78). Sula's intrigue does not necessarily prove that she caused her mother's death, though it could be argued, but it does render Sula emotionless; an observer, a Seer. Her ability to step back and watch the events of her mother's death unfold counteracts the notion that she is any normal woman. Later, in a conversation with Nel, Sula remarks of the incident stood there watching her burn and was thrilled' (147). This thrill is not a thrill of joy, but a physical thrill; an adrenaline rush, perhaps the reaction to her own spiritual influence.

Sula's death is particularly important to the text as a whole; to what Morrison says about community. Riddled with pain and awaiting death, Sula imagines what her death will be like. Her reflection included echoes of Chicken Little's death; who was it that had promised her a sleep of water always? (149). The text suggests the physical death of her body, but her spirit lives:

While in this state of weary anticipation, she noticed that she was not breathing, that her heart had stopped completely. Then she realized, or rather she sensed, that there was not going to be any pain. She was not breathing because she didn't have to. Her body did not need oxygen. She was dead. Sula felt her face smiling. 'Well I'll be damned, she thought, 'it didn't even hurt. Wait'll I tell Nel.' (149 emphasis added).

Sula's body is physically dead, but her mind is still aware; she has left her physical self behind and embodies her spiritual self. And her death has a profound effect on the Bottom.

Morrison writes of the few who were not afraid to witness the burial of a witch and who had gone to the cemetery, some had come just to verify her being put away (150). This illustrates the Bottom's need for physical proof that Sula is dead; it suggests a fear that if they don't see for themselves, than she is not truly dead. Arguably however, though they witness her physical dead body, they recognize that she is alive in spirit, and they see this in the changing weather patterns. The members of the Bottom felt that either because Sula was dead or just after she was dead a brighter day was dawning. There were signs (150-1). The Bottom starting changing, for the better it seemed, and then suddenly took a turn for the worse; the Medallion turned silver (151) and a falling away, a dislocation was taking place (153). Sula's presence is still felt in the Bottom community, and is at the very least subconsciously acknowledged by its members.

Sula dies nearly thirty pages before the end of the novel and the rest of the text focuses on the Bottom; the community and how they changed and developed after Sula's death. Morrison writes Sula to illustrate a community; Deborah Barnes in Myth, Metaphor and Memory in Toni Morrison's Reconstructed South that as a myth [Sula] inscribes emblematically the historical explanation for real-life socio-economic outcomes of American Blacks after the Civil War (Barnes 17). The text then functions both as a myth and as a folktale, and Sula is presented as a catalyst through which Morrison can highlight community formation in post-abolition America; by focusing on one member's influence, the picture of community can truly be developed. The folkloric elements such as writing Sula as a spirit-child and a conjure woman makes her that much different from her community and thus a viable catalyst.

Paradise Conjured

Morrison continues this trope of spiritual women in the novel Paradise. Therese Higgins writes in Religiosity, Cosmology, and Folklore, that Paradise is a modern American story with its roots firmly planted in ancient African soil (122). Morrison's seventh novel, Paradise embodies themes that are very similar to those in Sula; community formation in the aftermath of slavery. One critic describes this main theme to be the relationship of history and myth to the practices of exclusion that have characterized notions of America as paradise, as well as explorations of paradise within America (Gauthier 397). The novel is indeed a discourse on the notion of paradise, especially in relation to communities; the desire to create a utopian society. And a group of particularly witch-like woman play a big role in the attempt at the formation of such a community in Paradise.

At the center of this novel is a town called Ruby, formed by a group of all-black men and women looking for a place to settle. Rejected by a community of lighter-skinned black folks, these eight-rock (Morrison 193) blackest-of-the-black people went on to found Haven and later Ruby. Their original exclusion led them to form their own community, but also made them prone to exclusion; there exists in Ruby an unwritten rule about keeping the blood pure- essentially not contaminating the race with white or light-skin black blood. Ruby's exclusive tendencies extend further however, into other realms of purity, essentially maintaining utopian and Christian ideals. Anything that threatens Ruby's existence, or disturbs the upkeep of purity is to be exterminated. Ironically, the force that threatens Ruby takes the form of another, smaller community, dominated by women (this is viewed as a threat in itself) and steeped in the spiritual.

