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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
As I mentioned earlier, Mary has a moment in Invisible Man where she shares a portion of Minnie's spiritual acuity when she delivers her New York riddle ("I'm in New York, but New York ain't in me"). Mary urges the narrator to embrace his past, to learn from and draw upon it, and to use it as necessary equipment for functioning in an alien and deracinating culture. And in fact, shortly after this conversation, the narrator meets a man selling hot yams and has an epiphany of sorts as he gulps down the soul food he long ago repudiated. Mary's words prompt a series of questions about identity for the narrator, to which the yams give partial answer. "I yam what I yam," the narrator puns, embracing, momentarily, significant aspects of the Southern upbringing he has previously lost.
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Bambara's Minnie develops Mary's "New York idea" more fully as she encourages Velma to go deep within herself, to track the muddy backroads of memory and face the ghosts of her past. She must learn to live in a corrupt world (for The Salt Eaters never once loses sight of imminent global peril), but she must not let that corrupt world become or define her. Minnie knows that Velma
thought she knew how to build resistance, make the journey to the
center of the circle, stay poised and centered in the work and not fly off,
stay centered in the best of her people's traditions and not be available
to madness, not become intoxicated by the heady brews of degrees and
career and congratulations for nothing done, not become anesthetized
by dazzling performances with somebody else's aesthetic, not go under.
(258)
Read "college" and "philanthropists" and brotherhood," for "degrees" and career" and we have a nicely developed version of the Invisible Man's dilemma, a dilemma both Mary and Minnie wisely perceive.
Much like many women before her, Mary functions as a community networker. Even as Mary tends to the narrator's needs at their initial encounter on the street, she establishes links with those members of the community standing near her:
"...my name's Mary Rambo, everybody knows me round this part of
Harlem, you heard of me, ain't you?" And the fellow saying, "Sure, I'm
Jenny Jackson's boy, you know I know you, Miss Mary." And her
saying, "Jenny Jackson, why I should say you do know me and I know
you, you Ralston, and your mama got two more children, boy named
Flint and gal named Laura-jean, I should say I know you--me and your
mama and your papa useta--...." (246)
Mary's character, however, is constructed upon the assumption that women who are not sexually promiscuous naturally function as the emotional and spiritual ligaments of a community. This plus the fact that Mary's depiction focuses on the naturalness of her role rather than on the very real power such a function holds. The Salt Eaters seeks to correct the record, demonstrating first the cost of such connection without corresponding internal strength (Velma's frightening move toward suicide being one such cost). Velma, who had tried to be a bridge, has no internal, spiritual bridges for the many pieces of herself that drift further and further apart within her. In addition, she lives and works in a community that, although politically progressive, continues to operate as though its men were the prime, indeed only, movers. 4 The image of Velma having organized and marched with numbers of other women in a large-scale protest, camping in a soggy tent, covered in mud, exhausted, and searching through her purse frantically for a ragged tampax to stanch the flow of blood from her menstrual period is juxtaposed with the image of the sleek, polished black political candidate emerging from an expensive hotel with the requisite woman in silk on his arm. Velma's attempts to provide bridges and to work for social change in her community are consistently undercut by a social system that upholds male superiority, as well as by her lack of internal resources to deal with such a system by establishing and maintaining her own personal boundaries.
