Toni Morrison's Sula - The Character of Eva Peace in Sula

The Character of Eva Peace in Sula

In the novel Sula, there were other important characters besides Sula. The character in this book I would like to focus on most is Eva Peace. Eva is a woman who has a disability but remains strong, and this will be the focus of this paper since it wasn’t focused on so much in the book.

Eva is an amputee. There are many different theories about how she lost her leg. Many say she may have cut it off in order to receive insurance money so she could feed her children. Other tales told claim that Eva had sold her leg for $10,000.00 or that she had stuck it under a train. Some people in the town said that there was a corn on her toe and it just grew and grew, traveling up her entire leg until the doctors finally had to cut it off. Others told stories about how her leg had just got up one day and walked off. Nobody quite knew how Eva had lost her leg and not many people in the town remembered her with it, but everyone knew that Eva Peace was a very strong woman who knew what she needed to do in order to survive. Her survival consisted of taking care of her children, making sure they had enough to eat.

Eva was the single mother of three kids. She was the matriarchal figure in her household, which did not only consist of her children, Pear, Plum, and Hannah and Hannah’s daughter Sula, but also many others who boarded in her house. There were three young boys, all named Dewey by Eva, who had arrived to the house at the same time. Eva knew that if she named them all the same name it would make them feel as though they were equally loved and cared about. Such name-calling created a positive camaraderie between them. Also in the boarding house resided a drunk, Tar Baby, and various newlyweds. Eva kept the whole house under control.

Although the logistical theory of how she lost her leg was to feed her family, it did not stop there. Eva did everything she could do to protect her children. She used her stump, in one incidence, to maneuver herself in such a way that she was able to jump out of the window and save Hannah, who was literally on fire.