The Salt Eaters

by Toni Cade Bambara

  “Can you afford to be whole?” Minnie was singsonging it, the words, the notes ricocheting around the room. Mr. Daniels picked out one note and matched it, then dug under it, then climbed over it. His brother from the opposite side of the circle glided into harmony with him while the rest of the group continued working to pry Velma Henry loose from the gripping power of the disease and free her totally into Minnie Ransom’s hand, certain of total cure there.

  “Can you afford it, is what I’m asking you, sweetheart,” Minnie persisted, ignoring the sighs of impatience that issued from the visiting doctors, nurses and technicians.

  Several checked their watches, amazed that only five minutes of silence had ensued. It had seemed so much longer, that quiet moment broken by one of their members reciting the Hippocratic oath then exiting. Five minutes or not, there was still the lecture to be worked in before they reassembled in the lounge to pick up their conference kits and jackets and compare notes. The slide show and talk the administrator, Dr. Serge, would present that would answer all the questions put on hold at the morning session about the history of the Infirmary, about the fusion of Western medicine and the traditional arts, about the drug rehab acupuncture clinic, about this healing business, and about the controversial liaison with agencies such as the Academy of the 7 Arts—that was bound to take more than an hour. And it was no short stretch of leg to the corner where the driver Fred Holt would be waiting, but not too long he had made clear, for departure. Several shifted their weight from one leg to the other, trying to get the group’s attention, trying to get a consensus about leaving.

  Many of the strollers-in, Lily cups in hand, passes or prescription slips flapping and rustling, were as eager for Doc Serge’s talk as the visitors, particularly the part about how the workers of old held steadfast against the so-called setting of standards, the licensure laws, the qualifying exams, the charges of quackery or charlatanism or backwardness, the attempt to take over the medical arts by the spiritual and material capitalists. Things always got right lively then. And it was almost as pleasurable hearing Doc Serge knock down all of the visitors’ arguments as it was to hear about the courage and resourcefulness of the old bonesetters, the old medicine show people, the grannies and midwives, the root men, the conjure women, the obeah folks, and the medicine people of the Yamassee and Yamacrow who’d helped the Southwest Community Infirmary defend itself and build itself through the years.

  The rest of the old-timers, though, remained in deep concentration, matching the prayer group in silence and patience. For sometimes a person held on to sickness with a fiercesomeness that took twenty hard-praying folk to loosen. So used to being unwhole and unwell, one forgot what it was to walk upright and see clearly, breathe easily, think better than was taught, be better than one was programmed to believe—so concentration was necessary to help a neighbor experience the best of herself or himself. For people sometimes believed that it was safer to live with complaints, was necessary to cooperate with grief, was all right to become an accomplice in self-ambush.

  They were proud, frequently, the patients that came to Mrs. Ransom. They wore their crippleness or blindness like a badge of honor, as though it meant they’d been singled out for some special punishment, were special. Or as though it meant they’d paid some heavy dues and knew, then, what there was to know, and therefore had a right to certain privileges, or were exempt from certain charges, or ought to be listened to at meetings. But way down under knowing “special” was a lie, knowing better all along and feeling the cost of the lie, of the self-betrayal in the joints, in the lungs, in the eyes. Knew, felt the cost, but were too proud and too scared to get downright familiar with the conniption fit getting downright familiar with their bodies, minds, spirits to just sing, “Blues, how do you do? Sit down, let’s work it out.” Took heart to flat out decide to be well and stride into the future sane and whole. And it took time. So the old-timers and the circle concentrated on their work, for of course patients argued, fought, resisted. Just as Mrs. Velma Henry was fighting still what was her birthright.

  “Sweetheart?” Minnie was crooning, taking up both hands of the patient and clutching them in her lap.

