![]() In a sequence from Bambara’s epic novel Those Bones Are Not My Child, one that rivals the D-Day scene in Saving Private Ryan for its frenetic shock and terror, a day care center blows up. Anglo foreigners buzz about in “dazzling shoes,” but even they just want to kick their feet up. He in turn glances at the city-living landlord who makes an annual pilgrimage to collect rents and votes “in traditional dress, the incongruous leather shoes mocking the ploy.” There’s a revolution on, and each glance is a furtive scan for information. The ship’s captain gazes down “to stuff newspaper in his shoes to muffle the vibrations” from his raggedy vessel’s engine. A country woman spits in the direction of “two new black shoes” belonging to a soldier who’s part of the forces occupying her village, and who won’t return her gaze. A grandmother sizes up the “soft cloth shoes” and matching suit of a genteel passenger. After bing-bang-boom, the thugs are sent scampering, and we pan across Tram’s action-tensed figure: “His calves strain against denim thighs bulging in front, wind plastering his sweater against his chest so that eight separate segments of abdominal muscles lift like bas relief.” And cut!Īboard a ferry in the titular story from The Sea Birds Are Still Alive, everyone’s looking at each other’s feet. Just before, Mustafa swings his “elegantly draped coat” around a fellow traveler “like a cape” to offer her respite from the cold. At her most on-the-nose, in her short “Madame Bai and the Taking of Stone Mountain,” collected in the posthumous Deep Sightings & Rescue Missions, our heroes emerge from a kung fu flick and immediately encounter one-two-three-four a pack of white supremacist hooligans in hooded sweat suits (hmph) and swastika belt buckles. There’s a cinematic quality to what she does. ![]() But Bambara, who was a gifted film critic, educator, and occasion maker, invokes clothing as the eye perceives it, whether it’s the character’s or the reader’s.īambara uses fashion as a conveyance for ideals and even warnings. It is so often an interruption in the text, a grunting exercise of hurried exposition. We’re led to understand that the clothing is a useful ornament. Then, the author drops on us a “So-and-so was wearing such-and-such.” Maybe there’s a little razzle-dazzle as the clothing offers backstory or some poetic descriptions of color and fabric. A little action happens, then so-and-so enters the frame. Often, a writer announces a character’s clothes. Each letter of her work inches us toward the wholesale dismantling of our every oppression, and with her heaps of imaginary cloth, she lets us know that what lies beyond those oppressions is something that’s not just possible, but beautiful. But she also uses it as a conveyance for ideals and even warnings. ![]() It holds a bit of description, obviously, which extends naturally into bits of characterization. Kind of frisky looking, he thinks.Īcross her oeuvre-novels, short stories, criticism, and other writing-Bambara consistently uses clothing as the carrier for a great many things. It’s a sensuous expanse of fabric enveloping her, one that makes her look like “a farmer in a Halston, a snuff dipper in a Givenchy.” There’s nothing to suggest that we shouldn’t expect her kind of woman to have on these kinds of clothes, but Bambara winks at our disconnect when a bus driver wanders past with a spot of amused interest. But when we meet her at the opening of Toni Cade Bambara’s nuclear disaster prequel, The Salt Eaters, in the middle of healing a psychically broken civil rights worker, she’s wearing a flouncy red dress drawn in at the waist with kente cloth and a fringed, silky shawl that she handles like a cape. Minnie Ransom is cute, okay? She’s a rootworker, a spiritual healer, a crunchy-crunchy lady whose practice transcends earthly concerns.
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