Toni Cade Bambara 1939—

Writer

Studied Abroad, Served at Home

Gained Recognition for Anthologies and Gorilla

Community Service, Critical Raves

Selected writings

Sources

“It does no good to write autobiographical fiction ’cause the minute the book hits the stand,” averred Toni Cade Bambara in the whimsical “Sort of Preface” to her short story collection Gorilla My Love, friends and relatives become enraged by the personal details that end up in print. Yet her work has largely been proof of the good such fiction can do; her writings explore issues of identity in the black community, particularly as these issues bear on women’s lives. “What pulls us along,” theorized fellow writer Anne Tyler in a Washington Post Book World review, “is the language of [Bambara’s] characters, which is startlingly beautiful without once striking a false note.” As Bambara herself declared to Claudia Tate in an interview for the book Black Women Writers at Work, “I am about the empowerment and development of our sisters and the community. That sense of caring and celebration is certainly reflected in the body of my work.”

She was born Toni Cade in New York in the late 1930s. Her mother, Helen Brent Henderson Cade, was profoundly influenced by what she had seen during the “Harlem Renaissance,” a flowering of African American culture—especially literature—that reached its peak during the 1920s. As a result, she strongly encouraged her children to explore their creativity; Toni’s early interest in story writing flourished with her mother’s care. “She gave me permission to wonder, to dawdle, to daydream,” Bambara recalled to Tate. The writer also cited her visits with Helen to Speaker’s Corner, where New Yorkers of various philosophical persuasions practiced their speechifying, as a powerful influence as well.

Studied Abroad, Served at Home

After attending a number of public and private schools—in New York, New Jersey, and the Southeast United States, Cade headed for Queens College, part of the City University of New York. She majored in theater arts and English, receiving her bachelor’s degree in 1959, the same year she snared the school’s John Golden Award for Fiction and was handed a Long Island newspaper’s Pauper Press Award for nonfiction. 1959 also saw the first publication of one of her stories, “Sweet Town,” in Vendome Magazine.

Yet a full-time writing career was not immediately in store for her. Instead, Cade worked as an investigator for the New York State Department of Welfare for two years; no doubt what she observed helped fuel her later writing. She studied at Italy’s famed Commedia dell’Arte and at the Ecole de Mime Etienne Decroux in Paris France, but after her return she once again immersed herself in urban life, working at Metropolitan Hospital as the recreation director of its psychiatric ward. Though she returned to school and earned her master’s degree from City College in 1964, she also served as a program director at Colony House Community Center and assisted an array of community outreach and theater programs.

At a Glance…

Born Toni Cade, March 25, 1939, New York, NY; daughter of Helen Brent Henderson Cade; took name ’“Bambara”, 1970; children: daughter, Karma. Education: Queens College, New York, NY, B.A., 1959, City of College of New York, MA., 1964. Also studied at SUNY-Buffalo, Commedia dell’Arte, Italy, and Ecole de Mime Etienne Decroux, Paris, France.

Writer and educator. New York State Department of Social Welfare, investigator, 1956–59; published story “Sweet Town” in Vendome Magazine, 1959; Metropolitan Hospital, psychiatry department, director of recreation, 1961–62; Colony House Community Center, program director, 1962–65; City University of New York’s City College SEEK Program, English instructor, 1965–69; Rutgers University, Livingston College, assistant professor, 1969–74; Atlanta University, visiting professor, 1975, 1977; Neighborhood Arts Center, artist-in-residence, 1975–79; Pamoja Writers Collective, co-founder, 1976, director, 1976–85; Scribe Video Center, instructor, 1986—; cofounder, Southern Collective of African-American Writers.

Awards: Peter Pauper Press Award, 1958; John Golden Award for Fiction, Queens College, 1959; Theatre of Black Experience award, 1969; New York Times Outstanding Book of 1972 for juvenile literature award for Tales and Stories for Black Folks; Black Child Development institute service award, 1973; Encore Black Rose Award, 1973; Black Community Award, Livingston College, 1974; National Association of Negro Business and Professional Women’s Club League awards; George Washington Carver Distinguished African American Lecturer Award, Simpson College; Ebony Achievement in the Arts Award; Black Arts Award, University of Missouri; American Book Award, 1981, for The Salt Eaters; Best Documentary of 1986 Award from Pennsylvania Association of Broadcasters and Documentary Award from National Black Programming Consortium, for The Bombing of Osage; Honorary Doctorate of Letters, SUNY-Albany, 1990; Denison University, 1993.

