SOURCE: "'What It Is I Think She's Doing Anyhow': A Reading of Toni Cade Bambara's The Salt Eaters," in Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition, edited by Marjorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers, Indiana University Press, 1985, pp. 216-32.

[Hull is an American educator and critic who has written extensively on Black American literature and Black women writers. She coedited All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies (1982) and wrote Color, Sex, and Poetry: Three Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance (1987). In the essay below, she offers a detailed thematic and stylistic analysis of The Salt Eaters.]

Although everyone knows instinctively that Toni Cade Bambara's first novel, The Salt Eaters, is a book that he or she must read, many people have difficulty with it. They get stuck on page ninety-seven or give up after muddling through the first sixty-five pages twice with little comprehension. Some cannot get past chapter one. Lost and bewildered, students decide that it is "over their heads" and wonder what made their teacher assign it in the first place.

There are compelling reasons for studying the novel. It is a daringly brilliant work that accomplishes even better for the 1980s what Native Son did for the 1940s, Invisible Man for the 1950s, or Song of Solomon for the 1970s: It fixes our present and challenges the way to the future. Reading it deeply should result in personal transformation; teaching it well can be a political act. However, Toni Cade Bambara has not made our job easy. Salt is long, intricately written, trickily structured, full of learning, heavy with wisdom—is, altogether, what critics mean by a "large" book.

At its literal-metaphoric center, Velma Henry and Minnie Ransom sit on round white stools in the middle of the Southwest Community Infirmary. "The good woman Ransom," "fabled healer of the district," is taxing her formidable powers with Velma, who has lost her balance and attempted suicide. The novel radiates outward in ever-widening circles—to the Master's Mind, the ring of twelve who hum and pray with Minnie; to the music room cluttered with staff, visitors, and assorted onlookers; to the city of Claybourne surrounding the Infirmary walls—a community which itself is composed of clusters (The Academy of the Seven Arts, the cafe with its two round tables of patrons, La Salle Street, the park); to the overarching sky above and the earth beneath steadily spinning on its axis. From the center, the threads web out, holding a place and weaving links between everything and everybody. At the same time, this center is a nexus which pulls the outside in—setting up the dialectic of connectedness which is both meaning and structure of the book.

Of the huge cast, certain characters stand out. There is M'Dear Sophie Heywood, Velma's godmother, who caught her at birth and has protected and praised her ever since. Now, she is so incensed with Velma's selfish nihilism that she has imposed silence upon herself and exited the circle/room, thinking back on her godchild as well as her deceased mate, Daddy Dolphy; on her son and Velma's almost-husband, Smitty, who was turned into an invalid by the police in a violent anti-war demonstration; and on her own bitter memories of being brutally beaten in jail by her neighbor, Portland Edgers, who had been forced to do so by guns and clubs. There is Fred Holt, the bus driver, "brimming over with rage and pain and loss" (and sour chili). Married as a youth to Wanda, who deserted him for the Nation of Islam, he now has a white wife Margie, who gives him nothing but her back. His misery is completed by the death of his best friend, Porter, a well-read conversationalist who was the only bright spot in Fred's days. Other important characters are Velma's husband Obie, whose "image of himself [is] coming apart"; Dr. Meadows, a conscientious young M.D. who is pulling together his "city" versus "country," his white westernized and ancient black selves; and a traveling troupe of Third World political performers called the Seven Sisters.

The rich cross section of variegated folks also includes less prominent characters such as Butch and Nadeen, two teenage parents-to-be; Jan and Ruby, activist women sharing a salad and organizing strategy; Donaldson, the inept FBI-CIA informant; and the list goes on. Some of these people appear onstage in propria persona; others are offstage fragments of memory. Some are quietly dead; others are roaming spirits. In many ways, these distinctions are false and immaterial, for everyone we meet takes up essential space, and there is no meaningful difference between their various states of corporeality/being/presence (a fact which confuses readers trying to keep the characters "straight"). Old Wife, Minnie's "Spirit Guide," is as "real" as Cora Rider grumbling in the music room. When Obie muses about his younger brother Roland, incarcerated in Rikers Island prison for raping a forty-six-year-old black woman, mother of four, Roland's voice and the woman's mopping up her own blood are as clear as Palma and Marcus hugging in the rain. And, like Velma, all of the major figures who need it undergo a healing change.

