On the eve of National Suicide Day, Shadrack is surrounded by loneliness. He looks around for Sula's purple-and-white belt, the only evidence of his only visitor ever in his house. Years ago, a tearful, frightened girl with a tadpole-like birthmark over one eye came to his house. She looked so scared that he tried to comfort her with some words of reassurance, but he could manage only one word: "Always." Then she ran away, leaving her belt behind. For the first time since he began National Suicide Day, Shadrack wants to stay home with the memory of his one visitor.
This year's National Suicide Day is celebrated by many of the townspeople, much to Shadrack's amazement. Scores of people turn out to follow him, strutting, skipping, marching, and shuffling their way through the town, to the tunnel on the New River Road. There, in a frenzy of mob anger and frustration because the tunnel construction jobs have been given to whites rather than to blacks for so many years, the townspeople scramble over the barricade and plunder the construction site. Their fevered pitch of joy and revenge rages, fed by years of oppression, lost wages, and the poverty they have come to accept as a way of life.
Suddenly the tunnel collapses in a wall of water, ice, and mud, killing many of the townspeople, while Shadrack stands high up on the riverbank, ringing his bell.
