Black Things

The narrator begins Sula with the words: "In that place, where they tore up the nightshade and blackberry patches from their roots to make room for the Medallion City Golf Course, there was once a neighborhood" (3). This one sentence sets the tone for the story and gives us an idea of the narrator's point of view. By using the phrase "tore up," we know that the narrator is partial to the nightshade and blackberry patches (3). He or she believes that they were forcefully and probably unfairly removed from their home. Also, the "nightshade" and "blackberry patches" appear to be metaphors for a black community because of their dark flowers and fruit (3). By these rhetorical devices, the reader can infer that the narrator is from the neighborhood that was uprooted by the building of the golf course, and is most likely black. This gives us the idea that the rest of the novel will relate to this scenario and we are expectant of what is to come from the very first sentence.

Nightshade

Blackberries