The Salt Eaters

Toni Cade Bambara
THE SALT EATERS

Toni Cade Bambara is the author of two short story collections
Gorilla My Love
and
Seabirds Are Still Alive
. She has also edited
The Black Woman
and
Tales and Short Stories for Black Folks
. Ms. Bambara’s works have appeared in various periodicals and have been translated into several languages. She died in December 1995.

ALSO BY
Toni Cade Bambara

“Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?”

Velma Henry turned stiffly on the stool, the gown ties tight across her back, the knots hard. So taut for so long, she could not swivel. Neck, back, hip joints dry, stiff. Face frozen. She could not glower, suck her teeth, roll her eyes, do any of the Velma-things by way of answering Minnie Ransom, who sat before her humming lazily up and down the scales, making a big to-do of draping her silky shawl, handling it as though it were a cape she’d swirl any minute over Velma’s head in a wipe-out veronica, or as though it were a bath towel she was drying her back with in the privacy of her bathroom.

Minnie Ransom herself, the fabled healer of the district, her bright-red flouncy dress drawn in at the waist with two different strips of kenti cloth, up to her elbows in a minor fortune of gold, brass and silver bangles, the silken fringe of the shawl shimmying at her armpits. Her head, wrapped in some juicy hot-pink gelee, was tucked way back into her neck, eyes peering
down her nose at Velma as though old-timey spectacles perched there were slipping down.

Velma blinked. Was ole Minnie trying to hypnotize her, mesmerize her? Minnie Ransom, the legendary spinster of Claybourne, Georgia, spinning out a song, drawing
her
of all people up. Velma the swift; Velma the elusive; Velma who had never mastered the kicks, punches and defense blocks, but who had down cold the art of being not there when the blow came. Velma caught, caught up, in the weave of the song Minnie was humming, of the shawl, of the threads, of the silvery tendrils that extended from the healer’s neck and hands and disappeared into the sheen of the sunlight. The glistening bangles, the metallic threads, the dancing fringe, the humming like bees. And was the ole swamphag actually sitting there dressed for days, legs crossed, one foot swinging gently against the table where she’d stacked the tapes and records? Sitting there flashing her bridgework and asking some stupid damn question like that, blind to Velma’s exasperation, her pain, her humiliation?

Velma could see herself: hair matted and dusty, bandages unraveled and curled at the foot of the stool like a sleeping snake, the hospital gown huge in front, but tied up too tight in back, the breeze from the window billowing out the rough white muslin and widening the opening in the back. She could not focus enough to remember whether she had panties on or not. And Minnie Ransom perched on her stool actually waiting on an answer, drawling out her hummingsong, unconcerned that any minute she might strike the very note that could shatter Velma’s bones.

“I like to caution folks, that’s all.” said Minnie, interrupting her own humming to sigh and say it, the song somehow buzzing right on. “No sense us wasting each other’s time, sweetheart.” The song running its own course up under the words, up under Velma’s hospital gown, notes pressing against her
skin and Velma steeling herself against intrusion. “A lot of weight when you’re well. Now, you just hold that thought.”

Velma didn’t know how she was to do that. She could barely manage to hold on to herself, hold on to the stingy stool, be there all of a piece and resist the buzzing bee tune coming at her. Now her whole purpose was surface, to go smooth, be sealed and inviolate.

She tried to withdraw as she’d been doing for weeks and weeks. Withdraw the self to a safe place where husband, lover, teacher, workers, no one could follow, probe. Withdraw her self and prop up a borderguard to negotiate with would-be intruders. She’d been a borderguard all her childhood, so she knew something about it. She was the one sent to the front door to stand off the landlord, the insurance man, the greengrocer, the fishpeddler, to insure Mama Mae one more bit of peace. And at her godmother’s, it was Smitty who sent her to the front door to misdirect the posse. No, no one of that name lived here. No, this was not where the note from the principal should be delivered.

She wasn’t sure how to move away from Minnie Ransom and from the music, where to throw up the barrier and place the borderguard. She wasn’t sure whether she’d been hearing music anyway. Was certain, though, that she didn’t know what she was supposed to say or do on that stool. Wasn’t even sure whether it was time to breathe in or breathe out. Everything was off, out of whack, the relentless logic she’d lived by sprung. And here she was in Minnie Ransom’s hands in the Southwest Community Infirmary. Anything could happen. She could roll off the stool like a ball of wax and melt right through the floor, or sail out of the window, stool and all, and become some new kind of UFO. Anything could happen. And hadn’t Ole Minnie been nattering away about just that before the session had
begun, before she had wiped down the stools and set them out just so? “In the last quarter, sweetheart, anything can happen. And will,” she’d said. Last quarter? Of the moon, of the century, of some damn basketball game? Velma had been, still was, too messed around to figure it out.

