Savoring the Salt: The Legacy of Toni Cade Bambaraexplores the life, art, and activism of a singular woman. Born in 1939, Bambara came of age along with the movements for social justice of the 1960s. She helped shape and was shaped by the Black Liberation Movement, the Women’s Movement, and the struggle against the war in Vietnam. She worked to build coalitions among women of color internationally. She belonged to a group of African American women writers who came to voice in the early 1970s. Bambara’s art shares much in common with that of Audre Lorde, Paule Marshall, Toni...

More than three decades ago at a black writers’ conference in Atlanta, someone suggested that I write Toni’s biography. I don’t remember his name, but I do recall him saying that I might begin by taking notes on my conversations with Toni. I thought then, how could I, Toni’s former student, write Toni’s biography? Even more absurd was the suggestion that I take notes on conversations with her. That would make me a first-degree snitch to be guarded against. Or so I thought. But, would Toni have minded? Would she have felt invaded? How important was it to mask divergent...

Toni Cade Bambara belongs to the group of African American women writers who came to voice in the early 1970s, and her art shares much in common with that of Audre Lorde, Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, and AliceWalker. It, too, makes black female character central; it highlights intraracial rather than interracial conflict, and it represents black vernacular speech and cultural practices. But in its distinctive rendering of that speech, in its insistently urban setting and idiom, and in its feminist/Pan Africanist perspective, it stands apart. Bambara’s fiction emphasizes the primacy of the urban experience; it declines to accept the dictum...

It does no good to write autobiographical fiction cause the minute the book hits the stand here comes your mama screamin how could you and sighin death where is thy sting and she snatches you up out your bed to grill you about what was going down back there in Brooklyn when she was working three jobs and trying to improve the quality of your life and come to find on page 42 that you were messin around with that nasty boy up the block and breaks into sobs and quite naturally your family strolls in all sleepy-eyed to catch...

I wish I had met Toni Cade Bambara. I wish I had sat down with her and talked about the secret moments that little black girls soon-to-be grown black women soon-to-be elders know only of themselves and others like them. I wish I had learned then that those who live on the fringes, on the barest of corners, on the outskirts of society, create sacred spaces of their own: spaces of beautiful confusion and brilliant chaos, jazz spaces,Color Purplespaces, spaces where Girl–Women climb the trunks of rainbows, spaces where Women–Girls defy their invisibility and recover the...

Kalamu ya Salaam [KS]: Are you consciously trying to do anything particular with your style of writing?

Toni Cade Bambara [TCB]: I’m trying to learn how to write! I think there have been a lot of things going on in the Black experience for which there are no terms, certainly not in English, at this moment. There are a lot of aspects of consciousness for which there is no vocabulary, no structure in the English language which would allow people to validate that experience through language. I’m trying to find a way to do that.

KS: Do you see yourself,...

Old Wife: I’ma get my walkin shoes soon, Min, cause them haints fixing to beat on them drums with them cat bones and raise a rukus. So you just leave me here and I’ll talk to you after while. I can’t stand all that commotion them haints calling music …

Min: Old wife, what are you but a haint?

Old Wife: I’m a servant of the Lord, beggin your pardon.

Min: I know that. But you a haint. You dead ain’t you?

Old Wife: There is no death in spirit, Min, I keep tellin you [that]. Why you so hard...

Translation was indeed not my first choice as a professional activity, even though my training was literary. I studied American literature and decided to write my “Doctorat d’Etat” dissertation on the works of Herman Melville, preparing myself to become, with humility and awe, a specialist in the American Renaissance. Then I started translating modern American novels, but it was not until I came acrossThe Salt Eatersthat I really and deeply realized that this activity would eventually occupy a very important place in my personal and academic life. So this paper is not so much to be read as...

In an October 1999 interview, author Toni Morrison talked about her long literary friendship with Toni Cade Bambara, and about editing her “magnum opus,”Those Bones Are Not My Child—the novel Bambara worked on for the last 12 years of her life.

