The Salt Eaters

by Toni Cade Bambara

  She did not regret the attack of the children. She regretted only as she lay on the straw mat, lay on the ground, pressed between the sacred rocks, lying on her back under the initiation knife at an age when the female element is circumcised from the boys and the male excised from the girls, regretted only as she moved the knife aside and the shiver ran from spine to crown and she bled and the elder packed cobwebs and mud that would not dam the gush and she bled on as she’d dreamt she would. Regretted, lying between the rocks and staring up at the clouds surrounding the moon, clouds so like the cauliflowers Mama Mae filled her lunch pail with, clouds like wispy cotton snatched from dentists’ dispensers, regretted that she would not get promoted to the next class to learn about the nature of life on earth and the human and spiritual purpose because the planet was plunging into darkness as she was twisting around toward the last of the light, her tongue probing her mouth for signs of breath, slapping around out of control and ripping open on the serrated teeth till she was bleeding from everywhere.

  “I’m getting a message.” Minnie yanking frantically at Old Wife’s dress and grabbing air, her guide gone off to chapel at the critical moment. Minnie moving quickly, pressing her tongue down hard away from her back molars. It was coming to her like a siren, not at all like instructions. A frequency not used before, more shrill than the signal from Saturn’s rings, less timbre than the telling from the Ring of Wisdom, more static than the CB’s or traffic waves. A wiry, shrill siren that spun in her head like a gyroscope. She was holding her jaws and heading toward the path, moving swiftly through the woods not cloistered now at the crest by the sheltering branches but thrown open, clear. Gliding over the lemon grass damp against her legs, her shoes squishy like never before. She pauses merely to check the rainbow. It is not there, its colors absorbed by needy people, its vibes spiritualizing, soaked up, left faint and toneless. She pulls down quickly the branch to finger the moist leaf, to drink from it and chew the leaf, trying to give herself pause to think, be calm, breathe in her surroundings. Old Wife running up.

  “Pentagon.”

  “Say which? You mean like that thing you draw in the dirt with five points?”

  “Pentagon.”

  “Where’s it at?” Old Wife turning and casting suspicious glances.

  “Lower left bicuspid. Loud and clear. Red alert.”

  “That right?”

  “Why didn’t you tell me? Is this it?”

  “Whatcha mean ‘it’?”

  “Oh hell, why am I wasting time with you,” Minnie says, turning, wondering if there is time to race back, to appeal to the loa who can short-circuit, engulf, misdirect an electric charge jumping from cloud to cloud even as she stands there looking up at what should have been the rainbow. Why hadn’t she given the sacred jugs and pots a really good sweetening with some baking soda and prepared something extra special for the loa’s festival? It was nothing to them to jump the clouds or swallow up the flash in a cloak for the asking.

  “And what makes you think it ain’t them haints messing about with the electricity?”

  “Not now, fool. Not now.”

  “You ain’t got the sense you were born with, Minnie Ransom. Everything’s all right. I’m with you.”

  “Oh my lawd,” Cora Rider moaned before Anna Banks could say it. They clutched each other and grabbed at strangers too and there was nothing soothing now about the singing. It was like The Phantom of the Opera and every other spooky movie she had ever seen. She wished the Daniels would quit.

  “That one was enough to shift the needle on the university’s seismograph,” Doc said, the heh-heh smothered in his throat constricted with fear. The room was shaking, and Claybourne was nobody’s California.

  Nadeen held a chair and steadied herself. The baby, rushing from the front of her, had slammed into her back, turned and was now shifting around trying to distribute its weight. She closed her eyes and panted one two, one two.

  “That was the kind of thunderbolt that knocked Saul off his steed and turned him into Paul,” Cora said, releasing her friend to move toward the young girl and brace her. This was no time to be fainting or going into labor, not when the good woman Ransom was so close to bringing her patient around. She walked the girl to a chair carefully. But for all her caring and concern, Cora was busy checking calendar and clock, trying to calculate a three-digit number she could box for the morrow. Years hence she would remember that the beginning was not the payoff, not the beautician finally coming across with the money she had won, but was the moment Pony Daniels of the circle raised his voice and sang about the time his dungeon shook and his chains fell off.

