Deep Sightings & Rescue Missions

by Toni Cade Bambara

  TONI CADE BAMBARA

  DEEP SIGHTINGS AND RESCUE MISSIONS

  Toni Cade Bambara is the author of two short-story collections, Gorilla, My Love and The Sea Birds Are Still Alive, and a novel, The Salt Eaters. She edited The Black Woman and Tales and Short Stories for Black Folks. Bambara’s works have appeared in many periodicals and have been translated into several languages.

  ALSO BY TONI CADE BAMBARA

  The Black Woman (editor)

  Tales and Short Stories for Black Folks (editor)

  The Salt Eaters

  The Sea Birds Are Still Alive

  Gorilla, My Love

  CONTENTS

  PREFACE BY TONI MORRISON

  FICTION

  GOING CRITICAL

  MADAME BAI AND THE TAKING OF STONE MOUNTAIN

  BABY’S BREATH

  THE WAR OF THE WALL

  ICE

  LUTHER ON SWEET AUBURN

  ESSAYS AND CONVERSATIONS

  READING THE SIGNS, EMPOWERING THE EYE

  LANGUAGE AND THE WRITER

  DEEP SIGHT AND RESCUE MISSIONS

  SCHOOL DAZE

  HOW SHE CAME BY HER NAME

  THE EDUCATION OF A STORYTELLER

  PREFACE

  Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions is unlike other books by Toni Cade Bambara. She did not gather or organize the contents. She did not approve or choose the photograph on the jacket. She did not post a flurry of letters, notes and bulletins on the design, on this or that copy change, or to describe an innovative idea about the book’s promotion. And of her books published by Random House (Gorilla, My Love, The Seabirds Are Still Alive and Salt Eaters) only this one did not have the benefit, the joy, of a series of “editorial meetings” between us. Hilarious title struggles. Cloaked suggestions for ways to highlight, to foreground. Breathless discussions about what the whores really meant. Occasional battles to locate the double meaning, the singular word. Trips uptown for fried fish. Days and days in a house on the river—she, page in hand, running downstairs to say, “Does this do it?”

  Editing sometimes requires re-structuring, setting loose or nailing down; paragraphs, pages may need re-writing, sentences (especially final or opening ones) may need to be deleted or re-cast; incomplete images or thoughts may need expansion, development. Sometimes the point is buried or too worked-up. Other times the tone is “off,” the voice is wrong or unforthcoming or so self-regarding it distorts or mis-shapes the characters it wishes to display. In some manuscripts traps are laid so the reader is sandbagged into focusing on the author’s superior gifts or knowledge rather than the intimate, reader-personalized world fiction can summon. Virtually none of that is applicable to editing Bambara’s fiction.

  Her writing is woven, aware of its music, its overlapping waves of scenic action, so clearly on its way—like a magnet collecting details in its wake, each of which is essential to the final effect. Entering her prose with a red pencil must be delicate; one ill-advised (or well-advised) “correction” can dislodge a thread, unravel an intricate pattern which is deceptively uncomplicated at first glance—but only at first glance.

  Bambara is a writer’s writer, an editor’s writer, a reader’s writer. Gently but pointedly she encourages us to rethink art and public space in “The War of the Wall.” She is all “eyes, sweetness and stingers” in “Luther on Sweet Auburn” and in “Baby’s Breath.” She is wisdom’s clarity in “Going Critical,” plumbing the ultimate separation for meaning as legacy.

  Although her insights are multiple, her textures layered and her narrative trajectory implacable, nothing distracts from the sheer satisfaction her story-telling provides. That is a little word—satisfaction—in an environment where superlatives are as common as the work they describe. But there is no other word for the wash of recognition, the thrill of deep sight, the sheer pleasure a reader takes in the company Bambara keeps. In “Ice,” for example, watching her effortlessly transform a story about responsibility into the responsibility of story-telling is pure delight and we get to be in warm and splendid company all along the way.

