The Salt Eaters Read online

  Toni Cade Bambara

  THE SALT EATERS

  Toni Cade Bambara is the author of two short story collections Gorilla My Love and Seabirds Are Still Alive. She has also edited The Black Woman and Tales and Short Stories for Black Folks. Ms. Bambara’s works have appeared in various periodicals and have been translated into several languages. She died in December 1995.

  ALSO BY Toni Cade Bambara

  The Black Woman

  Tales and Short Stories for Black Folks

  Gorilla, My Love

  The Sea Birds Are Still Alive

  Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions

  Those Bones Are Not My Child

  FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, JULY 1992

  Copyright © 1980 by Toni Cade Bambara

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Random House, Inc., New York, 1980.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Bambara, Toni Cade.

  The salt eaters / by Toni Cade Bambara.—1st Vintage contemporaries ed.

  p. cm.—(Vintage contemporaries)

  eISBN: 978-0-307-77801-7

  I. Title.

  PS3552.A473S2 1992

  813′. 54—dc20 91-50902

  v3.1

  Dear Khufu—

  The manuscript, assembled finally in the second and third years of the Last Quarter and edited under Leo’s double moons, was initially typed by Loretta Hardge and is dedicated to my first friend, teacher, map maker, landscape aide

  Mama

  Helen Brent Henderson Cade Brehon

  who in 1948, having come upon me daydreaming in the middle of the kitchen floor, mopped around me.

  Bless the workers and beam on me if you please.

  Thank you,

  Toni CB

  August 27, 1979

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  one

  “Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?”

  Velma Henry turned stiffly on the stool, the gown ties tight across her back, the knots hard. So taut for so long, she could not swivel. Neck, back, hip joints dry, stiff. Face frozen. She could not glower, suck her teeth, roll her eyes, do any of the Velma-things by way of answering Minnie Ransom, who sat before her humming lazily up and down the scales, making a big to-do of draping her silky shawl, handling it as though it were a cape she’d swirl any minute over Velma’s head in a wipe-out veronica, or as though it were a bath towel she was drying her back with in the privacy of her bathroom.

  Minnie Ransom herself, the fabled healer of the district, her bright-red flouncy dress drawn in at the waist with two different strips of kenti cloth, up to her elbows in a minor fortune of gold, brass and silver bangles, the silken fringe of the shawl shimmying at her armpits. Her head, wrapped in some juicy hot-pink gelee, was tucked way back into her neck, eyes peering down her nose at Velma as though old-timey spectacles perched there were slipping down.

  Velma blinked. Was ole Minnie trying to hypnotize her, mesmerize her? Minnie Ransom, the legendary spinster of Claybourne, Georgia, spinning out a song, drawing her of all people up. Velma the swift; Velma the elusive; Velma who had never mastered the kicks, punches and defense blocks, but who had down cold the art of being not there when the blow came. Velma caught, caught up, in the weave of the song Minnie was humming, of the shawl, of the threads, of the silvery tendrils that extended from the healer’s neck and hands and disappeared into the sheen of the sunlight. The glistening bangles, the metallic threads, the dancing fringe, the humming like bees. And was the ole swamphag actually sitting there dressed for days, legs crossed, one foot swinging gently against the table where she’d stacked the tapes and records? Sitting there flashing her bridgework and asking some stupid damn question like that, blind to Velma’s exasperation, her pain, her humiliation?

  Velma could see herself: hair matted and dusty, bandages unraveled and curled at the foot of the stool like a sleeping snake, the hospital gown huge in front, but tied up too tight in back, the breeze from the window billowing out the rough white muslin and widening the opening in the back. She could not focus enough to remember whether she had panties on or not. And Minnie Ransom perched on her stool actually waiting on an answer, drawling out her hummingsong, unconcerned that any minute she might strike the very note that could shatter Velma’s bones.

