By the time Nel and Sula were 12, they had legs like stalks and necks like cords, which drew the attention of old male passersby who remembered “the taste of young sweat on tight skin” (49). A 21-year-old named Ajax looked at Nel and Sula and said what was on the minds of the other men: he called the girls “pig meat.” The girls walked through this cordon of men to get to Edna Finch’s Mellow House, an ice-cream shop.

The girls bonded over their solitariness, over being the only child in their respective families. When they met, it seemed as though they had always been friends. They were both the “[d]aughters of distant mothers and incomprehensible fathers” (51). With each other, they found the intimacy they craved.

It was 1922. Four Irish boys, around 13 or 14, entertained themselves by harassing Black schoolchildren in the early afternoons. They had come with their parents, believing that America was a welcoming promised land. Instead, they were met by aversions to their accent, to their Catholicism, and to their wishes to find work. Only Black people didn’t scorn them. But, to belong to the wider white community, the Irish “echoed the old [Medallion] residents’ attitude toward blacks” (53).