The Salt Eaters

by Toni Cade Bambara

  All those years Sophie had been turning a warm eye on the child’s triumphs, a glass eye on everything else, which was a lot, to hear the old folks tell it, as the girl, breaking her bonds and casting away the cord, was steady making her bed hard. For those old-timers, though, that walked the chalk, why a woman such as Sophie Heywood, chapter president of the Women’s Auxiliary of the Sleeping Car Porters for two decades running, would even cross the street for the likes of Velma Henry was a mystery anyway. But there it was, so must it be—the godmother ever ready to turn the lamp down low on the godchild’s indiscretions.

  The prayer group moved closer to repair the circle, searching Sophie’s face for a clue to the break and the odd leavetaking. But the woman’s eyes were as still as water in the baptismal pit, reminding them that she had been there too the day the congregation had stood by waiting for a moving of the water, had shouted when Velma had come through religion, had cheered when she walked across the stage of Douglass High to get her diploma, had stood up at her first wedding, hasty as you please and in a night club too, and worn white to the railroad station as the rites of good riddance had been performed. And when Velma had swapped that out-of-town-who’s-his-people-anyway husband for a good home boy whose goodness could maybe lay her wildness down and urge her through college, there was Sophie in her best threads following the child down the aisle, her needle still working in the hem of the gown.

  And here she was now, Sophie Heywood, not only walking away from her godchild, but removing Scorpio from the Mind. Heads turned round as she reached the door and stood there gazing up, they thought, at the ceiling, drawing other heads up too to study the ceiling’s luster, the gleam of the fluorescent rods. And study they did, for Sophie was forever reading signs before they were even so.

  “Every event is preceded by a sign,” she always instructed her students, or anyone else in her orbit who’d listen. “We’re all clairvoyant if we’d only know it.” The lesson was not lost on Cora Rider, whose bed, kitchen table and porch swing were forever cluttered with Three Wise Men, Red Devil, Lucky Seven, Black Cat, Three Witches, Aunt Dinah’s Dream Book, and other incense-fragrant softback books that sometimes resulted in a hit. Now, though, like some others, Cora studied the pockmarks in the plaster, the dance of light overhead, searching not so much for a number to box as for a clue to Sophie Heywood’s exit.

  Buster and Nadeen, the couple from the Teenage Parent Clinic, studied the ceiling too, recalling the counsel of Mrs. Heywood. Close enough to hear each other’s breathing, his arm around her, palm resting on the side of her bulging belly, he reviewed the way “sign reading” had been applied by the political theorists at the Academy of the 7 Arts, while she, palms resting on the rise of her stomach, remained attentive to the movement beneath her hands.

  What anyone made of the shadows on the ceiling or of the fissures in the plaster overhead was not well telegraphed around the room, though many were visibly intent on decoding the flickering touch of mind on mind and looking about for someone to head Sophie Heywood off at the pass. What did bounce around the circle of eleven was the opinion that Sophie should return and restore the group intact. But what jumped the circle to pass through bone, white jackets, wood chairs and air for Sophie to contemplate, did not bounce back. The only answer was the high-pitch wail of birds overhead like whistling knives in the sky.

  Sophie opened the door without a backward glance at the group or at the godchild huddled on the stool so mournful and forlorn. The child Sophie grieved for took another form altogether. So stepping over the threshold into the hall she was stepping over that sack of work tools by his bedroom door again, a heavy gray canvas sack spilling out before enemy eyes—screwdriver, syringe, clockworks, dynamite. She looked out into the hall of the Southwest Community Infirmary, fresh white paint dizzying her, temples buzzing, eyes stinging. Smitty.

  Smitty climbing the leg of the statue. The other students running down the street waving banners made from sheets. Mrs. Taylor watching from the window, leaning on pillows she’d made from rally banners. Smitty on the arm of the war hero chanting “Hell, no, we won’t go.” Sirens scattering the marchers. TV cameras and trucks shoving through the crowd. Mrs. Taylor screaming in the window. A boy face down in the street, his book bag flattened. The police rushing the statue like a tank. The package up under Smitty’s arm. The other flung across the hind of the first brass horse. The blow that caught him in the shins.

