by bell hooks
Like Lorraine Hansberry, Bambara became a literary mentor for me because she was a critical thinker who wrote across many genres. I wanted to write work that would cross many barriers and speak to diverse communities even as I wanted to stay rooted in the southern black folk traditions that had sparked my creativity, my desire to write. Throughout her life Bambara was a champion of the black poor and working class. Since I first read her work as a young student coming from a southern working-class background, it was affirming that our vernacular traditions were beautifully evoked in her stories. Few black writers have captured the wit and humor of black life as skillfully as Bambara. She recognized the role of laughter in struggles for decolonization. To her, laughter was a way to dissent. The oppositional perspectives black people used to resist dehumanization were consistently evoked in her stories.
I first met Bambara when she was living in Atlanta, Georgia. We met at a conference focusing on black women and feminism at Spelman College. Feminist scholar and director of the women’s center Beverly Guy-Sheftall introduced us. In those days I was shy in crowds and liked to be in the background when I felt uncomfortable. However, it was impossible to feel uncomfortable around Toni. She was this incredible embodiment of African and southern hospitality. She knew how to make one feel welcome. She put me at ease. Coming from a working-class southern background I often felt I lacked necessary protocol, the bourgeois demeanor valued in certain settings. Bambara affirmed that it was better to forget decorum and “just be real.” Most working-class black people who encountered Toni fondly remember her warmth and welcoming nature. As I heard one woman say: “She don’t put on airs and try to make you think you don’t know nothing.” From the moment we met Bambara praised my writing and encouraged me to write more.
During my undergraduate years I met many writers who did not all live the spirit of their work, who were threatened when in the presence of aspiring young writers. By the time I met Toni I was sorely disillusioned. I understood by then that the work of a writer’s imagination might indicate very little about her or his beliefs, her or his habits of being. I had met too many black writers who wrote didactically about the need to embrace “the people” who were deeply hierarchical, who liked lording it over others. The hypocrisy of the black middle class revolted me. Most writing about black life was done by privileged individuals who created poor and inadequate representations of the black masses. We were their subjects but they seemed to know nothing about our lives.
Toni Bambara was different. She loved blackness. She loved black people. She did not stand at a distance and write about the black masses. She lived among poor black people, in the segregated world of the South. Her love of regular everyday black folks was not sentimental. She was not a tourist. Her love was nurtured and sustained by keen political insights, an understanding of the importance of decolonization. It was she who most championed decolonization as an intimate process, telling us that “revolution begins in the self and with the self.” While her love of black folks, and poor black folks in particular, was a natural thing she understood its political implications in white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Spreading that love, displaying it, offering it to all and sundry who came her way was a powerful dimension of her political activism. Everyday life was the site for transformation and change.
Late one night I went with Beverly to Toni’s house in Atlanta. We had called to warn her we were on our way and planning to stay awhile. She let us know that her cupboards were bare ‘cause she had been too busy working to get the domestic thing together and that her place was untidy as usual, but that we would be welcomed. We were. When we entered the cluttered world of Toni she urged us to just push stuff out of the way and make ourselves comfortable. She offered us unconditional acceptance and we gave that to her in return. Who could care about housekeeping when we had precious little time to converse with one another? Days and nights spent in her company engaged in fierce intellectual dialectical debate and dialogue were inspiring. An avid reader of periodicals and books, Toni’s down-home manner often deflected attention away from the scope of her intellectual insights. I had never met a black woman writer as generous with her time and ideas as Toni Cade Bambara. She was always willing to nurture young writers and thinkers. She embodied for me the kind of writer I wanted to be—always in solidarity with my people, always struggling for justice for everyone, and always willing to sacrifice.
Everybody close to Toni knows that she could have had a different life, not a life where she was constantly struggling to make ends meet. She could have been part of the literary mainstream but that was not her nature. Her nature was bohemian; she liked to live life on the edge. And like all bohemians she was often critiqued by those around her who were frustrated that she was not living the life of the “great writer” that was the stuff of their imaginations. She invented the life that she wanted to live. And she lived this life on her own terms. This is the aspect of Bambara that more conservative folks found both incomprehensible and reprehensible. To them she was “mad” not to take the good jobs she could have taken in predominately white colleges in all-white communities. She was the high priestess of community, understanding the extent to which black survival is dependent on our capacity to make and live in community. She chose her communities. Often the manner in which she chose was reckless and haphazard but that is the nature of real community. It is a place where we learn to live comfortably with imperfections and contradictions.
