SOURCE: “He Speaks for Whom?: Inscription and Reinscription of Women in Invisible Man and The Salt Eaters,” in MELUS, Vol. 18, No. 2, Summer, 1993, pp. 17-32.

1

What happens to “the second sex” in a novel as powerful as Ellison's Invisible Man where the trope of invisibility functions as a critique of racist American society? When the text itself perpetuates the invisibility it seeks to undo, it seems inevitable that it will invite response and revision. In Toni Cade Bambara's The Salt Eaters we can discern an argument, not with Ellison's manifest text of invisibility and “the blackness of blackness,” but with the subtext of gender erasure.

African American feminist critics have, especially in the last fifteen or twenty years, articulated the problematic of double invisibility, the double jeopardy that results from being both black and female. They have sought to add gender to Du Bois's well known analysis of the sense of double—consciousness” with which many African Americans live (3). Bell Hooks claims that “no other group in America has so had their identity socialized out of existence as have black women” (7). It is not simply that race, gender and class compound oppression arithmetically, to cite Valerie Smith (who borrows from Barbara Smith), but that “issues of class and race alter one's experience of gender, just as gender alters one's experience of class and race” (“Loopholes” 225). Much work in black feminist theory and criticism has taken as its subject the construction and/or erasure of African American women, and especially how the combined categories of race, class, and gender intensify and illuminate in important ways both reading and writing, believing “that the meaning of blackness in this country shapes profoundly the experience of gender, just as the conditions of womanhood affect ineluctably the experience of race” (Smith, “Black Feminist Theory” 47).

Many novels written by black women since the publication of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man have (among other things) filled in gaps or given voice to the silences that have kept black women invisible.¹ Toni Cade Bambara's The Salt Eaters is one such novel. Published in 1980, twenty-eight years after Ellison's Invisible Man, after the turbulent sixties and some gains had been made by the Civil Rights Movement, The Salt Eaters moves beyond its own created world, engaging other texts like Invisible Man in a dialogic relationship. Henry Louis Gates explains the phenomenon thus:

Literary works are in dialogue not because of some mystical collective unconscious determined by the biology of race or gender, but because writers read other writers and ground their representations of experience in models of language provided largely by other writers to whom they feel akin.

(7)

Gates is speaking here of the construction of a tradition of black women writers, but this phenomenon/strategy is similar even when the writers do not, perhaps, feel such kinship.

Invisible Man itself is peopled with the discourse of Anglo-American male writers from Jefferson and Whitman to Faulkner and Hemingway, providing a “twentieth-century Western gloss in the use of Freudian, Marxist, and existentialist notions of self” (Byerman 11)². Ellison brings the language, imagery, and symbols of these writers and works into his text, and by placing them in an entirely new context, he “changes the joke and slips the yoke,” or rather reverses, revises, or augments the writing and thinking of these men in ways that Russian Formalists would have called “defamiliarization.” Viktor Shklovsky's 1917 essay, “Art as Technique,” explains:

After we see an object several times, we begin to recognize it. The object is in front of us and we know about it, but we do not see it—hence we cannot say anything significant about it. Art removes objects from the automatism of perception in several ways.

(13)

If the object in question happens to be another work of art, a literary text, for example—a Whitman poem or the Declaration of Independence—the estrangement” or defamiliarization occurs when that work is pulled into an unfamiliar context, such as a novel about the impossibility of freedom and “the body electric” for a man who is socially and culturally invisible. The shifted discursive ground makes possible fresh patterns of thought and action, and (among other things) provides readers with a different lens through which to read well-known cultural documents. In much the same way, The Salt Eaters takes on Invisible Man.

