“We was girls together”
Someone asked for the most haunting line people have ever read in a piece of literature that has stayed with them like a ghost, and “we was girls together” was the first and only line that came to me.
Not only has it stayed with me, it has occupied me and triggered the greatest unlearning I’m still undergoing.
The line is from Toni Morrison’s Sula, my favorite book; because it’s a story of female friendship that transcended blood relationship. And typical of most female friendships under the patriarchy, a man amongst other factors rocked the bottom of the ship. Causing it to sink and the thought of reconciliation happening only after a death.
“We was girls together” was uttered in a grave yard. Words so heavy they were accompanied by spiraling screams, bearing the regret and sorrow of a lifetime. Words from the living friend to the estranged dead friend. In fact, to qualify them as friends might be a disservice to the soul tie they had.
To be a girl or woman is to live with warnings of how the mere existence of a fellow woman is a threat to the romantic relationship you have with a man. Erroneously, you’re admonished to bend and contort to no end in order to have sole possession over him. To discard your female friends in order to eliminate the threat that their mere existence poses.
However, the purpose of this piece is not to go into the sensibility or not of that logic.
In this story of a beautiful soul tie, the rationale behind that logic manifested again. Sula came back to their hometown after 12 years of absence and among the things she did in her newly found wildness was to sleep with her soulmate’s husband.
I do not like to question mama Toni’s perspective because I’ve realized that she writes the reality without seeking to judge or communicate a moral story. She writes life as it is.
Expectedly, her soulmate cut her off. And the husband out of whatever it is, took off and never returned.
Now, soulmate was left with extreme loneliness, what the author described as second hand loneliness, because it was handed over to her by the absence of a man that had betrayed and left her. And later, the absence of Sula that she cut off.
The great unlearning is this question, why should the person to cut off by default be the friend not the man?
The pain of betrayal cuts deeply from both sides.
I think it’s the easier choice because we’ve been taught to deprioritize all our friendships in favor of our romantic relationships. While it’s possible that the actual soulmate is the friend.
Again, I’m not interested in the morality of the situation. I’m only concerned about how default and automatic the choice of who to forgive and who to cut off is.
Soulmate could only come to the realization that her partner that she missed and ached for all these decades was not her husband, but estranged and dead Sula.