  Velma would remember it as the moment she started back toward life, the moment when the healer’s hand had touched some vital spot and she was still trying to resist, still trying to think what good did wild do you, since there was always some low-life gruesome gang bang raping lawless careless pesty last straw nasty thing ready to pounce, put your total shit under arrest and crack your back—but couldn’t. And years hence she would laugh remembering she’d thought that was an ordeal. She didn’t know the half of it. Of what awaited her in years to come.

  Fred Holt would remember that something happened to him, happened inside, something he knew no words for and would not attempt to describe until six years later when his son was finally able to trace him to the Resettlement Center. He would remember the first part easily—He was in the chair having his blood pressure taken for a final check and thinking about going to the concert at the Regal, was thinking about the dude with the prison mouth, was grinding his teeth cursing a certain dentist’s soul, when lightning flashed and he found himself hunching down in the chair, bending to tie his laces though they didn’t need it. But he noticed the nurse was right down there with him and they both laughed. And settling back in his seat, waiting to hear whether they wanted a urine sample or not, he thought he saw from the side-street window Porter strolling out of Mount Shiloh Baptist Church, nonchalant about the rain, nonchalant about the fact that he was supposed to be dead. And he tried to fling open the window and shout while at the same time explaining to the nurse returning with his folder and the appointment card that he had to go that very instant. Then racing to the door that led down the stairs to the side street. He took them two at a time and then he fell, falling in wet leaves that felt like dog shit underfoot. The picture of himself on his behind stayed in his mind for a long time. Falling and trying to get up and trying to run to the opening in the hedge to see as he’d seen from the room and to shout across the street but when he got to the sidewalk there was nothing, no one there.

  The wind dumped its cargo of paper bags, candy wrappers and bus transfers gritty and limp at the edge of the bus kiosk he ran toward finally when the downpour came. He stood there not hearing the buzz and flutter of paper up against the plastic panes. Porter in his last days had acted just like that, blasé blasé, nonchalant, less and less concerned about the things so hard won—the day shift, his apartment lease, his grooming habits, his own ideas even. It was as if Porter were detaching himself from his job, his surroundings and from Fred too. As if preparing himself for a new life. Fred Holt shot his eyes around him and whispered quietly, “Porter, you there?”

  A young couple in paper streamers dying red and green on their necks and arms ran into the shelter and smiled his way as they tried to dry each other off with tissues and damp hands. “Kiosk,” he muttered to himself for something to fix on, fingering a pencil in his left pants pocket, humming a song lest the couple think he was talking to himself. They were paying him no mind, were glancing up and down the block and then taking a deep breath before dashing across the street to cut through the Infirmary yard, moving with a determination he would recall many years later when people raced across the borders to new frontiers.

  Campbell stood flattened against the service-counter wall looking first toward the round table where several men with rain-plastered hair tried to comb the whorls into some order, then looking tow
ard the other big table where Jan and her stubby friend sat with the media women, passing around napkins and using the tablecloth to dry each other’s faces. He wondered what effect the storm would have on the Brotherhood’s pageant, on the Academy’s procession, on the police’s program, on the vigilantes’ plans, and on his future. Something more than storm was up, he figured, rejecting the idea that ordinary lightning, thunder and rain could elicit so profound a response from everyone. They were doing a good job of playacting: Just a storm. None of the conversations around him yielded anything he could use. But years ahead at blue-ribbon panels and organized seminars, he would have occasion to say that the beginning was ushered in by an unusual storm. He wondered if the portable radio in the kitchen might inform him of similar storms in other parts of the country, in other parts of the world. He occupied himself by totaling checks and testing his memory. Was a comet due to appear anytime soon? Had a colliding asteroid been predicted? Was some country test-blasting?

