Toni Cade Bambara’s Memoir: An Excerpt from “Working At It in Five Parts”

Toni Cade Bambara’s “Working At It in Five Parts” is a hidden gem of prismatic self-reflection that we were surprised to find collecting dust in the Spelman College Archives along her voluminous letters, story drafts, teaching lesson plans, and much more. For our Lost & Found chapbook “Realizing the Dream of a Black University” and Other Writings, we were elated to include this essay alongside her proto-interventions in Black Women’s Studies to show the broad range of her legacy as a walking counter-institution. In its glittering narrative arc, we see Bambara’s precocious Harlem childhood (also resonant in her Gorilla, My Love stories) where she learned to embody the role of a community scribe. Bambara brought these rigorous, eclectic pedagogical qualifications to help transform City College and then Rutgers in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and then deepen her internationalism in 1970s delegations to Cuba and Vietnam, all before moving to Atlanta to pursue full-time writing while caring for her daughter Karma. Throughout the essay, Bambara harnesses the power of sharing one’s personal story to activate others, to “make revolution irresistible.”

As a teaching writer, Bambara playfully skewers the peculiar hardships of this frequently lonely profession, and offers hilarious examples of writers seeking solace. This honey aids the transmission of deeper medicinal counsel. Describing the writer as a kind of medium, she reveals how writing is akin to dreaming, both individually to “confront, discover, share, and fortify the self,” and also in the “meditative shaping” of an “underlying design” that can provide social clarity. Bambara underscores the need to cultivate writing communities—in a demystifying resistance to the tradition of the independent (white well-heeled male) writer—even as she offers some tricks to obtain solitude from friends, family, and lovers when the writing flow beckons. This essay serves as an all-too-rare candid self-assessment of Bambara’s craft just after completing her 1980 novel The Salt Eaters, and offers readers a new appraisal of her trajectory as she relocates to Philadelphia and becomes immersed in filmmaking while continuing to write fiction and essays before her untimely death in 1995 at the age of 56.

Although Toni Cade Bambara has been physically gone for a while now, her legacy is very much alive and well. With the Spelman College Archives, the annual Toni Cade Bambara Scholar-Activism Conference, the December 15, 2021 event “The School of Toni Cade Bambara’ and beyond, we are honored to join many in carrying on the wisdom and spirit of her cultural work, an endowment that we continue to channel in every classroom, meeting space, and living room.— Makeba Lavan and Conor Tomás Reed

Debussy Practiced With The Lid Down

I vaguely remember the wall—red brick, two stories high, uninterrupted by windows. Perfect for handball. Perhaps the building was a church. But I think though that what kept my Spauldeen in my pocket was the sign. The sign said: God Is Omnipotent, Omnipresent, and Omniscient. I knew in a flash what I wanted to be when I grew up and right away. Omnipotent meant a powerful arm for knocking out of the way snarling dogs, nasty boys, flashers, do ugly cops and anything else that turned a stroll around the block into an ordeal. Omnipotent meant a powerful glance that could silence a teacher in a rousing sing of “Old Black Joe.” It meant tough. I wanted to be omnipotent tough. Not gun-moll tough-molls look swollen and creased in the movies with their streaked hair, ten-minutes-to-the-cemetery makeup, and a grapefruit shoved in their kisser. Also, they were sad. I didn’t want to be sad. I wanted to be omnipotent tough. Which was not Chapman/ Bishops/Jolly Stompers/Imperial Gent tough either, fine as they were in their eye-stinging satin jackets, knife blade pants, ass-kicking shoes, and ace deuce lids. They got hurt. I didn’t want to get hurt, I wanted to be able to give a potent tough sigh in answer to anybody’s “Ya mama,” and they’d melt to the pavement while I glided off with my jump rope and my handball, not even sweating through my Noxzema.

