Namwali Serpell

And I realized, oh, wow, I think somehow we both managed to luck into that perspective about Blackness from a very early age for very different reasons.

But I do think it's a privilege.

It allows for a kind of –

groundedness in that double consciousness that we all experience growing up in the West where the default position is that black culture is central.

Yes.

So Pilot says black may as well be a rainbow, which is a beautiful way of talking about the many internal varieties and differences within blackness, not just the color, but also the culture.

Sula is a beautiful story of friendship.

It's really about the relationship between Nell Wright and Sula Mae Peace, who meet as young girls and fall in friends is the phrase I like to use about it.

And as they grow up in this fictional community, the bottom in the fictional town of Medallion, Ohio, you find them negotiating their relationships with the community but also their relationship with each other.

As very different kinds of people, right?

Nell Wright is very – she comes from a very orderly household, a very respectable household, whereas Sula comes from a kind of wayward, ramshackle family.

environment all women run by her grandmother and her mother a lot of violence happens in that family some of it accidental some of it intentional and Sula becomes this kind of wayward woman and

She leaves town and goes to college and she comes back and she has a kind of status in the community of where people respect her, but they also fear her.

She's a bit of a pariah because she's happily willing to sleep with anybody's husband, but she doesn't seem to be particularly pressed about being in real romantic relationships with them.

So she has the quality, I think, of glamour that Morrison really conjures for us in the way she dresses, in the way she talks, in the way that she thinks.

But she also has this – there's a sense about her that she's an – as Morrison puts it, she's an artist without an art form, right?

She doesn't have the painting or the sculpture or the musical instrument that would allow her to express her gifts.

And so her life becomes her art.

And that is both a beautiful thing and a bit of a dangerous thing.

There's this...