bambara in memory

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Race & Class

DOI: 10.1177/030639689603800106 1996; 38; 79 Race Class

LI Onesto US In Memory Toni Cade Bambara: passing on the story

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Commentary

US

In MemoryToni Cade Bambara: passing on the story

Stories are important. They keep us alive. In the ships, in the camps,in the quarters, fields, prisons, on the road, on the run, under-ground, under siege, in the throes, on the verge - the storytellersnatches us back from the edge to hear the next chapter. In which weare the subjects. We, the hero of the tales. Our lives preserved. Howit was; how it be. Passing it along in the relay. This is what I work todo: to produce stories that save our lives.’ I

Toni Cade Bambara

The people lost a significant writer, political activist and filmmakerwhen Toni Cade Bambara died of cancer on 9 December 1995. There’smuch to learn from looking at the life of Toni Cade Bambara. Andthere’s much to celebrate about what she continually contributed to thelives and struggle of the people.

Growing up in Harlem in the 1940s, Toni Cade Bambara startedtuning her writing skills as a young girl. In a 1994 interview with herfriend and collaborator, Louis Massiah, Toni tells how she wasrecruited to be the ’community scribe’:

People would say, ’Hey, you little honey, run down to MissDorothy’s house and help her write the letter to her nephew in theNavy.’ ’Run up the way and tell them what happened at themeeting.’ ’Hey, write this down.’ When I lived in Atlanta, I was acommunity scribe in the sense that people would hail me, ’Excuseme, you the writin’ lady?’ ’Yeah.’ ’Pull in here into the gas station.



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The man wants to sell his Ford to this guy here. Can you write acontract?’ ’Sure.’ ’Here’s a paper bag and a pencil. Get to it.’ Inreturn they would give me my inspection ticket stamped. People inthe neighborhood would knock on my door. ’You the writin’ lady?Listen, the telephone company has screwed me again. Can you writea nasty letter?’ Then they would pay me with Jell-o with fruit in it...So I got paid as a community scribe and got trained as a communityscribe very early.&dquo;

Growing up in Harlem also taught Toni, early on, the importance ofstanding up against oppression and not collaborating with ’the enemy.’She said:

My mother gave us the race thing. She also encouraged us in aninterventionist style. At school we were not to sing ’Old Black Joe’.We were not to take any shit, and we were to report back to her anystereotypic remark. This was difficult because shit was happening allthe time. For example, I had a really fascist teacher in the thirdgrade, Miss Beaks. She did all sorts of things that were really out. Iwrote a story once called ’The Making of a Snitch’. It was publishedwhen I was in high school, and it’s about the period of the late ’40swhen, as Gerald Horn would say, ’the national policy shifted fromBlacks as inferior to Blacks as subversive’. We were constantlygetting pressure in that McCarthy period. When anything weirdwent on in school, the teacher would grab one person at a time andtake him or her into the cloak room and encourage and bribe the

person to rat on classmates. I wrote that story, and many years laterI rewrote it when I ran into the classmate who had been made into asnitch in those early years and then turned up in the late ’50s as agovernment agent.’3

Such Harlem experiences would prove to colour and shape Toni CadeBambara’s expanding talent as a storyteller throughout her life. Thiswas a community full of lively, provoking culture: Langston Hugheslived down the street; you could go see Miles on Saturday night. AndToni remembers how, in the ’40s, ’There were lots of meetings andrallies going on ... There was still that notion that an active political lifewas a perfectly normal thing. People had to organise against thecrackdown forces which, in those days, was the police, the FBI,Immigration, the Draft Board, and the Mob, which are pretty much thecrackdown forces today.’4

’Speakers’ Corner’ on Seventh Avenue and 125th Street ’made iteasy to raise critical questions, to be concerned about what’s happeninglocally and internationally ... it shaped the political perceptions of atleast three generations.’ Here, the rhythm of political dialogue anddebate had a lasting impression. ’Grounded in orality,’ Toni said



