A title with a religious allusion ["From Baptism to Resurrection: Toni Cade Bambara and the Incongruity of Language"] may seem inappropriate for an essay on the works of Toni Cade Bambara since religion, i.e., Christianity, as it is often depicted in the works of Black writers with their depictions of hair straightening, signifying in church, and preacher men—sometimes more physically passionate than spiritually—is conspicuously absent here. In fact, many of the usual concerns, about color and class, frequently found in the writings of other Black women prosaists, are absent. Bambara appears less concerned with mirroring the Black existence in America than in chronicling "the movement" intended to improve and change that existence. Like a griot, who preserves the history of his or her people by reciting it, Bambara perpetuates the struggle of her people by literally recording it in their own voices.

Her three major works of fiction, Gorilla, My Love (1972), The Sea Birds Are Still Alive (1977), and The Salt Eaters (1980), trace the civil rights movement in America from its inception, through its most powerful expression, to its loss of momentum. Each uses language to particularize and individualize the voices of the people wherever they are—on a New York City street, crossing the waters of the Pacific, amid the red salt clay of the Louisiana earth—and to celebrate their progress as they think, feel, and act in their struggle to be free.

But, paradoxically, while Bambara uses language to capture the speech patterns of the characters she idomatically places in their time and space, Bambara eschews language, words, rhetoric, as the modus operandi for the people to attain their freedom. For Bambara, an innate spirituality, almost mystical in nature, must be endemic to the people if they are to have success. Her works juxtapose the inadequacy of language and the powers of the spirit, which needs no words to spread its light among the masses.

Words are only barriers to communication, here, in Bambara's first collection of short stories, Gorilla, My Love; a smile, a howl, a touch, a look, a hum, are the instruments with which her characters play in an attempt to communicate their joy, frustration, pain, confusion, and alienation.

These stories are all female ones, almost sung by Bambara in a first-person narrative voice reminiscent of the Negro spirituals with their strongly marked rhythms and highly graphic descriptions. Standard English is not so much put aside as displaced by constant repetition, a repetition bringing to mind the speech habits of a child who in just learning language constantly repeats himself, not fully convinced that language alone can communicate those needs and feelings so recently and so effectively expressed in tears and smiles.

And the childlike voices seem right here, and belong here, for each story is a vernal one—even those told by women who have long ceased to be girls—because each story is of initiation, of baptism, where the narrator is schooled in the ways of a world often cruel, more often disinterested, and rarely fair.

Gorilla, My Love precurses the eventual flowering of "the movement" which, in this collection, is in its infancy. "My Man Bovanne," its first story, gets its impetus from the Black Power Movement, just beginning. The younger generation has begun to cast off its slave names for African ones, but it is spouting a rhetoric that reveals its infantilism, for it has also cast off the old folks, "the nation," which the story's narrator Miss Hazel knows, but which her children still have to learn. Until they do, Miss Hazel must suffer the indignities that her children, who "ain't kids no more. To hear them tell it," put her through for "[d]ancin with that tom," Bovanne. "A blind old man who mostly fixed skates and scooters for these folks when they was just kids."

Miss Hazel's been around, "don't grown men call me long distance in the middle of the night for a little Mama comfort?" but she is a novice in this new generation that "don't hardly say nothin to me direct no more since that ugly argument about my wigs." Without Bovanne, with his "blown-out fuses" for eyes, his "hummin jones," and a stomach that "talks like a drum," Miss Hazel would feel lost in an environment that seems to her to have changed overnight. She is a victim of a movement still in the process of definition and like the newborn babe who copes with sudden, overwhelming, and unfamiliar stimuli by clinging to its mother, Miss Hazel "belly rubs" with Bovanne, because he is safe and familiar and his "touch talkin" reassures her that even though words may change and names may change, some things stay the same. Her need for "sameness" in a changing world, and her mistrust for words, which are too often used rhetorically, is exemplified by her repetitious speech which reiterates that Bovanne is "just a nice old man," the same "nice old man" who used to fix skates.