  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. There was no doubt whatsoever that the work she did had work to do. She always knew what her work was for. Any hint that art was over there and politics was over here would break her up into tears of laughter, or elicit a look so withering it made silence the only intelligent response. More often she met the art/politics fake debate with a slight wave-away of the fingers on her beautiful hand, like the dismissal of a mindless, desperate fly who had maybe two little hours of life left.

  Of course she knew. It’s all there in “How She Came By Her Name.” The ear with flawless pitch; integrity embedded in the bone; daunting artistic criteria. Perhaps my wondering whether or not she realized how original, how rare her writing is is prompted by the fact that I knew it was not her only love. She had another one. Stronger. As the Essays and Conversations portion of this collection testifies, (especially after the completion of her magnum opus about the child murders in Atlanta) she came to prefer film: writing scripts, making film, critiquing, teaching, analyzing it and enabling others to do the same. The Bombing of Osage Avenue and W. E. B. Du Bois: A Biography in Four Voices contain sterling examples of her uncompromising gifts and her determination to help rescue a genre from its powerful social irrelevancy.

  In fiction, in essays, in conversation one hears the purposeful quiet of this ever vocal woman; feels the tenderness in this tough Harlem/Brooklyn girl; joins the playfulness of this profoundly serious writer. When turns of events wearied the gallant and depleted the strong, Toni Cade Bambara, her prodigious talent firmly in hand, stayed the distance.

  Editing her previous work was a privilege she permitted me. Editing her posthumous work is a gift she has given me. I will miss her forever.

  “She made revolution irresistible,” Louis Massiah has said of her.

  She did. She is. Irresistible.

  TONI MORRISON

  June 1996

  Special thanks to Ms. Toni Morrison

  and Mr. Louis Massiah

  for their help in

  pulling this collection together

  and keeping my Mother’s voice alive.

  KARMA BENE BAMBARA

  June 1996

  FICTION

  GOING CRITICAL

  I

  One minute, Clara was standing on a wet stone slab slanting over the drop, a breaker coming at her, the tension tingling up the back of her legs as though it were years ago and she would dive from the rocks to meet it. And in the next minute, the picture coming again, brushing behind her eye, insistent since morning but still incomplete. Then the breaker struck the rocks, the icy cold wash lifting her up on her toes, and the picture flashing, still faint, indistinct. Teeth chattering, she flowed with it, tried not to understand it and blur the edges, but understood it beneath words, beneath thought. The brushing as of a feather, the wing-tip arrival of the childhood sea god who had buoyed her up from the deep when she’d been young and reckless in the waters. A feather brushing in the right side of the brain, dulled by three centuries of God-slight neglect, awakened in Clara at the moment of her daughter’s conception.

  Nineteen eighty, middle-aged woman in dated swim-suit and loose flesh, sliding perilously on moss slime stone, image clustering behind right eye, image-idea emerging from the void, a heresy in one era, a truth in the next, decaying into superstition, then splashing its message before retur
ning to the void. The water sucking at the soles of her feet before sliding out again to sea, she saw it and shivered.

  And then she was running, forgetting all her daughter had taught her about jogging. Running, she pushed her chilled body through an opening in the bushes as though heading toward a remembered site—a clearing, a desert nearly, where the bomb test was to be conducted. They’d been told through memos, at briefings, and over the PA system that they were in no danger providing, so long as, on the condition that, and if. No special uniforms or equipment had been issued, not even a shard of smoked glass. They were simply to take up their positions in the designated spots where the NCO rec hall was to be built. Line up, shut up, close the eyes—that was all, once the incomprehensible waivers had been signed.

  Cold and damp, Clara plunged through the green, seeing in memory remnants of the ghost bush, seeing the open-mouth Lieutenant Reed, a gospel singer in civilian life, crash through the bush at the last minute, leaving a gaping wound. The twigs and leaves trying to squeeze to, trying to knit closed, trying to lock up before the blast. Their straining prying Clara’s eyes open. And in that moment, the deep muffled thunder of the detonation. And the ground broke and the light flared and her teeth shook in the jellied sockets of her gums. Her heart stopped, but her eyes kept on seeing—Lieutenant Bernice Reed a shadow, an X-ray, the twigs and leaves transparent too, showing their bones.