The healing that constitutes the central plot is a second consideration which dislocates some readers. Without addressing the issue of belief in healing or giving anyone else a chance to do so, Bambara posits its authenticity and describes it with the same faithful nonchalance that she accords to every other human activity. She gives us a picture of Minnie Ransom before her gift unfolded—"jumpy," "down on her knees eating dirt," "racing off to the woods," being called "batty, fixed, possessed, crossed, in deep trouble." And she tries to find a way to explain what Minnie does:

She simply placed her left hand on the patient's spine and her right on the navel, then clearing the channels, putting herself aside, she became available to a healing force no one had yet, to her satisfaction, captured in a name…. On the stool or on the chair with this patient or that, Minnie could dance their dance and match their beat and echo their pitch and know their frequency as if her own…. Calcium or lymph or blood uncharged, congealed and blocked the flow, stopped the dance, notes running into each other in a pileup, the body out of tune, the melody jumped the track, discordant and strident. And she would lean her ear to the chest or place her hand at the base of the spine till her foot tapped and their heads bobbed, till it was melodious once more.

But this is all music and metaphor, not intended to convince anyone of anything, but to say what can be said, leave us with it, and get on with the work. It is also interesting that Bambara shows "ordinary" people "tuning in" to what is actually happening. When Minnie—out-of-body—follows Old Wife to their "chapel," even Dr. Meadows, a skeptic, intuits that her "essential self [had] gone off" maybe to "a secret rendezvous in the hills." And, at a later point, scary Nadeen "saw something drop away from Mrs. Henry's face," watched her wrist scars heal, and compared the miracle she was witnessing to the spurious healings of revival tents and spooky nighttime sessions in the woods—all the while saying to herself, "This was the real thing."

Bambara's handling of this healing stems from the fact that she believes in "the spiritual arts"—that is, all those avenues of knowing/being which are opposed to the "rational," "Western," "scientific" mode: telepathy and other psychic phenomena; astrology; dream analysis; numerology; colorology; the Tarot; past life glances and reincarnation; the Ouija board; reading auras, palms, tea leaves, cards, and energy maps; throwing cowrie shells; herbal and folk medicine; voices, visions, and signs; witches, loa, swamphags; saints, dinns, and devas; the "ancient wisdoms"; the power of prayer; "root men … conjure women … obeah folks"; divination; demons; and so on. This material is incorporated throughout the text—sometimes casually, at other times quite pointedly. Participants at the healing are "visibly intent on decoding the flickering touch of mind on mind." Travelers on the bus experience a "moment of correspondence—phenomena, noumena—when the glimpse of the life script is called dream, déjà vu, clairvoyance, intuition, hysteria, hunger, or called nothing at all." M'Dear instructs Velma about dreams: "The dream is one piece, the correct picturing of impressions another. Then interpretation, then action." Astrological references abound.

Bambara struggles with the problem of finding words and ways to communicate these forms of knowledge for which we, as yet, have no adequate vocabulary. Readers most versed in these spiritual arts (and in this new age, that number is growing) understand the work most deeply. The fact that The Master's Mind wears yellow and white works on a generally symbolic level, but resonates on other frequencies if one considers that yellow is the hue of intellect and a saint's nimbus and that white is the harmonious blending of all colors. The basic meaning of the number twelve will be easily grasped; but everyone will not know to reduce the year 1871 (when the Infirmary was built) and the 107 years it has been standing to their root "8," which signifies worldly involvement and regeneration. Then, there is Cleotus Brown, "The Hermit." Porter is planning to study with him when he is killed; Doc Serge directs Butch to him for answers to his impertinent questions; he himself appears incognito/in disguise to Jan (with Ruby), eerily reminding her of something she should/does know but cannot quite remember. He is the arcane figure from the Tarot (which Jan reads), who symbolizes the right, initiatory path to real knowledge and truth. These three slight examples suggest how the entire novel can be annotated in this manner. Integrally related here, too, are the recurring symbols of mud, blood, salt, circles, mirrors, sight, water (rain), fire, snakes, and serpents.