  While the others watched, not quite sure what to make of what was apparently happening to the patient, Cora Rider was jutting out her bony chest, certain it was she who had routed the noisy doctor, sent him out of the room with his blasphemous prayer. “Apollo!” she snorted to herself. No telling who a redbone will call on when faced with the black truth, she chuckled to herself. Bad as them workers down at the chemical plant—she fussed under her breath, not sure yet why the two seemed connected in her head—forming a committee to whine complaints to the very uglies who were making life so miserable in the first place. Calling on the big shots, hat in hand and bent at the knees and all, as if the big shots cared a hoot about safety gloves and ventilation and special ways to deal with asbestos and all them poisons down there. When who them workers should’ve been calling on were the crazy characters that had broken into the armory and stolen a lot of guns. “Men!”

  “Lawd, Lawd, Cora.”

  Cora rolled her eyes at her sighing friend, Anna Banks. Forever calling on the Lord for something she ought to be able to handle herself. And the first to get high-handed with her about playing numbers when no commandment said a thing about gambling, but sure had a thing or two to say about taking the Lord’s name in vain. When they played cards on Friday nights, Anna Banks called on Jesus. Like Jesus ain’t got nothing better to do than be her Whist partner. And when Cora and her partner ran a Boston and reminded Anna the game was rise and fly, why then she’d call on her mama. Poor dead woman roaming around on the other side trying to get her bearings and her fool daughter yelling at her to stack the deck on the next go-round to teach Cora and Bertha a lesson. It was enough to make you bust a girdle, Cora roared inside, assuming you was dumb enough to wear one in the first place. But that doctor beat all. Probably the first time he’d ever had a chance to learn something useful about curing and caring, and he right away calling out people from fairy tales. Might just as well try to get Goldilocks on the telephone for all the good Apollo could do. “Damn fool.”

  “Cora, please. Lawd.”

  Just like the patient that morning, stumbling in calling on guns, calling on a joy pill, calling on her dead mama, instead of putting herself in the hands of the very one God had groomed for just such occasions, the good woman Ransom. “I feel so bad,” she had wailed, setting Cora’s teeth on edge, “I want to blow my brains out, give me something.” And Cora had wanted to pull at her own hair the way the woman kept doing as if guns and pills grew there in all that henna for the picking. “I don’t want to feel this way,” she kept shouting. And the louder she got and the more she banged herself all in the face, the more the room tipped for Cora till she felt knocked right out of her shoes. And the good woman urging the wailer to let her mama go, to go ahead and hurt and holler, but to let the woman go. “Hold my hand, daughter,” she had coaxed the wailing woman. “Let me share your pain. And your joy. I hurt with you and rejoice with you, for your mama’s finished with this and gone on to come again another way.” But then the woman just climbed into Miz Ransom’s lap and like to knock the chair right over. And still yelling about give her some magic pill. Wanted to swallow her mother and grief with the pill, drink down sorrow and keep her inside, as though a daughter could give birth to her own mother. It was enough to scare the pants off of you, great big overgrown woman wanting to be Miz Ransom’s baby and her mama’s mama all at the same time and sliding off Miz Ransom’s lap, the whole room on the slide, it had seemed to Cora. But Cora held up, did not faint or embarrass herself.

  Miz Ransom rocking that woman like the mothers of all times hold and rock however large the load, never asking whose baby or how old or is it deserving, only that it’s a baby and not a stone. But all that was changing. And that was the part that was really knocking Cora off her center these days. Cause she’d been there and sh
e’d seen the little children brought into the place burned, beaten, stabbed, stomped, starved, dropped, flung, dumped in boiling water. It was a sign of the times. Too much to bear, but she held on and never fainted and never lost her faith. Invalid mother-in-law cranky and smelly, rifled mailbox and neighbor kids in her yard with no manners, beauticians lying that they didn’t get a chance to put in her number, smart-aleck youngsters telling her she was killing people in Africa by giving crime men her gambling money, church folks igging her cause she didn’t dress fancy. But Cora Rider held on, didn’t traffic in gossip, wished no one ill, kept the faith. Cause her dreams assured her of one thing if nothing else, that she would be rewarded when things turned right side round again. What goes around, comes around. So Cora continued with good works and a life of harmlessness. And she stuck out her bony chest and rubbed her eyes dry against the fluff of her sweater.

  “Answer me now,” Minnie insisted, leaning into Velma Henry.

