Read Online The Salt Eaters by Toni Cade Bambara - Free Book Online Page A

path and pass the time of day with neighbor or friend who’d chosen this route over the paved walks or the bus line or the highway, it was customarily safe to keep stomping because the snakes had to be warned people were afoot. So she did as she was told, not even thinking on the snakes people said were not in the woods but kept clear of the woods as much as possible and when they didn’t, stomped with the best of them.
    Minnie’d be stock still finally, while Old Wife’s eyes stared at a spot just above her head where her hair had once puffed up before the New York trip, and stared at the sides of her as though remembering her filled out, young and plump, beingsent off to Bible college in Beaufort. Held her there and the greasy teeth finally parting and “Not long, now, Minnie, and take care,” coming out, jaws unhinged, looking like a vaudeville dummy. And Minnie’d stumbled off bewildered and spooked cause Karen Wilder after all was a teller of strange tales, and who could know then that the message wasn’t about death coming to sting her but about a gift unfolding? Minnie eased away sleepwalking till a slither along the side or a rustle overhead reminded her to pick them seven’s up and plant them down like she had good sense. Sleepwalk stomping to the mound, the hill, the special place, the rich dark earth, the eating dirt that smelled of paprika and curry, smelled of spice and sweet and bitter and sweat from the days when the Gypsies had planted their Sara, their Black Madonna, at the crest of that hill and the community of Sicilians on an adjacent hill, turned their Black Maria aside, giving Sara her back. And Minnie, climbing the hill like the Matterhorn or Jacob’s Ladder one, her eyes right on Sara’s wooden orbs, not daring to look back behind her toward Old Wife, felt the old cat eyes a pinpoint of light at the crown of her head.
    And there, squatting in the dirt at the top of the bluff, still listening, Minnie was told to clear the path that led up to the cliffs, set the trees, fix the rainbow, erect a fountain and build the chapel in The Mind. And going there—the cooling dark, the candles, the altar—she saw the gift and knew, for at least that instant, where the telling came from.
    And would go back again and again, live there nearly all the time, in the days when she had not trusted the gift, when instructions had come, it seemed, from her back teeth as she leaned against the starchy crochets of her parlor chair and let her jaws give into gravity, her tongue resting on the cusp, her lids locking out the banging dance. But what fine radio receiversdental fillings are, she learned, screening out the waves from mundane sources—police car messages, helicopter traffic signals, then all the CB foolishness—to be available to the waves from the Source.
    “Remember the time you first showed up at a session?”
    “I’d been there all along, Min, I keep telling you.”
    “It amused you some? The animal doctor and all?”
    “Amuses me still,” grinning with the same greasy teeth after all this time.
    A vet in Bangor, Maine, had been relaying instructions to a ham operator in Orlando, Florida, who’d sent out an S.O.S. on behalf of his wounded hamster. And Minnie had been well into step three of brewing the remedy tea for her patient until “apply poultice warm to hind legs and paws” stopped her in her tracks between the stove and the pantry wall.
    “Spun you right up into two jars of ginger peaches.”
    “But I learned to listen and to screen.”
    “You learned to pray some, Min. You never be listening too much. Just a little around the edges,” grinning. “But you learned to pray some.”
    “Learning still, Old Wife, learning still.”
    “But ain’t learned to quit casting a voluptuous eye on the young mens, I notice,” chirping her teeth.
    “When you gonna learn, you ole stick in the mud, that ‘good’ ain’t got nothing to do with it? They packed me off to seminary thinking