Later, as she stands beside Sula's grave, she discovers that she has denied this perversity all her life. She questions herself about why it felt so good to see Chicken Little disappear under the water and drown. When Nel is able to remember the scene on the riverbank so long ago, she finally accepts her dark complicity in the little boy's death. She draws a vivid parallel as she makes Nel realize that her watching Chicken Little drown - and feeling good as she witnessed the tragedy - parallels Sula's watching Hannah burn and marveling at her mother's flaming, dancing movements. But Eva insists that there is no difference between Nel and Sula.

For years, Nel has enveloped herself in good works and has done the right things it was Sula, the bad girl, who let Chicken Little sail toward the river and drown. She forces Nel to confront her guilt and involvement in Chicken Little's death. Her uneasiness with these changes foreshadows her move to a new and shocking self-awareness by the end of the day.Įva, despite her dementia, provides the final revelation of the Nel/Sula friendship theme. Nel also realizes that the Bottom's new prostitutes are 'pale and dull,' suggesting that blacks have blindly accepted the white community's norms and values. The narrative then focuses on the current practice of putting old people in nursing homes. Now black people live in the valley in 'separate houses with separate televisions and separate telephones' - emphasizing the private and individual space that is so very different from the closeness and the sense of one communal family previously felt in the Bottom. The Bottom's sense of community is gone - in part because various advancements of the civil rights movement have fractured the community's unity. This final chapter in the novel begins ironically: 'Things were so much better in 1965.' However, the next sentence reads, 'Or so it seemed,' and we realize immediately that things are not really better. The narrative has circled back on itself to a time before the prologue was written. The breeze carries Nel's whisper, 'Sula?' and finally she releases a deep, instinctual cry for her long-lost, beloved friend and soul mate. The events of the day well up in her her eye twitches, and she gazes up at the trees. Leaving the cemetery, Nel passes Shadrack, who stops and tries to remember where he has seen her. Besides Nel, only white people came to bury Sula, not like the hordes of black people who showed up for Hannah's funeral. She remembers the day of Sula's death: No one came running at the news of her death, and it was Nel who finally called the mortuary. Nel's walk takes her to the cemetery, where Sula is buried alongside Plum, Hannah, and Pearl. She recalls the good, satisfying feeling she had when she saw his hands slipping away from Sula's, and she remembers feeling proud that she remained calm and controlled while Sula became hysterical. What's the difference?' Eva then drifts between the present and the past, but her many references to Nel and Sula being 'just alike' haunt Nel, who finally acknowledges that she indeed shares Sula's guilt perhaps she and Sula really were two halves of the same person.Īs Nel leaves the nursing home, Eva calls after her, 'Sula?' and Nel hurries away, searching her memory for that day on the riverbank when Sula was swinging Chicken Little. Nel pushes the blame for the boy's death solely on Sula, but Eva insists, 'You. Their disjointed conversation swings from Eva's non sequiturs to her up-front confrontation about Nel's involvement in Chicken Little's death. Nel visits Eva in the Sunnydale nursing home and is saddened to find a pale, confused miniature of the magnificent Eva Peace she remembers.

Nel is fifty-five years old, and the future seems to be anywhere but up in the Bottom blacks are anxious to move to the valley, and whites are erecting television towers and building golf courses up in the Bottom. She has spent her life in a tiny sphere of children and work - without love, without marriage. Nel reminisces about the twenty-five years since Jude left.

The community has spread out and changed, so much so that even the prostitutes seem pale and lifeless compared to the tough, fat, laughing women of forty years ago. Blacks are now working in jobs once available only to whites, but Nel is aware of a diminished vitality in people, the same people who previously drew collective strength from their hard times together. Nel takes stock of the many changes in the community.

Nearly a quarter of a century has passed.

Swing it sunny summary