What happens in Chapter 2 of Sula?
Set in 1920, this chapter focuses on Hannah Peace, Sula's mother, and her open, unabashed sexuality—a quality that shocks the women of the Bottom, even as their husbands secretly pursue her. Eva Peace, Hannah's mother and the novel's strong-willed matriarch, runs the household with the authority of someone who has thrived through sheer determination. The chapter offers a deeper look at the unconventional domestic world of the Peace women, a home that welcomes boarders, strays, and lovers without any fuss. Hannah's relationship with her daughter Sula is explored through a painful overheard exchange: Hannah tells a neighbor that she loves Sula but does not like her, a distinction that sticks with the child like a splinter. At the same time, Eva's past is revealed, particularly the mystery of how she lost her leg and the rumor that she deliberately placed it under a train to collect insurance money. The chapter also highlights the community's mixed feelings about the Peace women, who exist just beyond the moral framework that the Bottom uses to define itself.
Analysis
Morrison uses the 1920 chapter to explore the divide between love and approval, highlighting the harm this divide can cause to a perceptive child. Hannah's comment — that she loves but does not like Sula — serves as the chapter's quiet explosion, and Morrison deliberately keeps Sula's response mostly hidden, allowing the reader to sense the injury through its absence. This reflects Morrison's narrative restraint; she presents the most damaging moments indirectly.
The chapter also acts as a communal biography. The gossip in the Bottom functions like a Greek chorus, both judging and preserving the legend of the Peace women. Eva's missing leg becomes a focal point for competing stories — each narrative shared by the community reveals more about their own fears regarding female agency and sacrifice than it does about Eva herself. Morrison doesn’t choose sides among the versions, maintaining the ambiguity as a structural element.
Tonally, the chapter shifts between the warmly humorous (with Hannah's lovers coming and going in a routine manner) and the quietly painful (the rift between mother and daughter). Morrison’s writing is vivid and grounded, filled with smells, textures, and the distinct sounds of the house, which makes the emotional turmoil hit harder by contrast. The Peace household is presented not just as a backdrop but as a living entity with its own logic, one that both nurtures and harms, foreshadowing Sula's future struggles to create a traditional life.
Key quotes from Chapter 2
“I love Sula. I just don't like her.”
Hannah says this casually to a neighbor, unaware Sula is within earshot — the line crystallizes the novel's central wound around maternal approval versus maternal love.
“Eva had married a man named BoyBoy and together they had three children… and then he left.”
Morrison introduces Eva's backstory with blunt economy, the flatness of the syntax mirroring the flatness of abandonment and setting up the iron self-sufficiency Eva will build in response.
“The Peace women simply loved maleness, for its own sake.”
The narrator characterizes the Peace women's relationship to men as appetite rather than need, distinguishing them sharply from the Bottom's conventional femininity.