Omnipresent meant being a fly on the wall and seeing everything going on, and to be an ear grown-ups said some walls had. And it means taking trips all over. Solid. Riding down 5th Avenue on the double decker bus with the family on Sunday was quasi- omnipresent. I could see right into the trees and imagine myself atop the skyscrapers. Changing trains at White River Junction for summers with the Coles in Vermont was semi-O. I could fly along the tracks with the telephone poles and visit with the cows and imagine myself in the houses along the way eating cheddar cheese cut from a black-rind wheel. Walking with my mother along 7th Avenue while she pointed out the Old Lafayette, places where the Dark Tower poets used to meet, the bookstore-workshop of J.A. Rogers that was very close to O. For I would get a twitch of the vestigial wings as though any minute I could be on the rooves, in the buildings, listening to Countee Cullen and reading over Rogers’ shoulder, all at the same time.

Omniscient was why I tried devouring whole shelves of library books. Why I’d light up when they passed out in class those purple mimeo sheets designed to get students into the encyclopedias, almanacs, etc. Dull normal assignments really, but there were adventures to be had along the way to finding out the average snowfall in Fairbanks, Alaska and the height of mountain ranges in the far- flung regions of Outer Mongolia. I had an indiscriminate appetite for print: bubble gum wrappers, comic books, other people’s post cards. I’d eavesdrop on subways, in beauty parlors, and would linger recklessly in doorways sopping up overheards to transform into stories to keep my friends entertained on the long walks to and from school. I hung tough with my Daddy in the Apollo and learned how high the community standards were/are for musical, comic, and flamboyant rap performances. I hung tough with my mother on Speaker’s Corner listening to trade unionists, Pan-Africanists, Ida B. Wells Club organizers, Communists, the Temple People as Muslims were then called, Abyssinians as Rastafarian were known as. On the corner of 125th and 7th Avenue in front of Michaux’s Book Store, I learned the power of the word and the particularity of the Afro-centric perspective. And learned too to appreciate the continuity of the community’s wisdoms. So. When grown-ups got all in my face, as grown-ups are wont to do with little children and with midgets too, asking “And what do you want to be, etc.?” I would say, “God,” meaning the Three-O very tough, riding the rails, smart person mentioned on the no-playing-handball wall. Raised eyebrows and chirped teeth soon taught me to say, “I’ll be a doctor,” and to keep my real career plans to myself.

Other kids who passed that wall on 145th and St. Nick and began their Three-O apprenticeship probably became ministers, doctors, traveling salesmen, Colonels, or magicians. I became a writer. At what point one becomes a writer, I don’t know. As a small kid, I used to fiddle with the ketchup bottle in the Automat, that wonder place in the old days where you could shove nickels in a slot and spring from glass cages in the wall great food, and picture myself years later writing at one of the sunny tables, using the sugar bowl and shakers to hold down pages and pages of poems and stories and radio scripts. And then I actually began to do it—in restaurants, on the fire escape, in bed, at school.

In elementary school I scripted assembly programs for Negro History Week. In junior high I wrote poems and tried to overload English teachers with five-for-one writing assignments. In high school I hogged the lit journal. In Queens College, writing courses and the theatre club in need of plays lured me away from the H2S generator and the shelf of jarred-in-formaldehyde frogs. Ink and greasepaint smelled better. By 1967 I’d had a few things published, most importantly to me “Mississippi Ham Rider” in Massachusetts Review (64) and “The Hammer Man” in Negro Digest (66). I was the book reviewer for Dan Watts’ Liberator and was sandwiching writing in between street work in Brooklyn and hanging out, or teaching at CCNY and trying to hang in. In 1968, urged by colleagues at CCNY like Addison Gayle, and encouraged by students at SEEK like Francee Covington and Gayl Stokes, and coaxed by a few friends like Hattie Gossett, I began work on The Black Woman. As the book was coming out, I was assembling the next one, Tales and Short Stories for Black Folks. Toni Morrison reviewed it and next thing I knew I was putting old and new stories together for Random House which published Gorilla, My Love. That year, 1972, I was teaching at Livingston College of Rutgers University, the most stunningly profound period in my life thanks to the students and to a few colleagues who made a difference. Students for years had been and in upcoming years would continue to be the center of my days and nights; writing of the pre-dawn in-betweens. In preparation for an interview somewhere in the early ’70s, I observed that, since becoming a teacher rather than a youth-developer social worker or recreational therapist in hospitals, people around me, more often than not, were practicing writers. At CCNY, for examples, were Addison Gayle, David Henderson, Wilfred Cartey, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Lennox Raphael, Tom Poole, Larry Neal, John A. Williams, Raymond Patterson, and Adrienne Rich to mention a few.