  “I like to caution folks, that’s all.” said Minnie, interrupting her own humming to sigh and say it, the song somehow buzzing right on. “No sense us wasting each other’s time, sweetheart.” The song running its own course up under the words, up under Velma’s hospital gown, notes pressing against her skin and Velma steeling herself against intrusion. “A lot of weight when you’re well. Now, you just hold that thought.”

  Velma didn’t know how she was to do that. She could barely manage to hold on to herself, hold on to the stingy stool, be there all of a piece and resist the buzzing bee tune coming at her. Now her whole purpose was surface, to go smooth, be sealed and inviolate.

  She tried to withdraw as she’d been doing for weeks and weeks. Withdraw the self to a safe place where husband, lover, teacher, workers, no one could follow, probe. Withdraw her self and prop up a borderguard to negotiate with would-be intruders. She’d been a borderguard all her childhood, so she knew something about it. She was the one sent to the front door to stand off the landlord, the insurance man, the greengrocer, the fishpeddler, to insure Mama Mae one more bit of peace. And at her godmother’s, it was Smitty who sent her to the front door to misdirect the posse. No, no one of that name lived here. No, this was not where the note from the principal should be delivered.

  She wasn’t sure how to move away from Minnie Ransom and from the music, where to throw up the barrier and place the borderguard. She wasn’t sure whether she’d been hearing music anyway. Was certain, though, that she didn’t know what she was supposed to say or do on that stool. Wasn’t even sure whether it was time to breathe in or breathe out. Everything was off, out of whack, the relentless logic she’d lived by sprung. And here she was in Minnie Ransom’s hands in the Southwest Community Infirmary. Anything could happen. She could roll off the stool like a ball of wax and melt right through the floor, or sail out of the window, stool and all, and become some new kind of UFO. Anything could happen. And hadn’t Ole Minnie been nattering away about just that before the session had begun, before she had wiped down the stools and set them out just so? “In the last quarter, sweetheart, anything can happen. And will,” she’d said. Last quarter? Of the moon, of the century, of some damn basketball game? Velma had been, still was, too messed around to figure it out.

  “You just hold that thought,” Minnie was saying again, leaning forward, the balls of three fingers pressed suddenly, warm and fragrant, against Velma’s forehead, the left hand catching her in the back of her head, cupping gently the two stony portions of the temporal bone. And Velma was inhaling in gasps, and exhaling shudderingly. She felt aglow, her eyebrows drawing in toward the touch as if to ward off the invading fingers that were threatening to penetr
ate her skull. And then the hands went away quickly, and Velma felt she was losing her eyes.

  “Hold on now,” she heard. It was said the way Mama Mae would say it, leaving her bent in the sink while she went to get a washcloth to wipe the shampoo from her eyes. Velma held on to herself. Her pocketbook on the rungs below, the backless stool in the middle of the room, the hospital gown bunched up now in the back—there was nothing but herself and some dim belief in the reliability of stools to hold on to. But then the old crone had had a few choice words to say about that too, earlier, rearing back on her heels and pressing her knees against the stereo while Velma perched uneasily on the edge of her stool trying to listen, trying to wait patiently for the woman to sit down and get on with it, trying to follow her drift, scrambling to piece together key bits of high school physics, freshman philo, and lessons M’Dear Sophie and Mama Mae had tried to impart. The reliability of stools? Solids, liquids, gases, the dance of atoms, the bounce and race of molecules, ethers, electrical charges. The eyes and habits of illusion. Retinal images, bogus images, traveling to the brain. The pupils trying to tell the truth to the inner eye. The eye of the heart. The eye of the head. The eye of the mind. All seeing differently.

  Velma gazed out over the old woman’s head and through the window, feeling totally out of it, her eyes cutting easily through panes and panes and panes of glass and other substances, it seemed, until she slammed into the bark of the tree in the Infirmary yard and recoiled, was back on the stool, breathing in and out in almost a regular rhythm, wondering if it was worth it, submitting herself to this ordeal.

