"Sula," Vocabulary from pages 30-48

The creator and sovereign of this enormous house with the four sickle-pear trees in the front yard and the single elm in the back yard was Eva Peace, who sat in a wagon on the third floor directing the lives of her children, friends, strays, and a constant stream of boarders.

Her dresses were mid- calf so that her one glamorous leg was always in view as well as the long fall of space below her left thigh.

Plum stopped crying as the black hard stools ricocheted onto the frozen ground.

First she reclaimed her children, next she gave the surprised Mrs. Suggs a ten-dollar bill, later she started building a house on Carpenter’s Road, sixty feet from BoyBoy’s one-room cabin, which she rented out.

His shoes were a shiny orange, and he had on a citified straw hat, a light-blue suit, and a cat’s-head stickpin in his tie.

He swept his hat off with a satisfied gesture.

Their conversation was easy: she catching him up on all the gossip, he asking about this one and that one, and like everybody else avoiding any reference to her leg.

Operating on a private scheme of preference and prejudice, she sent off for children she had seen from the balcony of her bedroom or whose circumstances she had heard about from the gossipy old men who came to play checkers or read the Courier, or write her number.

Stouthearted, surly, and wholly unpredictable, the deweys remained a mystery not only during all of their lives in Medallion but after as well.

It was manlove that Eva bequeathed to her daughters.

When he heard it, the man tipped his hat down a little over his eyes, hoisted his trousers and thought about the hollow place at the base of her neck.

When those places were not available, she would slip into the seldom-used parlor, or even up to her bedroom.

He chuckled as though he had heard some private joke.

Talking about his appointments and exuding an odor of new money and idleness, he danced down the steps and strutted toward the pea-green dress.

Slowly each boy came out of whatever cocoon he was in at the time his mother or somebody gave him away, and accepted Eva’s view, becoming in fact as well as in name a dewey—joining with the other two to become a trinity with a plural name ... inseparable, loving nothing and no one but themselves.

Under Eva’s distant eye, and prey to her idiosyncrasies, her own children grew up stealthily: Pearl married at fourteen and moved to Flint, Michigan, from where she posted frail letters to her mother with two dollars folded into the writing paper.

Her flirting was sweet, low and guileless.

The people either accepted his own evaluation of his life, or were indifferent to it.

Deep in its darkness and freezing stench she squatted down, turned the baby over on her knees, exposed his buttocks and shoved the last bit of food she had in the world (besides three beets) up his ass.

Quickly, as the whoosh of flames engulfed him, she shut the door and made her slow and painful journey back to the top of the house.