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He speaks for whom?: inscription and reinscription of women in 'Invisible Man' and 'The Salt Eaters.' - Varieties of Ethnic Criticism
MELUS, Summer, 1993 by Ann Folwell Stanford
When I awakened she stood looking down. Her newly straightened hair
gleamed glossily in the intense light, her blue uniform freshly ironed
and stiffly starched. Seeing me awake she shook her head and grinned.
I tensed, expecting a trick. But not this time. Instead, she tried seriously
to communicate with me. (244)
Mary's communication consists of attempts to find out the reasons for the narrator's confinement in the hospital. Once satisfied that he has committed no crime, she sets about the dangerous business of freeing him. Not only her courage, but Mary's physical strength, becomes evident as she pries the lid of the box, so heavy that "an expression of pain gripped her features" as she does so (246).
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Mary encourages the enervated man not to come home with her (as in the later, published version), but to remember why he was put in the hospital in the first place, to talk, to eat, and to become strong enough to escape the hospital. She challenges him to "stop being such a sissy" (262) and later returns with something "green like balled grape leaves that had dried without fading," obtained from her rootworking mother, a woman who
useta sing alto, grow the best crops in the country, and right now...knows
more about roots and herbs and midwifery and things than anybody
you ever seen. (261)
Two remarkable women -- strong, subversive, and not only willing to assist the narrator in his escape but practically demanding it of him. The stuff" works its intended magic, and soon the narrator gains the strength of "Jack-the-Bear," making a hair-raising escape from the hospital, running completely naked in an underground ritual of rebirth. It is only through Mary's fearless and determined preparation, as well as her competent engineering, that the narrator makes his escape at all.
Leaving aside debates over Ellison's artistic judgment in rewriting this episode for his novel, it is interesting to look at the textual regression of a Mary who, with her mother, functions as healer/rescuer/ conjure woman to the narrator, in contrast to the shapeless Mary Rambo of Invisible Man, whose function as a healer is implied but only briefly evident and, in addition, is diminished by sexual stereotype. This is not to argue that Ellison should have written a different novel. It is, however, to explore the terrain of absence, silence, or invisibility that inheres in the novel's gender bias, and to consider how another text, The Salt Eaters, pulls from Invisible Man the "not said" in order to construct a more expansive discourse of the female self.
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One is struck, reading The Salt Eaters, by the presence of two unusually strong women characters: Minnie Ransom, the healer, and her patient, Velma Henry. Velma, much like the Invisible Man of Ellison's novel, has failed to make sense of the world in which she lives -- a world where her blackness is not as apparently erased as the Invisible Man's, but where social forces, such as sexism and racism, endanger her functioning as well as her spiritual, mental and physical health. A politically correct superwoman, Velma Henry ends up in her own version of the underground--the cave of her gas stove as she attempts suicide. And, as is the case for Ellison's narrator, an important aspect of Velma's moving beyond her nightmarish trajectory toward suicide will be her willingness to travel the dark inroads of memory and recover lost or forgotten wisdom within herself. For Velma, however, the search is doubly vexed: she must come to terms with herself as an African American and as a woman. "What has brought Velma to that stool and her confrontation/interaction with Minnie is in many ways the history of black women characters in contemporary Afro-American fiction" (Harris 152). Velma's illness is, in part, a result of the gender erasure exemplified in Invisible Man. However, while both Invisible Man and The Salt Eaters chronicle (in different ways) the search for an identity and integrity of self in a world that would deny, denigrate, or exploit that self, the novels differ sharply in the contrast between the two healers, Mary Rambo and Minnie Ransom (and indeed, in the differences that inhere in each character's understanding of caregiving and/or healing processes).
