We meet Eva Peace — mother, grandmother, matriarch. Deserted by her husband, BoyBoy, with three young children to feed, Eva is desperate. Having only a little money and a few beets in the kitchen, she leaves her children with her neighbor, Mrs. Suggs, and promises to return the next day. Eighteen months later, a vigorous and prosperous Eva makes a dramatic return — on crutches and missing her left leg — prompting the black community to speculate as to whether or not she intentionally threw herself under a train in order to collect insurance money.
Eva begins taking in boarders, stray children, and adults whose circumstances are fodder for the town's gossip mill. The mix includes Tar Baby, a troubled, alcoholic white man who is determined to drink himself to death, and three boys, all of whom Eva names Dewey. Eva's daughter Hannah and Hannah's daughter, Sula, move into the boardinghouse. Before long, Hannah begins to enjoy a sweet and flirtatious life. One by one, she collects the town's men as her lovers but never attaches herself to any of them.
After serving a stint in World War I, Eva's son, Plum, returns home. He is an emotionally wrecked, extremely thin and malnourished ex-soldier, a "shadow" who is now addicted to drugs. With the same ferocity that she summoned when she saved his life as a child, Eva burns Plum to death because she knows that he is a doomed, addicted adult: After rocking him to sleep one night, she douses his bed with kerosene and lights it. Her love for him will not allow her to watch him decay into a slowly rotting corpse.