Devising a vocabulary and symbology for communicating spiritual matters is only one aspect of Bambara's general quest for an adequate language and structure. She says: "I'm just trying to tell the truth and I think in order to do that we will have to invent, in addition to new forms, new modes and new idioms." [The author notes: "This quote and the following two come from 'Searching for the Mother Tongue,' an interview with Toni Cade Bambara by Kalamu ya Salaam in First World 2:4 (1980)."] The process is an arduous one, beginning with the word, the first unit of meaning:

I'm trying to break words open and get at the bones, deal with symbols as though they were atoms. I'm trying to find out not only how a word gains its meaning, but how a word gains its power.

It is further manifested in the overall composition of the book, Bambara's "avoidance of a linear thing in favor of a kind of jazz suite." Predictably, this approach results in a novel of extraordinary brilliance and density that swirls the reader through multiple layers of sound and sense.

The literal plot, which takes place in less than two hours, is almost negligible. However, while Velma and Minnie rock on their stools, other characters are proceeding with their lives. We follow first one and then another of them through the twelve chapters of the book. The effect is to recreate the discretely random, yet touching, simultaneity of everyday existence. A unifying focus—something shared in common by everyone—is the annual spring festival of celebration and rebirth. This basic structure, though, is complicated further by the near-seamless weaving in of flashbacks, flashforwards, dreams, and visions.

It is this dimension of the novel's technique that dismays many people and causes them to complain that they "can't tell what's really happening." In essence, this is a pointless lament, for, writing in this way, Bambara is attempting to convey that everything happening is real, occurring merely on different reality planes (some of which we have been taught to discount as immaterial). The characters slip easily in and out among these levels while Bambara solidly captures it all. Not surprisingly, this is the undifferentiated way that we remember the book. Porter's plunging his bus into the swamp, or Minnie's seducing Meadows on her porch while swinging her suedes and serving him tea—events that did not take place on this level—are no less distinct than Lil James bending from his bike to tie the laces of his No. 13 sneakers or Guela Khufu nee Tina Mason dancing around her studio. What Bambara implies is that our dreams are as vivid as our waking activities—and just as real.

Tied in with this view of multiple reality planes is an equally complex conception of time. Time (synonymous with timelessness) is not fixed or one-dimensional or solely horological; instead, it exists in fluid manifestations of its various dimensions. Past, present, and future are convenient, this-plane designations which can, in fact, take place simultaneously. Even though this may be confusing, the novel demonstrates clearly how it works—in both simple and complex ways.

The subjective nature of time is perhaps the easiest idea to show. There are places where moments seem interminable, and others that telescope months and years. The short healing session, for instance, feels much longer. At one point, "several [bystanders] checked their watches, amazed that only five minutes of silence had ensued." Toward the end of Salt, events move swiftly. In the final chapter, scoring the transformations, Bambara strings passages together with the phrase, this-or-that character "would remember"/"would say," and with "by the fall of '83," "the summer of '84," etc. Commentators have criticized this section as a hasty tying up of loose ends. [The author offers as an example Susan Lardner's article "Third Eye Open," The New Yorker 56 (5 May 1980).] It seems more important to see it as Bambara, once again, writing mimetically, here echoing the swiftness with which change occurs once the pivotal breakthrough has been won.