  It would have been more restful to have simply slept it off; said no when the nurse had wakened her, no she didn’t want to see Miz Minnie; no she didn’t want to be bothered right now, but could someone call her husband, her sister, her godmother, somebody, anybody to come sign her out in the morning. But what a rough shock it would have been for the family to see her like that. Obie, Palma, M’Dear Sophie or her son Lil James. Rougher still to be seen. She wasn’t meant for these scenes, wasn’t meant to be sitting up there in the Southwest Community Infirmary with her ass out, in the middle of the day, and strangers cluttering up the treatment room, ogling her in her misery. She wasn’t meant for any of it. But then M’Dear Sophie always said, “Find meaning where you’re put, Vee.” So she exhaled deeply and tried to relax and stick it out and pay attention.

  Rumor was these sessions never lasted more than ten or fifteen minutes anyway. It wouldn’t kill her to go along with the thing. Wouldn’t kill her. She almost laughed. She might have died. I might have died. It was an incredible thought now. She sat there holding on to that thought, waiting for Minnie Ransom to quit playing to the gallery and get on with it. Sat there, every cell flooded with the light of that idea, with the rhythm of her own breathing, with the sensation of having not died at all at any time, not on the attic stairs, not at the kitchen drawer, not in the ambulance, not on the operating table, not in that other place where the mud mothers were painting the walls of the cave and calling to her, not in the sheets she thrashed out in strangling her legs, her rib cage, fighting off the woman with snakes in her hair, the crowds that moved in and out of each other around the bed trying to tell her about the difference between snakes and serpents, the difference between eating salt as an antidote to snakebite and turning into salt, succumbing to the serpent.

  “Folks come in here,” Minnie Ransom was saying, “moaning and carrying on and say they wanna be well. Don’t know what in heaven and hell they want.” She had uncrossed her legs, had spread her legs out and was resting on the heels of her T-strap, beige suedes, the black soles up and visible. And she was leaning forward toward Velma, poking yards of dress down between her knees. She looked like a farmer in a Halston, a snuff dipper in a Givenchy.

  “Just this morning, fore they rolled you in with your veins open and your face bloated, this great big overgrown woman came in here tearing at her clothes, clawing at her hair, wailing to beat the band, asking for some pills. Wanted a pill cause she was in pain, felt bad, wanted to feel good. You ready?”

  Velma studied the woman’s posture, the rope veins in the back of her hands, the purple shadows in the folds of her dress spilling over the stool edge, draping down toward the floor. Velma tried not to get lost in the reds and purples. She understood she was being invited to play straight man in a routine she hadn’t rehearsed.

  “So I say, ‘Sweetheart, what’s the matter?’ And she says ‘My mama died and I feel so bad, I can’t go on’ and dah dah dah. Her mama died, she’s supposed to feel bad. Expect to feel good when ya mama’s gone! Climbed right into my lap,” she was nudging Velma to check out the skimp of her lap. “Two hundred pounds of grief and heft if she was one-fifty. Bless her heart, just a babe of the times. Wants to be smiling and feeling good all the time. Smooth sailing as they lower the mama into the ground. Then there’s you. What’s your story?”

  Velma clutched the sides of the stool and wondered what she was supposed to say at this point. What she wanted to do was go away, be somewhere, anywhere, else. But where was there to go? Far as most folks knew, she was at work or out of town.

  “As I said, folks come in here moaning and carrying on and say they want to be healed. But like the wisdom warns, ‘Doan letcha mouf gitcha in what ya backbone caint stand.’ ” This the old woman said loud enough for the others to hear.

  The Infirmary staff, lounging in the rear of the treatment room, leaned away from the walls to grunt approval, though many privately thought this was one helluva way to conduct a healing. Others, who had witnessed the miracle of Minnie Ransom’s laying on the hands over the years, were worried. It wasn’t like her to be talking on and on, taking so long a time to get started. But then the whole day’s program that Doc Serge had arranged for the visitors had been slapdash and sloppy.

