Sula
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40 free Sula trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Sula is Toni Morrison's short, fierce second novel, the story of two girls who grow up side by side in a hillside Black community and become very different women. Nel chooses marriage and respectability; Sula chooses herself, and the neighbors never forgive her for it. The novel asks who gets to be called good, and it refuses to make the answer easy. This quiz walks through the whole story: the origin of the Bottom, Shadrack and his strange holiday, Eva's fearsome household, the accident at the river, the betrayal that splits the two friends, and the last chapters that follow the community long afterwards. A handful of questions cover the author, the reception and the afterlife of the novel. It suits students checking their reading before class, reading groups looking for discussion starters, and anyone revisiting a modern classic. Each answer comes with a short explanation, so a miss teaches you something too.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In Sula, a white farmer tricks a freed slave into taking hilltop land as the bottom of what?
Heaven
Heaven was the pitch: the farmer claimed the rocky hills were the bottom of heaven as God saw it. That is how a Black neighborhood high above the valley came to be called the Bottom.
Q 02Which annual holiday does the shell-shocked veteran Shadrack invent in Toni Morrison's Sula?
National Suicide Day
National Suicide Day falls on January 3. Shadrack reasons that if death is given one day of its own, everyone can live unafraid until the next one comes around.
Q 03Which part of her body is Eva missing when she returns after eighteen months away in Sula?
Her leg
Her leg is gone, and far from hiding the loss she keeps the remaining one in a fine stocking and shoe at all times. Nobody in town ever learns for certain what happened.
Q 04How does Eva try to reach her daughter Hannah when Hannah's dress catches fire in the yard in Sula?
Jumps out a window
Eva jumps out a window of her upstairs bedroom, hoping to drag herself across the yard in time. The fall nearly kills her, and Hannah dies on the way to the hospital.
Q 05Which birds descend on the Bottom in huge numbers on the day Sula returns after a decade away?
Robins
Robins fill the trees and foul the streets she walks through. The townspeople link the plague to her homecoming and read both as an evil omen.
Q 06What is due to be built where the Bottom stood in the opening pages of Toni Morrison's Sula?
A golf course
A golf course is planned for the bulldozed hillside. The irony is sharp: Black families got that land only because it was thought too poor to farm.
Q 07What does the young Sula slice off with a knife to frighten away white boys harassing her and Nel?
Her fingertip
Her fingertip drops to the ground, and she tells the boys to think what she would do to them if she can do that to herself. The stunt works, and the boys back off.
Q 08Which liquid does Eva pour over her addicted son Plum before setting him alight in Sula?
Kerosene
Kerosene is what she uses, while Plum lies in a drugged haze. She later tells Hannah she did it out of love, wanting him to die as a man.
Q 09Where does Sula send her grandmother Eva after gaining guardianship over her, shocking the Bottom?
A nursing home
A nursing home, and a shabby one, is where Eva lands soon after Sula comes back. Nel visits her there decades later and hears an accusation she cannot shake.
Q 10In which US state lies the fictional town of Medallion, the setting of Toni Morrison's Sula?
Ohio
Ohio is the setting, and the author knew it well. She drew on her own small-town Midwestern childhood there to build Medallion and its hillside neighborhood.
Q 11Shadrack and Plum both come home to the Bottom badly damaged by which conflict in Sula?
World War I
World War I leaves both men shattered. Shadrack returns in 1919 with shell shock, and Plum comes back with a drug habit that his mother cannot bear to see.
Q 12Which man marries Nel Wright and later abandons her after she finds him in bed with Sula?
Jude
Jude proposes largely to feel like a man after being turned away from work he wanted. When he walks out, Nel loses her husband and her best friend on the same day.
Q 13Which pool-hall charmer, a conjure woman's son, becomes the one lover Sula truly falls for in Sula?
Ajax
Ajax comes to her door with bottles of milk and wants no commitment. Once she starts to love him he feels trapped and goes, leaving her heartbroken.