A less accessible notion of time (and being) governs the "she might have died" section of chapter 12 immediately prior to Velma's cure. It begins with Velma recalling possible ways she might have died earlier this lifetime—but did not. With only this sentence beginning, "And the assistants lifted her on the litter and carried her out of doors to the straw mat in the courtyard," it shifts to Velma, "some lives ago," having her return to health celebrated by her people with dancing and the reading of signs. "Be calm," Minnie croons next, in a paragraph of the present that pushes Velma "back into the cocoon of the shawl where she died again"—here, in a number of ways which range from the historical (being killed waiting in a six-block-long gas line) to the imaginary ("the taking of food sheds or the Pentagon"). Then follows the horrible visions of the burial grounds and the young mutants—still couched in the past tense of "might have been." After the children's attack, Velma lies on her back in the ruined city street remembering her this-time childhood and thinking:

She did not regret the attack of the children. She regretted only as she lay on the straw mat, lay on the ground, pressed between the sacred rock, lying on her back under the initiation knife …, regretted only as … she bled [from the clitoridectomy] and the elder packed cobwebs and mud that would not dam the gush and she bled on as she'd dreamt she would.

In these sentences, Bambara slides without warning or guidepost into Velma's other lives and times. How she does this—coupled with her general ontological view—accounts, in large measure, for the original style and structure of Salt.

Its design is concomitantly determined by the deliberate way that "everything becomes a kind of metaphor for the whole" ["Searching for the Mother Tongue"]. Bambara herself explains it this way:

We have to put it all together…. The masseur, in my mind is the other half of the potter, in the sense that to raise the clay you've got to get the clay centered. The potter's wheel is part of the whole discussion of circles.

All of the images and symbols coalesce in this interlocking fashion.

Although Bambara has become a novelist with Salt, her "druthers as writer, reader, and teacher is the short story" ["What It Is I Think I'm Doing Anyhow," in The Writer on Her Work, edited by Janet Sternburg, 1980]. (In fact, The Salt Eaters originated as a story about a Mardi Gras society reenacting an old slave insurrection.) One of the principal vehicles she uses to make the stretch from short fiction to novel is her rhetoric. "An elaborator by nature," [according to Susan Lardner] she joys in language and writes best when she feels free to pull out all the stops. In fact, she is similar to her character Buster, who can not rest until he has found the verbal "likes" (similes) to pin down a situation. Her penchant for drawn-out precision is very apparent in the "frozen moment" passages which "stop action" a scene, then exhaustively limn its every detail—for example, when Porter announces five minutes to Claybourne, or when the rumble of thunder is heard.

Another source of Bambara's rhetoric is her racial identity. No one writing today can beat her at capturing the black voice—Cora "reading" Anna's whist playing; Ruby loud-talking the "blood" in the Blues Brothers T-shirt; the "Black-say" of "How's your hammer hanging?"; the marvelous encomium to black musicians or Minnie "going off" on the wasteful bickering of the younger generation. Everyone who has read the book can leaf to a favorite passage. Generally speaking Bambara is more rhetorical than lyrical. Yet, she can write the following:

They send a child to fetch Velma from her swoon and fetch a strong rope to bind the wind, to circle the world while they swell the sea with song. She is the child they sent. She is the song.

While it is not her usual mode, the poetic sensibility glistening here underlies the novel, giving it emotional appeal and beauty.

Form and rhetoric become even more important for Bambara because they enable her to talk about the spiritual-political dichotomy that is the critical equation in Salt. She explains this novelistic intention:

… there is a split between the spiritual, psychic, and political forces in my community…. It is a wasteful and dangerous split. The novel grew out of my attempt to fuse the seemingly separate frames of reference of the camps; it grew out of an interest in identifying bridges; it grew out of a compulsion to understand how the energies of this period will manifest themselves in the next decade. ["What It Is I Think I'm Doing Anyhow"]

Often this schism is referred to explicitly—for example, as "the two camps of adepts still wary of the other's way." One side complains: "Causes and issues. They're vibrating at the mundane level." The other counters: "Spirit this and psychic that. Escapism. Irresponsible, given the objective conditions." It is embodied in the verbal skirmishes between Ruby, a 1960s-vintage politico, and Jan, an astrologist, and kept constantly to the fore in the ubiquitous images of split and wholeness. The point is that we contain both of these sides (as Sophie says, "We're all clairvoyant if we'd only know it") and that this enervating schizophrenia must be healed individually and collectively.

