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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
However, The Salt Eaters also thematizes the extraordinary power behind the kinds of connections both Mary and Velma make in their communities. Reflecting on Velma's gift for bringing together disparate elements, her husband recalls that:
... things had seemed more pulled together when Velma had been there,
in the house and at the Academy. Not that her talents ran in the peacemaking
vein. But there'd been fewer opportunities for splinterings with
her around. (92)
On the surface, Velma has simply done a more sophisticated kind of connecting than Mary, but Bambara's text insists upon a new understanding of community and connecting-the necessity "to be whole" before you can "see whole" (92). Sara Hoagland's notion of "autokoenony" captures much of The Salt Eater's construction of community. Hoagland explains,
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An autokoenonous being is one who is aware of her self as one among
others within a community that forms her ground of being, one who
makes her decisions in consideration of her limitations as well as in
consideration of the agendas and perceptions of others. (145)
Being autokoenonous and seeing whole, however, is no small task, as Velma's godmother knows:
A deep rift had been developing for centuries ... beginning with the
move toward the material world and away from nature. Now there was
a Babel of paths, of plans. "There is a world to be redeemed.... and it'll
take the cooperation of all righteous folks." (92)
What is, in Ellison's text, a commonplace about women's roles as community networkers and caretakers takes on new dimensions in the dynamic of The Salt Eaters: dimensions having implications for the survival of the human race.
In Invisible Man, on her way from being a networker to becoming a virtual abstraction, Mary enacts another stereotype, a permutation of woman-as-mother. She is finally inscribed as the entrapper implied in "let me help you," which by now in the novel has become a version of let me own you." Her language changes from an initial concern to a controlling, domineering and even carping invasiveness:
Boy, when you come home?.... ain't you going to eat supper?. .. What
kind of business you got on a cold night like this?.... hurry on back here
and git something hot in your stomach. (290-91)
Take some of that water in the kettle and go wash your face. Though
sleepy as you look, maybe you ought to just use cold water.... You
didn't come back for supper.... Boy, you better start eating again.
(314-15)
Thus the focus of Mary's interest in the narrator changes from redemptive to restrictive, from mother to (s)mother. The Invisible Man becomes restive and guilty under her watchful (and anxious) care. Here, Mary has shifted from one cliche to another, becoming the tar baby from whom the Invisible Man must escape in order to continue his search for identity.
In contrast, Minnie Ransom's relationship with Velma remains detached yet enabling. Her touch, the music she plays, and her reliance upon the other, spirit, world, give Minnie the necessary power to help set Velma free. Bambara's text insists, after all, that healing is a release from bondage (a "ransom" of captives), and that caring constitutes both detachment and connection at the same time. Velma, sitting on a stool next to Minnie, feels "the warm breath of Minnie Ransom on her, lending her something to work the bellows of her lungs with. To keep on dancing like the sassy singer said" (263-64). Minnie loans her breath to Velma; she does not attempt to breathe for her, nor to surround or entrap her. In fact, at the end of the novel (and of the healing session), Minnie knows when there is "no need of [her] hands ... withdraws them, drops them in her lap just as Velma [rises] on steady legs," the "burst cocoon" of her shawl left behind on the stool (295). Minnie's detached intimacy becomes the counter to Ellison's construction of smothering female "care." Mary, however, is finally written out of Invisible Man entirely as the narrator flees from her help. The big dark woman" regains her helpfulness only when the narrator is physically distant from her, and she ultimately becomes an abstraction -- a lodestar and symbol that the invisible man both embraces and resists:
