First Line From Toni Morrison's Sula

I started this journal to write down the first lines of books I read. More recently, I decided to read one book slowly and write down a line or two I liked each day. This idea was partly inspired by Yiyun Li and her experience with an online reading group that spent 85 continuous days reading Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace. The experiences of this group are described in the book Tolstoy Together.

Yesterday, I started Toni Morrison's Sula. The first line is:

In that place, where they tore the nightshade and blackberry patches from their roots to make room for the Medallion City Golf Course, there was once a neighborhood.

There are dangers in looking for hidden meaning in a book. This danger is perhaps best parodied in Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire in which one person writes a 999 line poem and another writes a long commentary telling a wild story that has nothing to do with the poem.

In this line from Sula, I noticed a contrasting plant/gardening metaphor. At one time in the early 20th century, Medallion had blackberries and nightshade -- plants that produced edible food for the Black community that lived there. The golf course that replaced this garden is probably filled with well-watered green grass, shrubs, and trees. Grass, shrubs, and trees are plants that people do not eat.