  Sophie face down in the jailhouse bed springs. Portland Edgers, her neighbor, handed a billy club. The sheriff threatening.

  Mrs. Taylor moaning in the window. The boy gagging on his own blood face down in the street, the cameras on him. Smitty with a bull horn. A Black TV announcer misnumbering the crowd, mixmatching the facts, lost to the community. Smitty. The blow that caught him in the groin.

  The blow that caught her in the kidney. Someone howling in the next cell. A delegation from the church out front talking reasonably. Sophie face down on the jailhouse bed springs, the rusty metal cutting biscuits out of her cheeks.

  Smitty kicking at the clubs, the hands. Smitty jammed between the second brass horse and the flagpole. The package balanced in the crook of the bayonet. The blow that caught him from behind.

  Portland Edgers turning on the sheriff and wrestled down on her back and beaten. Sophie mashed into the springs. Portland Edgers screaming into her neck.

  Smitty pulled down against the cement pedestal, slammed against the horses’ hooves, dragged on his stomach to the van. A boot in his neck. Child. Four knees in his back. Son. The package ripped from his grip. The policeman racing on his own path and none other’s. The man, the statue going up Pegasus. Manes, hooves, hinds, the brass head of some dead soldier and a limb of one once-live officer airborne over city hall. A flagpole buckling at the knees.

  And a tall building tottering trembling falling down inside her face down in the jailhouse bed springs teeth splintering and soul groaning. Smitty. Edgers. Reverend Michaels in the corridor being reasonable.

  Sophie Heywood closed the door of the treatment room. And there was something in the click of it that made many of the old-timers, veterans of the incessant war—Garveyites, Southern Tenant Associates, trade unionists, Party members, Pan-Africanists—remembering night riders and day traitors and the cocking of guns, shudder.

  “Are you sure, sweetheart? I’m just asking is all,” Minnie Ransom was saying, playfully pulling at her lower lip till three different shades of purple showed. “Take away the miseries and you take away some folks’ reason for living. Their conversation piece anyway.”

  “I been there,” Cora Rider testified, wagging both hands by the wrists overhead. “I know exactly what the good woman means,” she assured all around her.

  “We all been there, one way or t’other,” the old gent with the lemonade tie said, hummed, chanted and was echoed by his twin from the other side of the circle, singing in common meter just like it was church.

  Minnie Ransom’s hands went out at last, and the visitors, noting the way several people around them checked their watches, concluded that this was either the official beginning of the healing or the end, it was hard to tell.

  “I can feel, sweetheart, that you’re not quite ready to dump the shit,” Minnie Ransom said, her next few words drowned out by the gasps, the rib nudges against starchy jackets, and shuffling of feet. “… got to give it all up, the pain, the hurt, the anger and make room for lovely things to rush in and fill you full. Nature abhors a so-called vacuum, don’t you know?” She waited till she got a nod out of Velma. “But you want to stomp around a little more in the mud puddle, I see, like a little kid fore you come into the warm and be done with mud. Nothing wrong with that,” she said pleasantly, moving her hands back to her own lap, not that they had made contact with Velma, but stopped some two or three inches away from the patient and moved around as if trying to memorize the contours for a full-length portrait to be done later without the model.

  Several old-timers
at this point craned their necks round to check with the veteran staff in the rear. It was all very strange, this behavior of Miz Minnie. Maybe she was finally into her dotage. “A hundred, if she’s a day,” murmured Cora.

  “I can wait,” Minnie said, as though it were a matter of handing Jake Daniels her shoes and sitting in the booth in stocking feet to flip through a magazine while her lifts were replaced. She crossed her legs again, leaned forward onto the high knee, dropped her chin into that palm, then slapped her other arm and a length of silk around her waist and closed her eyes. She could’ve been modeling new fashions for the golden age set or waiting for a bus.