Addresses: Home—5720 Wissahickon Ave., Apt. E12, Philadelphia, PA 19144.

Cade’s teaching career began at City College’s “Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge,” or SEEK program, where she worked as an English instructor, aided the flowering of the Theater of the Black Experience, and served as adviser to a number of SEEK-related publications. At the same time, she continued writing short stories that appeared in such periodicals as Redbook and Prairie Schooner. She became an assistant professor at Rutgers University’s Livingston College in 1969. The following year, while searching through materials in her great-grandmother’s trunk, she came upon a sketchbook with “Bambara” written on it and decided to adopt the name as her own.

Gained Recognition for Anthologies and Gorilla

1970 was a milestone for black American women’s literature; during that year landmark works by Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and several others saw publication. This sudden recognition enabled Bambara to edit a literary collection, The Black Woman: An Anthology, that included both established professional writers and fledgling authors from the SEEK program. Intended to respond to men’s and white feminists’ generalizations and misconceptions with unvarnished testimony, the collection filled a decided void in both Black Studies and Women’s Studies reading lists. The next year, Bambara assembled Tales and Stories for Black Folks, an anthology to show young readers the importance and development of storytelling in black culture. She further contributed to the burgeoning celebration of African American cultural history with two screenplays for public television, Zora and an adaptation of her story The Johnson Girls.

In 1972 Random House published Gorilla, My Love, a collection of 15 stories Bambara had written between 1959 and 1970. Critics praised her ability to evoke the music of real conversation in her prose; many reviewers suggested that Bambara’s feel for the rhythms of speech owes more to jazz music than to specific literary predecessors. “For the most part, the voice of my work is bop,” the author confirmed to Tate. “The improvising, styling, vamping, re-creative method of the jazz composer is the formal method by which the narrative genius of Toni Cade Bambara” balances conflicting elements of experience, ventured critic Eleanor W. Traylor in the anthology Black Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation. A reviewer for Newsweek admired its “situations that build like improvisations of a melody.” Saturday Review opined that “Bambara writes with pride, wit, and a generous portion of human warmth.” At the same time, Gorilla manages to take a hard look in most of its stories at both race and gender. Its title piece was adapted for the screen.

Community Service, Critical Raves

Bambara spent much of the 1970s as a visiting professor, adviser, or artist-in-residence at a number of institutions—including the New Jersey Department of Corrections, for which she served as Humanities consultant. She also found time to visit Cuba and Vietnam, two Communist countries with which the United States had been in conflict, to meet with politically active women’s organizations. In 1974 she and her daughter Karma moved to Atlanta, Georgia, where she was writer-in-residence at Spelman College and co-founded the Southern Collective of African-American Writers and the Neighborhood Cultural Arts Center, Inc.

A strong advocate of writing collectives, both for their protection of writers’ interests and the relief they provide for writerly solitude, Bambara has attempted to use in-class exercises as a way of both guiding her students to revelatory truth-telling and uplifiting other people in the community. “I’m a very seductive teacher, persuasive, infectious, overhwelming, irresistible,” she proclaimed to Tate. One exercise asked students to compare incidents of shame and pride around the mention of Africa in school; some works inspired by this process were then shared with inner-city schoolkids.

Bambara published her second collection of short stories, The Sea Birds Are Still Alive to generally rapturous reviews in 1977; Tyler, in a National Observer notice, asserted that the volume’s tales “positively sing.” Robie Macauley observed in the New York Times Book Review that “reading her stories is like coming in a crowded, hot, smoky room where a dozen different voices—most of them speaking ’Black English’—are telling a dozen disparate tales.” Macauley felt that “some of the stories fail just because there is too much verbal energy” but praised the collection’s title story in particular for its narrator, a character “so full of life she almost bursts from the page.”