  Clara passed through the bushes out of breath and exchanged her swimsuit for a towel, wondering if the bush still quaked on the flats in Utah. Had it ever closed, had it ever healed? And did Bernice Reed still sing in the choir in Moultrie, Georgia, or had she left her voice there in the wounded green?

  II

  “Ya know, Mama, the really hip part of the fish and loaves miracle?”

  Clara watched her daughter squat-walk across the sandy blanket, thinking fishes and loaves, the Piscean age, Golden Calf, the Taurean. Wondering too, would the girl ever get it together and apply her gift in useful ways in the time of the Emptying Vessel?

  “There were no dishes to wash, no bottles to sterilize or nipples to scrub. And no garbage to put out, Mama. That was the miracle. Hell, feeding the multitudes ain’t no big thing. You and Aunt Ludie and women before and mamas since been doing that season in and season out.”

  Season in and season out. To feed the people, Clara muttered, pulling her overall strap over her shoulder and hooking it. What crops would be harvested from the contaminated earth?

  “But of course, it was probably a classic case of the women doing the cleaning up. So quite naturally all that non-high drama escaped the chronicler’s jaundiced eye.”

  “I knew you were going to say that,” Clara said. She stumbled into her clogs, watching Honey bury a lump of potato salad in the sand.

  Honey shrugged. “How boring it must be for you to always know what I’m going to say.”

  “Not always. I don’t always know, I mean.”

  Clara stuffed garbage into a plastic sack while her daughter gathered up the casting stones. The bone white agate Honey always used as the control was slipped into the leather pouch she wore around her neck. The two pebbles she’d found on the beach, the yes and no for the impromptu reading, Honey tossed into the picnic hamper.

  “You were able to help them?” Clara knew Honey would merely glance toward the couple she’d read and shrug. The arguments over the proper use of Honey’s gifts had been too frequent and too heated of late. Honey could not be lured into a discussion just like that. Clara ignored the press of time and softened her voice all the more. “You saw something for them?”

  They had walked right up, the couple, tracking sand onto the blanket, ignored Clara altogether as though she were already gone, and said to Honey that they’d recognized her from the Center and would she read their cards, or read their palms, or throw the cowries, or “Give us some money,” the woman had joked not joking, “Cash money in the hand,” karate-chopping the air and baring her teeth. And Clara had done a quick aura-scan, first of the couple, swarmy and sparkish, then of her daughter, a steady glow.

  “They seemed bad news to me,” Clara said, still not expecting an answer, but searching for a point of entry. And saying it for the sake of the phrase “bad news,” in preparation for the talk they’d come to the old neighborhood beach for but thus far had skirted. “Vampires,” Clara said flatly. Honey did not take up the challenge, but went right on gathering up their things, her beaded braids clinking against her earrings.

  Clara squatted down and folded the towels, wondering if Honey’d had a chance to rest, to recharge after the command-performance reading. She leaned over to dump the towels in the hamper and too to place her hand on her daughter’s nerve center.

  “Was there anything helpful you could tell them, Honey, about, say budgeting for the future?” Clara heard it catch in her throat, “the future,” and felt Honey hearing it in the small of her back.

  They both sat silent for a moment, gazing off in the direction of the couple arguing and wrassling their beach chairs as far from the water’s edge as they could get.

  “But then, what could you tell them? Hard to make ends meet when you’ve got your ass on your shoulders,” Clara said, and was immediately sorry.

  “Mama,” Honey made no effort to disguise her annoyance, “I will gladly pay you back for the wedding. I will tell Curtis not to bug you any further about a loan. And damnit, I will pay for the parking.”

  “I didn’t mean …” Clara didn’t bother to say the rest of it, that she was only trying her hand at a joke. Her ears, her tongue, her heart were stinging.

