The Salt Eaters

by Toni Cade Bambara

  “Banana nut cake. I toasted it on the grill. Gas flames.” He was speaking strictly to Jan, smiling his laziest, easy man smile, and totally ignoring the other woman and what sounded like a royal command. Close-cropped bush, weighty jewelry, wiry body, flowing clothes like royal robes. It was her eyes that clinched it, never on him, not deigning to take him in. She simply waved her hand in his general direction as though it were a foregone conclusion her order would be carried out, and he would stand there dutifully holding forth on the subject of plutonium.

  Campbell continued to ignore her even as she smirked, “ ‘Albeit,’ a literate waiter, as I live and breathe.”

  “You have a class tonight? Or other business up at the Academy? I’m going that way later.”

  “No, we’re going over to the park in a while. Maybe catch the concert at the Regal if there’re still tickets. The festival begins tonight,” Jan said.

  “Perhaps I’ll see you then,” he said, taking a long lingering time to release his grip on the clean fork he handed her.

  Campbell moved off to pass out menus to the media women. He glanced toward the round table. Krupp’s Kreep was lining up cufflinks, rings, and the tops of the salt and pepper shakers. They were evidently preparing for round one of Fission, having gotten bored with Fail-Safe Phooey.

  “… triterium and deterium. And for a catalyst, let’s try something inexpensive, something available to your average high school chem lab.”

  There were times when they played the game of putting together various fissionable elements, fuels, propellants, outlining processes, conditions, possible containers, that Campbell could actually see the unbonded atoms on the table, so many colored balls on the green tablecloth like after the opening break, various colored balls settling into position waiting for the cue, waiting for the next shot to overcome inertia and go banging, bouncing, colliding all over the table. They were an unstable group of men, Campbell concluded. And to think the Rosenbergs could be executed while six blabbermouth engineers breached security practically every day.

  “Of the three pestilences that plague our community—agents, hustlers and fools—I do believe that hand-pumping turkey is the worst. So I repeat, Jan, you need to seriously consider running for office.”

  Jan missed seeing Jay Patterson making the rounds of the café tables, pinning buttons on where he could, where he dared in some cases. She missed seeing too the young dude, making dangerous entries in his daily log, withhold his hand and make his jacket lapel unavailable to Patterson. She had turned the other way; she thought she smelled smoke. Then she thought she recognized the sisters in the T-shirts.

  “Ruby, aren’t those the sisters that turned the conference out last year, remember? The Black United Fund conference? Or was it the International Women’s Day thing? No, it was the testimonial to Sophie Heywood. Remember?” She turned back around in her chair, but Ruby, holding on to the railing, had tipped her chair way back to watch Jay Patterson attempt to horn in on the gathering near the entrance step.

  “That man’s pitiful. And who’s the joker in the Rudy Vallee get-up, bow tie and all? Those young folks haven’t budged a muscle since we’ve been here. The Stepford students,” Ruby was saying, turning to face Jan. The woman she leaned her chair against was the only one who heard the remark and was amused, curious, but nonetheless annoyed by the burden on her back.

  But Jan didn’t hear her, she had turned round again. Daughters of the Crops. Sisters of the Fruit. Jan pursed her lips, on the half-chance that the memory cells in her mouth had better storage and retrieval faculties than her brain. Palma’s friends. The Asian sister had done a song about the pig-iron furnaces of China. There was a long piece they’d ended with, a colored sister solidarity piece, operatic almost, a fuguelike interweaving of the voices, the histories, the lore of Caribbean, African, Native American—“Seven Sisters! Remember?” But Ruby was still not facing her way and Jan felt a bit silly, exclaiming aloud. She turned back toward the large table hoping to catch one of the sisters’ eyes, but they were buried in their menus, and the dark-skinned sister in the black felt hat was talking very rapidly, as if reciting the words of a song they all had to put to memory right away. It was clear she wanted to eat and that what enthusiasm had gotten her started was waning now. Jan smiled their way anyway, remembering that Velma had played piano for the group and had gone touring with them the summer before.

  “In all the years I’ve known Velma, it wasn’t till then that I realized what a serious musician she was. Ruby, you listening?”

