among metaphorical / doors, coffee cups float-
ing poised / hysterias.. .” (29–31). Conceptually,
segregation (“doors”) becomes “metaphorical.”
Hayden and Van Doren, while attempting to open
such doors by having coffee together in several
French Quarter restaurants, found that segrega-
tion laws made it virtually impossible for them to
do so (McClusky, 161). This biographical “dance”
with hysteric racism translates as poetic crisis.
Spellbound by this racist history, the poet cannot
voice his humanity to announce that history’s pos-
sible demise.
Van Doren delivers the poet from the “dance”
and the parade, which surged as “a threat / of
river” (15–16):
Then you arrived, meditative, ironic,
richly human; and your presence was shore
where I rested
released from the hoodoo of that dance,
where I spoke
with my true voice again. (34–37)Encountering another’s humanity, the poet regains
what the 1948 version calls his “human voice,” and
“the minotaurs of edict dwindle feckless, foolish”
(37, 38). In the end, “A Ballad” exemplifies Hayden’s
continued faith that humanism may be neither fu-
tilely utopian nor perniciously ideological.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Chrisman, Robert. “Robert Hayden: The Transition
Years, 1946–1948.” In Robert Hayden: Essays on
the Poetry, edited by Laurence Goldstein and Rob-
ert Chrisman, 129–154. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 2001.
Hayden, Robert. “A Ballad of Remembrance.” 1962.
In Collected Poems, edited by Frederick Glayshere.
New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation,
1985.
McClusky, Paul. “Robert Hayden: The Poet and His
Art: A Conversation.” In How I Write / 1, 133–213.
New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972.
Williams, Pontheolla T. Robert Hayden: A Critical
Analysis of His Poetry. Urbana and Chicago: Uni-
versity of Illinois Press, 1987.
Robert S. Oventile
Bambara, Toni Cade (1939–1995)
Novelist, essayist, short story writer, activist, and
screenwriter Toni Cade Bambara was a prolific
artist and a spokesperson for issues affecting
black women. She was born Mitona Mirkin Cade
to Helen Brent Henderson Cade in New York City
on March 25, 1939. She grew up in Harlem, Bed-
ford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, and Queens. She
took the name Toni when she entered school and
added the name Bambara later when she found
it on a sketchbook belonging to her great-grand-
mother. She attended the public schools of New
York and then entered Queens College to study
theater arts and English. After receiving her degree
in 1959, she continued her education at the Uni-
versity of Florence, where she studied commedia
dell’arte, and in Paris at École de Pantomime Eti-
enne Decroux. She returned to the United States
to complete an M.A. at City College in 1964. She
undertook additional work in linguistics at New
York University and New School for Social Re-
search. She did doctoral work at State University
of New York, Buffalo.
During this period Bambara was also involved
in community activism. During college she worked
as a social investigator for the New York Depart-
ment of Social Welfare and then for Metropolitan
Hospital and Colony House Community Center.
Later, she was part of the SEEK program of City
College and the New Careers Program in Newark,
New Jersey.
Her first short story, “Sweet Town,” published
while she was a student, received the John Golden
Award for fiction. In 1970, she published The Black
Woman, an anthology of poetry, essays, and stories
by NIKKI GIOVANNI, ALICE WALKER, AUDRE LORDE,
and others. Her second collection, Tales and Sto-
ries for Black Folks, included works by both estab-
lished African-American authors and students of
Livingston College of Rutgers University, where
Bambara was teaching at the time.
In 1972, she published Gorilla, My Love, a col-
lection of stories written between 1959 and 1970.
They were narrated in the voices of black women
of different ages, from childhood to maturity,
and had both northern urban and southern rural
settings. They made considerable use of the oral30 Bambara, Toni Cade