  “Looking more like a monkey every day,” Cora thought she was thinking to herself till someone jostled her elbow from behind and scorched the back of her neck with a frown.

  “Far out,” one of the visitors was heard to mumble. “Far fucking out. So whadda we supposed to do, stand here for this comedy?”

  “Shush.”

  “Look, lady,” tapping on his watch, “We—”

  “I said to shush, so shush.”

  The visitor turned red when the giggles from the rear and side drifted his way. And the woman who had shushed him, a retired schoolteacher from the back district, shifted her position so that she no longer faced the two women but was standing kitty-corner, her arms folded across her chest, keeping one eye on her former student in the gown with her behind out and the other on the redbone who seemed to have more to say but not if she had anything to do with it.

  Velma Henry clutched the stool. She felt faint, too faint to ask for a decent chair to sit in. She felt like she was in the back room of some precinct, or in the interrogation room of terrorist kidnappers, or in the walnut-paneled office of Transchemical being asked about an error. She cut that short. She hadn’t the strength. She felt her eyes rolling away. Once before she’d had that feeling. The preacher in hip boots spreading his white satin wings as she stepped toward him and was plunged under and everything went white.

  She closed her eyes and they rolled back into her head, rolled back to the edge of the table in her kitchen, to the edge of the sheen—to cling there like globules of furniture oil, cling there over the drop, then hiding into the wood, cringing into the grain as the woman who was her moved from sink to stove to countertop turning things on, turning the radio up. Opening drawers, opening things up. Her life line lying for an instant in the cradle of the scissors’ X, the radio’s song going on and on and no stop-notes as she leaned into the oven. The melody thickening as she was sucked into the carbon walls of the cave, then the song blending with the song of the gas.

  “Release, sweetheart. Give it all up. Forgive everyone everything. Free them. Free self.”

  Velma tried to pry her eyelids up to see if the woman was actually speaking. She was certain Mrs. Ransom had not spoken, just as she was sure she’d heard what she heard. She tried to summon her eyes back, to cut the connection. She was seeing more than she wished to remember in that kitchen. But there she was in a telepathic visit with her former self, who seemed to be still there in the kitchen reenacting the scene like time counted for nothing. She tried to move from that place to this, to see this yellow room, this stool, this white tile, this window where the path to the woods began, this Ransom woman who was calling her back. But the journey back from the kitchen was like the journey in the woods to gather. And gathering is a particular thing where the eyes are concerned, M’Dear Sophie taught. You see nothing but what you’re looking for. After sassafras, you see only the reddish-brown barkish things of the woods. Or after searching out eucalyptus, the eyes stay tuned within a given range of blue-green-gray and cancel out the rest of the world. And never mind that it’s late, that the basket is full, that you got what you came for, that you are ready to catch the bus back to town, are leisurely walking now on the lookout for flowers or berries or a little holding stone to keep you company. The gathering’s demands stay with you, lock you in to particular sights. The eyes will not let you let it go.

  All Velma could summon now before her eyes were the things of her kitchen, those things she’d sought while hunting for the end. Leaves, grasses, buds dry but alive and still in jars stuffed with cork, alive but inert on the shelf of oak, alive but arrested over the stove next to the matchbox she’d reached toward out of habit, forgetting she did not want the fire, she only wanted the gas. Leaning against the stove then as the performer leaned now, looking at the glass jars thinking who-knew-what then, her mind taken over, thinking, now, that in the jars was no air, therefore no sound, for sound waves weren’t all that self-sufficient, needed a material medium to transmit. But light waves need nothing to carry pictures in, to travel in, can go anywhere in the universe with their independent pictures. So there’d be things to see in the jars, were she in there sealed and unavailable to sounds, voices, cries. So she would be light. Would go back to her beginnings in the stars and be star light, over and done with, but the flame traveling wherever it pleased. And the pictures would follow her, haunt her. Be vivid and sharp in a vacuum. To haunt her. Pictures, sounds and bounce were everywhere, no matter what you did or where you went. Sound broke glass. Light could cut through even steel. There was no escaping the calling, the caves, the mud mothers, the others. No escape.