This is the hard-learned lesson which Velma objectifies. She breaks down being solely political and relentlessly logical, and gets well when she comes into conscious possession of her spiritual being. As a young girl, Velma's search for the missing something in her life begins when she runs from church to tunnel her way to China in the rain. She matured into a truly dedicated civil rights worker, committed even to the dirty and thankless behind-the-scenes toil. One march (later the subject of bitter memories) she completes swollen-footed and beginning her menstrual period with a raggedy tampon in a filthy gas station toilet, while "The Leader" steps cool, pressed, and superficial from his air-conditioned limousine. Married to Obie, Velma keeps her life on the line—adopting a baby after she miscarries, filling jobs as a computer programmer (and being interrogated for security leaks), playing piano for the Seven Sisters, and working so hard at the Academy that it takes "[Obie], Jan, Marcus (when he was in town), Daisy Moultrie and her mother (when they could afford to pay them), the treasurer of the board, and two student interns to replace" her. In addition, she somehow manages to hold together the various factions, keeping things "all of a piece."

Immediately prior to her breakdown, she cannot relax, frightens Obie, upsets their son, goes on walking/talking jags, disappears, has an affair after Obie begins sleeping around, and gets described as a "crackpot." The most telling detail is when she "had come to the table stiff-necked and silent and bitten right through her juice glass." Ruby describes her as being guarded, defended; Obie begs her to let go of old pains. But Velma, who had thought herself immune to the sting of the serpent, succumbs—slits her wrists and thrusts her head into a gas oven hunting for inviolable stillness, "to be that unavailable at last, sealed in and the noise of the world, the garbage, locked out." It is the price she pays for blotting out the mud mothers as a child, for seeking at the swamp with a willful spirit, and, finally, for running from the answer when it stares her in the face:

Something crucial had been missing from the political/economic/social/cultural/aesthetic/military/psychosocial/psychosexual mix. And what could it be? And what should she do? She'd been asking it aloud one morning combing her hair, and the answer had almost come tumbling out of the mirror naked with serrated teeth and hair alive, birds and insects peeping out at her from the mud-heavy hanks of the ancient mothers' hair. And she had fled feverish and agitated from the room,… fled lest she be ensorceled, fled finally into a sharp and piercing world, fled into the carbon cave.

Velma is fleeing from her own reflection; from wisdom which is primitive, intuitive, unconscious; from thought, imagination, magic, self-contemplation, change, ambivalence, past memories and images, the multiple possibilities of her soul, passage to "the other side"—all symbolized by the mud mothers and the mirror. Spiraling upward from her dangerous descent, she makes these connections, calling Minnie's jugs and bowls by their right names of govi and zin that she did not even know she knew, seeing for the first time the "silvery tendrils" of auric light and energy extending about her. Only then does she rise on steady legs, throwing "off the shawl that drops down on the stool a burst cocoon." In a less dramatic fashion, this is the spiritual breakthrough achieved by other characters, with varying degrees of import and transformation—Nadeen becomes a woman, Fred sees Porter in the streets, Meadows vows to give the Hippocratic oath some real meaning in his life.

