The Salt Eaters

by Toni Cade Bambara

  “What you say?”

  “Say she sure is fidgetin like she got the betsy bugs.”

  “She one of Oshun’s witches, I suspect. What’s Oshun’s two cents worth on the matter? Maybe she’d like to handle this Henry gal herself.”

  “I don’t know about the two cents cause I strictly do not mess with haints, Min. I’ve always been a good Christian.”

  “When you gonna stop calling the loa out of their names? They are the laws alive. Seems to me you need to slough off a lot more of the nonsense from this plane if you’re going to be any help to me. Some spirit guide.”

  “Leastways I know that Oshun ain’t studyin this problem, Min, cause I hear Oshun and Oye prettyin up to hop a bus to New Orleans. Carnival in this town ain’t fancy enough for them. Town gettin too small for some other proud spirits I could name too.”

  “Bus? What are you talking about—the loa on some bus?”

  “I’m talkin about them haints that’re always up to some trickified business. They ride buses just the same’s they ride brooms, peoples, carnival floats, whatever. All the same to them. What they care about scarin people with they ghostly selves?”

  “Then you tell me, Old Wife, teller of tales nobody much wants to hear anymore except this humble servant of a swamphag, where’s the Henry gal gone off to? I don’t feel much turbulence in her now.”

  “Swamphag?” leaning over to flounce Minnie’s dress and jangle her gold bangles, chuckling. “She’s off dancing, Min.”

  “In the mud?””

  “Mud seems to belong to her ways, Min.”

  “Dancing in mud with cowries. Mmm. Twisting and grunting for the reward-applause of a bloody head on a tray. Lord, have mercy. What is wrong with the women? If they ain’t sticking their head in ovens and opening up their veins like this gal, or jumping off roofs, drinking charcoal lighter, pumping rat poisons in their arms, and ramming cars into walls, they looking for some man to tear his head off. What is wrong, Old Wife? What is happening to the daughters of the yam? Seem like they just don’t know how to draw up the powers from the deep like before. Not full sunned and sweet anymore. Tell me, how do I welcome this daughter home to the world, when they all getting to acting more and more like—”

  “I’sh potatoes?”

  “Exactly. One in here yesterday whooping and hollering about some hole in a bucket. Took me a good five minutes to recall that song, remember—‘There’s a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza. Well, fix it, dear Henry’? Like that was a message to go after her husband with a hammer. I’m telling you, when we started letting these silly children arrange their own marriages without teaching them about compatible energies, about the powers, we made a serious mistake. More mix-match mating going on, enough to make you crazy. Buckets. Full-grown women talking about a song told her to hit her husband in the head. Like she don’t have options. Hmph. You know what I mean?”

  “I know, excusing the part about the bucket. But course I member the woman.”

  “Course you do, bless your heart, and thank you. A dormant nerve in the clitoris. No wonder she restless and jumpy with back pains and her legs aching. And no wonder, no mating fuel there at all. But like I say, she got options. Just like the Liza in the song. She can just go ahead and fix the fool bucket herself and quit getting so antsy about it. Or she can go find a man that can. Always got options.”

  “Say which?”

  “Options. Affirmation and denial. Ole no-count Henry ain’t the only reality. Or she might try affirming his ability to wield a hammer or tote her some water and see what that’ll do. How come you squinching up like I’m talking foreign? Ain’t you studying at all, Old Wife?”

  “Well you know, Min, I never was too quick at learning.”

  “Were too. Wisest woman in these parts, bless your heart. Look how you had it all together this morning when that grieving child commenced to sit on my lap and I was about to keel over.”

  “You was about to dump her on the floor as I recollect.”

  “True, true. But little did I know till you gave me the message that there was more to the wailing than grief.”

  “Message?”

  “You mean you don’t remember? You said to check in the floor of the third ventricle. So I did and zapped a little energy up there near the pineal, good ole pineal, and those lavender beams commenced to glow, and she was right as rain.”

  “I said which?”

  “You said ‘Malignant ependyma attempting to take up residence in the base of the brain, Min.’ Old Wife, don’t you take notes on these sessions? Ain’t you getting it all down?”

  “I got all there is to be got, Min, excusin a tablet and pencil.”