  Dr. Julius Meadows would say that it began on the stoop listening to M1 and Thurston and their buddies talk about conditions at the plant. He would say that partway through the discussion when the first rumble of thunder had been detected, listened to, called an explosion at the plant and then discounted as weather merely, he’d taken time out to vow to give the Hippocratic oath some political meaning in his life. He would describe at length the tavern they took him to, five grown men running through the streets, splashing in puddles like schoolboys whooping and hollering, ducking into the place loud and raucous and being greeted by equally boisterous men, the rusty, ashy, scar-faced denizens of the neighborhood bar where it was certain one was wont to part another’s hair with a chair on the slightest provocation. Would describe how he helped to pass out flyers about the rally. Would get up to show how the woman from the kitchen shook out the flyer he handed her as if to check for roaches, then smoothed the flyer against her breasts pressing out the damp creases and then took her time reading it as he ran the spiel as Thurston had. Would get sober and dignified explaining that at that moment he understood that, talking about the health hazards at the plant, the woman leaning away from him as if to get a better view of the hole in his head or as if to avoid contagion, understood that industrial arrogance and heedless technology was first and foremost a medical issue, a health issue, his domain.

  By the fall of ’83 he would have taught himself that the reason they went to the Tip In Tavern was not to pass out leaflets or to scout up tickets to the Regal concert but to set the scene for his conversion. By the winter of ’83/’84, while twisting around in his dentist’s chair, pushing the metal arm away from his jaw and arguing that a second x-ray was not only not called for but dangerous, Meadows would have earned a reputation among his colleagues for being a stickler about certain “regulations,” “measures,” “obligations” to the public. By the spring of ’84, doing his taxes and checking the nuclear exemption clause in his insurance policy, he would have already queried administrator B. Talifero Serge about a position at the Southwest Infirmary and sent an angry letter to the local TV station and gone on the air to say that the TB mobile units in the Black community had screens that were longer than any others’, long enough to cover the genitalia of youths coaxed into the trucks by lollipops, comic books, and free passes to the local discos. But none of it would really come together as a coherent and focused narrative until the summer of ’84 when he lunched with Mrs. Sophie Heywood and Mrs. Janice Campbell and the man he’d come to call Doc and heard the younger woman hold forth on what to expect now that Pluto had moved into Scorpio for a long spell.

  “A planet of immense power. Annihilation and transformation. The planet of complete and total change.”

  And the older woman would ask him, flipping open the Bible, whether he understood the significance of certain tamperings with the script.

  “The expressions about the second coming and Armageddon, for example?” And he would shake his head no; it had been years since he’d had occasion to even look at a Bible, except to move it from the phone table in the hotels to a drawer.

  “Should be translated ‘presence of Christ’ and ‘new age,’ not …” And Doc would catch his eye and wink, two men humoring the women.

  It was the first crack of lightning and thunder that made Palma duck into the shelter of Marcus Hampden. And he held her and held too the weight for her, her dread, annoyance, and now alarm. Standing by the flat truck watching for a minute the young Academy boys serious and efficient with the unloading of chairs and tables, they then straightened and began combing the park with their eyes. A few people were scurrying for cover under the trees, older folks snapping out their newspapers in preparation for tent hats, but most of the early arrivers to the park simply strolled about, hailing friends, groups of brothers eying the sisters, groups of sisters eying the brothers, children fussing at kites that would not get up off the ground. There were a lot of people, considering the early hour.