Actually, however, undergirding this emphasis on spiritual unification is Bambara's belief (shared by geniuses and mystics) that all knowledge systems are really one system and that "everything is everything," that the traditional divisions are artificial and merely provide the means for alienating schisms. This basic epistemology is one reason why The Salt Eaters is such a "heavy" book. With its universal scope, it demands our intelligent participation in disciplines and discourse other than our narrowly conceived own—ancient and modern history, world literature, anthropology, mythology, music, astronomy, physics, biology, mathematics, medicine, political theory, chemistry, philosophy, and engineering. Allusions to everything from space-age technology through Persian folklore to black American blues comfortably jostle each other (and the reader—but perhaps not so comfortably).

The prodigy-journalist Campbell flashes on the truth about the oneness of knowledge,

Knew in a glowing moment that all the systems were the same at base—voodoo, thermodynamics, I Ching, astrology, numerology, alchemy, metaphysics, everybody's ancient myths—they were interchangeable, not at all separate much less conflicting.

Knowing this, he is able "to discuss fission in terms of billiards, to couch principles of thermonuclear dynamics in the language of down-home Bible-quoting folks." And he can ultimately write with assurance:

Damballah [a popular voodoo deity, associated with water, lightning, and the serpent-snake] is the first law of thermodynamics and is the Biblical wisdom and is the law of time and is … everything that is now has been before and will be again in a new way, in a changed form, in a timeless time.

Amen. Campbell is a projection of the author's own incredibly associative mind. She keeps us alert with her constant yoking together of far-flung, but perfectly matched, bits of information—as when she refers to today's "screw-thy-neighbor paperbacks" as "the modern grimoires of the passing age," making an ironically appropriate comparison between our sex and selfishness "manuals," and the old textbooks of instructions for summoning the devil and performing other darkly magical feats.

Just as Bambara stresses unity throughout, so too is the political vision she screens in Salt a holistic one—an analysis that tries to be both total and coherent. The best example of how lifesaving connections among issues are made is this pointed exchange between Jan and Ruby:

"All this doomsday mushroom-cloud end-of-planet numbah is past my brain. Just give me the good ole-fashioned honky-nigger shit. I think all this ecology stuff is a diversion."

"They're connected. Whose community do you think they ship radioactive waste through … What parts of the world do they test-blast in? And all them illegal uranium mines dug up on Navajo turf—the crops dying, the sheep dying, the horses, water, cancer…. And the plant on the Harlem River and—Ruby, don't get stupid on me."

The tacit reproof is that neither should we, the readers, opt for a reductionist and divisive theory. All revolutionary causes and movements must be addressed if we are to "rescue the planet" and redefine power as "the human responsibility to define, transform, and develop" ["What It Is I Think I'm Doing Anyhow"].

This message (for community organizers, especially) goes out in what Bambara conceptualizes as a "call" to bridge the gap between "artists and activists, materialists and spiritualists, old and young, and of course the communities of color." This task (embodied in the Seven Sisters) is particularly timely now when many seasoned political workers are beginning to devote themselves more exclusively to their art or to seemingly privatistic personal development. In specific terms, Bambara shows "Women for Action" breaking away from sexist black politicians and independently tackling the problems of "drugs, prisons, alcohol, the schools, rape, battered women, abused children … the nuclear power issue." M'Dear Sophie even feeds her boarders "natural growth," no "food in tin cans on shelves for months and months and aged meat developing in people's system an affinity for killed and old and dead things"—although Cecile is allowed to wisecrack about "plant-life sandwiches with cobwebs."

The movement which is least concretely handled in the novel is lesbian and homosexual rights. "Gays" are cataloged in one or two lists; a joke of sorts is made about Ahiro "hitting on" Obie; and there is a surreal encounter between Meadows and a group of wacky male cross-dressers whose sexuality is left in doubt (who legitimately symbolize the confusion, chaos, and social inversion of carnival). This scant and indirect attention—especially in such a panoramic work which so wonderfully treats everything else—is unrealistic and all the more glaring. It indicates, perhaps, that for the black community at the heart of the novel, unabashed recognition of its lesbian and homosexual members and participation in their political struggle is, in a very real sense, the final frontier.