One of the primary projects of black women's writing has been, according to Deborah McDowell, “a revisionist mission aimed at substituting reality for stereotype” (284) and correcting a record of invisibility. This project is not unlike Ellison's dialogue with and revision of Anglo-American white writers, but for African American women, it necessarily takes into account and foregrounds gender. In addition, Mary Helen Washington says that it is a move that “takes the trouble to record the thoughts, words, feelings, and deeds of black women, experiences that make the realities of being black in America look very different from what men have written” (xxi). For Bambara, that project has included a specific dialogue with Ralph Ellison's text, a move that, to borrow from Mae Henderson speaking about black women writers in general, is “a deliberate intervention … into the canonic tradition of sacred/literary texts, (124).

Through this interventionist, intertextual, and revisionary activity, black women writers enter into dialogue with the discourses of the other(s). Disruption—the initial response to hegemonic and ambiguously (non) hegemonic discourse—and revision (rewriting or rereading) together suggest a model for reading black and female literary expression.

(Henderson 131)

By inscribing in her main character, Velma Henry, the consequences of double invisibility and silencing, and by constructing a female healer who bears similarities with Ellison's major female character, but who stands in stark contrast to her, Bambara's text functions not only as a critique of and an argument with, but as a corrective to, Ellison's text.

Particular signals, patterns of imagery, and thematic similarities suggest strong links between The Salt Eaters and Invisible Man, making an inquiry into the intertextual relationship between the two especially appropriate.(1) Many as yet unexplored suggestions of links between Invisible Man and The Salt Eaters exist. Bambara's use of bird imagery recalls Ellison's, where birds function as signals, warnings, or emblems within both texts, often signifying a character's shift of understanding or perception, or (in The Salt Eaters) a shift in space/time relationships. Patterns of circles and cycles appear in both novels; indeed, the structure of The Salt Eaters, while a plot exists, is more circular than linear. This is much the same for Invisible Man, about which Kimberly Benston says, the “plot—the soul of (hi)story, as Aristotle would have it—is circular yet inconclusive, ordered yet open” 90).’ Explorations of the role of memory are crucial to both; both novels make brilliant use of dream/fantasy narratives. Another striking resemblance to Ellison's text, as Eleanor Traylor points out, is Bambara's use of the jazz mode as a form. Both novels ultimately seek to map out a terrain in which, among other things, American myths of self-reliance and integrity are probed and challenged, and where “the liberating epiphany … can occur … only when the ‘telos’ of discovery is seen truly as a point of departure” (Benston 89).

2

Ellison's novel begins, “I am an invisible man,” thus voicing the narrator's hard-won realization that his search for identity begins and ends in the paradox of invisibility. Indeed, invisibility becomes the trope Ellison uses to critique and explore what it means to be a black man in America. The narrator of the novel, rendered invisible because people refuse to see” him, searches for the answer to the questions, who am I, where did I come from, and “what did I do to be so black and blue?”

Written prior to the civil rights movement and the second wave of the women's movement, Ellison's novel predictably foregrounds race—“blackness of blackness”—in his character's search for identity, meaning, and place in American history. The novel insists, however, that this problem of origins and identity is not, of course, limited to blacks, but permeates the fabric of American society, and is shared by all Americans (albeit in quantitatively and qualitatively different ways). Critics have accordingly drawn attention to the novel's “universality,” noting that Ellison's story reaches far beyond racial boundaries. Gene Bluestein argues that the protagonist of Invisible Man moves through various stages of acceptance and identity as a black man, as an American, and finally, to the stage which expresses the universal values of humanity” (604). While the impulse to come to terms with one's personal history (ethnic identity, folk heritage, family tradition) and to claim a national identity is no doubt shared by many, the very notion of “universal humanity,” erases or at least blurs more political considerations about how a text is produced as well as about how it is received. J. Lee Greene notes that critics often had “strained to make the definition of ‘universality’ in Invisible Man synonymous with white” (154).

