Photo Joyce Middler
(March 25, 1939 - December 9, 1995)
Toni Cade Bambara, born Miltona Mirkin Cade on March 25, 1939, lived the first ten years of her life in Harlem. Toni Cade Bambara was a writer, activist, feminist, and filmmaker. In 1982, in a taped interview with Kay Bonetti, Bambara reflected on her work: "When I look back at my work with any little distance the two characteristics that jump out at me is one, the tremendous capacity for laughter, but also a tremendous capacity for rage." Bambara spent her entire life writing about both. Her ability to laugh and imbue laughter into her stories came from her strong conviction and belief in family and community. Her rage came from the injustices she saw in the treatment of children, the elderly, and the oppressed black community
bio excerpted from University of Minnesota. All rights reserved read full
in depth citation at
http://voices.cla.umn.edu/vg/Bios/entries/bambara_toni_cade.html
Poet Sonia Sanchez reads from Bambara's work during
tribute to Bambara Reads at the 2010 National Black Writers' Conference
Deep Sightings & Rescue Missions
Fiction, Essays, and Conversations
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Paperback: 272 pages
Publisher: Vintage; 1st Vintage Contemporaries
Ed edition (January 26, 1999)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0679774076
This compilation of selected short fiction,
essays and interviews by (and with) the late
Bambara (The Salt Eaters) is her first published
work in 14 years, and it provides intriguing
insights into this challenging African American
writer. The collection includes a warm,
appreciative preface by Nobel laureate Toni
Morrison, who also edited this volume. The six
stories feature characters who seek
self-definition through their relationships with
others: in "Going Critical," a mother slowly
dying from radiation poisoning reflects on her
relationship with her daughter during a day at
the beach; and two boys are puzzled by the
community's warm reception of a painter who
transforms their favorite landmark and play area
in "The War of the Wall." The second section
features Bambara's voice much more clearly, as
she tackles discursively the social and
political concerns, often about race and gender,
that animate her fiction. Her film criticism is
especially trenchant: she discusses
blaxploitation films of the 1960s and '70s,
Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust and Spike
Lee's School Daze with a sharp eye for their
complexity, message and vision. She also
questions the assumptions behind our daily
language, provoking readers to think in more
complicated terms. Bambara (1939-1995) never
made any bones about the fact that she viewed
writing as a political act. The writings
collected here show that, unlike many others,
she rarely let her activist motives cripple her
aesthetic sense or her intellectual honesty.
'Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Gorilla, My Love
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Paperback: 192
pages
Publisher: Vintage (June 30, 1992)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0679738983
In these fifteen superb stories, written in a style at once ineffable and immediately recognizable, Toni Cade Bambara gives us compelling portraits of a wide range of unforgettable characters, from sassy children to cunning old men, in scenes shifting between uptown New York and rural North CaroLina. A young girl suffers her first betrayal. A widow flirts with an elderly blind man against the wishes of her grown-up children. A neighborhood loan shark teaches o white social worker a lesson in responsibility. And there is more. Sharing the world of Toni Cade Bambara's "straight-up fiction" is a stunning experience.
Deep Sightings & Rescue Missions: Fiction, Essays,
and Conversations
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Paperback: 272 pages
Publisher: Vintage; 1st Vintage Contemporaries Ed edition (January 26, 1999)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0679774076
ISBN-13: 978-0679774075
Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 6 x 0.7 inches
Edited and with a preface by Toni Morrison, this posthumous collection of short stories, essays, and interviews offers lasting evidence of Bambara's passion, lyricism, and tough critical intelligence. Included are tales of mothers and daughters, rebels and seeresses, community activists and aging gangbangers, as well as essays on film and literature, politics and race, and on the difficulties and necessities of forging an identity as an artist, activist, and black woman. It is a treasure trove not only for those familiar with Bambara's work, but for a new generation of readers who will recognize her contribution to contemporary American letters.
The Salt Eaters
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Paperback: 304
pages
Publisher: Vintage (June 30, 1992)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0679740767
Set in Claybourne, a small town somewhere in the South, THE SALT EATERS is the story of a community of black faith healers who, searching for the healing properties of salt, witness an event that will change their lives forever.
Those Bones Are Not
My Child
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Paperback: 688
pages
Publisher: Vintage (October 24, 2000)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0679774084
On a Friday night in July 1979, the first victim in what would come to be called the Atlanta Child Murders disappeared. Over the course of two years, more than 40 African American children would die--abused, mutilated, strangled--before an arrest in 1981 apparently settled the issue. Wayne Williams, a black man, was accused, tried, and convicted of the murders, and the good citizens of Atlanta breathed easy again, assured that the crimes had not been racially motivated after all, and that the criminal was behind bars.
Or was he? In her posthumously published novel, Those Bones Are Not My Child, Toni Cade Bambara revisits the summer of 1980 and suggests a chilling alternative:
The terror is over, the authorities say. The horror is past, they repeat every day. There've been no new cases of kidnap and murder since the arrest back in June. You've good reason to know that the official line is a lie. But you sweep the walk briskly all the way to the hedge, as though in clearing the leaves you can clear from your mind all that you know. You'd truly like to know less. You want to believe. It is 3:23 on your Mother's Day watch. And your child is nowhere in sight.
The protagonist of Bambara's novel is Marzala Rawls Spencer, an African American mother of three who is managing--just--to raise her family, hold down three jobs, and attend night school. When her 12-year-old son, Sundiata, doesn't return from a camping trip, Zala finds herself plunged into the nightmarish possibility that he has become the latest victim in the series of murders rocking the "City Too Busy to Hate." As she and her estranged husband, Spence, frantically attempt to discover what has happened to their child, the book takes them through the complicated morass of politics, race relations, and class that bedevil Atlanta--and perhaps obstruct the search for the true killer.
Bambara worked on Those Bones Are Not My Child for 12
years before her death in 1995. Toni Morrison edited the
manuscript for publication, and though the occasional rough
edge shows through, the well-drawn characters and inherent
human drama in this stranger-than-fiction tale overcome its
minor weaknesses. This is the novel Toni Cade Bambara will
be remembered for, and rightly so.
'Amazon.com
(Alix Wilber)
The
Black Woman: An Anthology
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edited by Toni Cade Bambara
Paperback
Publisher: Washington Square Press (March
29, 2005)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0743476972
When it was first published in 1970, The Black Woman introduced readers to an astonishing new wave of voices that demanded to be heard. In this groundbreaking volume of original essays, poems, and stories, a chorus of outspoken women -- many who would become leaders in their fields: bestselling novelist Alice Walker, poets Audre Lorde and Nikki Giovanni, writer Paule Marshall, activist Grace Lee Boggs, and musician Abbey Lincoln among them -- tackled issues surrounding race and sex, body image, the economy, politics, labor, and much more. Their words still resonate with truth, relevance, and insight today
