Overview
Salt Eaters
Quick Reference
Toni Cade Bambara's important multilayered novel The Salt Eaters (1980) is set in the community of Claybourne, Georgia, during the late 1970s. The novel centers on the attempted suicide and healing of the main character, Velma Henry, as she comes to grips with the fragmentation, rage, and self-will that have driven her in the past. In the Southwest Community Infirmary, after her wounds are bandaged, Velma sits with the fabled healer, Minnie Ransom, surrounded by a circle of twelve spiritual adepts (The Master's Mind); a group of nervous medical students; the clinic physician, Dr. Julius Meadows; and an assortment of casually interested clinic patients. Also surrounding Velma and Minnie, beyond the clinic itself, are a dazzling constellation of characters, institutions, and situations: Fred Holt, the bus driver nearing retirement and grieving the death of his friend, Porter; Velma's husband, Obie, who heads the also fragmented Academy of the Seven Arts; the Seven Sisters performing arts group who travel toward Claybourne for the annual Mardi Gras festival.
Boundaries of time and space, imagination and reality are frequently blurred, as when Minnie Ransom and her spirit guide, Old Wife, freely commune throughout Velma's healing and even “travel” to a chapel for prayer. Jazz-inflected rhythms, lyrical language, flashbacks, digressions, and a panoply of characters and subplots create a novel that many reviewers initially found difficult—but ultimately worthwhile— to read. Gloria Hull, calling the novel “daringly brilliant,” describes its structure as one of widening circles, and provides a diagram of how those many circles and characters connect. While the novel was enthusiastically received, some felt that its strength—its panoramic sweeps and encompassing themes— eclipsed character development, leaving readers little connection with individual characters.
All of the main characters are related in some way to Velma, whose fractured psyche serves as a trope for the splinterings and fractures of the community, where fundamental values (like connections with the best of people's traditions and attention to spiritual well-being) have been left behind in the wake of the civil rights movement. Like other African American women's novels of the 1970s and 1980s, The Salt Eaters deals with the gender oppression that African American women experienced before, during, and after civil rights. Minnie Ransom repeatedly asks Velma if she is ready for the “weight” of being well, a question the novel implicitly directs to the entire community.
The Salt Eaters integrates African and Afro-Caribbean spiritual and healing traditions with those from Western religion and other spiritual practices. The novel includes references to prayer, tarot, cowrie shells, herbal and folk medicines, loa, rootwork, and obeah, among others. Under Minnie's guiding hand, Velma will move backward in time to relive her fear and rage, as well as to recover lost wisdom and rooted-ness. Illness, however, becomes a matter of community as well as individual healing; as Velma returns to health, she is also restored to a community badly in need of its own healing. The novel ends apocalyptically, with the culmination of preparations for a local Mardi Gras festival and a cataclysmic storm that signals changes in the characters who need them the most, including Velma, who rises from the stool as though from a “burst cocoon.”
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Subjects: Literature
