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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
Both Mary Rambo and Minnie Ransom (who incidentally share the same initials) are single, older women who play special roles in their respective communities. Where Minnie is the "celebrated healer" of 1980s Claybourne, Georgia, Mary is the well-known helper of Harlem in the 1940s. Both women are important to their communities in bringing people together and in providing spiritual and physical sustenance, nurture and healing. But here the similarities end. Bambara has drawn Minnie with sharper, more complex lines, making her much less predictable than Ellison's Mary, who not only fulfills a classic stereotype of black women, but also undergoes a progressive erasure within the textual system of Invisible Man, becoming finally a mere abstraction in the mind of the narrator.
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Language sharply delineates the two characters. Dramatically different from Mary's initial utterances ("Let me help you."), Minnie Ransom's first words (and indeed the first words of the novel) arrive by way of high challenge: "Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?" (3). Minnie is no self-effacing stranger eager to fix" Velma. She offers a question fraught with risks, one that shifts the location of healing from external sources to Velma herself. Instead of the yoked and potentially entrapping me-help-you proposition of Mary's offer, Minnie's words establish clear boundaries between herself and Velma, paradoxically clearing a space between them in which the two women connect at deeply intimate levels throughout the healing process. Under the surface of Mary's words, on the other hand, the image of mother as a (s)mothering womb/tomb floats uneasily.
Making sure mother is safely asexual, the narrator describes Mary Rambo as a "heavy composed figure" (249) with "worn brown fingers" (247). She is also ultimately invisible as a "big dark woman" (245). Minnie Ransom, on the other hand presents something of a sensation, described in The Salt Eaters as "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 hotpink
gelee.... (3)
Bringing together both sexuality and nurture, Minnie's appearance suggests a celebration of her own womanhood, history and culture, embodying the implied "yes" in the title (borrowed from Sojourner Truth) of Bell Hooks's study of African American women and feminism, Ain't I A Woman? Where Mary Rambo appears as asexual, Minnie thinks about (and is reproached by her spirit guide for doing so) a sexual liaison later that night with the younger Doctor Meadows. Where Mary sings "Back Water Blues," Minnie Ransom plays "some sassy twenties singer... Wiiiild women doan worrreeee, wild women doan have no bluuuzzzzzz'" (262). Furthermore, where Mary only briefly shows evidence of seeing beyond surface realities -- or at least does so in terms of traditional religion, Minnie freely negotiates the spirit world.(3) Functioning at the threshold between physical and spiritual realms, Minnie communes with her patient, Velma, while at the same time "travelling" and conversing with her spirit guide, Old Wife. She remains both separate from and yet integrally a part of Velma's healing.
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