Miss Hazel may not be able to abort the "generation gap" she feels separates herself and her children, but she can "speak the speak" (a recurrent phrase in Bambara's works) and put words into action. She derives a distinct and deserved satisfaction from turning the younger generation's rhetoric back on them and doing her part for the "old folks" by taking Bovanne home "just like the hussy my daughter always say I was."

But the young girl, also named Hazel, in the story "Gorilla, My Love" has not been around as long as the Miss Hazel of "My Man Bovanne" and does not yet know how to "speak the speak." "Gorilla, My Love," which like "My Man Bovanne" deals with a "generation gap," or to phrase it more aptly a "communications gap" (a central motif running through all of Bambara's tales), also focuses on changing how one sees oneself by changing what one calls oneself, although in this case it is "[n]ot a change up, but a change back." The young Hazel's Hunca Bubba has fallen in love and has chosen to resume his Christian name before he marries. Hazel's naïveté, evidenced by her belief that when "gangsters in the movies say My word is my bond" they mean it, relegates her to laconic tears when she learns that Hunca Bubba is not going to keep his promise and marry her when she grows up. Like the older Hazel, this young one feels out of place in a world where people—this time grown-ups—accept that words can be played with, twisted, ignored, or just forgotten, and sympathize with Hunca Bubba, who has gone back on his word because he is Jefferson Winston Vale now, and it was Hunca Bubba who made the promise.

The incongruity of language becomes portentous now, for where it should serve as a means of bringing people closer together, it is too often used to force them apart. The spiritual kinship Hazel experiences with her brother, who is not old enough to talk or to understand her tears, but who cries with her, is worth more to Bambara than the words of apology Hazel would like from her uncle, who has already demonstrated that his word is not reliable.

The paradoxical nature of Bambara's fictions manifests itself again when one realizes that, although each of these stories is narrated by a female, the pivotal character is male. Even in "The Lesson," where an individual male's action does not provoke the narration of the tale, "the man" as entity, strikes the discordant note in the soul of a young Black girl, when a community worker forces her to visit F. A. O. Schwarz and to see with her own eyes what words cannot communicate—the needless oppression of her people by the white man.

This is not to intimate that in each story the male's presence strikes a bitter chord. In "Raymond's Run," as a young girl waits to hear if she has won the race, it is the sight of her retarded brother who has nothing of his own, and her recognition that she could do nothing better than to help him to something of his own, that makes her a winner, even before the loudspeaker pronounces it so. A real winner, one who can look at her stiffest competition "with this big smile of respect … about as real a smile as girls can do for each other."

Success and failure for Bambara is directly proportional to one's ability to almost extrasensorily communicate to another the emotions one feels. The winners in her tales all know how to "speak the speak" and to ensure that their actions speak louder than words.

In "Blues Ain't No Mockin Bird" one feels the closeness and the potency of the granddaddy and granny who can recognize and respond to each other's wordless signals. Their actions—her humming, his killing a hawk with a hammer and squishing a movie camera with his hand—achieve what they both want, what their words could not do, and get the white film crew, who has been nosing around their property, to move on.

But "Blues" is unique to Gorilla, My Love for it delineates the one story in this collection in which male and female cooperatively harmonize. Characters in the other tales seem unable to approach this type of man-woman symmetry. Diametrically, in "Talkin Bout Sonny," a man named Sonny, who has never been able to disclose what is inside of him, can only remark that "something came over him" after he takes a pickax to his wife's throat.

With the exception of "Blues," it is only when women come together in these stories that the spiritual communion Bambara feels must exist, before real communication can take place, occurs. In "Maggie of the Green Bottles," the ignorance of a newborn baby girl's grandfather, who wrote "enspire" for "inspire" in the family Bible, draws Maggie, who has been disappointed by life and has given herself up to dipsomania and the study of the occult, into taking over the education and indoctrination of her great-granddaughter so the males in the family do not limit her possibilities.