81

Speakers’ Corner taught her ’how to speak and leave spaces to letpeople in so that you get a call and response’. Her mother used to walkher over to the Speaker’s Corner to listen to the folks: ’Of course, ifthey were talking &dquo;religious stuff&dquo;, she’d keep on going to wherever wewere going; but if they were talking union or talking race, we’d hangtough on the corner. I wasn’t raised in the church. I learned the powerof the word from the speakers on Speakers’ Corner - trade unionists,Temple People as we called the Muslims then, Father Divinists, Pan-Africanists, Abyssinians as we called Rastas then, Communists, Ida B.Wells folks.’S

Later, Toni moved out of Harlem. She went to Queens College, livedin Greenwich Village, moved to Atlanta, and lived for many years inPhiladelphia. But throughout all this, the soul of Harlem kept comingback around and informing Toni’s muse.

It wasn’t until the ’60s struck that I really finally felt at home in theworld. I finally reconnected with a lot of things from childhood thatI had lost ... I always take Harlem as my standard of a viable com-munity ; a Speakers’ Corner, a place where politics are discussed andwhere there is critical response so that you do not become captive; aBlack bookstore so you do not become captive to schools and otherindoctrinating institutions; a library in case you can’t get to thebookstore; a park to sit at and talk (also, the park can be where PopJohnson and his cronies sit to create community sovereignty. Theycan check out who is coming up the walk); you have got to have ascreening room of some kind so you can know what our culturalworkers are doing with our image and our voice; you have to have apress to get the word OUt.16

The rhythm of writingThe musicians of the forties and fifties, I suspect, determined myvoice and pace and pitch. I grew up around boys who carried horncases and girls who couldn’t wait for their legs to grow and reach thepiano pedals. I grew up in New York City, bebop heaven - and it’sstill music that keeps that place afloat. I learned more from BudPowell, Dizzy, Y’Bird, Miss Sassy Vaughn about what can becommunicated, can be taught through structure, tone, metronomicsense, and just sheer holy boldness than from any teacher oflanguage arts, or from any book for that matter. For the most part,the voice of my work is bop.1

Toni Cade Bambara

It is much like a musical experience reading Toni Cade Bambara. Youget some blues, gospel, and a lotta jazz. Characters tend to spring out atyou from all different corners, some voices whisper pianissimo, others



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shout forte. You get to feel comfortable with the tune, it seems like youknow where it’s going. But these compositions can be unpredictable.The cadence of the words might start off with the beat of a normalmelody, but just when you get your foot tapping, things quickly take aturn into galloping improvisation. There are streams of consciousness,flashbacks, and interweavings of plot and sub-plot. Readers/listenersusually get lost somewhere along the way. But never for too long - forthe characters are real, the ballads familiar - and Toni always comesback around to pick you up again and carry you along.

Toni’s colleague and friend, writer Eleanor Traylor, compared Tonito the jazz musician whose vitality ’is precisely this ability to compose,in vigorous images of the most recent musical language, the con-tingencies of time in an examined present moment’.

Indeed, ’jam sessions’ of characters in Toni Cade Bambara presenttales in traditional jazz structure: theme, variation, then re-statement oftheme. Point of view shifts from player to player, from past to present,to imagined future. Familiar tunes change as different characters speak- different stories and interpretations of a single incident. Traylornotes: ’Constructing rapid contrasts of curiously mingled disparities,the jam session is both a summing up and a part-by-part examinationby various instruments of an integrity called melody. Now a melody isnothing more or less than the musical rendition of what a poet or ahistorian calls theme. And a theme is no other thing than a noticeablepattern occurring through time as time assumes its rhythmic cycle: past,present, and future. The Salt Eaters of Toni Cade Bambara is a modernmyth of creation told in the jazz mode.’8

In The Salt Eaters, healer Minnie Ranson is trying to help Velmarecover from an attempted suicide. At one point, the story’s action isdescribed as an interplay of notes: ’Minnie was singsonging it, thewords, the notes ricocheting around the room. Mr Daniels picked outone note and matched it, then dug under it, then climbed over it. Hisbrother from the opposite side of the circle glided into harmony withhim while the rest of the group continued working to pry Velma Henryloose from the gripping power of the disease and free her totally intoMinnie Ransom’s hand, certain of total cure there.’