Set in Atlanta in the early 1980s,Those Bonesplaces readers at the center of that awful atrocity that came to be known as the Atlanta child murders—the period roughly from 1979 to 1982 when more than 40 black children were abducted or killed. But the novel isn’t about the tragedy in an abstract way: it’s...

In the early ’80s, I spent two years in a writing workshop that Toni Cade Bambara held in her Atlanta home. Anybody in the community who was writing was welcome. I adored the opportunity to sit at this great writer’s feet who knew so much about so much. In 1990, she moved to Philadelphia and was later diagnosed with cancer. We talked on the long-distance line when we could. I would always ask if there was anything she needed that I could send. She usually answered no. But in our last conversation, which took place one week before she crossed...

In late May, I received an invitation from the Women’s Union of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam to make a three week visit to the North as a guest of the Women’s Union. At that time, I made some attempts, not terribly organized, but I made some attempts to contact a number of organizations in the Black community and to put myself at their service as a mailman. Again, while I wasn’t terribly organized in doing this, it was important to do because as most of us know, the White Left has a virtual monopoly on trips like this. All...

Ah, there is a steadily more greedy shadow alienating us from our memory. That comes with time, which consumes us finally, to make us history.

The consciousness of this, we mark by the completeness of our perception, rationale and use of the world. But also by the hostility and sadness pressed upon us by death. The death of our friends. Especially of those whom we agree were, in some way, wondrous. Those who have left the brain prints of their minds and visions upon our lives and upon the world’s.

Particularly, for a people deprived of the primitive normalcy of...

In early January 1985, Toni Cade Bambara, Rosa Guy, Verta Mae Grosvenor, Audre Lorde, Gloria Josephs, Mildred Walters, Mari Evans, Alexis DeVeaux, and I arrived at Jose Marti airport in Havana, Cuba. Poet Nancy Morejon and members of the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC) met the delegation. This was the Black Women Writers Cultural Tour to Cuba arranged byBlack Scholar Magazine. After checking into the Havana Riviera Hotel we went to the offices of UNEAC to meet with translators and go over details concerning the tour. While in Havana we met with the Federation of Cuban...

In 1974, Toni Cade [Bambara] had recently moved to Atlanta and was one of the first persons with whom my departmental colleague Roseann Bell and I consulted when we began conceptualizing our anthology,Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature, which would be the first collection of black women’s literature in the African diaspora.¹ Bambara’s now-classic textThe Black Woman(1970) had been in print only four years. I also felt strongly that Bambara’s contribution to the development of contemporary black feminism, feminist theory, and women’s studies had not been adequately documented by scholars, though it is the...

I can’t remember the year I first met her. Time doesn’t seem so important when thinking about Toni Cade Bambara. But I do remember the scene when we had our first long talk together. It was soon after the publication ofThe Black Woman, and I wanted to interview her for a magazine article. Toni suggested we do it at her place in New York.

On the appointed day, I took a taxi and spent most of the ride reading my notes. I did not look up until the cab driver announced that we had arrived. I gazed at the...

In the spring of 2001, I joined a group of writers, critics, and musicians on a trip to Cuba. The trip was organized and coordinated by Charles Rowell, esteemed editor ofCallaloo, the premier journal of black arts and letters. At the end of our weeklong sojourn in Havana, we all participated in an academic conference, a series of poetry readings, and a musical performance. When Charles called with the invitation, he asked that I present a paper for a session titled “La mujer negra: feminismo y teoria del feminismo” or “Black Women: Feminism and Feminist Theory.” I immediately knew...

When we were living in Atlanta, a visiting faculty member at Emory left us in charge of her Porsche while she returned to England for a brief visit. My husband, John I. Lattany, and I were extremely conscientious about never touching her splendid vehicle—-until Toni Cade Bambara saw it parked in our yard.

“You got a key to that?” she asked in her usual direct manner.

“Yes,” John replied. “But we don’t use it. We’re keeping it for—.” He mentioned the Englishwoman’s name.

“Does it run?” was Toni’s next question.