At the center of this smaller community is a group of women who live in a run-down mansion referred to as The Convent in the text because of the fact that it was once a school for Native American girls who were taught by nuns. The women who inhabit the Convent now are of a different sort, and in Paradise, Morrison demonstrates the connections between the Convent community and the community of Ruby (Higgins 130). Morrison does this by portraying the Convent and the women inside as a supernatural force to be reckoned with; a scapegoat for all that is wrong with Ruby. It is the conjure women living inside that create alarm for Ruby and threatens its perfect existence.

Higgins cites in Religiosity, Cosmology and Folklore that within the Convent there exists what can only be described as mystical presences (131). The most mystical of these presences is Consolata, or Connie, who can undoubtedly be likened to a conjure woman. The people of Ruby leave the Convent in isolation, unless they need something. Famous for their peppers and other plants, people often come in search of food, or else some sort of remedy, conjured up by Connie. For example, Soane Morgan goes to the Convent in order to procure herbs from Connie that would induce an abortion. Connie's prowess with herbs suggests a conjure woman reading and is in direct opposition to what the Ruby townsfolk would consider normal, conventional medical practices. They only seek her out and appreciate her abilities when it is of benefit to them.

One such instant where Connie's otherworldliness comes to light is in her role in saving Scout- the son of a Ruby founder. Involved in a car accident, which Connie and her conversant, Lone Dupres, hear Scout is undoubtedly gravely injured and unconscious. Lone, who recognizes Connie's conjuring, magical abilities urges her friend to go to the boy's aid. The scene that follows blatantly addresses the fact that Connie is no ordinary human being. She is a conjure woman with amazing, supernatural powers and magical control of natural vitality, (Brodhead in Chesnutt 8) in this case Scout's vitality:

I'm too old now. Can't do it anymore, but you can.

Lift him?

No. Go inside him. Wake him up. Consolata looked at the body and

without hesitation she stepped in. Inside the boy she saw a pinpoint of light receding. Pulling up energy that felt like fear, she stared at it until it widened. Then more, more, so air could come seeping, at first, then rushing rushing in. Although it hurt like the devil to look at it, she concentrated as though the lungs in need were her own. Scout opened his eyes, groaned and sat up. (245)

What this scene looks like to observers is not made clear, though they do not seem to regard it as altogether strange, suggesting that perhaps it did not physically look like Connie was doing anything at all. There is acute awareness among the members of Ruby of Connie's conjuring abilities, which makes it easier to label her and the other Convent women as scapegoats for the problems preventing the attainment of paradise in Ruby.

Connie's conjuring extends into the lives of the women who live with her. While most members of Ruby steer clear of the Convent, its doors are seemingly open to those in need. The Convent serves as refuge for women who have fled from previous disastrous situations and Connie takes them all in and acts as Mother did for her. She becomes the mother of a flock of spirit-children; they come to the Convent and are reborn. In a session referred to as a loud dreaming (264), Connie gives the women instructions to lie down, naked on the basement floor after having scrubbed it totally clean; when each found the position she could tolerate on the cold, uncompromising floor, Consolata walked around her and painted the body's silhouette (263). Connie is the first to speak when the body outlines are finished; she delivers a sermon of sorts, a purging of thoughts and troubles, encouraging the other women to do so, acting as a conjurer to their voices: that is how the loud dreaming began. How the stories rose in that place. Half-tales and the never-dreamed escaped from their lips (264).

All speaking at once, the loud dreaming acts as catharsis to these troubled women but also signifies a death of sorts, and a rebirth into understanding. Higgins points out that they reenact the ritual until they are no longer haunted by their past lives their nakedness signifies a new birth (Higgins 136). As time progressed after the loud dreaming, the woman began to heal more and more, and as they did, filled in their silhouettes. Seneca, for example, when she had the hunger to slice her inner thigh, she chose instead to mark the open body lying on the cellar floor (Morrison 265) and they all fill in their silhouettes with all the natural features and visual, artistic representations of the good and bad things in their past experiences. The loud dreaming and the drawings on the basement floor signify a constant death and rebirth with Connie like a new and revised Reverend Mother (265). Connie, thus, is a conjure woman, a witch of sorts who also is a mother to the born and reborn spirit children, like the ogbanje-abiku, who are living in the Convent. This however is what targets Connie and the other women as threats to Ruby, according to its patriarchal dictators.