  “Velma?” All four legs of Ruby’s chair thudded down against the tile. “I think she’s lost her marbles. Know what she asked me the other night? Suicide. When is it appropriate to commit suicide. Appropriate, I remember that was how she put it. And did suicides reincarnate right away or have to wait around till full term. Full term, I’m practically quoting verbatim. Stone crazy. Those fumes at the plant have eaten up the sister’s brain, I’m telling you.”

  “Suicide?”

  “And what do I know about suiciding, reincarnating and what have you? I know from amber and trade beads, from brass and soldering and so forth. Scared me to death. Totally out there.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “About when it’s appropriate to do yourself in? Hell, what do I know? I guess if you’re a duty-bound officer of the crown and you’ve been hounding Jean Valjean through the woods, across the borders, through the sewers of Paris, making his life holy hell and then the kindhearted sap turns around and saves your ass from drowning, why then I suppose it’s appropriate to fall on your sword or fling yourself into the Seine.”

  “Ruby, never mind all that. What do you think? Was she serious? You know, serious, serious?”

  “She crazy.”

  “But you say that about everybody.”

  “Am I wrong? Hell, Claybourne getting to resemble the back wards of the asylum more everday.”

  “Velma, Ruby, Velma. Do you think she was trying to tell you something?”

  “I can’t get too worked up over Velma’s crises anymore, Jan. There’ve been too many. She’ll be fine. Sometimes she takes everything so … seriously, gets disappointed, even when she knows better.” Ruby was drifting, was a student again cutting classes, and going off to war. She was in the drenched tents bathing Velma’s muddy, swollen, bruised feet. “She’s so … what’s the word? And works so hard to be guarded, defended.”

  “The drive for invulnerability usually leaves one totally vulnerable,” Jan mumbled. “Take U.S. policy on nuclear armament for a case in point.” Jan waved the idea away. It was not where her mind was. “Why didn’t we think to ask the kid? Velma’s boy? He might’ve known something.”

  Ruby shrugged. “I thought we did, no? Were we trying to avoid being worried? I’m tired of worrying about Velma,” Ruby said, trying to sound annoyed and to be done with the wet tents and bloody feet. It was tiresome being anywhere but in the now moment.

  ten

  Sophie Heywood rocked and glided in Doc Serge’s chair, its orbit a four-by-six oval patch of purple pile. But in the next moment the chair was a swing lifting out as in an amusement park ride. The desk, floor, wastebasket, Mama Mae driving home in the deacon’s car, Velma inching along a drainpipe like a worm and Palma in pursuit, Minnie on the stool hugging Velma, the grille and faces sifting stories through it to her—all seen in a whirling blur from above as Sophie rode the circumference in search, her thoughts of Velma cleansed now of distaste, charged now with blessing and a dim regret as when single friends realize when one marries that they move about in separate solar systems ever after.

  The place was dry and barren, red dust, red rocks, and the swing chair buoyant now, the neck of a parachute catching and the billowing out of the silk raising swirls of red dust around her feet. Not a touchdown, Sophie was suspended while she watched her godchild cutting up on the stairs of the Patterson Professional Building, leaping from the landing in her maypole dress of crinoline petticoats and
dotted-swiss pinafore, the dress billowing out and the child suspended over the staircase for an incredible cool moment, the twitch of vestigial wings a reminder of that earlier flight from the red place of rocks Sophie journeyed through now, the breeze of the silk stirring up clouds of red dust. And then the drop and then another, bouncing down, sailing down now toward a pinpoint of heat and light below, dropping through layers of soundlessness and then birds and wind and then the tree-green-sweet against her teeth, and then the change in heat, the sun-held earth releasing its greeting and stretching up to meet her. And somewhere there she found Velma in a nightgown roaming about with a nub of a candle stuck to a jelly-jar lid.

