Conversations with Toni Cade Bambara ed. by Thabiti Lewis (review)

There was a period when I went utterly mad in the eighties in response to the Atlanta missing and murdered children’s case. . . . I stopped going out, I stopped bathing, I stopped washing my hair, I became this lunatic. My daughter would tap me every now and then and say, “Ma, you look like hell.” Then it was “Mother, get it together.” She was thirteen at the time, and she took what little money was left and enrolled in the Barbizon Modeling School; the idea was to make money as a runway model, pay the bills, and keep us going until I found myself again.

(133)

There is something hauntingly familiar about this image recalled by Toni Cade Bambara in a 1994 interview newly republished in Conversations with Toni Cade Bambara, edited by Thabiti Lewis. It is the immemorial tale of a child forced to emerge from isolation and rescue her “spiritually, financially, psychically, physically” depleted parent who is crippled by the burden of history, of the memory of the dead, murdered, and forgotten of what Bambara calls “those African bones in the briny deep.”

Surely this story of Bambara struggling to write a novel about the Atlanta Child Murders in the 1980s evokes the character Sethe from Bambara’s friend Toni Morrison’s novel, Beloved. In reading Conversations, it also becomes apparent that there is something crucial about what Bambara has to say that goes beyond offering what Lewis calls “sound direction” (xvi) into her most complex work. Indeed, this collection of interviews reveals why Toni Morrison said Bambara’s work was “absolutely crucial to twentieth-century literature” (qtd. in Lewis vii), as it unveiled a voice and consciousness that has resonated throughout African American literature of the later half of the twentieth century and continues to resonate today.

Toni Cade Bambara, writer, teacher, editor, social activist, community organizer, and “product of the nineteen-sixties spirit” was born in 1939 and died of colon cancer in 1995. Her published literary work includes an anthology; three collections of short stories; a collection of essays, fiction, and interviews; and two novels, one of which is the masterpiece The Salt Eaters, which won the American Book Award, the Langston Hughes Society Award, and awards from Medallion and the Zora Neale Hurston Society. She had a “spirit,” says Lewis, “that could not be controlled” (viii), and which deeply affected those she met, particularly that widespread community of writers that came out of the heady awakening of the 1960s and fundamentally transformed the direction of literature. She discusses this milieu in a 1983 interview with Claudia Tate:

But writers have gotten their wagons in a circle, which gives us each something to lean against, push off against. It’s the presence on the scene of Gwen Brooks, Ron Milner, Alice Walker, and Lorenzo Thomas that helps me edit. . . . I’m influenced by Ishmael Reed, Quincey [sic] Troupe, Janet Tolliver, Lucille Clifton, Ianthe Thomas, Camille Yarborough, Jayne Cortez, etc., in the sense that they represent a range and thus give me the boldness to go headon with my bad self. The found voice of writers from other communities—Leslie Silko, Simon Ortiz, Rudy Ananya, Sean Wong, Wendy Rose, Lawson Inada, Janice Mirikitani, Charat Chandra, etc. . . . I need to slap five every now and again with Pearl Lomax, Nikki Grimes, Victor Cruz, Toni Morrison, or Verta Mae, whether they’re in slapping distance or not. . . . That we keep each other’s writing alive is the point I’m trying to make. The literature of this crucial time is a mixed chorus.

(63)

And within this chorus, Bambara had a special place. She was a writer’s writer.

For this reason alone, Conversations is an indispensible text to any contemporary scholar of African American literature. Lewis’s masterful sixteen-page introduction spells this out, elaborating many of the most important themes of the interviews and of Bambara’s work, particularly her view of “herself as a cultural worker for oppressed people whose job...