For—her cosmopolitan inclusiveness notwithstanding—the Afro-American community is clearly Bambara's main concern. She is asking: Where are we now? Where should we be heading? How do we get there? Above all, she wants black people to "get it together." This is crisis time, but the beginning of a new age, the last quarter, the end of the twentieth jumping into the twenty-first century. The Salt Eaters is about love and change. It challenges: "When did it begin for you?"—when the future was ushered in with a thunderbolt that transfixed people, opening up the Third Eye and clearing the way for useful visionary action in this world. The question feels almost apocalyptic, and resounds with the fervor of Minnie's "Don't they know we on the rise?" "On the subject of Black anything," the wisdom remains the same:

Dispossessed, landless, this and that-less and free, therefore to go anywhere and say anything and be everything if we'd only know it once and for all. Simply slip into the power, into the powerful power hanging unrecognized in the back-hall closet.

Two versions of the future are given. One is an in-process sketch of a humanitarian society newly evolving from the death of "the authoritarian age." The other is a nightmarish glimpse of "everyone not white, male and of wealth" fighting for burial grounds, of radioactively mutant kids roaming the stockaded streets killing "for the prize of … gum boots, mask and bubble suit" needed to breathe the contaminated air. Yes, there are "choices to be noted. Decisions to be made." This ultimatum is the burden of the question that Minnie repeatedly puts to Velma: "Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?"—for health entails taking responsibility for the self and the world we live in. Years after her healing, Velma "would laugh remembering she'd though that was an ordeal. She didn't know the half of it. Of what awaited her in years to come."

Concern for a viable future explains the emphasis which Bambara places upon children, the succeeding generations. Unfortunately, they, too, are suffering from the vacuity of the age:

… there was no charge, no tension, no stuff in these young people's passage. They walked by you and there was no breeze of merit, no vibes. Open them up and you might find a skate key, or a peach pit, or a Mary Jane wrapper, or a slinky, but that would be about all.

They want a sweet, easy life, and they fight each other. Like their elders, they, too, have to be saved from and for themselves, for, as Old Wife declares, "The chirren are our glory."

As a self-described "Pan-Africanist-socialist-feminist," [in "What It Is I Think I'm Doing Anyhow,"] Bambara not only cares about children, but manifests a political consciousness which makes her a socially committed writer. It was quite some time, she says, before she "began to realize that this [writing] was a perfectly legitimate way to participate in struggle" ["Searching for the Mother Tongue"]. Now she fulfills what Kalamu ya Salaam defines as the "responsibility of revolutionary Third World writers": "to cut through this [mass media] crap, to expose the cover-ups and ideological/material interests inherent in these presentations, and … to offer analysis, inspiration, information and ideas which … work in the best interest of Third World defense and development."

Her life experiences have provided ground for this mission, beginning, no doubt, even before 1948 when, in her words, "my first friend, teacher, map maker, landscape aide Mama Helen …, having come upon me daydreaming in the middle of the kitchen floor, mopped around me." [The author comments that this quote is taken from the dedicatory page of The Salt Eaters.] Born and bred in New York City, she took a 1959 B.A. from Queens College in Theater Arts/English Literature, and a 1963 M.A. from the City College of New York in Modern American Literature. In the arts, her training has included traditional and modern dance, trapeze, theater, mime, film, weaving, pottery, watercolor, acrylics, oils, and basketry. She has worked as a welfare investigator, community center program director, university English professor, and artist-in-residence, while consulting for various organizations and rendering service to such institutional and community groups as the Gowanus Neighborhood Houses and the Livingston College Black Studies Curriculum Committee. Lectures; workshops on black women, black literature, and writing; television, radio, and tape programs; book reviews and articles; and, of course, her fiction writing have all occupied her. From 1968 to the present, she has "read prose works at high schools, elementary schools, college campuses, factories, in prisons, over radio, at bookstores, at conferences, at rallies." Ultimately, one suspects that Velma's spiritual journey echoes the author's own, and that more than a little of the novel is autobiographically generated.

