Redlining Culture: A Data History of Racial Inequality and Postwar Fiction by Richard Jean So (review)

break stereotypes “of the passive or accommodating girl” (64) and struggle with lessons that mentors and elders seek to impart, weighing inherited wisdom against the experiences of their daily lives. In Bambara’s deft hands, characters who might not fit conventional definitions of activists are honored for the questions they ask, the lessons they teach, and the laughter they generate in a radically unjust and unequal world. The remaining chapters analyze how Bambara’s two novels draw on “West African-based religions” (10) to depict a liberation that is equal parts spiritual and political. Chapter four explores the dynamics of “renewal” and “transformation” in The Salt Eaters (1980), and chapter five illustrates how Bambara’s posthumously published novel, Those Bones Are Not My Child (1999), a fictional retelling of the Atlanta child murders of 1979-81, draws on the ethos of African spirituals and religious practices to emphasize the importance of keeping covenants with “family, faith, feeling, and freedom” (2). Weaving together genres ranging from spirituals to sermons and incorporating practices like nature worship, Bambara’s fiction explores a complex, multifaceted spirituality that is integral to larger freedom movements. One unexpected insight into Bambara’s œuvre comes in Lewis’s analysis of her Black feminist perspective on masculinity. Bambara is well known for stories that explore the wide range of relationships among Black women: as mothers and daughters, teachers and students, and as activists and members of communities. Lewis also draws our attention to her depictions of men, showing how she centers Black women characters and perspectives in ways that are “critical of patriarchy” (15) yet also create spaces for men as collaborators and “comrades for change” (201). As Lewis writes, “Given Bambara’s views of womanhood/manhood and revolution, when one views Bambara against her contemporaries, she was less concerned with the hurt of it all and chose to handle Black male-female relationships differently. . . . These stories model a society that is egalitarian, with new masculine realities that feature a more responsible Black manhood that is less sexist and believes less in patriarchy” (98). Such striking observations lead one to wonder whether Bambara’s work was wholly circumscribed by rigid male-female binaries, or if her “spiritual wholeness aesthetic” might also provide grounds for thinking in more fluid, less binary terms about gender. “Black People Are My Business” offers dazzling new insights into one of the most important Black feminist writers and activists of the late twentieth century. From her charismatic characters to her jazzy, belly-laugh-inducing dialogue, Lewis invites us to savor the revolutionary impulse that animates her every word. Or, as Bambara would say, “It is all sacred” (191).