Chelsea Dunn Sula pt 1

"Nel watched her mother cutting the pattern from newspapers and moving her eyes rapidly from a magazine model to her own hands. She watched her turn up the kerosene lamp at sunset to sew far into the night"(19), this quote to me really provoked some memories for me and it helped me visualize what was actually going on in this scene. My own grandmother was always constantly sewing me and my siblings things, and when we would go to her house on the weekends she would take us to the fabric store and we would get to pick out the fabric and pattern of what we wanted her to make us. My favorite part about this scene is that Helene was making this elegant dress for her trip south because she felt that she would have to deal with less discrimination if she wore a beautiful dress.

The next quote that really intrigued me was about Eva, "The children needed her; she needed money, and needed to get on with her life. But the demands of feeding three children were so acute she had postpone her anger for two years until she had both the time and energy for it"(32). This specific passage made me remember a poem that one of our class members brought on a day when we could bring our own text. Her poem was about a mother's role and how no matter what the children came first, and this specific mother felt her role in life was to raise her children. In this passage, Eva had been faced with the devastation of her husband leaving her and her children with nothing, and how Eva was so occupied with feeding her children she could not hardly acknowledge what Boy-Boy had done to her and her family. I feel like this describes a strong woman who was courageous enough to become independent, and did whatever it took to survive. I believe that my own mother would do the same thing, she would push her emotions aside until she was ready to handle them.