SOURCE: "'What It Is I Think She's Doing Anyhow': A Reading of Toni Cade Bambara's The Salt Eaters," in Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition, edited by Marjorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers, Indiana University Press, 1985, pp. 216-32.

Hull is an American educator and critic who has written extensively on Black American literature and Black women writers. She coedited All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies (1982) and wrote Color, Sex, and Poetry: Three Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance (1987). In the essay below, she offers a detailed thematic and stylistic analysis of The Salt Eaters.

Although everyone knows instinctively that Toni Cade Bambara's first novel, The Salt Eaters, is a book that he or she must read, many people have difficulty with it. They get stuck on page ninety-seven or give up after muddling through...