“Wholeness Is No Trifling Matter”

Abstract

I n this quote from Toni Cade Bambara’s novel, The Salt Eaters, Minnie Ransom, the “fabled healer of the district,” asks the novel’s protagonist, Velma, this critical question. This powerful scene echoes themes of individual healing connected to communal wholeness throughout the book, and these themes are also evident in the materials in Bambara’s archival collection. Considering this in the context of Bambara’s own life and work, Black women feminists and writers’ archives give insight into their ideological evolution, personal growth, community involvement, and overall involvement in varied freedom struggles. How do the papers of Black women feminist and writers illustrate individual and collective “wholeness”? How do these collections expand on concepts of care, celebration, and repair? This article explores these questions through a close reading of materials from the papers of Black feminist writers Toni Cade Bambara and Audre Lorde, housed in the Spelman College Archives. It provides a brief overview of how Black feminists and writers have crafted archives of Black women’s lives. This article analyzes how Bambara and Lorde utilized their work to illuminate the experiences of Black people, Black women, and subsequently became archivists of their own experiences and by extension the diverse communities they inhabited. This piece also discusses how Bambara and Lorde’s archives engage the concepts of care, celebration, and repair. Engaging the concepts of care, celebration and repair, this article employs the theoretical framework of radical empathy in the archive and is informed by the author’s personal reflections and professional experience working with Black women’s archival collections.