Nearly a quarter of a century has passed. Nel takes stock of the many changes in the community. Blacks are now working in jobs once available only to whites, but Nel is aware of a diminished vitality in people, the same people who previously drew collective strength from their hard times together. The community has spread out and changed, so much so that even the prostitutes seem pale and lifeless compared to the tough, fat, laughing women of forty years ago.
Nel reminisces about the twenty-five years since Jude left. She has spent her life in a tiny sphere of children and work — without love, without marriage. Nel is fifty-five years old, and the future seems to be anywhere but up in the Bottom; blacks are anxious to move to the valley, and whites are erecting television towers and building golf courses up in the Bottom.
Nel visits Eva in the Sunnydale nursing home and is saddened to find a pale, confused miniature of the magnificent Eva Peace she remembers. Their disjointed conversation swings from Eva's non sequiturs to her up-front confrontation about Nel's involvement in Chicken Little's death. Nel pushes the blame for the boy's death solely on Sula, but Eva insists, "You. Sula. What's the difference?" Eva then drifts between the present and the past, but her many references to Nel and Sula being "just alike" haunt Nel, who finally acknowledges that she indeed shares Sula's guilt; perhaps she and Sula really were two halves of the same person.