Bambara's outlook—and this is one of her greatest strengths—is consistently positive. She will have none of the despair and negativity which is always being passed around:

As for my own writing, I prefer the upbeat. It pleases me to blow three or four choruses of just sheer energetic fun and optimism, even in the teeth of rats, racists, repressive cops, bomb lovers, irresponsibles, murderers. I am convinced, I guess, that everything will be all right. ["What It Is I Think I'm Doing Anyhow"]

But her optimism is not blind. One of the ways she uses its reality is in the portraiture of her characters. To a certain extent, the "together" ones are larger-than-life super people—Doc Serge, for instance (in some ways a questionable personality), who can manage smoothly anything from a "stable" of prostitutes to a community hospital. His outrageous paean of self-praise is not simply "fun," but the revelation of a mighty secret: "that self-love produces the gods and the gods are genius."

The Seven Sisters provide another example. They are simultaneously engaged in myriad projects, always thinking and doing, being political and creative, smart and hip, all at the same time. On Porter's bus, making him nervous with their "unbridled bosoms," "bossy T-shirts," and "baffling" talk, they do everything from argue Marx to write a skit on John Henry and Kwan Cheong, to overhaul their cameras and tape recorders. Through such characters, the novel presents models to strive toward. True, they are ideals of sorts, but they are near enough in contour to familiar prototypes to function as possible, actualized versions of our daily existence. Thus, through them, too, we apprehend the truth of the street exhorter's cry: "The dream is real, my friends. The failure to make it work is the unreality."

Bambara is also creating from her identity as a woman writer. Demonstrably, women are at the novel's center. Other aspects of it, too, are very female—references to "the moony womb," "the shedding of skin on schedule," and the synchrony of Palma's and Velma's menstrual clocks; the sister love between Nilda and Cecile who wear each other's hats; Obie's precise description of Velma's orgasm as "the particular spasm … the tremor begin[ning] at the tip of his joint" which it had taken him two years living with her to recognize; M'Dear's teaching that the "master brain" was in the "uterus, where all ideas sprung from and were nurtured and released to the lesser brain in the head." Such intimate attention parallels Bambara's larger interest in "Black women and other women, particularly young women," in "that particular voice and stance that they're trying to find":

I think they have a really tremendous contribution to make because no one else has their vantage point. No one moves in the universe in quite that way, in all the silences that have operated in the name of I don't know what: "peace," "unity," and some other kinds of bogus and ingratiating thing. ["Searching for the Mother Tongue"]

Like them, Bambara searches for a "new vocabulary of images" which, when found, is "stunning … very stunning."

First at the beginning, and then finally at the end, of studying the novel, one must reckon with its initially strange name. Of the three working titles which Bambara used to help her stay focused—"In the Last Quarter," "The Seven Sisters," and "The Salt Eaters"—this is the one she retained. Her explanation of its meaning suggests two applications:

Salt is a partial antidote for snakebite…. To struggle, to develop, one needs to master ways to neutralize poisons. "Salt" also keeps the parable of Lot's Wife to the fore. Without a belief in the capacity for transformation, one can become ossified. ["What It Is I Think I'm Doing Anyhow"]

This title also calls into the subconscious images related to the folk concepts of "swallowing a bitter pill" and "breaking bread together." There are many allusions to salt in the novel, but they are not as numerous as references to some of the other major symbols. While the image of "The Salt Eaters" condenses the essence of this grand work, it does not reverberate all of its colors.

Providing the exegetical glossing to thoroughly illuminate The Salt Eaters would require multiple volumes. Because the book is such a mind-expanding experience, it must, ultimately, be read and reread. [In "What It Is I Think I'm Doing Anyhow"] Bambara says that she "came to the novel with a sense that everything is possible." We leave it feeling that yes, indeed, everything is.