  “I had this dream the night before the gas, M’Dear,” the voice traveling through the grille. “There was a war going on. Delegates from the People’s Army were invited to come and negotiate the peace. Obie was there and Smitty and Clara Shields, who was my desk mate in elementary school, and Maazda, the original Sister of the Yam, and I don’t remember the others. The treaty signed, they were asked to pose for the historic photograph. They took their positions in front of the bandstand at Douglass Park. The photographer was dressed in high collar and sleeve garters and it was like we were more in a movie than in war. Over the camera was a sheet not a black cloth. But when the sheet was pulled off the camera, it was a machine gun, M’Dear.”

  “What else?”

  “They dragged one of our people out into the courtyard. Emaciated, M’Dear, like the cadavers in the medieval woodcuts. They took him to the wall, propped him up. It was the yard of the old waterworks.”

  “Where the power plant is now. Next to Transchemical.”

  “Yes. I think it was Smitty. It looked like Lil James, but I seemed to understand in the dream that it was your son, looking like my son.” And she had rushed them, nothing but kitchen shears between her and the rifles and Smitty and the wall and the hill looming up behind gold and mammoth. “A shot rang out.” She felt the crack against bone and stumbled, gray slime running down the side of her face. Red but gray. Her mind running like mud. “The end was so … nonchalant, M’Dear.”

  “And?”

  “I made up my mind.”

  “The dream is one piece, the correct picturing of impressions another. Then interpretation, then action. You always were too hasty, Vee. What is the photo scene?”

  “Posturing? Naïveté?”

  “The waterworks?”

  “Emotion?”

  “Not all wars have casualties, Vee. Some struggles between old and new ideas, some battles between ways of seeing have only victors. Not all dying is the physical self.”

  “Death of habit, idea, a time?” Velma sits down on a log and ponders. “Seeing. Dying.”

  “To announce a new beginning.” Sophie tugs on the lines and the silk ripples. “And was the wound near your eye, Vee?”

  Velma traces the line from the wound to her eyebrow to a spot between her eyes. Sophie leans out of the chair and places a shell there, then stretches her ear toward her godchild’s forehead and listens …

  Velma smelled Minnie Ransom near, coconut cream sachet or body oil or hair grease.

  “Bless you,” Minnie said, her hands holding Velma’s head, which had begun to wag uncontrollably, her right palm flat against the forehead, the left at the back as if fingering an egg.

  “Choose your cure, sweetheart. Decide what you want to do with wholeness.”

  Velma was peering through a triangle of space between Minnie’s elbow and her waist, to get to the window. And then she was peering through an opening in a jade bush to get to the tree. She overshot it, or rather went through it and banged into the tabby wall, the crushed oyster shells scraping her eyes. She pulled back to get on the near side of the tree. A small bird there, fallen over on its collapsed wing, the other flopped out and quivering at the tip, its head tucked in as if to hide but only for a moment to catch its breath. Then the tiny head out and up, the beak opening and shutting, calling to the air, calling to the air.

  “The source of health is never outside, sweetheart. What will you do when you are well?”

  Velma once again focused on the woman’s arm as it swung away from the crown of her head toward the stereo. But she still could not concentrate on the music. She was skating the rim of the bush tub, the empty shells gaping. Skating the rim of the tub in imitation of M’Dear’s circling overhead until the circles were in synch, drawing her to the center.

  eleven

  Mai stared at the blank top page on her clipboard. It was eluding her. Her great-aunt’s story, the one she’d hoped to get down the minute she was seated, if she could remember it right. If she could get a pinch of it, she was thinking, she could pull out the whole of it intact from the past. Something Cecile had been saying about the woman-charged culture of Dahomey had sparked it, thrown a light in a dark corner. The mamba priestesses of the voudon, the amazons. Perhaps the contrast of Mai’s story and Cecile’s, the two family stories rubbing against each other in Mai’s mind. But even before Cecile shared the story of the mothers in her family, something had flashed a light around in the jumble of those old told-to’s. The smoke perhaps, the bar b q shop ablaze. Mai worked on it. It was like reaching in the back of the drawer for the emergency twenty-dollar bill fallen down between the drawer and the back of the desk. The nails of two fingers barely getting a grip, the tips of the fingers reading the difference between wood and paper, then slowly a slip of it is between the flesh of the fingertips so it can be pulled forward. She knew it would come. The main thing was to relax and maintain a light concentration.

