The Salt Eaters

At the heart of The Salt Eaters is Minnie’s healing of Velma in the infirmary of Claybourne, a fictional city in the South. Minnie works with spirits to help Velma after a suicide attempt. The opening line of the novel is Minnie asking Velma, “Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?” (3). In the following chapters, the reader gets a glimpse into Velma’s responsibilities and passions. Being well means dealing with these responsibilities. At the same time, taking on too many responsibilities contributed to her Personal and Public Health Conditions in the Black Community. Velma’s husband, “James Lee Henry, called Obie” (20), notes that she often mentally revisits painful moments from the past. He says, “It takes something out of you, Velma, to keep all them dead moments alive” (22). Struggling to live in the present moment is a common symptom of mental health conditions, such as depression and PTSD. Velma is keeping the dead past inside of her instead of rebirthing the Black community and its vision. Minnie asks Velma if she is sure she wants to be well to challenge Black readers; if they want their community to thrive, they will have to do the work to heal.

There are both external and internal factors that led to Velma’s mental health crisis. Velma’s condition is repeatedly explored as a loss of her identity and herself. Minnie’s spirit guide, Old Wife, says Velma is “off somewhere tracking herself” (42). Later in the novel, this theme culminates with a scene in Velma’s mind where she sees herself as another person. A doctor who is new to the infirmary, Dr. Meadows, thinks about Velma’s condition as “[t]he essential self gone off” (57). She is divided, rather than whole. Her condition parallels the Black community and its activism; Barbara asserts that it is lost and looking for something else.

This is also reflected in the external Fracturing in Black Activism that Velma tried to bridge. The factions are explored in more detail in later sections. In this first section, the division between the esoteric and the material considerations is introduced through a group of Velma’s activist friends traveling on a bus toward Claybourne. When Cecile and Inez discuss Palma’s astrological sign, Inez says, “[T]he material without the spiritual and psychic does not a dialectic make” (64). A dialectic is a type of duality. Activist groups often fracture because their focus is only spiritual work or material work. The Black community must embrace both activism and African spiritual concerns; the two must be in dialectic with each other.

Other issues that contribute to Velma’s mental health crisis are Uterine Issues, Sexist Oppression, and Reproductive Justice, or issues having to do with menstruation and motherhood. While participating in organizing meetings, Velma gets her period, but there are no supplies at hand to deal with it properly: “There’d been nothing in the machines—no tampons, no paper towels, no roll of tissue she could unravel and stuff her panties with. So she slid carefully into the wide bowl of the wooden chair, the wad of rally flyers stretching against her panty hose” (26). Many activists do not have to deal with the physical problems that come with having a uterus and either overlook or dismiss these problems. It is revealed later that Velma also had a miscarriage, which negatively affected her marriage and her mental health. In addition to these physical issues, women are expected to do more work than men. Ruby, a friend of Velma’s, says, “[W]e women have been expected to carry the load” (31) in the same meeting where Velma uses flyers as pads. The women seek a fairer division of labor and to have their labor recognized by men. They face oppression due to their uteruses and gender identities, and the men fail to see that their uteruses are a source of justice and power for the Black community. This reflects the 1970s Black feminist discourse about reproductive justice, which focused on issues like the compulsory sterilizations of Black women.

The motif of mud develops the themes of Uterine Issues, Sexist Oppression, and Reproductive Justice and Personal and Public Health Conditions in the Black Community. Velma has visions, including one in which “mud mothers [are] painting the walls of the cave” (8). These mud mothers represent the ancient past, living outside the rules of civilized society, and altered mental states. When discussing Velma’s condition, Minnie says, “A grown woman won’t mess around in mud puddles too long before she releases” (20). The symbolism of mud includes both motherhood and childhood, an embodied connection to nature and the Earth. Another important motif and symbol is salt. Salt is considered a cure for ailments; for instance, it aids with snakebites. Velma’s visions are “trying to tell her about the difference between snakes and serpents, the difference between eating salt as an antidote to snakebite and turning into salt, succumbing to the serpent” (8). Salt, in moderation, is a remedy for poison, but excessive salt is a type of poison and is harmful. Turning into salt is also an allusion to Lot’s wife in the Bible. When fleeing Sodom and Gomorrah, God instructs Lot and his family to leave and never look back. Lot’s wife cannot resist a final glimpse at her home city, and when she turns to look, she turns into a pillar of salt. Bambara draws on this story to illustrate the risk of dwelling so intensely on the past.

Mud and salt are motifs that bind the nonlinear narrative together. The structure of the novel consists of moving back and forth in time through the perspectives of various characters. The characters in the novel frequently go on mental tangents, and time dilates. For instance, the bus driver Fred, who is taking friends of Velma’s to Claybourne, pauses a little too long for some passengers. They ask, “What’s the delay?” (72). The delay is the result of Fred being caught up in his own thoughts, which are about a dead friend of his, named Porter, and a potential future. Fred getting caught up in his thoughts can be compared to the questions that Minnie asks Velma before she begins the healing. Minnie, the text states, if asked, “would have to admit that she was stalling” (47). She doesn't know how to help Velma initially, and the novel begins with a delay tactic. This represents how the Black community will have to work and heal together to fix Personal and Public Health Conditions in the Black Community and counter systemic injustice.

One motif that links many different times and characters together is music. Music is included as lyrics, such as Minnie telling Old Wife to “recall the song, remember—‘There’s a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza. Well fix it dear Henry’” (44). This links Velma’s last name, Henry, to “There’s a Hole in the Bucket,” a well-known folk song. Another example of using lyrics to evoke music in the reader’s mind is when Fred recalls “O the Rock Island Line is a mighty good…” (69), channeling “Rock Island Line,” an American folk song. The musical motif appears in descriptions, too, such as the prayer circle around Minnie healing Velma “singing in common meter just like it was church” (16). This shows how music can be a tool for fixing the Fracturing in Black Activism.

Both lyrics and descriptions of music can give the reader an earworm, or a song in their head on repeat. An important part of Minnie’s healing ritual is her tapes. She tells Old Wife that she is going back to the physical realm to “put on some music for the folks” (63). The plural folks include Velma, the prayer group, and the “loa.” Minnie’s tapes also reach other people inside and outside of the infirmary, connecting the different scenes. Music as a method for uniting people is therefore represented literally in the text’s structure. Through the extended metaphor of Velma’s healing journey, joining the Black community together is the healing itself, with fracturing being the illness.