Deep Sightings & Rescue Missions

by Toni Cade Bambara

  THERE WILL BE NO LOITERING.

  THERE WILL BE NO PROFANE LANGUAGE.

  THERE WILL BE NO CREDIT.

  CURTESY OF THE MANGLEMENT.

  I talked to people who seemed interested in me. Because we came from a tiny family (my mother was an orphan, and my father was the son of a runaway), I was always looking for grandmothers, because I didn’t have any, and everybody else had some. People had grandmothers with them plus grandmothers down South to go to. This seemed extravagant to me; I wanted some. I wanted uncles and cousins, which I didn’t have, so I began adopting people in the same way people adopted me. I had relatives, so to speak, that had never met my mother. They were just people in the neighborhood who thought I was interesting, who wanted to talk to me, or who recognized that I was available.

  To answer your question as to what made me able to do that, I have no idea. Loneliness impelled me; curiosity keeps me doing it.

  You dedicate The Salt Eaters to your mother for giving you the literal space to create. Could you talk about your mother as an influence in your artistic development?

  My mother had put herself through school wanting to be a journalist with the New York Age, but instead got married and went into civil service. I always think of her as a shadow artist in the sense that that is her take on things. I have been trying to encourage her to be a mystery writer because she really has that kind of suspicious mindset! My mother was not a house-proud woman, but she had a thing about these bookcases that she bought in Macy’s basement, unfinished furniture division, and every spring she would spread the paper, get a rag, take the books out, dust them, and then she would repaint these bookcases a sparkling white. I would look at these books, and one of the books was a little, skinny, flat, black book with a little bronze insert, Bronzeville, by Miss Gwendolyn Brooks. It had pictures of children, so I kind of thought it was mine. I used to read it and take it to my room, but it wasn’t my book, so I would bring it back and put it in the bookcase. I would hear the name Gwen Brooks because I lived in Harlem, and Harlem was a very rich, wealthy society in the sense that we had everybody. The Robesons had moved back in 1936. Camilla Williams was vocalizing up in the Harlem Y. Everybody in the world went to the Countee Cullen Branch, and to the Arthur Schomburg Collection (which is where I met John Henry Clarke). I would look at a poster of Gwen Brooks, and I liked her face. I like her name, Gwendolyn Brooks. It sounded very ordinary, and it sounded like it was possible to be a writer and to be ordinary.

  Also in Mom’s bookcase was Langston Hughes’s The Big Sea. The jacket had come off, leaving only the yellow book, so I didn’t see his picture, and I didn’t know for years that Langston Hughes was the Mr. Langdon who used to come into the library and talk to us. When I was in the fifth grade, I was going to school in the Bronx, but we lived on Morningside Avenue, and though the Mount Morris library was not the closest branch, it was the most interesting because those ladies really knew books; and they were interested in making you read. If you were taking out two books, they would recommend a third. Langston Hughes lived diagonally across the street, and he would break three rules that endeared him to me forever. First of all, he would come into the library and would not take off his hat. Not because he was rude, but because he was loaded down with a briefcase, portfolio, a satchel of books: he was coming to work. He had great hats. He had a Borsalino that I would really like to have. The second violation was he would come into the children’s section. As you know, in those days age borders were very strict and they were heavily patrolled. If you were little, then you went over here, and you listened to Sunday school stories; if you were a grown-up, you were over there listening to the senior choir. If you were in the movies, you were in the children’s section, roped off with that lady in the white dress with the flashlight to hit you with and keep you all in check. The rest of the movie house was for the grown-ups.

  It was the same thing with the library. So, Mr. Langdon (as we thought he was called) would come into the children’s library, would stroll along the windowsill; looking at the sweet potato plants stuck with toothpicks hanging in the wide-mouth amber jars, and he would comment on them. We would always be looking at him thinking, Is he the stranger our parents always warned us against? Was he the pervert we had to watch out for? What was he doing in the children’s library? Then he would come and sit down with us and spread out his work. He was always very careful about space. If his book hit yours, he would say “Excuse me.” I can’t tell you how rare that was in those days. Nobody had respect for children or their sense of space. Well, he would be writing, reading, and pondering, and then he would look up and break the third rule—he would talk. He would ask us what we’re doing. What kind of homework we have. Do we think it is intelligent homework? What was on our minds? The man was a knockout!

  So, why I dedicated The Salt Eaters to my mom: I can remember any number of times my mother, unlike other parents, would walk around us if we were daydreaming. If she was mopping, she would mop around us. My mother had great respect for the life of the mind. Between working her two jobs, she would put one foot in her stocking and would go into this deep stare. She too had the need for daydreaming and for talking with herself. She didn’t get much of an occasion with a mouthy kid like me.

