The Salt Eaters
[Jackson is an American poet, short story writer, and dramatist. Below, she offers a highly favorable assessment of The Salt Eaters.]
Some extraordinary books define their time. By so doing they become historical events. Some momentous books transform the sense of the time, the order. By so doing they become political movement. Some most rare books are a healing session: they cleanse, rename, baptize, and confirm us as adults, responsible intelligences. They are spiritual acts of a high order and dangerously wonderful.
Some stories, in their telling, extend the language to music; fine tuning the seeming diverse moments of reality into a divine order. By the author's authority we are permitted to see with an eye of the universe; in balancing this, the narrative logic pulls all into place. In this way Vision and Voice, Feeling and Form are one—in awesome perfection. This is High Art.
The Salt Eaters by Toni Cade Bambara is such an extraordinary, momentous, most rare, and visionary story. This is literature in preparation for the Twenty-First Century. It is written in a new time and from another place, a step ahead. The Salt Eaters is strong premonition. It is where we should want to be. Where we will be.
It is a healing time. The healing session begins with these words, "Are you sure, sweetheart, you want to be well?" The question is posed to Velma Henry, a failed suicide, and sister-activist. It is posed to the community from which this sister springs. It is posed to all of us in this African Diasporan Family, by Minnie Ransom, the faith healer of legendary proportions and snazzy mode of dress who heals out of Southwest Community Infirmary. The Infirmary is a long established black institution making people well through an innovative, wholistic approach.
At Minnie Ransom's side throughout most of this healing is Old Wife, a sister-advisor, fleshless, only spirit, full of spunk and spicey wisdom.
A wide array of characters people these pages, all citizens of Claybourne, Georgia. Claybourne is so named because its people are fashioned personally by divinity, with feet of clay; flawed but no less miraculous. And each of these characters is so vital and so idiosyncratically imperfect! Velma, our heroine, is blessedly without complete virtue as she engages in an affair with her guru-advisor. Minnie Ransom, the healer herself, leans happily on the carnal with her yen for fine younger men. A whole span of people travel through these pages with their baggage of ego and desire and divine, human impulse toward evolution.
All are in busy preparation for a Carnival. And all are, unconsciously, in preparation for a new epoch, a decisive shift in the heavens, the arrangement of stars under whose influence we all fall and ascend.
The form of this book, a collection of event, characterization, feeling and idiom, is as complex as any fall of the odus of Ifa in the Yoruba system of prophecy. For The Salt Eaters, fate, faith, and healing make themselves manifest in multiples of changes upon changes inside a great Change.
Bambara's telling is an intellectual challenge and a spiritual one, for you have to be at the point of wellness, on the verge of wholeness to know this tale in a visceral way, to appreciate its magnetic pull into health. The most we are conditioned to know is hum-drum, dead-end emotionalism.
Her charges to us are spiritual then, and political. For politics live and breathe throughout these pages. Political theories become the actual quests and questions they should be: nuclear waste, multicultural alliances, "feminism" or, more appropriately, a politicized sisterhood, commitment to the people, the Seven Principles, black institution building, health care, and personal and collective self-determination. Politics walk alongside the burning issue of a failing marriage. All the bafflements become clear. Call us out and up to commit ourselves to health and warfare.
If you wish to hide from the generous complexity of our existence then run from The Salt Eaters. Continue to look back. Be a pillar of salt. But if you genuinely wish health and wholeness, if you are sure you want to be well, affirmed, exhilarated, and accelerated into the mountaintops of your own divinity, your full capacity of being and performance, your own deep responsible humanity, then reach for these healing words. Take the salt antidote here-in offered us as cure for the bite of the snake, or serpent in whose realm we reside.
Read the genius work of our sister, Toni Cade Bambara. Let the healing of Velma Henry, and the people of Claybourne, be a part of your own healing. Indeed, do not be caught cowering, fractured and frozen, in the coming shift of the sky!
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