Race & Class

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US In Memory Toni Cade Bambara: passing on the story

LI Onesto
Race Class 1996; 38; 79
DOI: 10.1177/030639689603800106
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Commentary

US
In Memory
Toni 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, underground, under siege, in the throes, on the verge - the storyteller
snatches us back from the edge to hear the next chapter. In which we
are the subjects. We, the hero of the tales. Our lives preserved. How
it was; how it be. Passing it along in the relay. This is what I work to
do: to produce stories that save our lives.I
Toni Cade Bambara
The people lost a significant writer, political activist and filmmaker
when Toni Cade Bambara died of cancer on 9 December 1995. Theres
much to learn from looking at the life of Toni Cade Bambara. And
theres much to celebrate about what she continually contributed to the
lives and struggle of the people.
Growing up in Harlem in the 1940s, Toni Cade Bambara started
tuning her writing skills as a young girl. In a 1994 interview with her
friend and collaborator, Louis Massiah, Toni tells how she was
recruited to be the community scribe:

People would say, Hey, you little honey, run down to Miss
Dorothys house and help her write the letter to her nephew in the
Navy. Run up the way and tell them what happened at the
meeting. Hey, write this down. When I lived in Atlanta, I was a
community scribe in the sense that people would hail me, Excuse
me, you the writin lady? Yeah. Pull in here into the gas station.
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80
The man wants to sell his Ford to this guy here. Can you write a
contract? Sure. Heres a paper bag and a pencil. Get to it. In
return they would give me my inspection ticket stamped. People in
the neighborhood would knock on my door. You the writin lady?
Listen, the telephone company has screwed me again. Can you write
a 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 community
scribe very early.&dquo;

Growing up in Harlem also taught Toni, early on, the importance of

standing up against oppression and not collaborating with the enemy.
She said:

My mother gave us the race thing. She also encouraged us in an

interventionist 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 any
stereotypic remark. This was difficult because shit was happening all
the time. For example, I had a really fascist teacher in the third
grade, Miss Beaks. She did all sorts of things that were really out. I
wrote a story once called The Making of a Snitch. It was published
when I was in high school, and its about the period of the late 40s
when, as Gerald Horn would say, the national policy shifted from
Blacks as inferior to Blacks as subversive. We were constantly
getting pressure in that McCarthy period. When anything weird
went on in school, the teacher would grab one person at a time and
take him or her into the cloak room and encourage and bribe the
person to rat on classmates. I wrote that story, and many years later
I rewrote it when I ran into the classmate who had been made into a
snitch in those early years and then turned up in the late 50s as a
government

agent.3

Such Harlem experiences would prove to colour and shape Toni Cade
Bambaras expanding talent as a storyteller throughout her life. This
was a community full of lively, provoking culture: Langston Hughes
lived down the street; you could go see Miles on Saturday night. And
Toni remembers how, in the 40s, There were lots of meetings and
rallies going on
There was still that notion that an active political life
was a perfectly normal thing. People had to organise against the
crackdown forces which, in those days, was the police, the FBI,
Immigration, the Draft Board, and the Mob, which are pretty much the
crackdown forces today.4
Speakers Corner on Seventh Avenue and 125th Street made it
easy to raise critical questions, to be concerned about whats happening
locally and internationally it shaped the political perceptions of at
least three generations. Here, the rhythm of political dialogue and
debate had a lasting impression. Grounded in orality, Toni said
...

...

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81

Speakers Corner taught her how to speak and leave spaces to let
people in so that you get a call and response. Her mother used to walk
her over to the Speakers Corner to listen to the folks: Of course, if
they were talking &dquo;religious stuff&dquo;, shed keep on going to wherever we
were going; but if they were talking union or talking race, wed hang
tough on the corner. I wasnt raised in the church. I learned the power
of the word from the speakers on Speakers Corner - trade unionists,
Temple People as we called the Muslims then, Father Divinists, PanAfricanists, Abyssinians as we called Rastas then, Communists, Ida B.
Wells folks.S
Later, Toni moved out of Harlem. She went to Queens College, lived
in Greenwich Village, moved to Atlanta, and lived for many years in
Philadelphia. But throughout all this, the soul of Harlem kept coming
back around and informing Tonis muse.
It wasnt until the 60s struck that I really finally felt at home in the
world. I finally reconnected with a lot of things from childhood that
I had lost ... I always take Harlem as my standard of a viable community ; a Speakers Corner, a place where politics are discussed and
where there is critical response so that you do not become captive; a
Black bookstore so you do not become captive to schools and other
indoctrinating institutions; a library in case you cant get to the
bookstore; a park to sit at and talk (also, the park can be where Pop
Johnson and his cronies sit to create community sovereignty. They
can check out who is coming up the walk); you have got to have a
screening room of some kind so you can know what our cultural
workers are doing with our image and our voice; you have to have a
press to get the word OUt.16
The