I would add that “universal” is not only synonymous with white,” but with “male” also. The very premise of the novel's universality ignores the problematic of gender, and thus perpetuates the invisibility it seeks to undo. Both black and white female characters throughout the novel are constructed along a spectrum that replicates the classic duality embodied in representations of women—madonna or whore, mother or seductress—reinforcing and adding to the bulk of literature that produces women's characters according to this bifurcated vision. (These dichotomies show up curiously at several points in Invisible Man through milk/beer or milk/wine imagery associated with some female characters.)

The mother/mammy/madonna figures in Invisible Man include Mary Rambo, Mrs. Provo, Lottie (the pregnant wife of the kerosene wielding Dupre), the nameless women and children who inhabit the soon to be burned tenement, and the duped sisters” of Rev. Rinehart's church. Even in the narrator's dream vision at the beginning of the novel, he encounters “the old singer of spirituals” and her sons (9-10). The women in sharecropper Jim Trueblood's chaotic household represent both sides of the duality: Trueblood's pregnant wife, Kate, and pregnant daughter, Mattie Lou (both of whom are impregnated by him), are mother figures, but Mattie Lou functions as a seductress as well (“maybe sometimes a man can look at a little ole pigtail gal and see him a whore” [59]). Other seducers include college student Jack Maston's girlfriend (who sends a message for a secret meeting on the campus by way of the narrator), the whores in the Golden Day (who also display maternal characteristics), and Rinehart's seductive, exotic, and nameless “girl,” to name a few. Even Harlem's female brotherhood” members are commandeered as majorettes, “the best-looking girls we could find, who pranced and twirled and just plain girled in the enthusiastic interest of the Brotherhood” (371). Finally unifying in two images (milk/beer) both mother and what might loosely be termed seductress is the “huge woman in a gingham pinafore” who careens through Harlem on a Borden's milk wagon, drinking beer from a barrel which sat before her.”

We stepped aside, amazed, as she bowed graciously from side to side like a tipsy fat lady in a circus parade, the dipper like a gravy spoon in her enormous hand. Then she laughed and drank deeply while reaching over nonchalantly with her free hand to send quart after quart of milk crashing into the street.

(532)

Even while the fat woman rejects the milk of human (read maternal) kindness for what might be seen as the beer of loose living, she holds the dipper like a “gravy spoon,” locked into a gender-marked system that “pens” her between two polarities. Because Invisible Man is indeed frequently assumed to be universal, we need to ask for whom it is “universal,” a question that in the asking undoes the term's very premise.

It is, ultimately, a mother figure, Mary Rambo, who stands out the only positively memorable woman character in the novel (out of a cast of almost twenty black women characters), and it is precisely with the construction of Mary that Bambara takes issue most forcefully. Mary, the mother/healer of Invisible Man, enters the text immediately preceding the narrator's harrowing stay at the Liberty Paints factory hospital where, after perceived intransigence at work, he is confined and forced into shock treatment. He is pronounced “well” when he cannot remember his name, his mother's name, nor who Brer Rabbit is. (The politics of diagnosis alone provides an important lens through which to examine this section.) Stripped of his cultural and familial memory, the narrator is finally released—weak, hungry and disoriented.

Enter Mary Rambo, “a comfortingly nonsexual big dark woman,” who offers the narrator help when she sees him stagger and faint on a sidewalk in Harlem. Taking charge, she directs the crowd to “stand back and let the man breathe.” Once the narrator is back on his feet, Mary convinces him to come home with her (“you weak and caint hardly walk … and you look what's more like you hungry”). Mary, who apparently has time on her hands, pleads, “let me do something for you” (246). A nearby man chimes in like a Greek chorus, “You in good hands, daddy. Miss Mary always helping somebody” (247). My point here is not to diminish the significance of black women's traditional importance to their communities as networkers and caregivers, but to look at how this particular stereotype functions to erase the nonessential diversity of black women by slotting them into two extreme and essentialist characterizations. Mary Rambo joins a long line of textual representations of women as “helpers,” “caretakers,” and “nurturers,” women who occupy the moral high ground of the madonna/whore duality.