“It did when she brought it here,” I...

The education of the nation’s young is a crucial subject. And in recent years the public schools have been front-page news. Strikes, riots, disruptions and expos´es have revealed deep-rooted problems, have caused seemingly unbridgeable polarizations.

Parents maintain that they are treated as outsiders. Students reject the traditional power relationship of decisions from above and obedience from below. Administrators explain that they are the victims of bad budgets. Books by disenchanted teachers revealing the inadequacies, absurdities and injustices of the system have become popular reading. Many of us, educators and laymen alike, tend to agree that the schools are indeed a...

The funniest thing to me about Toni is that she was a true New Yorker: She could not drive. So I picked her up two days a week to take us to Rutgers in my 1960 VWBug, which cost $600 in those days. Ha! Never Again. And the drive gave us a chance to discuss and change the world. At least in our heads.

When I met Toni she lived in Harlem. Her apartment was what I had dreamed a New York apartment would be. She had a lot of room and rooms, but mostly she had a rooftop that...

When making course selections as an undergraduate student at Livingston College in the late 60s, the only criteria that mattered was relevancy. If there was a course catalogue, I never saw it. The student grapevine provided all the information I needed for selecting courses. Was the teacher black? Was the reading list radical? Did the professor accept “participating in protest” as a valid reason for missing class? Did the homework interfere with community organizing? Was the grading process collective?

Deciding on Toni Cade Bambara’s class was easy; she met the activist definition of relevant. Talk about Toni’s writing and literature...

I vividly remember meeting Toni Cade Bambara in 1970 when I was teaching at Princeton University. I was one of the founders of their Afro-American Studies Program and I also was an exchange professor with Livingston College at Rutgers University. Toni Cade was a very handsome black woman, and what occurred to me after living for decades in Europe was why so many of the African American men whom I had entertained and showed around in different cities in Europe were more interested in European women than in women like Toni who were black, gifted, and beautiful. As I began...

Toni Cade Bambara was/is one of the gems in my life. I was blessed to know from the beginning, over 25 years ago, how truly fortunate I was to have Toni as one of my mentors. Of course, I knew who she was before I met her. I vividly recall the first time I ever saw her. Nikki Giovanni was hosting a bid whist book party, complete with Queen of Sheba (black) playing cards; this was about 1973. In walked this incredibly striking couple, both bald, both beautiful, with glowing brown skin. It was all I could do to keep...

“Good morning. May I speak with Mrs. Cade please?” I asked, anxious to complete the first of many calls early in the business day. I had a full schedule and wished to set certain things in motion before setting out for a luncheon at the British Consulate, my first appointment away from City Hall as the Mayor’s Special Assistant for International Affairs.

“Who is calling please?” asked an adult female voice that was friendly but also wary.

I introduced myself and then said: “I am calling Mrs. Cade to invite her to attend a meeting of the Atlanta Sister City...

Toni Cade’s young people live in an ethical universe. The issues they face are complex, and so are the answers, but they are there; rather, they are there to be sought. What matters to her is the process of their unveiling, the recognition of complex mutabilities, that the world of seeming certainties needs always to be reassessed, sometimes with painful difficulty. Yet, at the same time that assessment never diminishes the underlying principle of a moral universe that must govern the life of a community. Thus, everything can and does become a lesson.

My observations on teaching Toni Cade Bambara...

Thus, we find in the Afro-American narrative prose tradition as well as in the newly emerging Black cinema, attentiveness to time-honored ways of storytelling, constant use of circles, people gather, with the emphasis on “we.”

Classical in the sense that the people and the work are coherent. That is to say, that the insights and impulses that give rise to our expression are made appropriable, apprehendable, usable, sensible through metaphors and patterns that are familiar to us from everyday occurrence, rituals, ceremonies, tradition, spiritual practice. Such as call-and-response which we know from our sermons, from our chorus/soloist songs, from our...

