The Salt Eaters 201memOr y in The Salt Eaters
Toni Cade Bambara uses memory in The Salt Eaters
to create a cosmic sense of time. The events of one
day are able to reflect on the entire second half of the
20th century and more. Traumatic memories play a
significant role in the novel. Sophie Heywood expe-
riences traumatic memory of police violence against
her son. While Velma is on the verge of a nervous
breakdown, her husband, Obie, insists that she is
becoming bitter and losing a grasp on her mental
health because she refuses to let go of the traumatic
memories she has of being taken advantage of and
belittled within the sexism of the civil rights and
black liberation struggles. While Velma thinks back
on the path that led her to attempt suicide, she has
flashes of an ancient set of people called the “mud
mothers” who continue to break into her conscious-
ness, demanding healing. The timeless mud moth-
ers place Velma’s life into a larger spiritual context
by referencing the maternal energy of creating the
earth itself.
Minnie Ransom, the healer who attempts to
guide Velma through her recovery, draws on the
help of a spiritual guide, “Old Wife,” who mentors
her across the divide between the living and the
dead. Old Wife’s references to “dancing in the mud”
suggest that she is also one of the mud mothers who
appear in flashes of consciousness throughout the
novel. Bambara’s spiritual time scale fills the single
day of the novel with the impact of centuries.
Bambara also opens up the characters’ memories
in order to develop their personalities and tell the
reader about the tense times they are navigating.
The memory of the Civil Rights movement is key
to the women and men seeking to enact a creative
and educational black liberation struggle in the late
1970s, but since they have not processed the vio-
lence that people in the movement experienced from
outside forces like the police and from one another
within the sometimes oppressive power dynamics
of the movement itself, traumatic memories can
resurface at any moment and erupt in the lives of the
community members.
Bambara uses the legend of the salt eaters to
contextualize the entire novel. According to the
story, passed down through word of mouth, once
the enslaved African people in the Americas ate salt,
they forgot the ability they had to fly back to Africa.
In this way, The Salt Eaters is as much about forget-
ting as it is about memory. Toni Cade Bambara
uses memory in the novel to explore how a group
of people traumatized by their struggle can recon-
nect to ancestral resources and play their role in the
planet’s necessary healing by healing each other and
themselves.
Alexis Pauline GumbsviOlence in The Salt Eaters
In the opening scene of The Salt Eaters, Velma
Henry is on a stool in the Southwest Community
Infirmary, after attempting suicide. From the outset,
Toni Bambara contextualizes Velma’s self-inflicted
harm within a longer story. As Velma asks herself
how she ended up on this recovery stool, the reader
journeys backward into her memory to learn that
her violence against herself is a delayed result of
gendered violence within the black movement for
liberation.
While under Minnie Ransom’s care at the
infirmary, Velma has a violent and vivid memory
of sitting in a meeting where the voices and work
of women in the black liberation movement are
silenced by the charismatic power posturing of Jay
Patterson, a so-called community leader. During
this meeting, Velma is literally bleeding, because
her menstrual cycle has started. Velma remembers
hitchhiking and walking through the rain, her body
sore and bruised in order to salvage an event that Jay
Patterson is able to enjoy and take credit for with-
out doing any work. The sexism in the Civil Rights
and black liberation movements meant that while
women were doing the majority of the physical
and strategic labor, men were making the speeches,
projecting their visions and garnering “fame” in the
movement. Through Velma’s experience, Bambara
describes the impact of this ongoing sexism as
violence. The weight and bitterness of these memo-
ries of the exploited labor of women by their male
comrades stays in Velma’s body. They tear apart her
mental health, to the point that she eventually tries
to take her own life.
While Velma relives these painful memories, her
godmother, Sophie Heywood, is so distressed that
she leaves the room during Velma’s healing process.