Q 21Townspeople in Sula believe Eva let a train maim her so that she could collect what?
Insurance money
Insurance money is the town's theory, since regular checks begin arriving once she is back. Eva uses them to build the rambling house where she takes in boarders and strays.
Q 22What does Sula do during her decade away from Medallion that sets her apart from her neighbors?
Attends college
Sula attends college and travels, then comes back in expensive clothes. To neighbors who had always found her strange, the polish only widens the gap.
Q 23How do the people of the Bottom behave once they have decided that Sula is evil?
Treat each other better
Q 14Each chapter of Sula, from the veteran's return to Nel's final visit, carries what as its title?
A year
A year heads each chapter, starting at 1919 and skipping unevenly to 1965. The reader sees a whole community age across nearly half a century.
Q 15To which Southern city do Helene and Nel travel by segregated train to see a dying relative in Sula?
New Orleans
New Orleans is Helene's birthplace, and the trip changes Nel. After seeing her mother humbled by a white conductor, she comes back sure for the first time that she is her own person.
Q 16Which single name does Eva give to all three boys she takes into her house in Sula?
Dewey
Dewey is what she calls every one of them. The three arrive from different families looking nothing alike, yet they blur into one being the town can no longer tell apart.
Q 17Eva's son Plum comes back from the war to Medallion addicted to which drug in Sula?
Heroin
Heroin has hollowed him out: he seldom eats or talks to anyone in the house. He was the child Eva had hoped to leave everything to.
Q 18Which item does Sula leave behind in Shadrack's riverside shack, where he hangs it on his wall?
Her belt
Her belt becomes his keepsake of the only visitor he ever had. When she dies as a grown woman, he is the one person in town who is saddened.
Q 19In Sula's 1941 chapter, Shadrack's parade ends with many townspeople killed when what collapses?
A tunnel
A tunnel under construction caves in on the marchers. They had turned on it in fury because the building jobs long promised to the Bottom never came.
Q 20Which surname do Sula, her mother Hannah and her grandmother Eva share in Toni Morrison's novel?
Peace
Peace is the family name, a dry joke for a household that sees two deaths by fire and bitter quarrels between mothers and daughters.
They treat each other better: wives soothe their husbands and mothers take more care of their children, all to be unlike her. Once she is dead, the harmony dissolves.
Q 24Which language, spoken by her own mother, does Helene refuse to speak or teach to Nel in Sula?
Creole
Creole belongs to the mother Helene was taken from as a baby. She wants no trace of that past in her own strict, respectable household.
Q 25What job does Nel's husband hold while longing for heavier work on the road crew in Sula?
A waiter
A waiter is all he is allowed to be, because the road crew will not hire Black men however strong they are. The slight leaves him bitter, and he proposes soon after.
Q 26Which noisemaker does Shadrack carry as he leads his lonely January parade through the Bottom in Sula?
A cowbell
A cowbell announces him, and most neighbors keep well away. The quiet boarder Tar Baby is the first ever to join the march.
Q 27Which rumor, spread by husbands in the Bottom, turns the town against Sula for good?
She sleeps with white men
She sleeps with white men, the husbands claim, and the town calls it the one thing it cannot forgive. From then on every accident and illness is laid at her door.
Q 28To which Northern city does Nel's husband move, never to return, once his affair with Sula ends?
Detroit
Detroit swallows him for good. Nel never remarries and pours her whole life into raising the children he left behind.
Q 29What does Sula do on the porch while her mother Hannah burns in the yard, to Eva's lasting horror?
Simply watches
Sula simply watches. Neighbors say the girl was frozen by shock, but Eva never stops believing she looked on out of curiosity.
Q 30Which debut novel by Toni Morrison appeared in 1970, shortly before she published Sula?
The Bluest Eye
The Bluest Eye grew out of a short story she wrote for a campus writers' group. It was turned down many times before a publisher finally took it in 1969.