Although Mary is locked into her representation as a self-effacing, maternal caretaker, Ellison's text has a momentary rupture in which Mary emerges demonstrating considerable sagacity and wit. In this section, Mary delivers a riddling passage to the narrator as he is readying himself to leave her for the last time. He listens, but fails to understand fully when Mary tells him,

And you have to take care of yourself, son. Don't let this Harlem git you. I'm in New York, but New York ain't in me, understand what I mean? Don't git corrupted.

(249)

This uncharacteristically wise and direct discourse can be traced to an earlier version of the “Mary Rambo” section of Invisible Man, a version Ellison excised because of “space constraints.” In this version Mary figures as a fully described, spunky, physically strong and self-reliant healer. A paid employee at the Liberty Paints hospital, she is also connected through her 104-year-old mother to the traditional healing arts of rootwork and conjure. This Mary was quite nearly buried until 1963 when Herbert Hill's collection, Soon, One Morning, appeared, including the excised chapter from Invisible Man.

Introducing the segment, Ellison explains that this longer narrative marked an attempt to get the hero … out of the hospital into the world of Harlem. It was Mary's world, the world of the urbanized (or partially urbanized) Negro folk, and I found it quite pleasurable to discover, during those expansive days of composition before the necessities of publication became a reality, that it was Mary, a woman of the folk, who helped release the hero from the machine.

(“Out” 243)

Ellison adds that he is “pleased to see this version in print” because Mary “deserved more space in the novel and would, I think, have made it a better book” (“Out” 243).

In this segment, titled “Out of the Hospital and Under the Bar,” the action begins after an explosion (and not coincidentally, after the narrator has aroused suspicion of being a union sympathizer) at the Liberty Paints factory. The narrator has been held inside a glass box, figuring much like a jail or coffin, for extended electric-shock treatments designed to “cure” him into forgetting his blackness. Mary appears to the narrator while he is still strapped inside the box. Weak from lack of food, disoriented, and exhausted, the narrator notices her grinning down at him. The differences in physical description between this Mary and Invisible Man's shapeless, sexless, “big dark woman” are striking:

When I awakened she stood looking down. Her newly straightened hair gleamed glossily in the intense light, her blue uniform freshly ironed and stiffly starched. Seeing me awake she shook her head and grinned. I tensed, expecting a trick. But not this time. Instead, she tried seriously to communicate with me.

(244)

Mary's communication consists of attempts to find out the reasons for the narrator's confinement in the hospital. Once satisfied that he has committed no crime, she sets about the dangerous business of freeing him. Not only her courage, but Mary's physical strength, becomes evident as she pries the lid of the box, so heavy that “an expression of pain gripped her features” as she does so (246).

Mary encourages the enervated man not to come home with her (as in the later, published version), but to remember why he was put in the hospital in the first place, to talk, to eat, and to become strong enough to escape the hospital. She challenges him to “stop being such a sissy” (262) and later returns with something “green like balled grape leaves that had dried without fading,” obtained from her rootworking mother, a woman who

useta sing alto, grow the best crops in the country, and right now … knows more about roots and herbs and midwifery and things than anybody you ever seen.

(261)

Two remarkable women—strong, subversive, and not only willing to assist the narrator in his escape but practically demanding it of him. “The stuff” works its intended magic, and soon the narrator gains the strength of “Jack-the-Bear,” making a hair-raising escape from the hospital, running completely naked in an underground ritual of rebirth. It is only through Mary's fearless and determined preparation, as well as her competent engineering, that the narrator makes his escape at all.

Leaving aside debates over Ellison's artistic judgment in rewriting this episode for his novel, it is interesting to look at the textual regression of a Mary who, with her mother, functions as healer/rescuer/ conjure woman to the narrator, in contrast to the shapeless Mary Rambo of Invisible Man, whose function as a healer is implied but only briefly evident and, in addition, is diminished by sexual stereotype. This is not to argue that Ellison should have written a different novel. It is, however, to explore the terrain of absence, silence, or invisibility that inheres in the novel's gender bias, and to consider how another text, The Salt Eaters, pulls from Invisible Man the “not said” in order to construct a more expansive discourse of the female self.

