Readers following at least two movements will welcome more writing by Toni Cade, who edited The Black Woman two years ago. There she deplored stereotyped sex roles ("merchandising nonsense") and called "for Selfhood, Blackhood," and the study of alternatives buried in Third World history. And she urged especially that the revolution begin at home:

It'll take time. But we have time. We'd better take the time to fashion revolutionary selves, revolutionary lives, revolutionary relationships. Mouth don't win the war. Not all speed is movement. Running off to mimeograph a fuck-whitey leaflet, leaving your mate to brood, is not revolutionary. Hopping a plane to rap to someone else's "community" while your son struggles alone with the Junior Scholastic assignment on "The Dark Continent" is not revolutionary. Sitting around murder-mouthing incorrect niggers while your father goes upside your mother's head is not revolutionary. . . . Ain't no such animal as an instant guerrilla.

In Gorilla, My Love, she takes time for a wide range of black relationships at home and in the neighborhood and for the discovery of complexity in black unity. It is interesting that none of these 15 stories, written in the last 13 years, center on relations between black men and women (though in two, women deal with separation from their lovers). The characters of whom she writes most often and with the greatest tenderness and subtle invention are adolescents and old people, mostly female. It is as if before treating the fraught relations between men and women she must draw in her writing on the knowledge of those for whom sexual conflict is past and those for whom sexual differentiation has not yet become rigid.

I find much of the writing here wonderful and well worth anyone's attention. The stories are often sketchy as to plot, but always lavish in their strokes—there are elaborate illustrations, soaring asides, aggressive sub-plots. They are never didactic, but they abound in far-out common sense, exotic home truths. The black life she draws on—mostly in New York City but sometimes in the rural South—whether bizarre, poignant, or hilarious, is so vividly particularized you don't feel the wisdom or bite till later.

The collection begins, as if in a caveat for ideologues, with the story of Mama Hazel in her 60s being scolded by her nouveau radical children for dancing too close and humming with the old blind man Bovanne at a "grass roots" dance. "I was just talking on the drums,' I explained when they hauled me into the kitchen. I figured drums was my best defense. They can get ready for drums what with all this heritage business. And Bovanne stomach just like that drum Task give me when he come back from Africa. You just touch it and it hum thizzm, thizzm." Affronted, she takes off with Bovanne and plans a showdown by which her family will learn that "old folks is the nation."

Like the old folks, the adolescents are scrupulous about truth to feeling and are surrounded by careless adults and white folk. "Gorilla, My Love" is what it said on a theatre marquee one Easter, but it turned out to be "this raggedy old brown film 'King of Kings'" they show every year. When the manager won't give back her money, the narrator, a young black girl, sets a fire under the candy stand. "Cause if you say Gorilla, My Love, you suppose to mean it. I mean even gangsters in the movies say my word is my bond."

But truth to feeling in adolescent black girls is elusive because their fantasy life lies aslant the real world and partly motivates it—they obey compulsions based on movie melodrama or cause bedlam by slanders based on sexual speculation or draw confidence from their great granny's dream books. These girls move in the world with wise eyes and sassy mouths and bravado. If your opponent gets too threatening, you can always lie up in bed and let it out you have yellow fever.

In the stories I like best of this group, the real world makes some claims that threaten the balance. In "The Lesson," the young narrator, her resources stripped, flees from a bitter demonstration of ill-distributed wealth in a visit to F. A. O. Schwarz. In "The Hammer Man," the tomboy narrator is on her "last fling" before committing herself to young womanhood. She watches her old antagonist, the crazy boy of the neighborhood, talking to himself and shooting baskets on a court at night. When the cops try to interfere, she defends him, but they take him away. By the time she learns he was sent to a state hospital, she is already competing in a fashion show. Here the role of woman is narrow, but safer.

But in "The Johnson Girls," a story extraordinarily rich in funny talk and true pain, the teenage narrator is forced to confront the choices facing strong black women. She watches Inez, a clear, proud woman, surrounded by women friends like Job's comforters, as she packs to go after her man, who has left only a note. Above the battle, Inez has always offered "a tax-free relationship, no demands, no pressure, no games, no jumpin up and down with ultimatums"; one friend points out that this "is the heaviest damn pressure of all." The friends discuss black men. "'One day,' say Sugar, lickin the tomato sauce off her arm, 'what I want's goin to be on the menu. Served up to my taste and all on one plate, so I don't have to clutter up the whole damn table with a teensy bowl of this and plate of extra that and a side order of what the hell.' She shimmy her buns on top of the dresser and plants her feet in the bottom drawer. 'Cause let Sister Sugar hip you bitches, living a la carte is a trip,' Inez says only, 'It's either a la carte of half a loaf.'" But finally she permits her sisters to help her think through what she wants and how to get it. This compromise between solidarity and an impossible ideal of selfhood is instructive for the black women's movement and beyond.

The story ends with swift changes for Inez and the teenager:

"O. K.," said Inez like she never said before and drew her chair up to the suitcase It halted me in my tracks and Gail looked dumbfounded. "O. K.," she said again and something caught me in my ribs. Love love love love love. We all sat down and Inez opened her fist and the keys and the crumpled note fell out on the suitcase. Sugar look at Gail and Gail look at Marcy and Marcy look at me. I look at Inez and she's sittin so forward I see the tremor caterpillar up her back. And I can't breathe. Somebody has opened a wet umbrella in my chest. And I shudder for me at the preview of things to come.

"O. K.," I say, takin command: "Let's first deal with the note."

"Right," say Gail, and lights my cigarette.

Footnote on style. One reviewer wrote of this collection, "Black English is spoken here." It's a term that has not been around for many years, but I know I'll be very tired of it the next time it is used in reviewing serious prose. By itself, it is dismissive, a fence over which a lot of different sorts of writing will be thrown, and work distinguished only by current jargon or ghetto grammar will be classed with things like Toni Cade's that—witness the last quotation—play in and out of an idiom which is itself subtle and untranslatably characterizing. And at moments she risks, by classical standards, over-writing of a curious sort. She fools with an excess of understatement that makes her tone unique—zealously cool, ardently tough.

But once you're won by its rhythms, it runs on with a breathless ease and self-acceptance that needs no more authority. And raises the question: where is the novel?