The Salt Eaters

Bambara's first novel, set in the fictional Claybourne, Georgia, during carnival time, is built around a single healing. Velma Henry, a community activist and computer programmer exhausted by factionalism in the movements she served, by her marriage, and by her work, has attempted suicide. In the Southwest Community Infirmary she helped found, the fabled healer Minnie Ransom, guided by her spirit companion Old Wife, asks the book's central question: "Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?" Around that brief ritual Bambara weaves the voices, memories, and arguments of a whole community — veterans of the civil rights, feminist, and anti-war movements reckoning with what the struggle cost them. Experimental, musical, and explicitly political in form as well as content, edited by Toni Morrison, the novel won the American Book Award and is regarded as Bambara's masterpiece.

Author: Toni Cade Bambara · Original publisher: Random House (New York), 1980