In this way I could never be like Toni even though she was a mentor for me. I love solitude and order, everything in its place and a place for everything. She respected my choices and I respected hers. When she came to my minimalist flat she marveled at my capacity to live with so little, signifying and joking about the way I lived. Toni appreciated me for being me. Many times she would tease me about the way my mind works, telling me: “Girl, I just love to watch you thinking.” No idea shared with Toni, no theory was too far-fetched to be considered. This unswerving support from a fellow writer was deeply affirming. As a critical thinker she treasured open-mindedness. While I often threatened others with my clarity of speech, my insights, Toni always told me that these were my gifts.
I was not in regular close contact with Toni. We did not hang together on a consistent basis. Our natures were too different to make for sustained intimacy. We were in the deepest sense of the word comrades in struggle, two black women who realized in our encounters with each other the power and pleasure of feminist sisterhood. We communicated about work and ideas. We played together. We respected each other. When other folks rebuked and scorned me, Toni would respond by writing the encouraging letter—making the don’t-let-it-get-you-down phone call. She supported dissenting voices. I dedicated Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery to Toni because it was the literary magic of her novel The Salt Eaters that cast a spell on me and made me think more deeply about issues of depression and isolation in black female life.
We talked about this dedication. Toni shared that she did not want anyone to think she was not still on the journey towards self-recovery because she was. That did not matter. It mattered that she had raised in this novel a clarion call for black females to stir from our psychic slumbers, to rise and rescue ourselves and one another. In her introduction to a collection of Bambara’s work published posthumously, her dear friend and comrade Toni Morrison writes: “I don’t know if she knew the heart cling of her fiction. Its pedagogy, its use, she knew very well, but I have often wondered if she knew how brilliant at it she was. There was no division in her mind between optimism and ruthless vigilance; between aesthetic obligation and the aesthetics of obligation.” Like many of her readers who were her peers, Morrison fully appreciates Bambara’s imaginative powers, her capacity to use black vernacular in a manner intensely poetic, lyrical, and accessible.
There are those individuals who are disappointed with Toni. They wanted her to write more, be more practical, live life on the terms that they would have chosen
—terms that might have provided safety and stability. They resent her for the messes she made that they elected to try and tidy (those of us who knew girlfriend know that she never expected anyone to do anything that they did not willingly choose to do). She was not a creature of obligations. She did not expect a return on the care she gave. She gave freely and expected others to do the same.
When Toni was critically ill and it was evident that she would soon die, mutual women friends called to say I should contact her. I did not want to call Toni for fear I might be intruding. I did not want to impose an unnatural intimacy on us. I called though. We had several conversations. In all of them she was vibrant. I could feel the full force of her reckless and generous nature and it delighted me. She was dying as she had lived. And she was still welcoming me. Our last conversation was not about death or writing; Toni wanted to talk seriously with me about her concern that I was working too much. She felt I was allowing myself to become too isolated, that I needed to get out more, to socialize—to have more fun. We talked about the fun times we had shared. We talked about the place of pleasure in our lives. She wanted me to remember that pleasure is political—for the capacity to relax and play renews the spirit and makes it possible for us to come to the work of writing clearer, ready for the journey.
Those who attended to Toni in her last days and throughout the period of her illness may be convinced that she was not ready for her journey because she was unprepared in more ways than one. What they may fail to see is that she had already embraced this final journey when she chose to sacrifice a life of material comfort and acclaim to take the hard road. She was ready. She had been preparing herself her whole life to go the hard way. And to be at peace with that, with contradictions, with protracted struggle, with fate. I was blessed to be given an opportunity to share that peace with her in our last conversations. She taught me much about how to live as a black woman writer in this world. Even in the midst of her dying she was teaching me still.
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Copyright © 1999 by Gloria Watkins
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Earlier versions of some of the chapters in this book appeared in the following publications: “Intellectual Life: In and Beyond the Academy,” reprinted from Z Magazine, November 1995; “A Life in the Spirit: Faith, Writing, and Intellectual Work,” reprinted from Revision, Winter 1993 (first published as “A Life in the Spirit”).
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hooks, Bell.
Remembered rapture : the writer at work / Bell Hooks.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8050-5910-6
ISBN-10: 0-8050-5910-5
1. Hooks, Bell. 2. American literature—Afro-American authors—History and criticism. 3. American literature—Women authors—History and criticism. 4. United States—Intellectual life—20th century. 5. English teachers—United States—Biography. 6. Afro-American women—Intellectual life. 7. Scholarly publishing—United States. 8. Critics—United States—Biography. 9. Feminism—United States. 10. Women—Authorship. 11. Authorship. I. Title.
PE64.H66A3 1999
808'.02'082—dc21
98-7998
CIP
First published in hardcover in 1999 by Henry Holt and Company
First Owl Books Edition 1999
eISBN 9781466847583
First eBook edition: May 2013