  I was writing stories long before I learned to spell. My father used to get the Daily Mirror (which my mother thought was an antilabor paper), and there were very fat margins, so I would scribble in the margins. When I had someone captive, like my mother in the bathtub, I would read this scribble-scrabble to her and she would listen. Essentially, it was my mother’s respect for the life of the mind. She gave us permission to be artists. After my first aptitude test I was made aware that I was a freak in some way. In those aptitude tests they would say. “If you have a half hour to spare, would you build a wagon, take apart a clock and see how it works?” etc. They never said, “Daydream, just sit in a window and stare. Conjure up characters and plot stories.” They never said that. My mother made it all very casual. My brother was something of a prodigy in terms of art and music, and so her thing was to give us access. To give us access to materials, to museums, to libraries, to parks. We figured that one of her motivations was that she had been kind of shy about going to these places, but she became emboldened as a mother. We always had equipment. We had no furniture or much in the way of wardrobes, but we had drawing paper, paints, and raffia to make mats. We had books and a piano. In the fourth grade I went to the Modern School run by Miss Mildred Johnson, sister of James “Dark Manhattan” Johnson. She was very mean, very yellow, very strict, and very snooty. She would look down at me coming in there with hand-me-down clothes. I didn’t come in a cab like most of the other students. The other kids would talk about going up to Martha’s Vineyard for the weekend, or going to Sugarbush to ski. They went to Europe and to the Met. They were Black people, but they were not my people. It was confusing. We would take our early lessons in French, and in the afternoon we were learning about the medieval guilds of Europe. I was totally out of it. But Miss Francis, my teacher, wrote a report home and said, “She’s making a very difficult social adjustment, but she evidences talent in creative writing.”

  Where did you learn your first political lessons? Who were you listening to?

  The radical thirties were not over with in the early forties, so there were people running around the neighborhood setting up meetings and rallies. And I lived in Harlem with Black bookstores, such as Micheaux’s Liberation Memorial Bookstore—“the home of proper propaganda”—and with Speakers’ Corner. I do not think a community is viable without a Speakers’ Corner. If we can’t hear Black people speak, we become captive to the media, and we disacknowledge Blackspeak. Our ears are no longer attuned to any kind of sensible talk. I knew that Speakers’ Corner was valuable, because when we left Harlem most people seemed to be kind of airheads. They were not raising critical questions. There was no street culture. They were stupid compared to Harlemites, who were sharp and cynical. My k
ind of folks. Everybody spoke at Speakers’ Corner, from center to left. You didn’t have too many right-wing jerks getting up on that soapbox. Who would speak were people like the women from the Sanctified Church, and they might talk about the research they were doing on the Colored People’s Conventions of the Reconstruction era. Trade unionists, definitely, talking about the need for a Black coalition, which we have now—the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists. The members of the Harlem branch of the Communist party might give an analysis of candidates running on the ward level, city level, or national level. Members of the various Socialist parties would get up and talk about the state, the circumstances, conditions, and status of workers throughout the world and why there needed to be solidarity, etc. The Abyssinians (now called Rastas) would get up and talk about African civilizations and why we needed to support Haile Selassie. Temple people (now called Muslims) would talk about how they were catching hell back in Chicago and Detroit from the government. Why stateside Black folks needed to be in solidarity with West Indians and East Indians coming into the community. West Indians would get up and speak. Folks would talk about how the Puerto Ricans were coming into the neighborhood, and we ought not be xenophobic. The U.S. government was bringing truckloads of Puerto Ricans into Harlem in 1948, which was around the time of the Nationalist party formation, which is why they were bringing in people from Puerto Rico to break that independence movement up. Speakers on the corner would explain all that. Then the Puerto Ricans would get up and speak, and people would try not to laugh at the accents.

  So Speakers’ Corner made it easy to raise critical questions, to be concerned about what’s happening locally and internationally. It shaped the political perceptions of at least three generations. It certainly shaped mine, and I miss it today. There is no Speakers’ Corner where I live. There is no outdoor forum where people can not only learn the word, hear information, hear perspective, but also learn how to present information, which is also what I learned on Speakers’ Corner: how to speak and leave spaces to let people in so that you get a call-and-response. You also learn how to speak outdoors, which is no small feat. You also have to learn how to not be on paper, to not have anything between you and the community that names you. So I learned a great many things, and I am still grounded in orality, in call-and-response devices, and I do not deliver papers. I am frequently asked to give a paper at a conference and I refuse. I say that I don’t do papers unless I am being paid to write an essay that is going to be published somewhere that I know of. But I am not doing a talk and a paper. People then ask me to give a talk. Well, I can do that. I prepare as hard as anybody else in order to be able to make eye contact with people I am talking to. One of the reasons I do that is I am very shy and I don’t like being shy, so I make a point of wrestling with that, and one way is to constantly remove any kind of camouflage or any kind of barrier that exists between me and the community that names me.

  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 or racist 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 it’s about the period of the late forties when, as Gerald Home 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 cloakroom 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 days and then turned up in the late fifties as a government agent. He was working the crowd in front of the Hotel Theresa when Malcolm (who was like our mayor) was there, certainly the appropriate person to welcome Fidel to Harlem.