“You just hold that thought,” Minnie was saying again, leaning forward, the balls of three fingers pressed suddenly, warm and fragrant, against Velma’s forehead, the left hand catching her in the back of her head, cupping gently the two stony portions of the temporal bone. And Velma was inhaling in gasps, and exhaling shudderingly. She felt aglow, her eyebrows drawing in toward the touch as if to ward off the invading fingers that were threatening to penetrate her skull. And then the hands went away quickly, and Velma felt she was losing her eyes.

“Hold on now,” she heard. It was said the way Mama Mae would say it, leaving her bent in the sink while she went to get a washcloth to wipe the shampoo from her eyes. Velma held on to herself. Her pocketbook on the rungs below, the backless stool in the middle of the room, the hospital gown bunched up now in the back—there was nothing but herself and some dim belief in the reliability of stools to hold on to. But then the old crone had had a few choice words to say about that too, earlier, rearing back on her heels and pressing her knees against the stereo while Velma perched uneasily on the edge of her stool trying to listen, trying to wait patiently for the woman to sit down and get on with it, trying to follow her drift, scrambling to piece together key bits of high school physics, freshman philo, and lessons M’Dear Sophie and Mama Mae had tried to impart. The reliability of stools? Solids, liquids, gases, the dance of atoms, the bounce and race of molecules, ethers, electrical charges. The eyes and habits of illusion. Retinal images, bogus images, traveling to the brain. The pupils trying to
tell the truth to the inner eye. The eye of the heart. The eye of the head. The eye of the mind. All seeing differently.

Velma gazed out over the old woman’s head and through the window, feeling totally out of it, her eyes cutting easily through panes and panes and panes of glass and other substances, it seemed, until she slammed into the bark of the tree in the Infirmary yard and recoiled, was back on the stool, breathing in and out in almost a regular rhythm, wondering if it was worth it, submitting herself to this ordeal.

It would have been more restful to have simply slept it off; said no when the nurse had wakened her, no she didn’t want to see Miz Minnie; no she didn’t want to be bothered right now, but could someone call her husband, her sister, her godmother, somebody, anybody to come sign her out in the morning. But what a rough shock it would have been for the family to see her like that. Obie, Palma, M’Dear Sophie or her son Lil James. Rougher still to be seen. She wasn’t meant for these scenes, wasn’t meant to be sitting up there in the Southwest Community Infirmary with her ass out, in the middle of the day, and strangers cluttering up the treatment room, ogling her in her misery. She wasn’t meant for any of it. But then M’Dear Sophie always said, “Find meaning where you’re put, Vee.” So she exhaled deeply and tried to relax and stick it out and pay attention.

Rumor was these sessions never lasted more than ten or fifteen minutes anyway. It wouldn’t kill her to go along with the thing. Wouldn’t kill her. She almost laughed. She might have died.
I might have died
. It was an incredible thought now. She sat there holding on to
that
thought, waiting for Minnie Ransom to quit playing to the gallery and get on with it. Sat there, every cell flooded with the light of that idea, with the rhythm of her own breathing, with the sensation of having not died at all at any time, not on the attic stairs, not at the kitchen
drawer, not in the ambulance, not on the operating table, not in that other place where the mud mothers were painting the walls of the cave and calling to her, not in the sheets she thrashed out in strangling her legs, her rib cage, fighting off the woman with snakes in her hair, the crowds that moved in and out of each other around the bed trying to tell her about the difference between snakes and serpents, the difference between eating salt as an antidote to snakebite and turning into salt, succumbing to the serpent.

“Folks come in here,” Minnie Ransom was saying, “moaning and carrying on and
say
they wanna be well. Don’t know what in heaven and hell they want.” She had uncrossed her legs, had spread her legs out and was resting on the heels of her T-strap, beige suedes, the black soles up and visible. And she was leaning forward toward Velma, poking yards of dress down between her knees. She looked like a farmer in a Halston, a snuff dipper in a Givenchy.