Morrison includes Connie as conjure woman and the spirit-children inhabitants of the Convent as a means of serving as stark contrast to the ideals of Ruby. The focus of Ruby is purity; purity of race, values, of individuals. The members of Ruby seek an unattainable paradise, though they fail to recognize its inaccessibility. The Convent, which actually lies on the outskirts of Ruby, represents to the Ruby residents an evil impurity that besmirches the principles of paradise. It is seen as a direct threat to their ideals of purity and thus, they seek to destroy its inhabitants. What they actually are doing however, besides making Connie and the Convent a scapegoat, is symbolically destroying what they find to be the problems within themselves that prevent the acquisition of paradise.

Through this opposition between Ruby and the Convent, Morrison provides a discourse on community formation. The Disallowing that occurred when this group if eight-rock men and women first tried to find acceptance among fellow black people instilled in them a frustration that encouraged them to establish their own community. Rife with typical players; the disillusioned minister, the awkward somewhat outcast woman who knows everything about everybody, the patriarchal, town-council-like founders who dictate how the down is supposed to be run, Ruby symbolizes the struggles of community and how one form of exclusion (the Disallowing) can lead to another (the murders at the Convent). The supernatural element of the Convent makes it all that much more threatening to the Ruby community, though the Convent disallows no one.

In a shocking scene where the women are ambushed, Connie and the other women are gunned down as the disgusted men of Ruby ransack the mansion and discover the drawings in the basement that they deem evil and impure. At the end of the massacre, Roger Best, the resident undertaker slash ambulance driver, goes to get the Convent to retrieve the bodies. Having previously been told where he would find the corpses of the women, he arrives there only to search and find nothing: No bodies. Nothing. Even the Cadillac was gone (292). The women have literally disappeared, proving that they cannot be beaten and leaving the town of Ruby with a fear that they have only made the situation worse. Morrison succeeds further then in her criticism of community and paradise; implanting these supernatural conjure women who transcend death, she illustrates that Ruby will forever struggle for utopia and that their naivety and ignorance, and their exclusivity completely threaten the notion of community and of paradise.

The supernatural women of both Sula and Paradise are alive in their deaths. Sula's presence is known and witnessed in the physical changes in the weather and condition of Medallion; the Convent women leave behind a fear in their disappearance. In the last page of Paradise, it is suggested that the women have transcended into some other plane-somewhere between earth and heaven (Higgins 137). It is a beach setting, peaceful, full of music, and the women are assumed to all be there, resting on this beach which is obviously paradise: Now they will rest before shouldering the endless work they were created to do down here in Paradise (Morrison 318). The Ruby community seems to be aware of this fact; that physically they are gone, and they await the women's spiritual return. They each have a lasting effect on their respective communities.

Sula and Connie represent direct opposition to community formation, both novels are arguably discourses on the notion of paradise, and Morrison draws on African folklore and spirituality by creating these conjure women as a way to both pay homage to the folklore tradition in contemporary literature and to highlight the struggles of community formation in the post-abolition United States. The supernatural is blatant and obvious in Paradise and below the surface in Sula but it functions the same in both texts, and its safe to say that Sula is likely one of the women sitting on the beach in Paradise.

Works Cited

Barnes, Deborah. Myth, Metaphor, and Memory in Toni Morrison's Reconstructed

South. Studies in the Literary Imagination. 31:2 (1998): 17-35.

Chesnutt, Charles. The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales. Ed. Richard Brodhead.

Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1993.

Galehouse, Maggie. 'New World Woman': Toni Morrison's Sula. Papers on Language

And Literature: A Journal for Scholars and Critics of Language and Literature.

35:4 (1999): 339-62.

Gauthier, Marni. The Other Side of Paradise: Toni Morrison's (Un)Making of Mythic

History. African American Review. 39:3 (2005): 395-414.

Higgins, Therese. Religiosity, Cosmology, and Folklore: The African Influence in the

Novels of Toni Morrison. New York: Routledge, 2001.

Morrison, Toni. Paradise. New York: Alfred A. Knoff, 1997.

Morrison, Toni. Sula. New York: Plume, 1973.

Okonkwo, Christopher. A Critical Divination: Reading Sula as Ogbanje-Abiku.

African American Review. 38:4 (2004): 651-68.