3

One is struck, reading The Salt Eaters, by the presence of two unusually strong women characters: Minnie Ransom, the healer, and her patient, Velma Henry. Velma, much like the Invisible Man of Ellison's novel, has failed to make sense of the world in which she lives—a world where her blackness is not as apparently erased as the Invisible Man's, but where social forces, such as sexism and racism, endanger her functioning as well as her spiritual, mental and physical health. A politically correct superwoman, Velma Henry ends up in her own version of the underground—the cave of her gas stove as she attempts suicide. And, as is the case for Ellison's narrator, an important aspect of Velma's moving beyond her nightmarish trajectory toward suicide will be her willingness to travel the dark inroads of memory and recover lost or forgotten wisdom within herself. For Velma, however, the search is doubly vexed: she must come to terms with herself as an African American and as a woman. “What has brought Velma to that stool and her confrontation/interaction with Minnie is in many ways the history of black women characters in contemporary Afro-American fiction” (Harris 152)³. Velma's illness is, in part, a result of the gender erasure exemplified in Invisible Man. However, while both Invisible Man and The Salt Eaters chronicle (in different ways) the search for an identity and integrity of self in a world that would deny, denigrate, or exploit that self, the novels differ sharply in the contrast between the two healers, Mary Rambo and Minnie Ransom (and indeed, in the differences that inhere in each character's understanding of caregiving and/or healing processes).

Both Mary Rambo and Minnie Ransom (who incidentally share the same initials) are single, older women who play special roles in their respective communities. Where Minnie is the “celebrated healer” of 1980s Claybourne, Georgia, Mary is the well-known helper of Harlem in the 1940s. Both women are important to their communities in bringing people together and in providing spiritual and physical sustenance, nurture and healing. But here the similarities end. Bambara has drawn Minnie with sharper, more complex lines, making her much less predictable than Ellison's Mary, who not only fulfills a classic stereotype of black women, but also undergoes a progressive erasure within the textual system of Invisible Man, becoming finally a mere abstraction in the mind of the narrator.

Language sharply delineates the two characters. Dramatically different from Mary's initial utterances (“Let me help you.”), Minnie Ransom's first words (and indeed the first words of the novel) arrive by way of high challenge: “Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?” (3). Minnie is no self-effacing stranger eager to “fix” Velma. She offers a question fraught with risks, one that shifts the location of healing from external sources to Velma herself. Instead of the yoked and potentially entrapping me-help-you proposition of Mary's offer, Minnie's words establish clear boundaries between herself and Velma, paradoxically clearing a space between them in which the two women connect at deeply intimate levels throughout the healing process. Under the surface of Mary's words, on the other hand, the image of mother as a (s)mothering womb/tomb floats uneasily.

Making sure mother is safely asexual, the narrator describes Mary Rambo as a “heavy composed figure” (249) with “worn brown fingers” (247). She is also ultimately invisible as a “big dark woman” (245). Minnie Ransom, on the other hand presents something of a sensation, described in The Salt Eaters as “Minnie Ransom herself,”

the fabled healer of the district, her bright-red flouncy dress drawn in at the waist with two different strips of kenti cloth, up to her elbows in a minor fortune of gold, brass and silver bangles, the silken fringe of the shawl shimmying at her armpits. Her head, wrapped in some juicy hotpink gelee. …

(3)