At Livingston were Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, Aijaz Ahmad, A.B. Spellman, Miguel Algarín and others. I lived on the Lower East Side in the Umbra days and moved back to Harlem at the tail end of Black Arts Theatre days. But it was not until I returned from Cuba in the summer of ’73 that I said, “Hey, Cade, guess what? Seems you’re a writer.” Sometime that summer I learned all over what Langston Hughes and so many others had taught all along—that writing is a perfectly legitimate way to participate in struggle. I’d thought it trifling, it was more like fun than “serious work.” A serious writer, after all, wore suede elbow patches and worked all day at a huge desk with sunlight perpetually shining in the windows. My windows were filthy. And a serious writer said bold and dangerous things, elicited hard headed feedback and graciously used criticism to grow and improve. I was chicken shit.

By 1974 I had promised myself once too often to “one day” sit down with elbow patches and clean windows and paper. I resigned from a tenured professorship at Rutgers, side stepped friends convinced by that act that I needed to be committed, packed up the kid and the household gods and moved to Atlanta. I sat down and I wrote. There seemed to be boxes and boxes of folders and drafts and scraps of scribblings and undecipherable notepads and gobs of stuff to plow through. In the summer of ’75, while waiting for a postponed trip to Vietnam to be on again, I put together The Sea Birds Are Still Alive, reserving space for one or two new things that might crystallize as a result of the trip. In going through the backlogue of very old, kinda old, fairly recent manuscripts, then looking over the published work I had on the shelves, I observed a definite progress as I listened to my comic routines and outrage, to my contradictions, to my duplicities of feeling. I read, probing beneath the smooth camouflage of words for tell-tale droppings. I read, and discovered how akin writing is to dreaming. To make use of either state of being, conjuring/dialoguing takes risks. Dreams confront you, push you up against the games you play, the self-deceptions, the false knowings and false awakenings too.

The story “The Organizer’s Wife” pushed me up against set “opinions” I’d held about quiet, southern students. I called up Virginia for that story in much the same way the subconscious calls up characters for the scenarios at night—to find out what you know that you’ve been side stepping and over layering with “opinions.” Men careless with their seed have sides, motives I didn’t need to know about because I knew, until the first draft of “Louis Among the Women” worked me toward the final version—“Baby’s Breath” (Essence, Sept 80).

In Atlanta in the ’70s, still sandwiching writing between other work—lecturing, consulting, teaching, conducting writers workshops, and keeping house for the ancient soul who travels under the guise of being a thumb-sucking daughter—I began to appreciate what I’d been teaching for years, that writing is a powerful way to confront the self, discover the self, share the self, and fortify the self. This latter, most crucial in a country so well organized to fundamentally alter one’s being to the point of total derangement. Writing is a powerful way of journeying toward a knowing of what the shaping impulse can do. One gets glimpses at times at the potter’s wheel, or in the rock garden arranging stones, or making quilts, or writing poetry, or otherwise engaged in the quiet, reflective process of shaping and ordering—that underlying pattern in nature, that all-encompassing design within which the perceivable world (we’re trained to stay put in) operates.

There is so much disorder, dissipation, and chaos around us, peddled as information, necessity, inevitability, that I understand now why poets were/are considered priests in so many cultures. Through the practice of meditative shaping, the basic design can come through, that lost design, that underlying design eclipsed if not buried amidst the hopeless clutter that results from building up “disciplines” and “bodies of knowledge” based on unchecked at best premises, invalid assumptions at most—as is the way in Western Civ. In my writings somewhere up the road, I aim for a narrator who neither poses as omniscient eye nor imposes order like a chess board arranger, but acts as a medium to let the design come through. The narrator of Salt is as close as I can get at this stage in my development. Closer than witness or participant, that narrator is not quite a medium. It was Eleanor Traylor who, in her devastatingly brilliant critique of Salt, which appeared in the Summer/Fall issue of First World, sharply delineated for me how close I came and far I’ve yet to go […] breadth, motive, and precisioned naming of the thing. The kind of reviewer that makes you want to work harder.