Clairvoyants and mediums weave their way in and out of The SaltEaters, along with political activists. Toni uses these characters at timesto take you on a ride to an imaginary place. For me, as a dialecticalmaterialist, such journeys and explorations into un-reality are awonderful way for art to stimulate our thinking about the real world.But for Toni, these spirits are not just symbolic - she actually believesin a spiritual world.

The themes and issues in The Salt Eaters - of community, collectivity,transformative healing and struggle - are relevant and important. Andthese themes are found in many of her works. As Toni’s colleague, Ruth



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Elizabeth Burks, put it, speaking about the collection of short stories,Gorilla, My Love: ’Little otherworldliness imbues these tales; they takeplace in the present and the time is now for all good men and all goodwomen to come to the aid of oppressed people wherever they are.’9

Writer of truth

It’s a tremendous responsibility - responsibility and honor - to be awriter, an artist, a cultural worker ... whatever you want to call thisvocation. One’s got to see what the factory worker sees, what theprisoner sees, what the welfare children see, what the scholar sees,got to see what the ruling-class mythmakers see as well, in order totell the truth and not get trapped. Got to see more and dare more. 10

Toni Cade Bambara

As a young girl, Toni Cade Bambara was always listening, alwayswriting. The lively Harlem language that whirled around her inspiredcreative mental exercises. She recalls putting words together in differentconcoctions, then transferring them to pieces of white cardboard thatcame with her mother’s silk stockings. She would ’Linger reckless indoorways, hallways, basements, soaking up overheards to convert intoradio scripts I’d one day send out.’

Toni said that for years she didn’t acknowledge to herself that shewas a ’writer’. She didn’t see writing as ’my way of doing my work inthe world’. She said it was not until 1973, after returning from a trip toCuba, that she learned ’what Langston Hughes and others, mostespecially my colleagues in the Neo-Black Arts Movement, had beenteaching for years - that writing is a legitimate way, an important way,to participate in the empowerment of the community’. At this point,writing for Toni became ’a weapon, a real instrument for trans-formation politics’.&dquo; I

Toni’s view of the role of her writing evolved out of the conscious-ness and struggle of the ’60s and early ’70s. She saw her work asintimately connected with and serving the struggle of the Black masses,and other oppressed nationalities, against oppression. In an interviewby Claudia Tate in the early 1980s she said, ’I do not think thatliterature is the primary instrument for social transformation, but I dothink it has potency. So I work to tell the truth about people’s lives; Iwork to celebrate struggle, to applaud the tradition of struggle in ourcommunity, to bring to center stage all those characters, just ordinaryfolks on the block, who’ve been waiting in the wings... ’12

In 1965, Toni became an instructor at City College of New York andhelped organise SEEK - a programme aimed at recruiting Black andLatino students. Then, during the student uprisings of 1968-1969, shewas the unofficial faculty adviser/consultant of the student protest



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leaders. Toni was a trailblazer in giving voice to the struggle againstwomen’s oppression. As she put it: ’We can’t be rhapsodising aboutliberation, breeding warriors, revolution unless we are willing toaddress ourselves to the woman’s liberation.’’3 3

In 1970, she edited the book The Black Woman, a collection of shortstories and other writings by Black women. At the time this book wasthe first of its kind. The voices of Black women in the revolutionarymovement, speaking out against their oppression - including criticismof the way they were being treated by men in the struggle - had notbeen brought together and given a public forum in this kind of way.Toni said: ’The anger, dismay, disappointment, or just sheerbewilderment that many women experience as a way of life in regard tothe man-woman setup is something we’re all going to have to get usedto airing. Women are not going to shut up. We care too much, I think,about the development of ourselves and our brothers, fathers, lovers,sons, to negotiate a bogus peace.’’4

Toni would go on to explore and portray other aspects of thepeople’s struggle in her fiction. Her short stories and the novel The SaltEaters are filled with heroes of the fight against the oppression of Blackpeople. There are community activists, Black revolutionary leaders,spiritual healers, and plain po’ people, going up against the system andin the process building a new sense of collectivity and community.Many of these characters are trying to find the ways to move on afterthe high tide of struggle in the ’60s and ’70s and not give up the fight. Inthe interview with Claudia Tate, Toni said:

