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Authors
Toni Cade Bambara (1939-1995)
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Gorilla, My Love (1972) and The Sea Birds Are Still Alive (1977) are collections of Bambara’s stories; a posthumous volume, Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions: Fiction, Essays, and Conversations (1996), gathers her other short work. Her novel The Salt Eaters was published in 1980; another novel, Those Bones Are Not My Child (1999), was published posthumously. Numerous screenplays by Bambara were produced in the 1970s and 1980s, including an adaption of Toni Morrison’s The Tar Baby (1984) and a treatment of writer Zora Neale Hurston, Zora (1971). She edited the anthologies The Black Woman (1970), Tales and Stories for Black Folks (1971, for children), and (with Leah Wise) Southern Black Utterances Today (1975). Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions: Fiction, Essays, and Conversations (1996) is a posthumous collection of Bambara’s later work, edited by Toni Morrison. Critical analyses of Bambara’s work are found in Philip Page’s Reclaiming Community in Contemporary African American Fiction (1999) and Elliott Butler-Evans’s Race, Gender and Desire: Narrative Strategies in the Fiction of Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker (1989).
Toni Cade Bambara was a native of New York City who devoted her life to her writing and her social activism. Her causes ranged from improving the living conditions of minority city dwellers to creating television documentaries about racial or social injustice. Like Bambara herself, many of the characters in her short stories, most often women, were also community activists who derived strength from storytelling. Bambara's works include the short-story collections Gorilla, My Love (1972) and The Sea Birds Are Still Alive (1977) and the novel The Salt Eaters (1981).
Questions for Discussion and Writing
In Medley (1977) we can see resemblances between the form of the story and the improvisations of modern jazz. But this is fiction, not a musical medley, and as an accomplished writer, Bambara does respond to, and comment upon, the American realist tradition in fiction and certain basic expectations and practices of contemporary storytelling.
1. Locate several moments in which Sweet Pea muses on the talents of other people as tellers of tales and on the worth of any story, told badly or well. Why does she tell us about Hector as a "bad storyteller," but as "an absolute artist on windows"?
2. How would you describe the overall experience of reading Medley? How would you compare it to the experience of reading works by Welty, O'Connor, or Toomer?
