Chapter 11

Nearly a quarter of a century has passed. Nel takes stock of the many changes in the community. 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. 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.

Nel reminisces about the twenty-five years since Jude left. She has spent her life in a tiny sphere of children and work — without love, without marriage. 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.

Nel visits Eva in the Sunnydale nursing home and is saddened to find a pale, confused miniature of the magnificent Eva Peace she remembers. Their disjointed conversation swings from Eva's non sequiturs to her up-front confrontation about Nel's involvement in Chicken Little's death. Nel pushes the blame for the boy's death solely on Sula, but Eva insists, "You. Sula. 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.

As 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. 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.

Nel's walk takes her to the cemetery, where Sula is buried alongside Plum, Hannah, and Pearl. 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. Besides Nel, only white people came to bury Sula, not like the hordes of black people who showed up for Hannah's funeral. Even Eva refused to come.

Leaving the cemetery, Nel passes Shadrack, who stops and tries to remember where he has seen her. The events of the day well up in her; her eye twitches, and she gazes up at the trees. The breeze carries Nel's whisper, "Sula?" and finally she releases a deep, instinctual cry for her long-lost, beloved friend and soul mate.