The Salt Eaters by Toni Cade Bambara
"The Salt Eaters" by Toni Cade Bambara is a novel that intricately weaves themes of healing, spirituality, and community within the setting of Claybourne, Georgia. The story centers on Velma Henry, who finds herself at the South West Community Infirmary, undergoing a healing process facilitated by Minnie Ransom, a spiritual healer. Facing overwhelming pressures from her personal life and the inner workings of the Academy of the Seven Arts, Velma's struggle culminates in a suicide attempt, prompting Minnie's efforts to help her regain a sense of wholeness.
Bambara explores the intersection of traditional African American spiritual practices with contemporary life, creating a narrative that operates on both tangible and spiritual planes. Through telepathic connections and communications with spirit guides, Minnie engages with Velma in profound ways that transcend physical interaction. The novel also reflects on the Academy's role as both a hub for empirical knowledge and a space for folk traditions, emphasizing the importance of community and cultural heritage.
Set against the backdrop of a vibrant, progressive community, "The Salt Eaters" invites readers to consider broader concepts of reality, including near-death experiences and spiritual connections, challenging the confines of empirical evidence. Bambara’s blend of storytelling techniques highlights the richness of African American culture and the human experience, making the novel a significant exploration of identity, healing, and the complexities of existence.
On this Page
Subject Terms
The Salt Eaters by Toni Cade Bambara
First published: 1980
The Work
The Salt Eaters opens with Velma Henry sitting on a stool in the South West Community Infirmary of Claybourne, Georgia, being healed by Minnie Ransom. Claybourne is a beehive of progressive activity. The Academy of the Seven Arts, run by James “Obie” Henry, Velma’s husband, is the center of intellectual and social activities. Velma, performing the duties of seven employees, keeps the institution running. Overwhelmed by the infighting at the academy, her domestic problems with Obie, and her refusal to accept her spiritual powers, Velma has attempted suicide, and Minnie is laboring to “center” Velma, to make Velma whole.
The novel includes a spiritual plane where mortals interact with other life forms. Minnie Ransom operates on both planes. She is sitting opposite Velma while surrounded by her twelve disciples, the Master’s Mind. Sometimes she reaches out and touches Velma physically. Other times she does “not touch [Velma] flesh on flesh, but touch[es] mind on mind from across the room or from across town.” While Minnie is having these telepathic tête-à-têtes with Velma, she also confers at times with a spirit guide who helps her with the healing. When “centering” Velma becomes difficult, Minnie makes telepathic trips to the Chapel of the Mind to recharge her psychic energies.
The healing, which should take minutes, takes two hours—the time span of the novel. Velma, like Minnie, takes telepathic trips, during which she bumps into other characters, human and spiritual. These characters, filtered through Velma’s subconscious, are for the most part what people the novel.
Toni Cade Bambara skillfully combines the European American traditional mode of storytelling with African and African American concepts and traditions. The Academy of the Seven Arts is concerned with empirical knowledge, but the institution is also concerned with teaching folk art and folk traditions. The medical center accommodates physicians who practice modern medicine, but the center also makes use of the skills of Minnie Ransom. The spring celebration is a ritual celebrated by human beings, but in Claybourne the quick and the dead celebrate this rite.
Bambara’s concepts of the new age, guiding spirits, out-of-body experiences, and telepathic visions were not, at first, taken seriously. Reality is not, however, measured only by empirical evidence. Near-death experiences, guardian angels, and intergalactic travel are part of popular understanding. As the concept of reality expands, the significance of The Salt Eaters deepens.
Bibliography
Bambara, Toni Cade. “Toni Cade Bambara.” Interview by Claudia Tate. In Black Women Writers at Work, edited by Claudia Tate. New York: Continuum, 1983. This lengthy, excellent interview elicits Bambara’s thoughts on influences on her work and life, on the difficulties an activist finds in making time to write a novel, and on the belief that “we and everything here are extensions of the same consciousness.”
Burks, Ruth Elizabeth. “From Baptism to Resurrection: Toni Cade Bambara and the Incongruity of Language.” In Black Women Writers, 1950-1980: A Critical Evaluation, edited by Mari Evans. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983. Discusses Bambara’s short stories and The Salt Eaters in terms of the inadequacy of language to impel to action. Velma’s spiritual rebirth represents the “beginning of an apocalypse that recognizes that she, just as we, are the light, and the salvation, and the salt which . . . has always seasoned the earth.”
Butler-Evans, Elliott. Race, Gender, and Desire: Narrative Strategies in the Fiction of Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989. Detailed study of the fiction of the three most important African American female writers of the late twentieth century, with analysis of Bambara’s best stories, such as “My Man Bovanne,” as well as of The Salt Eaters.
Chandler, Zala. “Voices Beyond the Veil: An Interview of Toni Cade Bambara and Sonia Sanchez.” In Wild Women in the Whirlwind: Afra-American Culture and the Contemporary Literary Renaissance, edited by Joanne M. Braxton and Andree N. McLaughlin. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990. Bambara says that “organizing is what it’s all about,” that black Americans must celebrate their ancestors and turn away from disconnectedness and amnesia toward a sense of community and expression of the truth of the African American experience.
Eaton, Kalenda C. Womanism, Literature, and the Transformation of the Black Community, 1965-1980. Hoboken, N.J.: Taylor & Francis, 2007. Examines the relationship between self and community in The Salt Eaters.
Hull, Gloria T. “’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. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. A perceptive, well-written analysis that clarifies Bambara’s handling of time, narrative voice, and symbolism. Argues that a close reading of the novel “should result in personal transformation.”
Russell, Sandi. “’for colored girls . . .’ (1970’s-present).” In Render Me My Song: African-American Women Writers from Slavery to the Present. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. Covers briefly black women writers from Phillis Wheatley to Ntozake Shange. Particularly useful to the nonspecialist. Says Bambara’s message is that black Americans are divided and should become cohesive and join with Third World peoples.
Traylor, Eleanor W. “The Jazz Mode in the Works of Toni Cade Bambara.” In Black Women Writers, 1950-1980: A Critical Evaluation, edited by Mari Evans. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983. This excellent essay compares Bambara’s approach to that of a jazz composer examining the “contingencies of time in an examined present moment.” Bambara’s novel is a “rite of transformation quite like a jam session.” Bambara has understandably praised this essay as explanation; it is in its turn a jazz riff on the novel.