A similar symbiotic, almost speechless relationship between an older woman and her niece is presented in "The Survivor," the only story in this collection written in the third person past tense, and the least successful, I feel, because of it; its stream-of-consciousness, flashback structure obfuscates, and its images appear contrived. The substitution of the first person present tense for the thoughts of the niece—who is about to give birth—diminishes the story's immediacy and poignancy. The sophisticated, metaphoric language used to describe Jewel's thoughts—a language that will reappear in The Salt Eaters—seems schizophrenic and masks the events that alienated the women from their mates and left them survivors. While I sense that Bambara wishes to depict strong, courageous, resolute women who are, at the very least, the equal of the male, the male's presence in each of these stories, and the female's failure to spiritually connect with the male in most of the stories, renders the female ambiguous at best, unless Bambara wants us to see all males as gorillas, which the incongruousness of this volume's title does suggest.

The last story in this collection, "The Johnson Girls," deals exclusively with the pain that male-female relationships have in store for women. It is a good story with which to end Gorilla, My Love, for even though its narrator has not yet experienced what it is like to love a man, she is more educated—streetwise and schoolwise—than most of the other females in these tales, and she is mature enough to recognize that words must be put into action. Although she is the youngest of the four women who sit around filling their stomachs to assuage the ache in their hearts, and although she is only allowed the scraps of food that they leave, she is the one to take command and ask to see the note that Roy left Inez, when Roy left Inez, which is the event that spurred this feast and confab. "The Johnson Girls" foreshadows The Sea Birds Are Still Alive in both its food imagery and its characters, women like Inez and "her sisters," who are willing to unite and to fight for what they feel is rightfully theirs.

The characters in The Sea Birds Are Still Alive are no longer neophytes. "The movement" is in its most virulent stage and the people are educated and actively aware. The plaintive voice of the spiritual, which permeated Gorilla, My Love, has given way to the more upbeat, modernistic cadences of blues and jazz, just as the people have evolved from being acted upon to acting on. Little otherworldliness imbues these tales; they take place in the present and the time is now for all good men and all good women to come to the aid of oppressed people wherever they are.

The winners, here, are the activists, who are totally integrated into the community and who work tirelessly and endlessly to coalesce the people so their combined energies can defeat the oppressor. Food imagery dominates these stories, as does the need to "feed the people"; food assumes a symbolic role, supplying both the physical and the spiritual sustenance the people need if they are to succeed in their struggle.

Language takes on a dichotomous function, revealing both the education and the alienation of its more sophisticated users, whose greater fluency in the English language make them even less intelligible to the people to whom they most need to relate.

The male sociologist in "A Tender Man"—the only Bambara tale told from a man's perspective—expresses this dichotomy of language as he reviews his life and choices while he dines in an Indian restaurant with his soon-to-be colleague, whom he hopes to make his lover. She seems to want a relationship too, but she feels she must first let him know that she is planning to adopt his daughter, whom she knows he does not even know she knows, because she has decided the girl would be better off if she were to be raised by a Black mother instead of the white one, who is her own.

The man is not as stunned by her revelation as he is chagrined and filled with remorse for both siring a biracial child and then, when the marriage ended in divorce, not actively seeking custody of the child.

As the two sit chatting, unable to "speak the speak," eating a food that is not "soul food," one feels how far they have both gotten away from their roots. With every mouthful of food and its accompanying exchange, the two move further and further away from what each set out to do, as they allow their words to camouflage their thoughts. It is only after they have finished their "mint tea" and Indian pastries that they are able to see what they might be throwing away: a meaningful relationship between a tender Black man and a caring Black woman; both want to right things, they need only to act.