  “You the beatingest guide I ever heard of. Did you leastways get the drift yesterday when the little honey started singing the Henry/Liza/bucket song? Well, anyhow, I don’t understand these women sometime. Baby a man and then get all in a stiff cause he don’t know how to fix the hole in the bucket. Sometime original mother is too much the mother, if you know what I mean.”

  “I don’t be catching your drift at all much, Min. You all wound up today. What’s troubling you? It ain’t like you to be talking bout ‘Are you sure you wanna be well?’ What kinda way is that?”

  “It’s these children, Old Wife. I can handle the dry-bone folks all right. And them generations of rust around still don’t wear me any. But these new people? And the children on the way in this last quarter? They gonna really be a blip. But the ones pouring into the Infirmary are blip enough. Soon’s they old enough to start smelling theyselves, they commence to looking for blood amongst the blood. Cutting and stabbing and facing off and daring and dividing up and suiciding. You know as well as I, Old Wife, that we have not been scuffling in this waste-howling wilderness for the right to be stupid. All this waste. Everybody all up in each other’s face with a whole lotta who struck John—you ain’t correct, well you ain’t cute, and he ain’t right and they ain’t scientific and yo mama don’t wear no drawers and get off my suedes, and he hit me, and she quit me, and this one’s dirty, and that one don’t have a degree, and on and on.”

  “Min?”

  “Don’t they know we on the rise? That our time is now? Here we are in the last quarter and how we gonna pull it all together and claim the new age in our name? How we gonna rescue this planet from them radioactive mutants? No wonder Noah tried to bar them from the ark. Hmph. Shove over some, Old Wife, it don’t seem polite to poke my hand through you. I need to find some music to get it said. All this madness bout to rock me off this stool, Old Wife.”

  “Not madness throwing rocks at you, Min. Best see about yo sef.”

  “Well, I’m bearing up at least. But, Old Wife, we gonna have to get a mighty large group trained to pull us through the times ahead. Them four horses galloping already, the seven trumpets blasting. And looks like we clean forgot what we come to do, what we been learning through all them trials and tribulations to do and it’s now. Come in here after abusing themselves and want to be well and don’t even know what they want to be healthy for. Lord, the children.”

  “The chirren are our glory, Min.”

  “Amen on that. Wish I had some music to get it out there. These crazy folks need some saying-it music.”

  “In our extremity is God’s opportunity.”

  “I’ll hold that thought, Old Wife, but get your big buns out the way so I can shuffle through these tapes. Can’t seem to find …”

  “What you lookin for is in the chapel, Min, if you ain’t too proud to come and join me there.”

  If anyone had asked her—not that The Master’s Mind thought to query, or the old-timers would have interrupted, or the visitors dared, or the youth from the Teen Clinic would, or the staff had ever thought of it, or her guide or the loa who leaned against the window witnesses who of course knew, needed to—Minnie Ransom would have had to admit that she was stalling, stalling and failing, her hands resting on Velma Henry’s shoulders silent and her fingertips st
ill.

  Over the years it had become routine: She simply placed her left hand on the patient’s spine and her right on the navel, then clearing the channels, putting herself aside, she became available to a healing force no one had yet, to her satisfaction, captured in a name. Her eyelids closed locking out the bounce and bang of light and sound and heat, sealing in the throbbing glow that spread from the corona of light at the crown of the head that moved forward between her brows then fanned out into a petaled rainbow, fanning, pulsing, then contracting again into a single white flame. Just like the corona of the high-tension cables in the old streetcar sheds near the Bible college where day after day, drawn to like a craving, she stared at, strained toward, till one misty night many years later and in another place altogether, a powerhouse in the north, she could finally see it. One misty winter night when Venus beamed down on the corrugated roof at home and Pleiades clustered in the New York sky like the illustration of the double helix taking up so much space in the magazines and papers, she could see it. The light pulsing, the light breaking up and bouncing, swimming together in a rainbow of color, fanning out, and then the pinpoint flame.

  And she learned to read the auras of trees and stones and plants and neighbors, far more colorful, far more complex. And studied the sun’s corona, the jagged petals of magnetic colors and then the threads that shimmered between wooden tables and flowers and children and candles and birds.