  “Afford … Choose …” Velma groaned, sore and sodden, coming in from the muddy planks, stumbling, her feet entangled in sheets, reeling toward the sound of tambourines and joy, reeling and rocking on the stool, the mud going white linoleum underfoot, the tent canvas, the bedroom walls yellow latex paint, and the sting of disinfectant overpowering, making her squint. “But I thought …”

  “You think I mean money? Mmm.”

  Nadeen’s eyes were riveted on Mrs. Henry’s wrists now, thick brown wrists no longer banded by narrow red and black bracelets of flaking flesh. Healed. Nadeen felt a movement at the base of her stomach. Something leaped in her, like the baby Jesus leapt when Elizabeth, big with John, saluted Mary. She stretched her ears toward the woman. Would she ever finish answering whatever it was the healer was asking? Or would she just reel and rock on the stool until all the scars were healed? Nadeen breathed shallowly in light pants, as they often did in practice class. She was oblivious to the sharp intake of breath, the gasps, the stirrings around her as others began to take notice. This was the real thing.

  She had never seen a real healing. Her aunt had taken her to the summer tents, promising circus. But that didn’t count, wasn’t the real thing. A turkey-neck preacher throwing some poor cripple down on the platform and shouting heal, heal, heal. Like being saved that time, the preacher plunging her under. And for nights and nights the drowning dreams, the claws of seaweed dragging her down and her crawling on the water’s floor, eyes and ears sealed in mud. Then waking with crumbling teeth and frozen jaws not knowing where on earth she was, and Aunt Myrtle by the bed on her knees ready to turn the nightmare into a vision of Jesus, a visit from God. “God don’t lead you to deep waters to drown you, Nadeen,” she would whisper, “merely to cleanse you,” and would then want to hear her confession and the message from God, and would insist they go to the tents for a confirmation.

  Revival healing was just not it. The rolling in sawdust, the talking in tongues, the horns blaring and people crying, folks tearing off their clothes, the little kids whimpering. Grown people, grown-up adults who pinched you in church for squirming, who passed you on the block and told you to pull up your socks and be tidy, who got after you about your schoolwork or about wearing your hair to the side or with a streak, who told you to keep your pants up and your dress down, who stood up at meetings and said the younger generation had no self-control and no sense—rolling all over the ground, their clothes all messed up and underwear on show, talking out of their heads, totally off their nut. That was not the real thing.

  And them spooky sessions in the woods her younger cousin used to dare her to, sneaking off in the night with two pair of kitchen curtains to tuck and pin around their hips like skirts. She hoped and prayed they weren’t the real thing. The bloody chickens, the stuck pigs, the dancing men with their red glow cigars, and women too puffing like chimneys on a train. Everybody jerking and shaking like they were having a bad time. And couples dancing, doing the nasty, sweat pouring off them and their clothes like rainy windowpanes. She didn’t want that to be the real thing, no. And though her younger cousin would climb over the fence and throw herself into it, Nadeen preferred to watch through the fence and then run on home. Cause, no, that was not the real thing. That was some kind of crazy business. And dangerous too. Knives and swords and burning sticks and garden tools twirling and the dancers with their eyes closed, crowded as it was. No. This was the real thing.

  This was what it was supposed to be. A clean, freshly painted, quiet music room with lots of sunlight. People standing about wishing Mrs. Henry well and knowing Miss Ransom would do what she said she would do. Miss Ransom known to calm fretful babies with a smile or a pinch of the thigh, known to cool out nervous wives who bled all the time and couldn’t stand still, known to dissolve hard lumps in the body that the doctors at the county hospital called cancers. This was the real thing. Miss Ransom in her flouncy dress and hip shoes with flowers peeking out of her turban and smelling like coconut Afro spray. Even Cousin Dorcas, who had gone to specialists as far away as Boston, said this was the real place and Miss Ransom was the real thing.

  And even Buster, who never gave anybody a play, even Buster, who had to be begged to come to the Infirmary, had to be threatened by Uncle Thurston to take the father classes, even Buster had said Miss Ransom was for real, and Buster didn’t even say that about his own mother. But he had told Nadeen that if she was really pregnant and not just trying to fuck with his mind, and if the sucker did manage to grow to anything, well then he guessed it would be cool for the old lady to be in the delivery room when the time came.