  In those days teachers set traps for you. There was this kid Michael who sat three rows over. We used to walk home together because he lived one block from me. He was a very quiet kid, very repressed. The teacher would always lure him into saying something so that she would be able to call his mother to school. His mother would come and strap him with a Sam Browne belt. Most parents would come and beat their children in front of the class. When I would hear at meetings or at Speakers’ Corner about the brutality of slavery, I began to connect this as behavior learned and carried over, and I would hope that there would one day be a rehab camp. I still think that. What do we do with snitches like Earl Anthony, who had been a friend of mine, and now reveals himself in a new book as having been a government agent all those years when he was with the Panther party? What do we do with people like that? If you believe in transformation politics, or transformation psychology, you feel that they can change. But we don’t have rehabilitation centers to send them to. When I was in Laos in the summer of 1975, in Vientiane City, at the last moment of liberation they sent the generals to the Plain of Jars, which had been carpet-bombed, to share the hardships of the peasants, to live with them and to turn the Plain of Jars into a green haven. The generals went to school six hours a week, learning Marxist-Leninist doctrine, and they shared the hardships of the peasants. I found those kinds of camps in Vietnam, in North Korea, in China, and in Cuba. It’s dodgy to set up a system like that because it can get, in a split second, totalitarian and inhumane, but we very much need something because we have so many walking wounded and defectives, not only agent types, but also people who are still stumbling around from the sixties who never were embraced quite enough, who got assigned things to do and then got left hanging, and are still walking blasted.

  When did you first realize the possibility of your writing, and when did you begin to think of yourself as a writer?

  I never thought of myself as a writer. I always thought of myself as a community person who writes and does a few other things. I always get a little antsy when people limit me as a writer. In terms of scribbling, I’ve always been writing, so long as I could find paper—not easy during the war. My mother always had gorgeous legs, and my father had a very proprietary pride about her legs, so no matter how bad the market was, or how bad the budget was, she always had black silk stockings. These stockings came wrapped around a rectangle of paper. I couldn’t wait for my mama to get her gorgeous legs into another pair of stockings so I could get that paper. I became something of a community scribe. People would say, “Hey, you little honey, run down to Miss Dorothy’s 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. The man wants to sell his Ford to this guy here. Can you write a contract?” “Sure.” “Here’s 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. Sometimes they would wrap up a dollar, which had been folded and folded and tied in a corner of a handkerchief. Take you a year to unwrap that dollar. So, I got paid as a community scribe and got trained as a community scribe very early.

  When I came back from Cuba in 1973, I began to think that writing could be a way to engage in struggle, it could be a weapon, a real instrument for transformation politics. Let me take myself a little more seriously and stop just having fun, I thought.

  Let me talk about my mother as “hero.” There is a scene of a woman turning a school out in the title story “Gorilla, My Love,” and I once did an article for Redbook on Mother’s Day which was
about my mother at school. In 1946, the United Nations was established in New York and everyone was very proud. They would drive us crazy in school with these assembly programs about the goddamn United Nations. We would have to draw posters for various campaigns about the United Nations. Very generic and very dull. Children holding hands around the globe. So we’re drawing one day, and the teacher falls asleep. I am drawing the children around the globe, but now I want to give them color because my children are Chinese, Indian, and African. You know those school crayons, big and fat, but no matter how hard you pressed you could never get any color out of them. I did not want my children looking streaky and mud-colored. I wanted them to look cool. So I thought that if I got the coffee grinds out of Miss Beak’s coffee cup, I could maybe get the right color. So I went up to her desk and woke her up to ask if I could have the coffee. She woke up like a bear. The first thing she said was, “What are you doing out of your seat? You take yourself too seriously in general and in particular.” Well, I could handle that. But then she started really blowing like a hurricane, talking about “as ugly and crummy and lousy as these crayons are, they are good enough for you people because who the hell do you think you are? You are just poor colored children.” Well, this was too big for me. This was a case for Mother. My mother had a turning-the-school outfit. She had a serious Joan Crawford hat and a Persian lamb coat. She wore one of two favorite suits—either an aquamarine suit with a cherub cameo, which I didn’t like, or my favorite suit, a da wine, red, wide-wale corduroy, and, of course, her gorgeous legs in the silk stockings. And some I. Miller outlet opera pumps. She was bad! Now, she would stride into the class and lay out the first law: “My children are never wrong, so you cannot be right.” All the children would be so delighted because here was a woman come to champion her child, not humiliate, beat, torture, and terrorize everybody and make everybody throw up. The teacher would say, “Can we talk outside?” My mother was not moving. She also had this scary pocket-book. The click on it was like the cocking of a shotgun. Mom allowed how she was a substitute teacher, and she had pull with the Board of Education, she knew everybody, so “your ass is mine.” She would start working her thing. She would be working the dimple in her chin, arching one eyebrow and getting this flinty edge to her very articulate voice, and the teacher would be coming apart. The second law: “You apologize to my daughter and you apologize to the class.” The teacher would look at me and finally get my name right (the name my daddy gave me). Then she would turn to the class and try to present some lame story about how the coffee gave her nightmares and she ran amuck and lost her mind. My mother would be saying, “Apologize now or I’ll meet you down at no Livingston Street.” We would laugh at the teacher. Michael would not laugh. He never laughed at any so-called authority figure. He knew what would happen, but we all laughed at her. Then my mother swiveled on her I. Miller black suede opera pumps and moved out of the classroom with the sleeves of her Persian lamb moving like regal robes. Mother was therapeutic.