Bringing together both sexuality and nurture, Minnie's appearance suggests a celebration of her own womanhood, history and culture, embodying the implied “yes” in the title (borrowed from Sojourner Truth) of Bell Hooks's study of African American women and feminism, Ain't I a Woman? Where Mary Rambo appears as asexual, Minnie thinks about (and is reproached by her spirit guide for doing so) a sexual liaison later that night with the younger Doctor Meadows. Where Mary sings “Back Water Blues,” Minnie Ransom plays “some sassy twenties singer … Wiiiild women doan worrreeee, wild women doan have no bluuuzzzzzz”’ (262). Furthermore, where Mary only briefly shows evidence of seeing beyond surface realities—or at least does so in terms of traditional religion, Minnie freely negotiates the spirit world.(3) Functioning at the threshold between physical and spiritual realms, Minnie communes with her patient, Velma, while at the same time “travelling” and conversing with her spirit guide, Old Wife. She remains both separate from and yet integrally a part of Velma's healing.

As I mentioned earlier, Mary has a moment in Invisible Man where she shares a portion of Minnie's spiritual acuity when she delivers her New York riddle (“I'm in New York, but New York ain't in me”). Mary urges the narrator to embrace his past, to learn from and draw upon it, and to use it as necessary equipment for functioning in an alien and deracinating culture. And in fact, shortly after this conversation, the narrator meets a man selling hot yams and has an epiphany of sorts as he gulps down the soul food he long ago repudiated. Mary's words prompt a series of questions about identity for the narrator, to which the yams give partial answer. “I yam what I yam,” the narrator puns, embracing, momentarily, significant aspects of the Southern upbringing he has previously lost.

Bambara's Minnie develops Mary's “New York idea” more fully as she encourages Velma to go deep within herself, to track the muddy backroads of memory and face the ghosts of her past. She must learn to live in a corrupt world (for The Salt Eaters never once loses sight of imminent global peril), but she must not let that corrupt world become or define her. Minnie knows that Velma

thought she knew how to build resistance, make the journey to the center of the circle, stay poised and centered in the work and not fly off, stay centered in the best of her people's traditions and not be available to madness, not become intoxicated by the heady brews of degrees and career and congratulations for nothing done, not become anesthetized by dazzling performances with somebody else's aesthetic, not go under.

(258)

Read “college” and “philanthropists” and brotherhood,” for “degrees” and career” and we have a nicely developed version of the Invisible Man's dilemma, a dilemma both Mary and Minnie wisely perceive.

Much like many women before her, Mary functions as a community networker. Even as Mary tends to the narrator's needs at their initial encounter on the street, she establishes links with those members of the community standing near her:

“… my name's Mary Rambo, everybody knows me round this part of Harlem, you heard of me, ain't you?” And the fellow saying, “Sure, I'm Jenny Jackson's boy, you know I know you, Miss Mary.” And her saying, “Jenny Jackson, why I should say you do know me and I know you, you Ralston, and your mama got two more children, boy named Flint and gal named Laura-jean, I should say I know you—me and your mama and your papa useta—. …”

(246)

Mary's character, however, is constructed upon the assumption that women who are not sexually promiscuous naturally function as the emotional and spiritual ligaments of a community. This plus the fact that Mary's depiction focuses on the naturalness of her role rather than on the very real power such a function holds. The Salt Eaters seeks to correct the record, demonstrating first the cost of such connection without corresponding internal strength (Velma's frightening move toward suicide being one such cost). Velma, who had tried to be a bridge, has no internal, spiritual bridges for the many pieces of herself that drift further and further apart within her. In addition, she lives and works in a community that, although politically progressive, continues to operate as though its men were the prime, indeed only, movers.⁴ The image of Velma having organized and marched with numbers of other women in a large-scale protest, camping in a soggy tent, covered in mud, exhausted, and searching through her purse frantically for a ragged tampax to stanch the flow of blood from her menstrual period is juxtaposed with the image of the sleek, polished black political candidate emerging from an expensive hotel with the requisite woman in silk on his arm. Velma's attempts to provide bridges and to work for social change in her community are consistently undercut by a social system that upholds male superiority, as well as by her lack of internal resources to deal with such a system by establishing and maintaining her own personal boundaries.

