Toni Cade Bambara: Free to be Anywhere in the Universe

You can hear their voices long after you turn the final page. Toni Cade Bambara’s extraordinary ordinary people—streetwise, sensitive and complex—taunt, tease, and haunt: Don’t you want to be free? Yes, You. Freedom. What are you going to do to be free? In this way, they are not unlike their creator. When she passed on December 9, 1995, Toni Cade Bambara left us a legacy of social vision and social struggle, a legacy that challenges us upon every re-reading, a legacy that proves what we have always known—that the writing can be both beautiful and political—a legacy that insists upon the spiritual dimension of art and politics, a legacy in word and in deed—an artificial separation that her own work challenges. For the word is a deed, not the only one, but an important one nonetheless.

In two edited volumes, The Black Woman (1970), Tales and Stories for Black Folks(1971), two collections of short stories, Gorilla, My Love (1972) and The Sea Birds Are Still Alive (1977), one novel, The Salt Eaters (1980) and numerous essays and interviews, Toni Cade Bambara sought to empower her readers to claim and act upon their strength as individuals and as communities. In addition to her writing, Bambara taught at City College of New York, Rutgers University, Duke University, Spelman College and numerous other traditional and non-traditional teaching settings. Of her teaching, she noted: “My main thrust in the classroom has always been to encourage and equip people to respect their rage and their power” (Braxton 330).

In the early 1980s Bambara found yet another medium for her cultural activism—the Scribe Video Center in Philadelphia. At Scribe, she worked on documentary films, most notably “The Bombing of Osage Avenue” about the 1985 bombing of the radical group MOVE and “W.E.B. DuBois—A Biography in Four Voices.” Each of these works—the films as well as her fiction—embodies her commitment to articulating the struggles of the communities to whom she is dedicated and her desire to raise the consciousness of those people who read and/or view them.

While Bambara conducted most of her culture work in and for Black communities—especially in New York, Atlanta and Philadelphia—she was committed to the struggles of oppressed people throughout the world. These struggles convinced her of the need for coalition between people of color; coalitions like those between the Sisters of the Yam, Sisters of the Plaintain, Sisters of the Rice and Sisters of the Palma in the novel, The Salt Eaters. Furthermore, the liberation struggles of other people of color also informed and empowered her own writing. Following a trip to Cuba in 1973 and to Vietnam in 1975, Bambara became convinced that “Writing is a legitimate way, an important way, to participate in the empowerment of the community that names me” (Evans 42).

Toni Cade Bambara’s travels and her consciousness of liberation struggles worldwide allowed her to identify and articulate important commonalities and connections between those engaged in struggle and to turn her creative attention to settings other than the urban settings of her early fiction. “The Organizer’s Wife” and “The Sea Birds Are Still Alive” are the products of these efforts.

In “The Sea Birds Are Still Alive” a young Vietnamese refugee tells readers:

But that, the elders had taught her in the spring, was the wonderful thing about revolution. It gave one a chance to amend past crimes, to change, to be human. And that is why, the elders had taught her in the rainy season, the youth were so important, for they would prove to the ancestors that it had not been foolish to fight for the right to be free, to be human. And that was why, the elders had taught her in the first crop season, that she herself mattered, that what she did or did not do would matter for the yet unborn. So in winter when they took her from the schoolhouse and dragged her off for the interrogation, she was already an elder...