Extract
But since in that crowded house there were no places for private and
spontaneous lovemaking, Hannah would take the man down into the cellar in the
summer where it was cool back behind the coal bin and the newspapers, or in the
winter they would step into the pantry and stand up against the shelves she had
filled with canned goods, or lie on the flour sack just under the rows of tiny green
5
peppers. When those places were not available, she would slip into the seldomused parlor, or even up to her bedroom. She liked the last place least, not because
Sula slept in the room with her but because her love mate’s tendency was always to
fall asleep afterward and Hannah was fastidious about whom she slept with. She
would fuck practically anything, but sleeping with someone implied for her a
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measure of trust and a definite commitment. So she ended up a daylight lover, and
it was only once actually that Sula came home from school and found her mother in
the bed, curled spoon in the arms of a man.
Seeing her step so easily into the pantry and emerge looking precisely as she
did when she entered, only happier, taught Sula that sex was pleasant and frequent,
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but otherwise unremarkable. Outside the house, where children giggled about
underwear, the message was different. So she watched her mother’s face and the
face of the men when they opened the pantry door and made up her own mind.
Hanna exasperated the women in the town—the ”good” women, who said,
“One thing I can’t stand is a nasty woman”; the whores, who were hard put to find
trade among black men anyway and who resented Hannah’s generosity; the
middling women, who had both husbands and affairs, because Hannah seemed too
unlike them, having no passion attached to her relationships and being wholly
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incapable of jealousy. Hannah’s friendships with women were, of course, seldom
and short-lived, and the newly married couples whom her mother took in soon
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learned what a hazard she was. She could break up a marriage before it had even
become one—she would make love to the new groom and wash his wife’s dishes all
in an afternoon. What she wanted, after Rekus died, and what succeeded in having
more often than not, was some touching every day.
The men, surprisingly, never gossiped about her. She was unquestionably a
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kind and generous woman and that, coupled with her extraordinary beauty and
funky elegance of manner, made them defend her and protect her from any vitriol
that newcomers or their wives might spill.
Guiding Questions

How does this passage foreshadow later events in the book?

To what extent are characters shaped by their parents and to what extent are they unlike
their parents, looking at both earlier and later generations? What is the significance?