  On the stool or in the chair with this patient or that, Minnie could dance their dance and match their beat and echo their pitch and know their frequency as if her own. Eyes closed and the mind dropping down to the heart, bubbling in the blood then beating, fanning out, flooded and shinning, she knew each way of being in the world and could welcome them home again, open to wholeness. Eyes wide open to the swing from expand to contract, dissolve congeal, release restrict, foot tapping, throat throbbing in song to the ebb and flow of renewal, she would welcome them healed into her arms.

  “Why couldn’t it be something usual like arthritis, bursitis or glaucoma?”

  “Deal with what you’re dealt, Min.”

  “Mmm.”

  Calcium or lymph or blood uncharged, congealed and blocked the flow, stopped the dance, notes running into each other in a pileup, the body out of tune, the melody jumped the track, discordant and strident. And she would lean her ear to the chest or place her hand at the base of the spine till her foot tapped and their heads bobbed, till it was melodious once more. And often she did not touch flesh on flesh but touched mind on mind from across the room or from cross town or the map linked by telephone cables that could carry the clue spoken—a dream message, an item of diet, a hurt unforgiven and festering, a guilt unreleased—and the charged response reaching ear then inner ear, then shooting to the blockade and freeing up the flow. Or by letter, the biometric reading of worried eyes and hands in writing, the body transported through the mails, body/mind/spirit out of nexus, out of tune, out of line, off beat, off color, in a spin off its axis, affairs aslant, wisdom at a tangent and she’d receive her instructions. And turbulence would end.

  “What ought I do about the Henry gal, Old Wife?”

  “Don’t you know?”

  “Don’t you? Ain’t you omniscient yet, Old Wife? Don’t frown up. All knowing. Ain’t you all knowing? What’s the point of being in all-when and all-where if you not going to take advantage of the situation and become all knowing? And all the wisdom of the ages is available to you, isn’t that so?”

  “Is? I guess I have all I’m supposed to, Min, excusin your ear, beggin your pardon. I been tryin to get you to come to chapel for some time, Min, and now look like you want to traipse off after the Henry girl and go dancing in the mud. Her pull mighty strong. You best grab hold of that stool you’re on and come on to chapel.”

  “I’m coming,” stretching up to pull down the branch where she’ll find the exact leaf that will dip just so, releasing onto her finger the droplet of dew she will roll between thumb and ring finger like a drop of mercury. “Seems to me you are not making the most of your situation, Old Wife. You studying?”

  “You? You making the most of your situation, Min?”

  “Ya know, Old Wife, here lately you getting to be downright Jewish.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Just a little around the edges. I ask you a question, you answer with a question.”

  “For a fact?”

  “Quit funning,” wagging her head and turning toward the break in the trees. The rainbow—lemon, lime, melon and sherbert-pink arching. “We got a problem here. I can’t quite reach this chile and you keep acting like you dumb as me stead of telling me what to do. Now, suppose you just dig on down into that reticule bag of yours and fish me out a bat bone or some magic root,” chuckling.

  “You know I don’t traffic in such, Minnie Ransom.”

  “You do too. Fess up, what you hauling round in that gris gris sack?”

  “A few personals.”

  “Personals. What you need with personals anymore? Don’t they orient you none around here? Didn’t they tell you anything?”

  “Why I need some ‘they’ to tell me somp’n when I got you, Min?”

  “Okay. I’m gonna hush now and we gonna concentrate on this growler scowler Henry gal that’s blocking my sun. She’s good material, ya know. We need to get her back into circulation.”

  “I know this. Trouble is, Min, she got piss-poor guardians.”

  “Well, don’t look at me. I ain’t fixin to die yet just to be her guardian … am I?”

  “Am you which?”

  “I’m hushing up as of now, cause I see you are determined to be raffish,” stepping high over the lemon grass toward the fountain, the cooling spray against her cheek.

  “Your dress misbehavin, Min.”

  “Wind.”

  “Beggin your pardon, but wind my foot. You fixin to mess with that young doctor man behind yo corporal body. I seen you casting a voluptuous eye in that doctor man’s direction. You fixin to get into somp’n, Min.”