However, The Salt Eaters also thematizes the extraordinary power behind the kinds of connections both Mary and Velma make in their communities. Reflecting on Velma's gift for bringing together disparate elements, her husband recalls that:

… things had seemed more pulled together when Velma had been there, in the house and at the Academy. Not that her talents ran in the peacemaking vein. But there'd been fewer opportunities for splinterings with her around.

(92)

On the surface, Velma has simply done a more sophisticated kind of connecting than Mary, but Bambara's text insists upon a new understanding of community and connecting-the necessity “to be whole” before you can “see whole” (92). Sara Hoagland's notion of “autokoenony” captures much of The Salt Eater's construction of community. Hoagland explains,

An autokoenonous being is one who is aware of her self as one among others within a community that forms her ground of being, one who makes her decisions in consideration of her limitations as well as in consideration of the agendas and perceptions of others.

(145)

Being autokoenonous and seeing whole, however, is no small task, as Velma's godmother knows:

A deep rift had been developing for centuries … beginning with the move toward the material world and away from nature. Now there was a Babel of paths, of plans. “There is a world to be redeemed. … and it'll take the cooperation of all righteous folks.”

(92)

What is, in Ellison's text, a commonplace about women's roles as community networkers and caretakers takes on new dimensions in the dynamic of The Salt Eaters: dimensions having implications for the survival of the human race.

In Invisible Man, on her way from being a networker to becoming a virtual abstraction, Mary enacts another stereotype, a permutation of woman-as-mother. She is finally inscribed as the entrapper implied in “let me help you,” which by now in the novel has become a version of let me own you.” Her language changes from an initial concern to a controlling, domineering and even carping invasiveness:

Boy, when you come home?. … ain't you going to eat supper? … What kind of business you got on a cold night like this?. … hurry on back here and git something hot in your stomach.

(290-91)

Take some of that water in the kettle and go wash your face. Though sleepy as you look, maybe you ought to just use cold water. … You didn't come back for supper. … Boy, you better start eating again.

(314-15)

Thus the focus of Mary's interest in the narrator changes from redemptive to restrictive, from mother to (s)mother. The Invisible Man becomes restive and guilty under her watchful (and anxious) care. Here, Mary has shifted from one cliche to another, becoming the tar baby from whom the Invisible Man must escape in order to continue his search for identity.

In contrast, Minnie Ransom's relationship with Velma remains detached yet enabling. Her touch, the music she plays, and her reliance upon the other, spirit, world, give Minnie the necessary power to help set Velma free. Bambara's text insists, after all, that healing is a release from bondage (a “ransom” of captives), and that caring constitutes both detachment and connection at the same time. Velma, sitting on a stool next to Minnie, feels “the warm breath of Minnie Ransom on her, lending her something to work the bellows of her lungs with. To keep on dancing like the sassy singer said” (263-64). Minnie loans her breath to Velma; she does not attempt to breathe for her, nor to surround or entrap her. In fact, at the end of the novel (and of the healing session), Minnie knows when there is “no need of [her] hands … withdraws them, drops them in her lap just as Velma [rises] on steady legs,” the “burst cocoon” of her shawl left behind on the stool (295). Minnie's detached intimacy becomes the counter to Ellison's construction of smothering female “care.” Mary, however, is finally written out of Invisible Man entirely as the narrator flees from her help. The big dark woman” regains her helpfulness only when the narrator is physically distant from her, and she ultimately becomes an abstraction—a lodestar and symbol that the invisible man both embraces and resists:

Nor did I think of Mary as a “friend”; she was something more—a force, a stable familiar force like something out of my past which kept me from whirling off into some unknown which I dared not face. … at the same time, Mary reminded me constantly that something was expected of me, some act of leadership, some newsworthy achievement; and I was torn between resenting her for it and loving her for the nebulous hope she kept alive.