  Young men bopping by, yards of leather strung across back and over shoulders to hold tool-worked cases so small that keys and cigarette packs peeped out. Magenta, lime, copper-colored shirts unbuttoned to the belt, thin gold chains at the throat and a buddy cracking, “Maaan, why don’t you comb that nappy chest?” and folks falling out. Sisters with beaded braids swinging as they sashayed toward the bandshell where the food booths were setting up, moving over pebbles and scraggly grass on pencil-thin heels or clumpy wedgies. Vendors unpacking sacks and boxes of flashlights, candles, Darth Vadar laser sticks, maracas, eight-track tapes, film, banners, straw hats, fans. Folks walking along with trays strapped around their necks selling bags of peanuts, leaning in closely to this or that one selling bags of pot. Incense bundles in tinfoil, coke in tinfoil packets. The balloon man. A fat youth in clown white juggling baseballs. An old man with a risqué talking dummy on his knee drawing a crowd toward the benches. Portable radios, TV’s, phonographs with Ashford and Simpson “Don’t Cost You Nothing” vying with Peaches and Herb, Roberta and Donny, kiddie shows, news reports. Two Bloods in skinny black clothes, derbies and bright-yellow suspenders, skate dancing on a patch of cement near the bandshell, the crowd predicting how hip the Olympics’ll be once Black folks take over the ice competitions and then introduce the art of roller-skate dancing to the world. Drummers in dreads and knitted caps, beards, sandals, with cowbells and chekeres, working out on the hill. Women slumming from the Heights jiggling about, twitching to take their clothes off, settling for a veronica or two of their disco skirts mistaking the parkees ducking past to clear the trees for playmates.

  The wino couple from Palma’s old neighborhood holding each other up, eggshell stepping with their cups and brown paper sacks, managing to make it to the flat truck to sit down, smoothing down each other’s clothes, each other’s stringy, grease-waved hair, the kind of hair Palma and Velma had called “good hair” until Mama Mae explained the alcohol source of the waves. Looking up and answering bleary-eyed and incoherent that no they hadn’t seen Velma, and didn’t have a clue as to who Palma could possibly be.

  “Should we wait here?” Marcus was looking for a way for them to sit down comfortably.

  It seemed a sensible enough suggestion to her. Eventually everyone came to the drums, and cars and trucks were arriving already with the master drummers and dancers from the back districts. No matter where Velma was, she’d hear the drums and come to the park. Palma had her mouth open to say “Yes” when the rumble of thunder took hold of the park, arrested everybody in their tracks, Marcus staring down at the ground as if waiting for it to crack wide open. And still the lightning had not finished, was still blinking, stuttering, as though it meant to stay on forever once it took hold. And they would have occasion soon, and then way into the future too, to decode the look that passed between them the moment Marcus lifted his eyes and his mouth fell open and Palma dropped her eyes from the sky and moaned.

  Obie had been bobbing around in the whirlpool when the thunder struck, shaking the bui
lding. Bobbing around in the swirling waters, breathing along with the water’s pulse, with the pumping jets that throbbed against the back of his shoulders and the soles of his feet. Trying to maintain equilibrium, trying to find a balance between the longing for clarity and the dread of finding too great a challenge of reunion. His body too far down in the hot water one minute, and slippery as he was from the massage oil, slippery as his elbows were hooked on the rim of the pool, he could go under. His torso buoying up the next minute, the front of his body out of the water, not getting the benefit of heat and the forced currents. He’d been thinking of blueprints, the blue waxy kind with scraped white lines, trying to coax his subconcious to surrender the plan, to surface, take over, and reveal something he knew he must know to pull it all together. But dodging it too.

  Legs and feet floating gently to surface, his hands flat against the water’s green, the plan floating up to the threshold of consciousness and the knotty problem coming loose in his muscles, his joints, his brain. Then the building shook and he opened his eyes in a daze, staring at the lumpish green and gray on his right ankle—the elastic with the locker key on it. But still not awake, not even with pandemonium breaking around him, yearning and premonition still washing through him as his pool mates hustled themselves out of the water, some heaving themselves over the sides of the pool sending waves against him. And he watched as in a dream or dozing in the movies. Some pulling up on the hooped rails of the steps, kicking spray in his face. Others leaping clean out of the water, as flying fish, as if ejected by the waters’ jets.

  “Hey, Obie. Somebody wants you.”

  A wonderful message or not in his ears, at the back of his head, swarming through him. Velma wanted him. The folks wanted him. His brother Roland wanted him. And oh did the cops want him. Thunder rumbling up from the bottom, trembling the water, shooting through him and showers blasting full force then shut off abruptly, doors banging and brothers dripping and stumbling about in clouds of fog and steam, talking loud and flamboyant in defiance of whatever the interruption in their ablutions meant.