The Russell review[1] singular in that so few reviewers are adept at reviewing a collection. But then the whole publishing industry as well as the academic industry generally overlook the short story form in favor of the novel. This is murder for the gene-deep loyal storyist like myself who often works as hard and as long on a 10 page story as some novelists do on a book. Economically and critically not shrewd, I’ve heard for years. Most magazines and certainly most lit journals of the small press community cannot afford to publish a 10 page story. And while I am intrigued with the stretch-out possibilities of the novel, quite candidly it is the pull of “commercially wise” and “career smart” that sat me down to try.

The Greek writer Harry Petrakis in a recent interview was saying what storyists have been lamenting for years—that to keep on with the story writing that he prefers, he cannot afford not to produce a novel now and then. I’d always suspected that storyists did not abandon their “first love” because they reached its or their own limits with the genre. Nothing of the kind. Economics. Critical attention. A pity. The short story suits my temperament. I’m a sprinter rather than a long-distance runner. I like the modest appeal for attention the short [story] makes that allows me to slip up on the reader’s blind side and grab’m. But because I am neither white, male, dead (Fitzgerald or Cheever or Updike), I will simply learn to master the novel and learn to write more “economical” stories. What the hell.

xxx

The hard question: How do you educate family and friends to respect your need/right to be unavailable at times? No novelist I’ve ever talked to about this is free from guilty feelings; most do a lot of gift giving when the manuscript finally gets out of the house. Also, I don’t know any writers who call their “way” an answer for anybody else’s situation.

I like company in spurts. Am intensely affectionate, sociable, gregarious, hospitable in fits. But there are times when any visitor—in person, by phone, mail, or message—is a total drag, an intruder, a burglar, a space up-taker, a chaos maker, a conflict inducer, a mood chaser, a guilt projector, a breath stealer, a low-flying vampire. A roach may presume, but a human being insists—a presence on the consciousness that will not be ignored. A ceiling may cave in, it at least becomes a past tense affair. The visitor remains in the naggingly present progressive tense. Friends and kin come by to “rescue” the obsessive-compulsive, who must be “longing” for “a break.” They get antsy about the unplugged phone or the disconnected bell or the unanswered letter. “Suppose there was an emergency.” The only emergency ofttimes is the work itself. How to get that across is usually the problem.

I have no answer either. On the average, I have one lay-over guest a season. And I live alone with my daughter who grew up knowing what I do and how I look when my jones comes down. She used to have a lot of godmothers to go to, she now spends a lot of time with her grandmother. She tries to understand that her mother is neither a school girl who’s through with her homework by 4:00 or a retired elder with a pension. I wrassle guilt and convention to the mat 2 falls out of three. For the most part, they wag their heads and slink away, can’t do a thing with me. But I don’t think my way is much of an “answer” for anybody. I don’t have what I’d call a balanced life.

There are all sorts of ploys writers resort to, especially women who’ve been systematically trained or who are temperamentally predisposed to meet everyone else’s needs and not acknowledge their own. What to do, then, about that writing compulsion? “I have an upset stomach,” some say, then hide out in the bathroom, propping their pads on their knees and flushing the toilet at regular intervals. “I’ve got to visit a friend in the hospital,” then check into a hotel or hideout in the library and write.

One sister, at a recent workshop, shared her tried-and-true method and we didn’t know whether to laugh, cry, or scream. “I’m having a nervous breakdown,” she announces to her household of 7. Then she cooks four days’ worth of meals and jams them in the freezer. “I absolutely am on my last nerve and cannot go on,” then she does all the laundry and invites a friend in to fold and put away. “Take me away before I hurt somebody,” she sobs, having stashed a fistful of sharpened number 2 pencils and some notebooks in her nightgown and toothbrush sack. They take her off to the psych ward where she writes fairly undisturbed for a day or two, having convinced the nursing staff that voices are dictating to her and that the shrink will be interested in the scribblings for his diagnostic work-up. Her meals are brought to her in isolation and no one asks her to wash or comb her hair while she’s under initial observation. She “recovers” when the medication dosage is increased and threatens to send her under. I hope the reader is not waiting to hear if she’s a “good” writer. (Is that the question to raise?)

