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Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?

  • Rebecca Fischer
  • Dec 26, 2021
  • 3 min read

Updated: Mar 19


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The Salt Eaters, by Toni Cade Bambara, 1980 (novel)


“Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?”


“Just so’s you’re sure, sweetheart, and ready to be healed, cause wholeness is no trifling matter.”

The Rev. Rose Schwab shared this quote, from Toni Cade Bambara’s 1980 novel, "The Salt Eaters," in a recent talk about racial and social justice at Shawnee Mission Unitarian Universalist Church in Kansas City.


Before her talk was over I had hopped on Amazon to purchase the book. The quote resonated with me deeply. I have often marveled at the poise of my Black friends and neighbors, and Indigenous, and pretty much every person I’ve ever known who’s faced injustices regularly … how are they not angry every day? How do they remain loving?


And then there’s my own healing journey, which I have been on for as long as I can remember. With so much hurt in the world, how many people do I know who would consider themselves healed? So, I wanted to know: Who was saying this quote to whom? And what kind of wholeness were they referencing?

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"The Salt Eaters" takes place in a southern town called Claybourne, where members of the Black community have come together following the suicide attempt of Velma Henry, a veteran of the Black rights and women’s rights movements. She now sits in the center of a healing-circle session led by the community’s healer, Minnie Ransom.

When Minnie voices the quote, she’s finding Velma to be a difficult case, and she’s wondering if she’ll be able to help pull her through.

“For sometimes a person held on to sickness with a fiercesomeness that took twenty hard-praying folks to loosen. So used to being unwhole and unwell, one forgot what it was to walk upright and see clearly, breathe easily, think better than was thought, be better than one was programmed to believe – so concentration was necessary to help a neighbor experience the best of herself or himself. For people sometimes believed that it was safer to live with complaints, was necessary to cooperate with grief, was all right to become an accomplice in self-ambush.”

The session is taking place at the community’s pay-what-you-can health clinic, which blends Western medicine and the healing arts, including modalities like acupuncture and massage therapy but also techniques of “the old bonesetters, the old medicine show people, the grannies and midwives, the root men, the conjure women, the obeah folks, and the medicine people of the Yamassee and Yamacrow.”


To get us to the present moment -- the healing -- Bambara shares the rest of Velma’s story with us, as well as other key characters’ stories. She masterfully interweaves their tireless work in the Black Power movement of the ’60s and ’70s with their current struggles, including living near (and some, like Velma, working in) a toxic chemical plant.


We witness Minnie’s relationship with her spirit guide, Old Wife, and get glimpses into her rich spiritual world. Against the backdrop of the upcoming Mardi Gras carnival, we experience the community's eclectic traditions and shifting energy.


The novel is full of surprises, which I will keep surprises ...


But I'd be missing the mark to talk about "The Salt Eaters" without mentioning its living, breathing organic quality … its poetry … its jazz … its hops through time and its heartbeat in the now.


The book's power lies as much in its message as in its delivery: a beautiful dance between the nitty-gritty of being human and the effervescence of the mysterious.


“One would run the back roads to the woods, not jogging in unpaid outfits, trampling shoots, not moving in with tents, dope and bombed-out playmates mouthing off about 'We’re into nature,' not hiding out in Wordsworth or Kerouac, excusing the self from social action, but running into the woods in hopes of an audience with the spirits long withdrawn from farms and gardens all withered and wasted, bringing eagle-bone whistles or gourd rattles or plaster saints or rakes and seeds or gifts of soap or sacks of cornmeal or sticks of licorice or cones of incense, anything one had to place on a tree-stump altar or a turned-rock shrine to lure the saving spirits out to talk and be heeded finally. Stumbling through the thorns and briars, following the rada rada big booming of the drums or the weh weh wedo riff of reed flutes, running toward a clearing, toward a likely sanctuary of the saints, the loa, the dinns, the devas.”

Bambara offers so much with this novel … opening the door into a world that can only be experienced when someone inside it invites you in.


I know I’ll return to "The Salt Eaters" for inspiration and strength on my own healing journey: the journey of being human.

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