Toni Cade Bambara was accessible to the people. She did not allow her fame to separate her from the community from which she came. Toni was interested in character, personality, principled behavior, and commitment to struggle,notto status. If you met her and didn’t know that she was a BAAAAD ASS writer, filmmaker, cultural critic, organizer … she didn’t announce it … She was just Toni—-sistah, cultural worker, mother of Karma Bene Bambara, woman, friend … one of THE ULTIMATE BLACK WOMEN that I have had the pleasure of knowing in my lifetime.

I was fortunate … blessed...

I don’t remember the first time that I met Toni Cade Bambara, but I will never forget the first time she gave me a lesson.

It happened sometime between 1989 and 1990. I was a twenty-three year old know-it-all from San Juan, Puerto Rico fresh out of making my first film,AIDS in the Barrio(1989). The Neighborhood Film/Video Project, founded by Linda Blackaby to support independent film in Philadelphia, was presenting a comprehensive twelve-month retrospective on Latin American cinema curated by Beatriz Vieira and titled “Latin American Visions.” I was one of a handful of people who attended every...

I spend a fitful night fashioning questions to raise with myself in the morning. What characterizes this moment? There’s a drive on to supplant “mainstream” with “multicultural” in the national consciousness, and that drive has been sparked by the emancipatory impulse, blackness, which has been the enduring model for other down-pressed sectors in the U.S. and elsewhere. A repositioning of people of color (POCs) closer to the center of the national narrative results from, reflects, and effects a reframing of questions regarding identity, belonging, community. “Syncretism,” “creolization,” “hybridization” are crowding “assimilation,” “alienation,” “ambivalence” out of the forum of ideas. A...

Seeking a greater fusion between the spiritual and the political, and meditating on the unfinished liberations of the 1960s, I am drawn yet again into the extraordinary work of Toni Cade Bambara. Her novelThe Salt Eaters, produced at a particular historical juncture in the late 1970s, offers us a critical assessment of the 1960s civil rights movement on the one hand and a clairvoyant call for a different kind of revolutionary ethos on the other. It fuses the political and the spiritual into a liberatory movement in which each is simultaneously a component of the other, each holding the...

“Those bones are notmy child,” are the words of a fictional character, Zala Spencer, whose young son went missing for months on end. When she finally sees him—once lost, now found—he, her child, is beyond recognition. She didn’t deny the positive identification made by the authorities—police and official search teams—nor the boy’s own father. She rather didn’t want to believe her eyes nor any other sense that told her that she’d next be challenged to break the armor of a stranger to touch again, the warm heart of her first born.

Those Bones Are Not...

In 2002, the purported “year of child abductions,” the U.S. face of victimization was a blonde and blue-eyed girl named Elizabeth Smart.² From Salt Lake City, she was affluent, Mormon, and played a harp. Less seen was the face of seven-year-old Alexis Patterson.³ Disappearing in Milwaukee a month before Smart was abducted, she was, unlike the white teenager, from a poorer neighborhood, African American, and never recovered. What made Smart a universal sign of the endangered child and Patterson’s victimization invisible? A few news producers argued that the sensationalism of Smart’s abduction at gunpoint from an expensive home simply overshadowed...

The purpose of this essay is to examine Toni Cade Bambara’s utopian thought, particularly the remarkably rich vocabulary she gave us for describing and analyzing the sensuality of social movement and the day-to-day practice of instantiating an instinct for freedom. Indeed it is my view that Toni Cade Bambara was one of the great utopian thinkers of our time. Most people treat the utopian as an ideal future world which, at best provides a beacon of hope and, at worst, reflects an unrealistic fundamentalism bound to failure. But Bambara acted and wrote as if the utopian were a standpoint for...

And a generation of people began to question their silence. Their poverty. Their scarcity. Because you had asked the most important question we can ask ourselves:

What are we pretending not to know today? The premise as you said, my sister, being that colored people on planet earth really know everything there is to know. And if one is not coming to grips with the knowledge, it must mean that one is either scared or pretending to be stupid.

You open your novel with the simple but profound question: Do we want to be well? And you said in an...