  Nadeen folded her arms over the swell of her baby and wished the two women would get on with whatever was left to do. It was getting kind of spooky again, the two of them rocking and clutching with their eyes closed and Miss Ransom’s hand trembling and all. She’d heard these sessions were usually quick, that sometimes she simply hugged you and then you jumped right up and bump de bumped all the way home. It was a little after three; she hoped it wouldn’t be much longer. She had a bone to pick with the bossy nurse at the Teen Clinic. And she had a fitting at four o’clock. She was not going to the Carnival Ball in anything but a fine gown, not with her belly out the way it was. She could just see Cynthia looking at her sideways saying, “Girl, what’s your malfunction? You look like a penguin.”

  “Afford?” Velma was still muttering like she’d never heard the word before.

  “Oh, I don’t mean money, sweetheart. You know that.”

  Velma guessed she did. Nearly everyone in Claybourne knew that much. It was chisled over the archway of the Infirmary: HEALTH IS YOUR RIGHT. Translated by popular practice: Pay what you can when you can if at all. Yes, she knew that, if she didn’t know anything else on that stool, head numb, eyes crossed, circuits blown, working hard to get herself together to at least pay attention to the lift and stretch of the old woman’s arm reaching toward the stereo dials. Music? Music. She had thought she’d heard some music. Well, what was this anyway, a healing or a jam session?

  Velma was spinning in the music. A teenager at the rink in a fluffy white angora and a black and white checked skating skirt. Spinning in some corny my gal sal merry-go-round organ grinder music. Just the thing, the skaters joked, to keep Black folks off-balance. Spinning. The photo-lined walls, the concession stand, the rows of lockers, the entranceway, the organ stall—all flying around, merging. Photos on the lockers, the mayor shaking hands with a keyboard, the organist playing the cash register in the entranceway to the ladies’ room, racks of hot dogs suspended from the lobby light, spinning. The mud mothers on the ice building a fire, fanning the babies.

  Trying to scream, or maybe it was the weight in her left-hand pocket that was tipping her to the side, a rock a white kid had thrown at them from the bus, a bracelet Palma’s best friend had stolen from the 5&10, her keys. The weight pulling her to the side, the left blade not planted quite right on the ice. But Velma afraid to think on it, correct it, lest her ankles bump and she fall, or worse, she spin and tw
ist like the Turkish taffy figures in cartoons.

  Spinning and something very much the matter. Radios going and slide shows and movies and the records of special effects—waterfalls, and buffalo stampedes, and guns and high-pitched wailing, and chanting. Spinning, and then the women by the turnstile covered with leaves, covered with mud. And it’s too cold for them babies, young Velma wants to shout out. But the words bubble like foam in the chapped cracks round her mouth then whip around her cheek, the back of her neck, her ear, and seal her mouth closed.

  “I can feel it when something ain’t right,” Lorraine was saying to Jan that time, her foot out of her mules and on the kick wheel, her thigh bunching through the shiny skirt she’d kept from the old days. The pottery wheel spinning.

  And Velma was like the lump of clay, two hands holding her on the wheel, one hand pushing her hard up against the other in an effort to get her centered. And she was turning and lifting at last, the ridges of her sides smoothing out, rising moist and spreading, opening up, flaring out. But a lump in the beat, the rhythm wobbly. The healer’s hands steadying her, coaxing her up all of a piece.

  “Like being in bed with a Black trick who’s been sleeping white a long time, ya know?” Lorraine hiding her eyes, certain she’d gotten the attention of the girls. “The beat’s just off.” She paused while they howl. “Way off.”

  “A loss of rhythm,” Jan said slowly, mulling it over. The ceramics group too intrigued with what Lorraine is wearing and saying and promising for the afternoon to pay much attention to Jan’s efforts to bring them back round to the clay. Jan leaning, holding her hands over Lorraine’s jug as if it might spring off any minute.