  III

  They shook the sand out, then began folding the blanket, remembering how they used to do the laundry together, each backing up till the bedspread or sheet pulled taut—the signal to begin. Sometimes, flapping it flat, they’d dance to meet in the center, doing precise minuet steps, their noses pointed toward the basement ceiling, their lips pursed in imitation of a neighbor lady who complained of their incense, candles, gatherings, “strange” ways. Or, clicking across the ceramic tile of the laundry room, grimacing in tortured Flamenco postures, they’d olé olé till Jake, overhead in his den, hollered down the heat duct to lighten up and hurry up with supper. Sometimes, as part of their put-down of the school PE program, they’d clog, doing the squarest square dance steps they could muster. Yodeling, they’d bring each other the corners of the sheet, their knuckles knocking softly when they met, blind, each hiding behind her side of the raised-high fabric to prepare a face to shock the other with, once Clara, clasping all the corners and twanging in a hillbilly soprano, or Honey, nesting her hands in the folds to get the edges aligned, signaled the other to lower the covers in the laundry basket, their howls drawing stomps from overhead.

  In those free times before the lumps appeared and the nightmare hauntings began, Clara would hold on to a funny face remembered from a Galveston carnival mask, while Honey, bending, would smooth the bedspreads down her mother’s body to save her time at the ironing board. But then came the days when their signals went awry, when Clara, breathless with worry and impotence, and Honey, not yet reading the streaks in her mother’s aura or the netted chains in her palm’s mercury line, were both distracted, and the neatly folded tablecloth would wind up a heap on the basement floor. “I thought you had it, damnit. I thought you were going to take it. Shit.” And Jake, husband/father, would avoid the loyalty trap by giving both bristling women wide berth for the course of the day.

  There were the hot, silent times too, Clara racing feverishly through lists of healers yet to be seen, Honey searching for some kind thing to say now that radium and chemotherapy had snatched huge patches out of Clara’s hair and softened her gums, ruining a once handsome jawline. The covers between would get ironed flat by the heat of mother and daughter clinging to the spread, touching through terry cloth or wool or chenille, neither letting go. Overhead, Jake, his face pressed against cold iron, breathing in burnt dust from the grate and cat hairs in
the carpet, weeping into the ashes, would pray they’d let go of each other before the time.

  “I’ve got it,” Clara said finally, when she could bear it no longer, neither the strain of the silence, the memories, nor her daughter’s presence too close and too intense. “Let go, Honey,” as though the sun that Honey’s young body had soaked up all day were searing her now through the wool. “Let go.”

  Clara draped the blanket over Honey’s outstretched arm, dropped it really, as though it had singed her, as though she wanted to be done with blankets and outings and Honey and all of it quickly and get away, race back to the rocks, to the ice-cold waters that had known her young and fit and with a future.

  “Mama, are you alright?”

  Her daughter whispering as in a sickroom with shades drawn and carpets muffling; Honey slow-motion bending to lay the blanket in the hamper, slow and quiet as in the presence of the dying. Clara grabbed up one handle of the wicker hamper, and Honey took up her end. And now they could go. There was nothing to keep them there except what was keeping them there. But how to begin? Honey, your ole mama’s on her last leg and needs to know, you won’t be silly … My darling, please promise not to abuse your gifts … Before I kick off, Sweetie, one last request…? Words tumbled moist and clumsily in Clara’s mouth, and she rejected them. For now she wanted to speak of other things—of life, food, fun—wanted to invite her daughter, her friend, for a promenade along the boardwalk on the hunt for shrimp and beer, or quiche and a nice white wine.

  “The lunch was lovely, Honey, but I’m hungry for more. For more,” she said, veering closer to the subject that held them on the sand. But she could get no further into it and was grateful that Honey chose that moment to turn aside and hook-shoot the garbage sack into the dumpster some three feet away from the arguesome couple. Clara longed to touch her again, to trace with the tip of one finger the part in the back of Honey’s head, knowing the scalp would be warm, hot even. Hot Head. Jake had nicknamed her when she was just an infant. And Curtis had revived it of late, preferring it to Khufu, the name his wife was known by at the Center, to Vera, the name on the birth certificate, and to Honey, the name she’d given her daughter to offset the effects of “Hot Head.” Honey, a name she gave to give her daughter options.