Most of the stories in The Sea Birds are stories of people being drawn together, not of people being torn apart. Most of the characters have begun to think in terms of "we," instead of "me," and Bambara's words describe that which is and that which can be in a literate, highly descriptive style that makes one feel the cold of a New York City winter day, the warmth of a cup of hot cocoa, the stench of a pee-drenched building, and the noncaring of an architect who would design a project without regard for children. Ironically, however, with the exception of "Medley," which has a beat all its own, Bambara's first-person narrative tales are prosaic and didactic precisely because her characters' actions speak more forcefully than her characters' words, which seem to fall flat and offer a lukewarm denouement to an anticipated climax. It is as if the maturation, which has brought about the awareness and the desire to put words into action, which the characters in The Sea Birds share, has stripped them of the flavorful earthiness of the more naïve characters found in Gorilla, My Love. The relatively sophisticated, standard English language spoken by most of The Sea Birds' characters seems unequal to the task of organizing the people, for it is bereft of soul. Although these characters do speak, they have lost the ability to "speak the speak" and to find the middle ground between the two.

"The Apprentice" describes the personal sacrifices the community activists have to make to nurture and prepare the people for the struggle ahead. "Broken Field Running" depicts a similar need, and "Christmas Eve at Johnson's Drugs N Goods" juxtaposes the tinsel emptiness of Christmas with the love and brotherhood of Kwanza.

"The Long Night," describing one woman's vigil during a race riot as the police relentlessly massacre the people, is not mere exposition; its terrifying images, however, are diffused by Bambara's own voice, which seems to intrude upon the story and to cloud its real horror.

"The Long Night" is written in the third-person past tense, as is "A Girl's Story," which appears distinctly out of place in this more evolved Black world Bambara consociates, for where it deals with a young girl coming into her womanhood, her experience is one of guilt, fear, and ugliness.

But "Medley," a blues rendition of one woman's progression from just being to being alive, pulsates with the ups and downs of taking an active role in the shaping of one's own existence. It combines Bambara's food imagery with an animal imagery begun in Gorilla, My Love. It is not just the cantaloupe rinds piled up in the sink with the dirty dishes, which she confronts when she returns from a trip to make the money she needs to have her daughter come live with her, but the dog, who displaced Larry's best friend when Larry realized that the place was just not big enough for the four of them, that makes her know she has sung her last song with Larry. In an anthropomorphic gesture, she kicks the dog, and in so doing says goodbye to Larry, who could hit all the right notes in the shower but was the only musician she had ever heard who could not play on key with a group. Bambara's language peaks and riffs:

Then I was off again and lost Larry somewhere down there doing scales, sound like. And he went back to that first supporting line that had drove me up into the Andes. And he stayed there waiting for me to return and do some more Swahili wailing. But I was elsewhere and liked it out there and ignored the fact that he was aiming for a wind-up of "I Love You More Today Than Yesterday." I sang myself out till all I could ever have left in life was "Brown Baby" to sing to my little girl. Larry stayed on the ground with the same supporting line, and the hot water started getting funny and I knew my time was up. So I came crashing down, jarring the song out of shape, diving back into the melody line and somehow, not even knowing what song each other was doing, we finished up together just as the water turned cold.

Her off notes and her half notes meet and croon the melody of "Medley."