The eighties are now upon us - a period of devastating conflicts andchaos, a period that calls for organizing of the highest order andcommitment of the most sticking kind, a period for which the sixtieswas mere rehearsal and the seventies a brief respite, a breathingspace. Most of us are still trying to rescue the sixties - that stunningand highly complicated period from 1954 to 1972 - from themythmakers, still trying to ransom our warriors and theorists fromthose nuts who would cage ’em all up, crack their bones, and offer ussome highly selective media fiction in place of the truth. The eighties... a lotta work ahead of us.’ S

Toni conducted writers’ workshops, did readings and lectures atprisons, campuses, museums, rallies, libraries, conferences. Like manypeople in the ’60s and early ’70s, she was inspired by revolutionarystruggles going on in the Third World. And her travels to differentparts of the globe shaped her vision of humanity and futurepossibilities.

The US war in Vietnam and the Vietnamese people’s struggleagainst imperialism had a big impact on Toni. In the spring of 1975 shewas part of a delegation called The North American Academic



85

Marxist-Leninist Anti-Imperialist Feminist Women, invited to visitVietnam by the Women’s Union of North Vietnam. After coming backfrom this trip, Toni developed different stories as a way to talk abouther experience in Vietnam and spread solidarity. This was the basis forsome of the stories in The Sea Birds Are Still Alive, published in 1977.A widow woman of the title story of Sea Birds is a driving force in

her besieged community. She is ’the woman who hid the cadres in herstorage sheds and under her hut, who cooked for the young men of thedistrict, proud in her hatred for the enemy, proud of her love for thecountry and the nation coming soon. She was doing her part filling upthe quivers with new arrows, rosining the twine for the crossbow,stirring in the pot where the poison brewed.’

The struggle in Vietnam also got Toni to thinking about thepotential for men and women to develop revolutionary and liberatingrelationships. In a talk given in 1969, she said, referring to the war ofliberation in Vietnam: ’Certainly the huge body of poems and loveletters pouring out of that country reveal that men are congratulatingtheir women who shoot guns, bear babies, build bridges, keep thevillage fires going, plot out strategy, and bury the dead; just as it isobvious the women celebrate their men who dig booby traps, feed theinfants and the aged, impale GIs, write love poems and the like.’’6

Scripts of struggleWhat is noticeable to me about my current writing is the stretch outtoward the future. I’m not interested in reworking memories andplaying with flashbacks. I’m trying to press the English language,particularly verb tenses and modes, to accommodate flash-forwardsand potential happenings. I get more and more impatient, though,with verbal language, print conventions, literary protocol and thelike; I’m much more interested in filmmaking. 17 I

Toni Cade Bambara

By the 1980s Toni said she no longer had the patience to ’sit it out in thesolitude of my back room, all by my lonesome self, knocking outbooks’. Her main interest had turned to making films - being ’muchmore at home with a crew swapping insights, brilliances, poolingresources, information’.

She went to Philadelphia, where she met Louis Massiah, founder anddirector of the Scribe Video Center. When Toni learned he was thinkingabout doing a new video, she suggested he tackle the ’Move Incident’ asa community voice video. The Black revolutionary utopian group MOVEhad been under heavy attack from the power structure for several yearsin Philadelphia. And, on 13 May 1985, the cops and city authorities haddropped a bomb on a MOVE house, murdering eleven adults and



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children and burning down the whole neighbourhood. In response, Blackand other activists on the East Coast wrote a ’Draw the Line’ statementprotesting the massacre and waged a year-long campaign to get itpublished in a major Philly newspaper. Toni was one of the signatories tothis statement. Massiah invited Toni to do the narration for the film, TheBombing of Osage Avenue, and she ended up not only narrating thedocumentary but also writing the script and helping to devise the wholefilm. Toni went on to work at Scribe from 1986 until 1995, working onmany other documentaries and videos, including Massiah’s four-partseries on W.E.B. DuBois, John Akomfrah’s Seven Songs for Malcolm X,the United Hands Community Land Trust’s documentary, More ThanProperty, and Frances Negron’s documentary series on Puerto Rico.Toni also taught script-writing at Scribe, where she wrote and lecturedabout film, stressing the importance of movies that dispel Hollywoodstereotypes about Black people.