  She’d been in a stupor, her gaze gliding greasily over the jars on the shelf till she fastened onto the egg timer, a little hourglass affair. To be that sealed—sound, taste, air, nothing seeping in. To be that unavailable at last, sealed in and the noise of the world, the garbage, locked out. To pour herself grain by grain into the top globe and sift silently down to a heap in the bottom one. That was the sight she’d been on the hunt for. To lie coiled on the floor of the thing and then to bunch up with all her strength and push off from the bottom and squeeze through the waistline of the thing and tip time over for one last sandstorm and then be still, finally be still. Her grandmother would be pleased, her godmother Sophie too. “Girl, be still,” they’d been telling her for years, meaning different things.

  And she’d be still in the globes, in the glass jars, sealed from time and life. All that was so indelible on her retina that the treatment room and all its clutter and mutterings were canceled out. Her kitchen, that woman moving about in obsessive repetition, the things on the shelf, the search, the demand would not let her eyes, let her, come back to the healer’s hands that were on her now.

  “A grown woman won’t mess around in mud puddles too long before she releases. It’s warmer inside,” she thought she was hearing. “Release, sweetheart. Let it go. Let the healing power flow.”

  She had had on a velour blouse, brown, crocheted. She felt good in it, moving about the booth in it, the cush, the plush soft against her breasts. The kind of blouse that years ago she would have worn to put James Lee Henry, called Obie now, under her spell. She moved about in the booth, the leather sticky under her knees, but the velour comforting against her skin. He no longer thought she was a prize to win. But the blouse was surely doing something to him, she was certain. But certain too that she was, even sitting right there, just a quaint memory for him, like a lucky marble or a coin caught from the Mardi Gras parade. She didn’t want to think too much on that. She was losing the thread of her story. She had been telling him about those Chinese pajamas and the silver buckets but had lost her way.

  But it wasn’t the blouse feeling good or the memories of their courting days that was distracting her. James Lee had begun moving the dishes aside, disrupting her meal. Her salad bowl no longer up under her right wrist where she could get at it between chunks of steak and mouthfuls of potatoes but shoved up against the wall next to the napkin rack. Her sweet potato pie totally out of reach. And now he moved her teacup toward the hot sauce bottle. He was interrupting her story, breaking right in just as she was about to get to the good part, to tell her to put her fork down and listen. She was seriously considering jabbing his hand with the fork as he reached to grasp her hands, his tie falling into her plate, covering
the last two pieces cut from near the bone that she’d been saving to relish after she finished talking.

  “Baby, I wish you were as courageous emotionally as you are …”

  She missed hearing it somehow. Close as his face was to hers, plainly as he was speaking, attentive as she tried to be, she just couldn’t hear what the hell he was saying. She couldn’t blame it on the waiters. Usually rattling trays and slinging silverware into the washer, most of them were at the busboy table drinking ice tea and murmuring low. No diners were laughing or talking loud, only a few men sat about alone reading the Sunday papers and sipping coffee. The winos who usually parked by the coatrack to bug the diners lining up for the cashier were outside, sitting on the curb. It was quiet. But she still couldn’t quite seem to make out what he was jabbering about all up in her face.

  “Let me help you, Velma. Whatever it is we … wherever we’re at now … I can help you break that habit … learn to let go of past pain … like you got me to stop smoking. We could …”

  She heard some of it. He was making an appeal, a reconciliation of some sort, conditions, limits, an agenda, help. Something about emotional caring or daring or sharing. James Lee could be tiresome in these moods. She pulled her hand away and reached for her bag. If things were going to get heavy, she needed a cigarette. But he caught her hands again. Rising up out of the booth and damn near coming across the table, he pulled her hands away from her lighter and held them, then resumed his seat and went right on talking, talking.