Bambara’s first novel, The Salt Eaters, appeared in 1980; it garnered the American Book Award and more rhapsodic praise from critics who admired its dream logic and jazz-influenced prose. Carol Rumens of the Times Literary Supplement applauded the book as “a hymn to individual courage, a sombre message of hope” in the face of incessant racism. The Salt Eaters, Tyler wrote in her piece for the Washington Post Book World, “is a long, rich dream pivoting on a hospital stool.” It tells the story of Velma Henry, a Georgia woman who suffers a crippling depression and undergoes a healing ritual at the hands of another woman, Minnie Ransom.

This scenario allowed Bambara to move back and forth in time and space, as events in the lives of Velma and the people she knows swirl about in a phantasmagoria of memory. It also afforded her the opportunity to further explore the differing music in the speech of a wide variety of characters with varying intellectual and social points of reference. “I work to celebrate struggle,” Bambara insisted to Tate, “to applaud the tradition of struggle in our community, to bring to center stage all those characters, just ordinary folks on the block, who’ve been waiting in the wings, characters we thought we had to ignore because they weren’t pimp-flashy or hustlerslick or because they didn’t fit easily into previously acceptable modes or stock types.”

It would be seven years before Bambara published another novel—If Blessing Comes —but after relocating to Philadelphia Bambara continued her multi-faceted creative work. She wrote several screenplays, including an adaptation of Morrison’s novel Tar Baby and a piece called The Bombing of Osage, which garnered two “Best Documentary” awards in 1986.” I always have ten or 15 projects cooking,” she related to Zala Chandler in an interview for the book Wild Women in the Whild-wind, “because I never know which one is going to fly first or which one is going to get past that bend in the tunnel where the light is stuck.”

Though her published output in the ensuing years has been minimal, Bambara has played a vital role in contemporary literature, and been acknowledged as a noted film and television writer, all the while working tirelessly in community service. Indeed, in the words of Chandler, her multiple cultural activities have rendered her “a conveyer belt of history. “She has earned myriad awards, but capturing the experience of the marginalized and disenfranchised has remained her primary concern.

“It’s a tremendous responsibility—responsibility and honor—to be a writer, an artist, a cultural worker … whatever you call this vocation,” Bambara related to Tate. “One’s got to see what the factory worker sees, what the prisoner sees, what the welfare children see, what the scholar sees, got to see what the ruling-class mythmakers see as well, in order to tell the truth and not get trapped.”

Selected writings

Gorilla, My Love, Random House, 1972.

The Sea Birds Are Still Alive, Random House, 1977.

The Salt Eaters, Random House, 1980.

(preface) Smith, Cecelia, Cracks, Select Press, 1980.

(foreword) Moraga, Cherrie, and Gloria Anzaldua, editors, This Bridge Called My Back: Radical Women of Color, Persephone Press, 1981.

(foreword) The Sanctified Church: Collected Essays by Zora Neale Hurston, Turtle Island, 1982.

If Blessing Comes, Random House, 1987.

Also edited collections The Black Woman: An Anthology, 1970 (as Toni Cade), and Tales and Stories for Black Folks, 1971.

Sources

Books

Bambara, Toni Cade, Gorilla, My Love, Random House, 1972.

Clark, Darlene, editor, Black Women in America: An Historical Encylopedia, vol. 1, Carlson Publishing Inc., 1993, pp. 80–83.

Evans, Mari, editor, Black Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation, Doubleday, 1984.

McLaughlin, Joanna M. and Andrée Nicola, editors Wild Women in the Whirlwind: Afra-American Culture and the Contemporary Literary Renaissance, Rutgers University Press, 1990, pp. 342–53.

Serafin, Steven R., editor, Modern Black Writers, Supplement, vol. 2, Ungar, 1995, pp. 65–69.

Tate, Claudia, Black Women Writers at Work, Continuum, 1983, pp. 12–38.

Periodicals

National Observer, May 9, 1977, p. 23.

Newsweek, May 2, 1977.

New Yorker, May 5, 1980.

New York Times Book Review, February 21, 1971; May 2, 1971; November 7, 1971; October 15, 1972; December 3,1972; March 27,1977; June 1, 1980, p. 14; November 1, 1981.

Saturday Review, December 1972, pp. 97–98.

Times Literary Supplement, June 18, 1982; September 27, 1985.

Washington Post Book World, November 18, 1973; March 30, 1980, pp. 1–2.

—Simon Glickman