The mounting evidence for Sula being the embodiment of evil is contrived, but this belief gains credibility because Sula refuses to conform to the black community's social norms and tacit laws of acceptable behavior. Despite her two shocking transgressions — placing Eva in a nursing home and committing adultery with Jude — it is Sula's perceived promiscuity with white men that garners the loudest and foulest damnation: She has broken the laws of racial segregation. In contrast, Ajax is accustomed to being contrary to the order of things; as a man, he has license to act as he does without fear of retaliation by the black community. However, as a black woman, Sula's lawlessness alienates and frightens the community, and she is branded accordingly.
Paradoxically, the community-versus-Sula relationship is symbiotic. The previously factional community bands together, defining itself in the face of Sula's shocking behavior. Her rebelliousness unites the community as it moves to protect its own black honor. By identifying Sula as the evil within, the community copes with her the way it has coped with bigotry, misfortune, and oppression — through the collective strength of tradition and a unified sense of neighborhood.
In the midst of the community's swarming and buzzing around this so-called bewitched pariah, Sula takes Ajax as a lover. Never before has she opened her soul so freely to a man. Her lovemaking in the past titillated her "sooty" side and spoke to her wickedness, but for the most part it was lonely and not fulfilling. In the past, she would wait impatiently for her partner to finish and go, to leave her "to the postcoital privateness in which she met herself, welcomed herself, and joined herself in matchless harmony." However, although she finds such psychological singleness powerfully intoxicating, she soon learns that this singleness is actually "soundless-ness," a horrible void of nothingness that renders her powerless and, even worse, forces her to confront the possibility of a purely mortal and non-eternal existence.