I was once going around with a playwright who also writes songs and scores for industrial films. Ahhhh, I thought, I will surely not have to reassure him every 5 minutes that closed door I work behind is not a comment on our relationship, or that my frequent and sometimes lengthy absences from all known postal zones on planet earth are not sure signs of infidelity. I’m just working. Fool, me. Fighting has its merits. But I like to leave’m laughing with my Bela Lugosi bit. Recall: Igor has managed to steer the Frankenstein monster back to the castle. But the mob is coming along hot on their heels with their angry torches. And they are thoroughly pissed about the windmill-swat routine of the Monster’s that’s laid a few townfolk low, namely at the bottom of the hill with their necks broken. Doc Bela is having a dinner party for the burgomeister and assorted burghers. He sees Igor and tall friend hobble past the drapes on their way to the laboratory. Doc Bela removes his napkin, rising for his quaint get away speech. “Excuse me, gentlemen. I have a bone stuck in my throat.” Exit.

We all may be excused from the table to perform tangible, practical, something-to-show-for-it work or to climb into the iron lung lest we expire and not be able to change the flat or take the clothes to the cleaners tomorrow. But to write a novel? Which is why a community of writers, even if they only slap five once a month or once a season, can be so supportive. A collective, a workshop, a guild, an on-going group is even more sustaining for support and permission. One has to have or just flat out take permission to be an artist in a society that marginalizes, trivializes, and commodityizes (wha?) creative effort. From the aptitude tests of grammar school (where daydreaming and wondering rarely get a play, so you feel like a weirdo) to the higher grades (where art and music are minors and dance and the other arts are rarely offered at all), to the personnel office psychological tests, by whatever name they go by these days (where right brain sensitivity is frowned upon in favor of left brain manipulation), the artist is a freak and not to be taken seriously. For a serious writer who notices things and wants to tell the truth, it’s even dodgier. This society has rewards for those who demonstrate skills in nimble avoidance of uncomfortable realities that threaten the bogus peace, but no mercy for those who dare penetrate the social garments and speak out on the emperor’s clothes.

Some of us are lucky and others make good luck. Myself, I have a mother who values the life of the mind and never said (when I was a kid), when coming upon me scribbling or staring, “Since you’re not doing anything, mop the bathroom and run to the store.” And my daughter, at whatever age it is kids appoint themselves Keeper of the Phone, was once heard saying as mommy gazed out of the window with a bunch of pens stuck in her bush—“Sorry, she can’t come to the phone. She’s out of it… Important? Important to you or important to her?… Sorry, she’s working.” An exquisite child. I think I’ll keep her.

Sarah Fabio rapped non-stop to some writers at my house one night about all of this. She said either be prepared for agony, battle, and loneliness; or draw folks into your orbit of work so they have both understanding and vested interest in what you’re doing; or hope that critical reception for your work will encourage others to get out of your face and let you alone; or forget the whole damn thing. Just work. Course, when Fab said it, it was sage-like and hilarious.

Marge Piercy wrote a poem some time ago that I’ve been hunting for. It says in three or four stanzas: talent and genius is what they say they always knew you had, that’s after the Pulitzer and the rave reviews. Before that what you had was a delusion or a hobby, you should’ve had a baby, gotten a job and quit being a bum. The last line is indelibly printed on the brain—“Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved.” I dunno. I want it all.”

Note

1 Per Conor Tomás Reed: “After doing some sleuthing, it seems like Bambara is referring to a reviewer named Russell who was doing interviews in the 1980s to ultimately produce Render Me My Song: African American Women Writers from Slavery to the Present in 1990…Chapter 10 in Russell’s book in part addresses Bambara’s short fiction.”