  “Are you aware that you are being stared at?” Iris said.

  Mai looked across at the Japanese gentleman to her right. He was rearranging the daisies and jonquils in the slender apothecary jug in the center of the table he shared with several flushed men. Mai reached toward the center of their own table and ran a fingernail up a stem and across a petal. And it came sailing across her eyes. The flower boats. The floating bordellos on the bay. The saffron sails. The hanging lanterns. The young girls gathering up their silken robes to dive into the bay. Her great-aunt rescued from the burning flower boats at thirteen and taken to California. There chased in the streets, fingers pulling at her hair. Run down in the muddy streets, raped and scalped. The boats had at least been aromatic. Life had not been honorable, but one could buy oneself in time from the boats. Maybe marry. Maybe … an old story passed down on Mai’s maternal side huddled together in the internment camps of ’42, keeping themselves alive with the stories. But keeping separate even then, even there, the threads of the Japanese, Chinese, Filipino elders. Stories keeping the people in the camps alive while the bill in Congress to sterilize the women of the camps got voted down by one vote, one vote. And then the silence. A whole generation silent about the camps. Then the hand reaching back, the pen dipped, the stories alive again to keep the people going.

  A crisp snap as if of boat sails or robe sleeves, and Mai looked up. It was the café’s white and yellow awning flapping, the scalloped edges turning up sharply at the corner to show their oilskin innards. But there was more than the wind. There was a rumbling somewhere. Mai glanced around as she shook down the ink in her pen. Others at the tables strewn about the patio were looking up as if waiting for a flash of lightning.

  “Thunder? Rain?” Cecile paused long enough in her express delivery on the fire rites of macumba, condomble, obeah, shango, lucumi, santaria, winti, voodoo—none of which, she hastened to make plain, she held any belief in; she was simply answering Chezia’s question—to anchor down the napkins with the ashtrays.

  It sounded like a rumbling of the earth, like a procession, like marching, bare feet stomping along a dirty path, the jangling of canteens against machetes worn at the belt, forty or more marchers maybe, carrying rattling impedimenta, moving up from some hidden place below to appear any minute in view of the café. Some people by the rail glanced over at the vacant lot, but the drums from the park below were distinctl
y different. Others, seated near the corner where the tile design and levels changed, looked down the side street. Several tabled on the side-street patio leaned out of their chairs or simply went ahead and stood up in order to get a fix on the what and where that sounded to them like neither thunder nor marching.

  Chezia gripped her pendant, moving the tips of her fingers across the figure of Kashisk, god of wind and rain, her thumb fingering the thirteen constellations engraved on the back, the center figure raised, the rattlesnake Palma insisted on calling Uraeus but which she’d been taught at school to call Pleiades. She was pulling on it so that the leather thong, the original strap her godmothers had looped around her neck that last night, rubbed the hairs on the back of her neck. She’d originally planned to give it to Gimma, the original Sister of the Plantain from Trinidad. But Gimma had gotten a job at the workers’ college in Barbados and had left the troupe suddenly. Recently she’d thought to present it to Inez, the original Sister of the Corn, but right after the blazing bar b q Inez had caught the plane to Albuquerque to organize another troupe. Chezia looked at Mai now; she too planned to organize a Sister of the Rice contingent and another Seven Sister troupe. Chezia unknotted the thong, remembering what Great Mother had counseled that last night at home. Kashisk was the last of the gifts she hadn’t yet released to travel through the world beyond the village.

  Chezia smiled. Iris had leaned over to brush her hair up and adjust her collar, thinking that was why she had dropped her head down and was screwing it about. Cecile had stretched across the table with her palmetto fan and given her a blast of air, thinking she was hot and uncomfortable. Now, as she lifted the necklace over her head, even Nilda, who had been sitting quietly with her arms folded in her lap and her eyes closed as if asleep, moved to help her. Mai, little Sister of the Rice, was absorbed in her scripting. Quick, black, sleek figures dancing across a floor of white as her felt pen beat out the music. Chezia draped the necklace over Mai’s head, Kashisk clanking against the metal clamp of the writing board.