Toni Cade Bambara

Toni Cade Bambara 1939-1995

African-American, Harlem-raised, engaged leftist, Bambara sets her stories in leftist organizing communities, the communities they support, or with people otherwise involved in left issues. She maintains strict focalization in her stories; that is, nothing enters narrative that does not corespond strictly with what the focal character might see, feel, think. The prose is active, rhythmic, impassioned, and strong throughout, although certain details of perspective seem lacking at times in the impressionistic flow.

From The Sea Birds Are Alive. NY: Random House, 1977

"The Organizer's Wife" is set in what appears to be rural black community, perhaps Southern, 20th Century. Bambara handles the dialect like Twain, with steady misspellings, rather than like Toni Morrison, with the dialect rendered clearly by syntax alone. The focalizer falls in love with a guy, but Revun Michaels' church sells the place out from under her. She beats him with a yardstick and kicks him in the head when he tries to get up. He's "small and balding" or the "short, fat, balding preacher" and appears unable to defend himself against the young woman, who is apparently rather large. The narrative makes out that the preacher's height and weight are linked somehow with craven hypocrisy and moral weakness. One feels the contempt often felt by people engaged in manual labor for those who make a living without lifting; it's unclear how much distance Bambara herself has from this opinion.

The woman sort of mysteriously begins holding an infant - she's gotten pregnant somewhere along the way - and her husband is apparently the organizer. Someone has probably bought out the church so that they can't organize and work with the community on it, and probably particularly so they can shut the school down. I was left feeling that more details about the preacher's position would help define the difference or correlation between the focal character's rage and her situation. an injustice, but one wonders the extent to which the focalizer's criticism of and violence against the preacher is justified. Does she assume that he could avoid the sale, and is this justified? One needs the details of the business transaction to decide. While these details are clearly no yardstick of justice, they would give us an idea what the preacher might or might not accomplish practically.

The difficulty seems to be that Bambara herself considers these things as morally or practically straightforward. Perhaps they are in some sense. Clearly, racist cops should be curbed. Clearly, a church that serves as the center for an entire community should not be sold out from under that community, however its continuance might be arranged. But even assuming Ultimate Justice for such assessments, left groups constantly fragment over ideological and practical differences over just how to repair such problems. Taken very broadly, such distinctions account for the entire spectrum of social opinion on these issues.

This seems to me just the weakness of ideological or politically involved literature in general. The difference with Bambara, really, is that she's so engaging and so loving with emotional detail that she manages to reduce the issue greatly. But she doesn't resolve it here.

"The Apprentice"

Narrator's with a friend, Naomi, who stops to interrupt a bust in which a cop's roughly frisking a black man; the cop stops and lets the man go, perhaps since he sees witnesses. Naomi seems pretty professional about it, insists on getting details of the man who's been pulled over, the cop and the badge and so forth.

Naomi's got some grey hair. She appears to be an organizer of some stripe.

They wind up at a church, talking with an older woman. An old man brags obtrusively. The story wanders. She's doing a character sketch of her energetic organizer buddy Naomi, that's all. In this we find the strength and weakness of Bambara's writing. She catches moments of consciousness authentically and intensely. But strangely, the episodes do not reveal their ideological inspiration as they might. That is, one empathizes with the narrator's clear feeling that Naomi is wise and courageous. We see in a general way that Naomi works against Injustice: the police treatment of the African-American driver smacks of racism and might have done so more clearly. Bambara's issue might have to do with the level of engagement, and she may be signalling readers that one who becomes engaged winds up doing so 24/7, simply out of the constant need.

All this is valuable, but one wants something more out of such a sharp observer. What is the political nature of Naomi's involvement? How does the psychological dynamic relate to the business of involvement? What internal conflicts does Naomi face?

This issue, of course, breaks down differently here than in "The Organizer's Wife," which seems more complete emotionally, but in which the exact nature of the sale of the church seems missing. Clearly the sale of the church constitutes a loss for the community andlated errand in the snow and cold, running through the ghetto with a bunch of kids.


"The Long Night" is a thrilling description of living through a police raid, worth reading just for the emotional roller coaster, but also nice to visualize life as a target of CIA involvement in Latin America or in the gunsights of COINTELPRO in the US. Little media attention has been given to back the realism of this kind of description, but this is just plain harrowing, very intense stuff, and feels totally authentic and particularly relevant in this day and age, given the demise of habeas corpus and our onetime 4'th and 6th Amendment protections.