rhythm of writing

The musicians of the forties and fifties, I suspect, determined my

voice and pace and pitch. I grew up around boys who carried horn
cases and girls who couldnt wait for their legs to grow and reach the
piano pedals. I grew up in New York City, bebop heaven and its
still music that keeps that place afloat. I learned more from Bud
Powell, Dizzy, YBird, Miss Sassy Vaughn about what can be
communicated, can be taught through structure, tone, metronomic
sense, and just sheer holy boldness than from any teacher of
language 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

get

some

musical

experience reading Toni Cade Bambara.

You

blues, gospel, and a lotta jazz. Characters tend to spring out at

you from all different corners,

some

voices

whisper pianissimo,

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others

82

shout forte. You get to feel comfortable with the tune, it seems like you
know where its going. But these compositions can be unpredictable.
The cadence of the words might start off with the beat of a normal
melody, but just when you get your foot tapping, things quickly take a
turn into galloping improvisation. There are streams of consciousness,
flashbacks, and interweavings of plot and sub-plot. Readers/listeners
usually get lost somewhere along the way. But never for too long - for
the characters are real, the ballads familiar - and Toni always comes
back around to pick you up again and carry you along.
Tonis colleague and friend, writer Eleanor Traylor, compared Toni
to the jazz musician whose vitality is precisely this ability to compose,
in vigorous images of the most recent musical language, the contingencies of time in an examined present moment.
Indeed, jam sessions of characters in Toni Cade Bambara present
tales in traditional jazz structure: theme, variation, then re-statement of
theme. 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. Traylor
notes: Constructing rapid contrasts of curiously mingled disparities,
the jam session is both a summing up and a part-by-part examination
by various instruments of an integrity called melody. Now a melody is
nothing more or less than the musical rendition of what a poet or a
historian calls theme. And a theme is no other thing than a noticeable
pattern occurring through time as time assumes its rhythmic cycle: past,
present, and future. The Salt Eaters of Toni Cade Bambara is a modern
myth of creation told in the jazz mode.8
In The Salt Eaters, healer Minnie Ranson is trying to help Velma
recover from an attempted suicide. At one point, the storys action is
described as an interplay of notes: Minnie was singsonging it, the
words, the notes ricocheting around the room. Mr Daniels picked out
one note and matched it, then dug under it, then climbed over it. His
brother from the opposite side of the circle glided into harmony with
him while the rest of the group continued working to pry Velma Henry
loose from the gripping power of the disease and free her totally into
Minnie Ransoms hand, certain of total cure there.
Clairvoyants and mediums weave their way in and out of The Salt
Eaters, along with political activists. Toni uses these characters at times
to take you on a ride to an imaginary place. For me, as a dialectical
materialist, such journeys and explorations into un-reality are a
wonderful way for art to stimulate our thinking about the real world.
But for Toni, these spirits are not just symbolic - she actually believes
in a spiritual world.
The themes and issues in The Salt Eaters - of community, collectivity,
transformative healing and struggle - are relevant and important. And
these themes are found in many of her works. As Tonis colleague, Ruth
-

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83

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

tremendous

responsibility - responsibility and honor

- to be

cultural worker ... whatever you want to call this

vocation. Ones got to see what the factory worker sees, what the
prisoner sees, what the welfare children see, what the scholar sees,
got to see what the ruling-class mythmakers see as well, in order to
tell the truth and not get trapped. Got to see more and dare more. 10
Toni Cade Bambara