  “Ahhh, so you are omniscient or clairvoyant one,” leaning against the fountain for a full appraisal of this woman friend who’d been with her for most of her life, one way and then another. Nothing much had changed since she passed. Old Wife’s complexion was still like mutton suet and brown gravy congealed on a plate. She was still slack jawed. The harelip was as deep a gouge as ever. Nothing much to recommend her, or to signal she was special. “You’d think they’da fixed that lip,” Minnie muttering to herself, sitting down on the ledge she’d built during her apprenticeship. A fountain made from ceramic pipes she’d thought much too lovely to be laid underground conducting sewerage. A pause to view the water, to watch the fishes glinting shots of shine around the pool, the aromas from the right wafting past like a brushstroke in a cartoon. Gardenias, lily of the valley, lavender, cosmos, fuchsia, woolly apple mint, spearmint and foxglove lush on either side of the chapel’s circle doors, bumblebees drunk and swollen staggering from petal to pistil.

  “Come.”

  The journey, though familiar, was not the journey usual. Was like the old times before the gift unfolded. The days when everyone but her daddy was worried crazy about her, running off from Bible college to New York to get sick and be sent home on the train lying down. They called her batty, fixed, possessed, crossed, in deep trouble. Said they’d heard of people drawn to starch or chalk or bits of plaster. But the sight of full-grown, educated, well-groomed, well-raised Minnie Ransom down on her knees eating dirt, craving pebbles and gravel, all asprawl in the road with her clothes every which way—it was too much to bear. And so jumpy, like something devilish had got hold of her, leaping up from the porch, from the table, from morning prayers and racing off to the woods, the women calling at her back, her daddy dropping his harness and shading his eyes, which slid off her back like slippery saddle soap. The woods to the path to the sweet ground beyond, then the hill, the eating hill, the special dirt behind the wash house. The days w
hen stomping along the path, her shoes in her jumper pocket, stomping to alert the snakes that someone was coming through, she’d encounter Old Karen, the Old One, Wilder’s woman, Old Wife, the teller of tales no one would sit still to hear anymore, not when the new tellers could prophesy with such mathematical certainty who would be ill and who well, who fertile and who sterile, who crazy and who all right, who deserved to live and who was bound to die and in precisely what manner.

  And Minnie would slow down just as she was told. And the older woman would hold her there on the path like a mama cat with gripping teeth. A full-grown Minnie blocked, it seemed, to the women who hurled warnings at her back, by front-pew every-Sunday-spreading-no-gettin-around-them Karen Wilder hips. Not blocked but stopped by the thoughts, by the telling, watching the cracked lips slide away as though the teeth had been greased for some finicky photographer. Waiting for Old Wife to speak, Minnie’d be stomping in place, for while it was customarily polite to pause on the path and pass the time of day with neighbor or friend who’d chosen this route over the paved walks or the bus line or the highway, it was customarily safe to keep stomping because the snakes had to be warned people were afoot. So she did as she was told, not even thinking on the snakes people said were not in the woods but kept clear of the woods as much as possible and when they didn’t, stomped with the best of them.

  Minnie’d be stock still finally, while Old Wife’s eyes stared at a spot just above her head where her hair had once puffed up before the New York trip, and stared at the sides of her as though remembering her filled out, young and plump, being sent off to Bible college in Beaufort. Held her there and the greasy teeth finally parting and “Not long, now, Minnie, and take care,” coming out, jaws unhinged, looking like a vaudeville dummy. And Minnie’d stumbled off bewildered and spooked cause Karen Wilder after all was a teller of strange tales, and who could know then that the message wasn’t about death coming to sting her but about a gift unfolding? Minnie eased away sleepwalking till a slither along the side or a rustle overhead reminded her to pick them seven’s up and plant them down like she had good sense. Sleepwalk stomping to the mound, the hill, the special place, the rich dark earth, the eating dirt that smelled of paprika and curry, smelled of spice and sweet and bitter and sweat from the days when the Gypsies had planted their Sara, their Black Madonna, at the crest of that hill and the community of Sicilians on an adjacent hill, turned their Black Maria aside, giving Sara her back. And Minnie, climbing the hill like the Matterhorn or Jacob’s Ladder one, her eyes right on Sara’s wooden orbs, not daring to look back behind her toward Old Wife, felt the old cat eyes a pinpoint of light at the crown of her head.