Abstract
Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters (1980) opens with Minnie Ransom, “the fabled healer of the district,” performing one of her healing ceremonies on the text’s protagonist, Velma Henry, who, crippled by the responsibilities of civil rights activism and leadership, motherhood, and wifedom, has fallen ill.1 As Velma lies on the table, trying to “withdraw the self to a place where husband, lover, teacher, workers, no one could follow, probe,” the community watches, wondering how Velma, the “black superwoman,” had landed on Minnie’s table.2 While the narrative explores how the cultural manifestation of what black feminist critic Michele Wallace terms the “black superwoman” and Henry’s own investment in fulfilling this role intersect to contribute to her deterioration, Bambara’s critique of black patriarchy seems to be intricately connected to what I argue are the more pressing questions The Salt Eaters forces readers to consider. One of these questions opens the narrative and haunts Velma, the community, and the reader throughout: “Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?”3
“Do You Want to be Well?” was first accepted for publication in the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion (Vol. 30, no. 2). Printed with permission.
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Notes
Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters, (New York: Vintage, 1992), 1.
See Elliot Butler-Evans Race, Gender, and Desire: Narrative Strategies in the Fiction of Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989);
Keith Byerman, Fingering the Jagged Grain: Tradition and Form in Recent Black Fiction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985);
and David Ikard Breaking the Silence: Towards a Black Male Feminist Criticism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007).
Jacquie Jones, “The Construction of Black Sexuality,” in Black American Cinema, ed. Manthia Diawara (New York: Routledge, 1993), 248.
See Robert J. Patterson, “‘Woman Thou Art Bound:’ Critical Spectatorship, Black Masculine Gazes, and Gender Problems in Tyler Perry’s Movies,” Black Camera, and International Film Journal, Vol. 3 No. 1 (Winter 2011): 9–30.
Henry Louis Gates Jr. “The Chitlin Circuit,” in African American Performance and Theater History: A Critical Reader, ed. Harry J. Elam Jr. and David Krasner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 132–148.
Soyica Diggs Colbert, The African American Theatrical Body: Reception, Performance, and the Stage (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 131.
In Pauli Murray’s “Black Theology and Feminist Theology: A Comparative View,” Murray demonstrates the parallel ways in which both black theology and (white) feminist theology have neglected black women’s subjectivity in their theological formulations. Similarly, in “Black Theology and the Black Woman,” Jacquelyn Grant argues that black liberation theology has not offered a theology of liberation, but instead has offered a theology of black male liberation. She maintains that in ignoring the construct of gender, black male liberation theologians replicate the white power structures they critique. Although both of these essays were written before the institutionalization of womanist theology and womanist theological reflection, they function as precursors for the discipline’s development. See Pauli Murray, “Black Theology and Feminist Theology: a Comparative View,” in Black Theology: a Documentary History, 1966–1979, ed. Gayraud S. Wilmore and James H. Cone (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1979), 398–417.
See Jacquelyn Grant, “Black Theology and the Black Woman,” in Black Theology: a Documentary History, 1966–1979, ed. Gayraud S. Wilmore and James H. Cone (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1979), 418–433.
Stacey M. Floyd-Thomas, “Introduction: Writing for Our Lives: Womanism as an Epistemological Revolution,” in Deeper Shades of Purple: Womanism in Religion and Society, ed. Stacey M. Floyd-Thomas (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 3.
See pages 36–37 in Katie Cannon’s “The Bible from the Perspective of the Racially and Economically Oppressed,” in Scripture: The Word Beyond the Word, ed. Nancy Carter (New York: United Methodist Church, 1985), 35–40.
Carla Williams, “Naked, Neutered, or Noble: The Black Female Body in America and the Problem of Photographic History,” in Skin Deep, Spirit Strong: The Black Female Body in American Culture, ed. Kimberly Wallace-Sanders (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, Press, 2002), 196.
Erica R. Edwards, “Turning into Precious: The Black Women’s Empowerment Adaptation and the Interruption of the Absurd,” Black Camera, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Winter 2013): 4.
By politics of respectability I am referring to the Victorian ideals that black women tried to espouse in the late nineteenth century as a way to no longer be excluded from the body politics, as part of their oppression resulted from their alleged inability to conform to sexual and gender roles. Although it was a strategy for survival, it has been fraught with problems and complications. See Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, “African American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race,” Signs, Vol. 17, No. 2 (1992): 251–274.
See E. Frances White, “Dark Continent of Our Bodies: Black Feminism and the Politics of Respectability (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001).
Susana M. Morris, Close Kin, Distance Relatives: The Paradox of Respectability Politics in Black Women’s Literature (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014), 11.
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© 2014 LeRhonda S. Manigault-Bryant, Tamura A. Lomax, and Carol B. Duncan
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Patterson, R.J. (2014). “Do You Want to Be Well?” The Gospel Play, Womanist Theology, and Tyler Perry’s Artistic Project. In: Manigault-Bryant, L.S., Lomax, T.A., Duncan, C.B. (eds) Womanist and Black Feminist Responses to Tyler Perry’s Productions. Black Religion / Womanist Thought / Social Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137429568_14
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