writer,

As

an

artist,

girl, Toni Cade Bambara was always listening, always

The lively Harlem language that whirled around her inspired
creative mental exercises. She recalls putting words together in different
concoctions, then transferring them to pieces of white cardboard that
came with her mothers silk stockings. She would Linger reckless in
doorways, hallways, basements, soaking up overheards to convert into
radio scripts Id one day send out.
Toni said that for years she didnt acknowledge to herself that she
was a writer. She didnt see writing as my way of doing my work in
the world. She said it was not until 1973, after returning from a trip to
Cuba, that she learned what Langston Hughes and others, most
especially my colleagues in the Neo-Black Arts Movement, had been
teaching for years - that writing is a legitimate way, an important way,
to participate in the empowerment of the community. At this point,
a weapon, a real instrument for transwriting for Toni became
formation politics.&dquo;I
Tonis view of the role of her writing evolved out of the consciousness and struggle of the 60s and early 70s. She saw her work as
intimately connected with and serving the struggle of the Black masses,
and other oppressed nationalities, against oppression. In an interview
by Claudia Tate in the early 1980s she said, I do not think that
literature is the primary instrument for social transformation, but I do
think it has potency. So I work to tell the truth about peoples lives; I
work to celebrate struggle, to applaud the tradition of struggle in our
community, to bring to center stage all those characters, just ordinary
folks on the block, whove been waiting in the wings... 12
In 1965, Toni became an instructor at City College of New York and
helped organise SEEK - a programme aimed at recruiting Black and
Latino students. Then, during the student uprisings of 1968-1969, she
was the unofficial faculty adviser/consultant of the student protest
a

young

writing.

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84

leaders. Toni was a trailblazer in giving voice to the struggle against

womens oppression. As she put it: We cant be rhapsodising about
liberation, breeding warriors, revolution unless we are willing to
address ourselves to the womans liberation.33
In 1970, she edited the book The Black Woman, a collection of short
stories and other writings by Black women. At the time this book was
the first of its kind. The voices of Black women in the revolutionary
movement, speaking out against their oppression - including criticism
of the way they were being treated by men in the struggle - had not
been brought together and given a public forum in this kind of way.
Toni said: The anger, dismay, disappointment, or just sheer
bewilderment that many women experience as a way of life in regard to
the man-woman setup is something were all going to have to get used
to 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 the

peoples struggle in her fiction. Her short stories and the novel The Salt
Eaters are filled with heroes of the fight against the oppression of Black
people. There are community activists, Black revolutionary leaders,
spiritual healers, and plain po people, going up against the system and
in the process building a new sense of collectivity and community.
Many of these characters are trying to find the ways to move on after
the high tide of struggle in the 60s and 70s and not give up the fight. In
the interview with Claudia Tate, Toni said:
The

eighties are now upon us - a period of devastating conflicts and

a period that calls for organizing of the highest order and
commitment of the most sticking kind, a period for which the sixties
was mere rehearsal and the seventies a brief respite, a breathing
space. Most of us are still trying to rescue the sixties - that stunning
and highly complicated period from 1954 to 1972 - from the
mythmakers, still trying to ransom our warriors and theorists from
chaos,

those nuts who would cage em all up, crack their bones, and offer us
some highly selective media fiction in place of the truth. The eighties
S
a lotta work ahead of us.
...

Toni conducted writers workshops, did readings and lectures at

prisons, campuses, museums, rallies, libraries, conferences. Like many
people in the 60s and early 70s, she was inspired by revolutionary
struggles going on in the Third World. And her travels to different
parts of the globe shaped her vision of humanity and future
possibilities.
The US war in Vietnam and the Vietnamese peoples struggle
against imperialism had a big impact on Toni. In the spring of 1975 she
was part of a delegation called The North American Academic

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85

Marxist-Leninist Anti-Imperialist Feminist Women, invited to visit

Vietnam by the Womens Union of North Vietnam. After coming back
from this trip, Toni developed different stories as a way to talk about
her experience in Vietnam and spread solidarity. This was the basis for
some 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 her
storage sheds and under her hut, who cooked for the young men of the
district, proud in her hatred for the enemy, proud of her love for the
country and the nation coming soon. She was doing her part filling up
the 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 the
potential for men and women to develop revolutionary and liberating
relationships. In a talk given in 1969, she said, referring to the war of
liberation in Vietnam: Certainly the huge body of poems and love
letters pouring out of that country reveal that men are congratulating
their women who shoot guns, bear babies, build bridges, keep the
village fires going, plot out strategy, and bury the dead; just as it is
obvious the women celebrate their men who dig booby traps, feed the
infants and the aged, impale GIs, write love poems and the like.6

Scripts of struggle
What is noticeable to me about my current writing is the stretch out
toward the future. Im not interested in reworking memories and

playing with flashbacks. Im trying to press the English language,

particularly verb tenses and modes, to accommodate flash-forwards
and potential happenings. I get more and more impatient, though,
with verbal language, print conventions, literary protocol and the
like; Im much more interested in filmmaking. 17I
Toni Cade Bambara

By the 1980s Toni said she no longer had the patience to sit it out in the
solitude of my back room, all by my lonesome self, knocking out
books. Her main interest had turned to making films - being much
more at home with a crew swapping insights, brilliances, pooling
resources, information.
She went to Philadelphia, where she met Louis Massiah, founder and
director of the Scribe Video Center. When Toni learned he was thinking
about doing a new video, she suggested he tackle the Move Incident as
a community voice video. The Black revolutionary utopian group MOVE
had been under heavy attack from the power structure for several years
in Philadelphia. And, on 13 May 1985, the cops and city authorities had
dropped a bomb on a MOVE house, murdering eleven adults and

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86
children and burning down the whole neighbourhood. In response, Black
and other activists on the East Coast wrote a Draw the Line statement
protesting the massacre and waged a year-long campaign to get it
published in a major Philly newspaper. Toni was one of the signatories to
this statement. Massiah invited Toni to do the narration for the film, The
Bombing of Osage Avenue, and she ended up not only narrating the
documentary but also writing the script and helping to devise the whole
film. Toni went on to work at Scribe from 1986 until 1995, working on
many other documentaries and videos, including Massiahs four-part
series on W.E.B. DuBois, John Akomfrahs Seven Songs for Malcolm X,
the United Hands Community Land Trusts documentary, More Than
Property, and Frances Negrons documentary series on Puerto Rico.
Toni also taught script-writing at Scribe, where she wrote and lectured
about film, stressing the importance of movies that dispel Hollywood
stereotypes 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 to
movies constantly - I go to see them to train myself in film, to look at
what are the conventional practices, and what do they mean ideologically or politically. And she stressed the importance of independent
films that do not take the Hollyweird model as the protocol, but rather
are striking out for something else, for a socially responsible cinema.
-

Toni said, I despair at our failure to wrest power from those who have
it and abuse it; our reluctance to reclaim our old powers lying dormant
with neglect; our hesitancy to create new power in areas where it never
before existed. But she was also euphoric because everything in our
history, our spirit, our daily genius - suggests we do it .18
For sure, as community scribe, story-teller and chronicler of
struggle, through words and film, Toni Cade Bambara was a voice of
optimism. She believed in, championed and celebrated the potential for
human transformation and revolutionary change. And she loved to get
right up in the face of the oppressor and, as she put it, blow three or
four choruses of just sheer energetic fun and optimism, even in the teeth
of rats, repressive cops, bomb lovers, irresponsibles, murderers .19
There is much to learn from the words and life of Toni Cade
Bambara. Explaining what informed her work, the basics from which
she proceeds, she said: One, we are at war. Two, the natural response
to oppression, ignorance, evil, and mystification is wide-awake
resistance. Three, the natural response to stress and crisis is not
breakdown and capitulation, but transformation and renewal20

Chicago

LI ONESTO

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87
References
1

Tom Cade Bambara, Salvation is the issue, in Mari Evans (ed.), Black Women
Writers (1950-1980), a critical evaluation (New York, Doubleday, 1984), p.41.
2 Interview with Louis Massiah interview (9 October 1994), published in Hatch Billops
Collection (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 Ibid
8 Eleanor Traylor, Music as theme: the jazz mode of Tom Cade Bambara in Evans,
The Salt Eaters, like one complex jazz
op. cit., p.59. Traylor went on to write of how
symphony, orchestrates the chordal riffs introduced in the short stories of Tom Cade
Bambara collected, so far, in two volumes Gorilla, My Love (1972) and The Sea
Birds Are Still Alive. The improvising, stylizing, vamping, re-creative method of the
mass composer is the formal method by which the narrative genius of Tom Cade
Bambara evokes a usable past testing its values within an examined present moment
while simultaneously exploring the re-creative and transformative possibilities of
experience. The method of the jazz composition informs the central themes and large
revelation of the world of Bambaras fiction In that world, time is not linear like
clock time; rather, it is convergent. All time converges everywhere in that world in the
immediate present; the contemporary, remote, or prehistorical past, and the incipient
future are in constant fluid motion.
9 Ruth Elizabeth Burks, From baptism to resurrection: Tom Cade Bambara and the
incongruity of language in ibid., p 52.
10 Tate interview, op. cit., p.14.
11 Salvation is the issue, op. cit , p.42
12 Tate interview, op. cit., p. 18 See, for example, her evocative Whats 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.36
15 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.25
18 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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