Yet the most exceptional story in this collection, I feel, is "The Sea Birds Are Still Alive," its title story. In it Bambara displays her range of subject and style. Both omniscient and omnipotent, she describes the innermost thoughts and feelings of men, women, and children, of nondelineated race, as they take a forced boat trip to a nondesignated place. Their thoughts as well as their disdain for the woman, who lets her young daughter throw food to the sea birds, reveal their status; they are either the oppressed or the oppressor who see the woman's act of allowing her daughter to feed the birds as one of frivolity or ignorance: the oppressed begrudge the food; the oppressor the stupidity of the people who still do not know that "[b]irds will get vicious when they're fed and rejected … [p]eople as well." Both sides judge and condemn without knowing that the woman is superior to them, for even after "They'd stuffed hoses up her nose and pumped in soapy water, fish brine, water from the district's sewer till her belly swelled up, bloated to nearly bursting" and even after "they beat her with poles, sticks, rods of bamboo, some iron till she vomited, nearly drowning. She told them nothing." Neither side realizes that the food her daughter tosses to the birds was given the woman by one of her torturers and "of course she had expected the sea birds to drop down poisoned into the waters. Had not thought they'd live through the food long enough to attack her." And one recalls Maggie in "Maggie of the Green Bottles," who kicks the dog after she feeds him because, unlike the sea birds, he did not have sense enough to "bite the hand that fed him." Bambara's food imagery blends with her animal imagery and connects the oppressed with the oppressor. Both segments of the populace, if they—unlike the sea birds—are to be satisfied, must rely on revolutionaries like the woman whom they scorn. Her belief that "the most wonderful thing about revolution" is that "[i]t [gives] one a chance to amend past crimes, to change, to be human … that it had not been foolish to fight for the right to be free" is both the oppressed and the oppressor's only chance for redemption.

The Salt Eaters is a novel—Bambara's first—and therefore immediately differentiated from her other works. Its language is the language of the old, convoluted in its twists and turns, its sophistication, its punctuation, and its highly imaginative tones. Its characters speak little, because they have lost the desire to communicate with each other through words. Their thoughts, as conveyed by Bambara, are more real to them than that which is real. We are led to feel that the characters' imaginings are literally true:

They might've been twenty-seven miles back in the moment of another time when Fred Holt did ram the bus through the railing and rode it into the marshes … No one remarked on any of this or on any of the other remarkable things each sensed but had no habit of language for, though felt often and deeply, privately. That 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…. The passengers in the bus incident were not so sure where they were either, or why they should be sinking into the marshes, their spirits yawning upward, their eyes throwing up images on the walls of the mind.

It is not until we encounter Palma "holding to the rail to get off the bus," that we, the readers, realize that we have been duped and that, here, the language of the mind has usurped the language of action.

This is why, in the final analysis, The Salt Eaters does not work. Bambara's gift of language turns back on itself, as she uses language, which she has already demonstrated is not efficacious, to create characters who must eschew language if they are to communicate. As a result, Bambara cannot describe with words (and must leave to the reader's imagination) the resurrection that occurs at the end of this novel that finally sets the people free.

Velma, the central focus of this work, epitomizes the failure of language to provoke positive action. She is an older, disillusioned Naomi from "The Apprentice," who has worked and worked only to see the struggle lose its impetus and the things she fought so hard to achieve, their significance. She has learned that words and action are not enough and decides that she has had enough. She attempts to take her own life, and because she has found that whatever one does is still not enough, she both slits her wrists and sticks her head into an oven to make sure that it will be enough. But she is right, her double attempt at suicide fails. She is miraculously saved from physical death, but lost in a spiritual emptiness that must be filled before she can be whole. Her "insanity," the emptiness inside of her, must be replaced with a spirituality which eventually derives its strength and power from within. She has to find the internal wholeness, the meeting ground between words and actions, that will allow her to continue to positively affect her external surroundings. To accomplish this, all she has to do is to want to be well and spiritually whole; then words and actions can assume their proper place. Velma must put off feeling sorry for herself and perceive that she is the instrument of redemption for her people, as are we all. Like Christ, she must die (at least symbolically) and live again to absolve herself and her people from their current sin of apathy. But, unlike Christ's, her metamorphosis into the world of the spirit derives its strength from her people: African people. She must refind her roots by spiritually imbibing the sweat of her people who have nurtured the earth for centuries.

The narrative voice here is like a funeral dirge. Minnie Ransom plays preacher and her coterie, chorus, as Velma gives up this life for the next, which must be on a higher plane, if the people are to have success. Her spiritual death and resurrection signifies both the ending of the struggle and the beginning of an apocalypse that recognizes that she, just as we, are the light, and the salvation, and the salt which individually and collectively has always seasoned the earth.