Women's Work: Nationalism and Contemporary African American Women's Novels

1 / Organizing Her Nation: Toni Cade Bambara’sThe Salt Eaters

1 / Organizing Her Nation: Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters Toni Cade Bambara’s fiction continues the efforts of The Black Woman to envision a sovereign cultural nation constantly built by women’s work. Her 1980 novel The Salt Eaters organizes a collective that is distinctly African American and grounded in the United States. Bambara, a prolific organizer of protests, community centers, anthologies, and artists’ groups, uses formal experimentation to write a cultural nation of voices in chorus in the pages of The Salt Eaters. This novel claims the recovery of an ailing civil rights activist, Velma Henry, as a necessary starting point for suturing together a community. Organization, formally on the page and thematically in the narrative, heals fractured individual and communal bodies. The novel illuminates the work of practicing cultural nationalism through the story of activist, mother, sister, friend, and wife Velma. Over the course of the novel, Velma repairs her individual “inner nation” (118), which radiates outward to build a cultural nation shared by the residents of Claybourne, Georgia and Bambara’s readers.1 Bambara organizes this nation formally on the pages of the novel through polyvocality, simultaneous temporality, shifts in point of view, and various modes of knowledge. The novel weaves together an astounding variety of characters and possible outcomes into a collective ready to do the work of making social change. 34 / WOMEN’S WORK Concentric Circles of Community In 1978, following a suicide attempt, Velma comes to the Southwest Community Infirmary in Claybourne. She struggles to get well under the ministrations of Minnie Ransom. To aid in Minnie’s efforts, a circle of twelve community members, “the Master’s Mind,” surrounds Velma and Minnie. The spirit of a dead friend, Old Wife, counsels Minnie during the healing ritual. Dr. Julius Meadows, recently hired at the Infirmary , observes the healing; young, pregnant Nadeen and her boyfriend, Buster, are among those who come to watch Minnie work; activists Ruby and Jan of the Academy of the Seven Arts debate their next steps; women of the Seven Sisters collective sit in the local Avocado Pit Café; Velma’s husband, Obie, not knowing of his wife’s suicide attempt, seeks to lessen his own pain with a massage; Velma’s sister, Palma, arrives in Claybourne (and into the arms of her lover, Marcus) on the suspicion that all is not well; Infirmary administrator and former pimp Doc Serge prepares a lecture to deliver after the healing; bus driver Fred Holt communes with his dead friend Porter; Holt’s passengers complain about delays while their driver imagines a series of scenarios, including the bus careening off a bridge and sinking into a marsh, that “might have been” (86–87). The community of Claybourne overflows; there are far more characters than the reader can easily track. Claybourne is made up of many disparate individuals, each with his or her own complex and fractured internal life. If they cannot become whole on individual and collective terms, terrible alternative realities, from Fred’s passengers drowning on the bus (80) to Obie distributing bombs and guns to foment armed revolution (253) and a nuclear disaster (245), threaten to take over. Over the course of The Salt Eaters, these characters cohere into a collective determined by Velma’s recovery, a community strong enough to choose its own outcome. Bambara connects each person in Claybourne to Velma through textual organization; Velma’s story frames the narrative of every other character. Her healing promises to suture this fractured group into a new collective, to organize them into the site of an alternative nation that rejects the oppression, violence, and death that haunt the novel in a series of “might have been[s].” Worn down by years of activism, Velma is beyond exhaustion. Scattered among various political efforts, she cannot find her place in her late 1970s moment, when no national movement provides a context for her activism. She does not want to return to the marginal position of women in the civil rights movement.2 One woman’s body must be the organizing her nation / 35 first site of repair, the first location for healing from the fallout of the gender inequity that saturated earlier black liberation movements. The civil rights movement often put women in subservient roles, and the black power movement subjugated women, as evidenced by Stokely Carmichael ’s famous assertion that a woman’s position in the movement was “prone...