To her film work, Toni brought what had always ruled her creations- her dedication to the struggle for progressive change. She went tomovies constantly - ’I go to see them to train myself in film, to look atwhat are the conventional practices, and what do they mean ideo-logically or politically.’ And she stressed the importance of independentfilms that ’do not take the Hollyweird model as the protocol, but ratherare striking out for something else, for a socially responsible cinema’.

* * *

Toni said, ’I despair at our failure to wrest power from those who haveit and abuse it; our reluctance to reclaim our old powers lying dormantwith neglect; our hesitancy to create new power in areas where it neverbefore existed.’ But she was also ’euphoric’ because ’everything in ourhistory, our spirit, our daily genius - suggests we do it’ .18

For sure, as community scribe, story-teller and chronicler ofstruggle, through words and film, Toni Cade Bambara was a voice ofoptimism. She believed in, championed and celebrated the potential forhuman transformation and revolutionary change. And she loved to getright up in the face of the oppressor and, as she put it, ’blow three orfour choruses of just sheer energetic fun and optimism, even in the teethof rats, repressive cops, bomb lovers, irresponsibles, murderers’ .19

There is much to learn from the words and life of Toni CadeBambara. Explaining what informed her work, the basics from whichshe proceeds, she said: ’One, we are at war. Two, the natural responseto oppression, ignorance, evil, and mystification is wide-awakeresistance. Three, the natural response to stress and crisis is notbreakdown and capitulation, but transformation and renewal’20

Chicago LI ONESTO



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References

1 Tom Cade Bambara, ’Salvation is the issue’, in Mari Evans (ed.), Black WomenWriters (1950-1980), a critical evaluation (New York, Doubleday, 1984), p.41.

2 Interview with Louis Massiah interview (9 October 1994), published in Hatch BillopsCollection (New York), p.67

3 Ibid., pp.65-6.4 Ibid., p 61.5 Interview with Claudia Tate in C. Tate (ed.) Black Women Writers at Work (New

York, Continuum Publishing Corporation, 1988), p 28.6 Massiah interview, op cit , p.69.7 Ibid8 Eleanor Traylor, ’Music as theme: the jazz mode of Tom Cade Bambara’ in Evans,

op. cit., p.59. Traylor went on to write of how ’The Salt Eaters, like one complex jazzsymphony, orchestrates the chordal riffs introduced in the short stories of Tom CadeBambara collected, so far, in two volumes Gorilla, My Love (1972) and The SeaBirds Are Still Alive. The improvising, stylizing, vamping, re-creative method of themass composer is the formal method by which the narrative genius of Tom CadeBambara evokes a usable past testing its values within an examined present momentwhile simultaneously exploring the re-creative and transformative possibilities ofexperience. The method of the jazz composition informs the central themes and largerevelation of the world of Bambara’s fiction In that world, time is not linear likeclock time; rather, it is convergent. All time converges everywhere in that world in theimmediate present; the contemporary, remote, or prehistorical past, and the incipientfuture are in constant fluid motion.’

9 Ruth Elizabeth Burks, ’From baptism to resurrection: Tom Cade Bambara and theincongruity of language’ in ibid., p 52.

10 Tate interview, op. cit., p.14.11 ’Salvation is the issue’, op. cit , p.4212 Tate interview, op. cit., p. 18 See, for example, her evocative ’What’s happening in

Atlanta?’ (Race & Class, Autumn 1982), pp.111-24.13 Tom Cade Bambara, ’The pill. genocide or liberation?’, in Tom Cade Bambara (ed.),

The Black Woman, an anthology (New York, Penguin, 1970), p.165.14 Tate interview, op. cit., p.3615 Ibid., p. 14.16 Tom Cade Bambara, ’On the issue of roles’, in The Black Woman, an anthology, op

cit, p. 104.17 Tate interview, op. cit., p.2518 ’Salvation is the issue’, op cit , p.46.19 Sandi Russell, Render Me My Song African-American women writers from slavery to

the present (London, Pandora Press, 1990), p.177.20 ’Salvation Is the Issue’, op. cit., p 47.



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