  The visiting interns, nurses and technicians stood by in crisp white jackets and listened, some in disbelief, others with amusement. Others scratched around in their starchy pockets skeptical, most shifted from foot to foot embarrassed just to be there. And it looked as though the session would run overtime at the rate things were going. There’d never be enough time to get through the day’s itinerary. And the bus wasn’t going to wait. The driver had made that quite plain. He would be pulling in at 3:08 from his regular run, taking a dinner break, then pulling out sharply with the charter bus at 5:30. That too had been printed up on the itinerary, but the Infirmary hosts did not seem to be alert to the demands of time.

  The staff, asprawl behind the visitors on chairs, carts, table corners, swinging their legs and doing manicures with the edges of matchbooks, seemed to be content to watch the show for hours. But less than fifteen minutes ago they’d actually been on the front steps making bets, actually making cash bets with patients and various passers-by, that the healing session would take no more than five or ten minutes. And here it was already going on 3:00 with what could hardly be called an auspicious beginning. The administrator, Dr. Serge, had strolled out, various and sundry folk had come strolling in. The healer had sat there for the longest time playing with her bottom lip, jangling her bracelets, fiddling with the straps of the patient’s gown. And now she was goofing around, deliberately, it seemed, exasperating the patient. There seemed to be, many of the visitors concluded, a blatant lack of discipline at the Southwest Community Infirmary that made suspect the reputation it enjoyed in radical medical circles.

  “Just so’s you’re sure, sweetheart, and ready to be healed, cause wholeness is no trifling matter. A lot of weight when you’re well.”

  “That’s the truth,” muttered one of the “old-timers,” as all old folks around the Infirmary were called. “Don’t I know the truth of that?” the little woman continued, pushing up the sleeves of her bulky sweater as if home, as if readying up to haul her mother-in-law from wheelchair to toilet, or grab up the mop or tackle the laundry. She would have had more to say about the burdens of the healthy had she not been silenced by a
n elbow in her side pocket and noticed folks were cutting their eyes at her. Cora Rider hunched her shoulders sharply and tucked her head deep into the turtleneck by way of begging pardon from those around her, many of whom still held their clinic cards and appointment slips in their hands as if passing through the room merely, with no intention of staying for the whole of it.

  “Thank you, Spirit” drifted toward her. She searched the faces of the circle of twelve that ringed the two women in the center of the room, wondering whether God was being thanked for giving Miz Minnie the gift or for shutting Cora up. The twelve, or The Master’s Mind as some folks called them, stood with heads bowed and hands clasped. Yellow seemed to predominate, yellow and white. Shirts, dresses, smocks, slacks—yellow and white were as much an announcement that a healing session had been scheduled as the notice on the board. The bobbing roses, pink and yellow chiffon flowerettes on Mrs. Sophie Heywood’s hat, seemed to suggest that she was the one who’d praised God. Though the gent humming in long meter, his striped tie looking suspiciously like a remnant from a lemonade-stand awning, could just as well have been the one, Cora Rider thought. Though what Mr. Daniels had to be so grateful for all the time was a mystery to her, what with an alcoholic wife, a fast and loose bunch of daughters, and a bedraggled shoeshine parlor.

  Cora Rider shrugged and bowed her head in prayer, or at least in imitation of the circle folks, who seemed, as usual, lost in thought until several members looked up, suddenly aware that one of their number was inching away from the group. Cora looked up too, and like the old-timers and staffers who noticed, was astounded. For surely Sophie Heywood of all people, godmother of Velma Henry, co-convener of The Master’s Mind, could not actually be leaving.

  Sophie Heywood had been in attendance at every other major event in Velma Henry’s life. No one could say for sure if Sophie had been there when Velma had tried to do herself in, that part of the girl’s story hadn’t been put together yet. But she’d been there at the beginning with her baby-catching hands. There again urging “pretty please” on Velma’s behalf while Mama Mae, the blood mother, plaited peach switches to tear up some behind. Calling herself running away to China to seek her fortune like some character she’d read about in a book, young Velma had dug a hole in the landfill, then tunneled her way through a drainpipe that led to the highway connector past the marshes before her sister Palma could catch up with her and bring her back.