(252-53)

It is no accident that Mary's force becomes most intense after she is erased from the text altogether. For the final three hundred pages of the novel, Mary remains an abstraction, reappearing only in the consciousness of the narrator when he is in danger and in need of motherly guidance.

To point out the ways Bambara draws on and remakes Ellison's text is not to posit a simple Ellison-as-oppressor, Bambara-as-liberator opposition. Ellison's Invisible Man is a brilliant novel. Bambara's textual intervention and record-correcting is also only one part of a story as multiple and complex as any must be that attempts to construct gendered characters. Indeed, Minnie Ransom, by breaking one stereotype, may herself be constituting or upholding another.⁵ But in the references and signals that call Invisible Man into the text of The Salt Eaters, Bambara's novel interrogates a pervasive treatment of black women characters, rewriting the tradition, and in so doing, infusing it with a new vitality and angle of vision. Here, she demonstrates a strategy used by many other women writers to critique and correct textual records that perpetuate destructive and essentialized sexual stereotypes.

When Bambara's text draws directly on Ellison's trope of invisibility, the ground shifts enough to break up the terrain of the unsaid, and “invisibility” takes on new significance. A minor character in The Salt Eaters, Porter, explains that

They call the Black man The Invisible Man. And that becomes a double joke and then a double cross then a triple funny all around. Our natures are unknowable, unseeable to them. They haven't got the eyes for us. Course, when we look at us with their eyes, we disappear.

(158-59)

The question, in Bambara's terms, becomes one of who hasn't got the eyes for whom? The Salt Eaters consistently raises the possibility that those “unknowable, unseeable” natures of which Porter speaks are not those of all African Americans, but inscribed in the terms of Ellison's text, those of black women, rendered invisible under a system of essentially androcentric seeing.

Notes

1. Critics have noted similarities in the two novels. Gloria Hull, for example, argues that The Salt Eaters “accomplishes even better for the 1980s what … Invisible Man [did] for the 1950s” (124). In addition, Eleanor Traylor suggests that Bambara was quite familiar with Invisible Man, and points out in great detail her debt to Ellison in her uses of the jazz mode in The Salt Eaters.

2. This is underscored in a slightly different way in Byerman's comment that “disintegration is the primary concern of Bambara's only novel, as the black community, the main character, and the book's structure are all decentered” (123).

3. See Trudier Harris, “From Exile to Asylum,” for an incisive examination of the role of religious experience in black women writers. Harris points out that writers like Bambara, Toni Morrison, Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, and Gloria Naylor “redefine religion as a means of showing devotion toward and communing with the self, with other women, with nature, and with the expansive forces of the universe” (153).

4. This is somewhat confusing, since the community set forth in The Salt Eaters is politically progressive and collectively committed to social justice. It does, however, suggest sixties Civil Rights activism where women began to see that their position to the movement replicated the oppression they had experienced in their lives prior to Civil Rights. See, for example, in The Salt Eaters, where Velma furiously recounts incidents of the near past:

   Like work and no let up and tears in the night. Like being rolled to the edge of the bed, to extremes, clutching a stingy share of the covers and about to drop over the side, like getting up and walking, bare feet on cold floor, round to the other side and climbing in and too mad to snuggle for warmth, freeze. Like going to jail and being forgotten, forgotten, or at least deprioritized cause bail was not as pressing as the printer's bill. Like raising funds and selling some fool to the community with his heart set on running for public office. Like being called in on five-minute notice after all the interesting decisions had been made, called in out of personal loyalty and expected to break her hump pulling off what the men had decided was crucial for the community good.

   (25)

5. Although Minnie Ransom is drawn from a tradition of African American female healers and “spiritual adepts” (as Bambara would put it), I think the character type may be in danger of being over-used in contemporary African American women's fiction, and appropriated as a stereotype by readers looking for simple, untroubling niches into which these characters might be placed.

The author would like to thank J. Lee Greene for extensive comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

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