Chloe Anthony Wofford was born February 18, 1931 in Lorain, Ohio (a northern community located near Lake Erie) as what was to be the second of four children of George Wofford and Ramah Willis Wofford. Her parents had moved to Ohio from the South to escape racism and to find better opportunities in the North. Despite there desperate efforts the escape the state of the African American in the south, the Woffords were proud of their heritage.
Lorain was a small industrial town populated with immigrant Europeans, Mexicans and Southern blacks who lived next to each other. In her first grade, she was the only black student in her class and the only one who could read. She was friends with many of her white schoolmates and did not encounter discrimination until she started dating.
Chloe Wofford then attended, with the financial aid of her parents, the prestigious Howard University in Washington, D.C., where she majored in English with a minor in classics. Since many people couldn't pronounce her first name correctly, she changed it to Toni, a shortened version of her middle name. She joined a repertory company, the Howard University Players, with whom she made several tours of the South. She saw firsthand the life of the blacks there, the life her parents had escaped by moving north. Toni Wofford graduated from Howard University in 1953 with a B.A. in English. She then attended Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and received a master's degree in 1955.
After graduating, Toni Wofford was offered a job at Texas Southern University in Houston, where she taught introductory English. Unlike Howard University, where black culture was neglected or minimized, at Texas Southern they "always had Negro history week" and introduced to her the idea of black culture as a discipline rather than just personal family reminiscences. In 1957 she returned to Howard University as a member of faculty and there she met Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect she married in 1958. This was a time of civil rights movement and she met several people who were later active in the struggle.
The Morrison's first son, Harold Ford, was born in 1961. Toni continued teaching while helping take care of her family. She also joined a small writer's group as a temporary escape from an unhappy married life.
She drew on her memories from childhood and expanded them with her imagination so that the characters developed a life of their own.
She soon started writing her second novel where she focused on a friendship between two adult black women. Sula (1973), examinining (among other issues) the dynamics of friendship and the expectations for conformity within the community, became an alternate selection by the Book-of-the-Month Club. Excerpts were published in the Redbook magazine and it was nominated for the 1975 National Book Award in fiction.
The novel Sula takes place in a town known as The Bottom. The Bottom is a mostly black community in Ohio, situated in the hills above the mostly white, wealthier community of Medallion. Despite differences, the main characters Sula and Nel become fiercely attached to each other during adolescence. Throughout the novel Sula, Toni Morrison explores the events of these two womens lives.
Sula is a novel about ambiguity. It questions and examines the terms "good" and "evil," often demonstrating that the two often resemble one another. The novel addresses the confusing mysteries of human emotions and relationships, ultimately concluding that social conventions are inadequate as a foundation for living one's life. The novel tempts the reader to apply the diametrically opposed terms of "good and evil," "right and wrong" to the characters and their actions, and yet simultaneously shows why it is necessary to resist such temptation. While exploring the ways in which people try to make meaning of lives filled with conflicts over race, gender, and simple idiosyncratic points of views, Sula resists easy answers, demonstrating the ambiguity, beauty, and terror of life, in both its triumphs and horrors.
The question is, what prompts Toni Morrison to create such a novel?
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