Rereading ‘The Salt Eaters’ Helped Me Process My Pandemic Fears

Toni Cade Bambara’s novel on healing and activism is prescient for the present moment

Photo illustration.

Before all this started — the staying indoors and the constant cleaning and the calls about who got tested, who had it, who passed and was suddenly gone — I was afraid to go to the doctor. One of my earliest memories is running through a clinic’s waiting room, while a sibling was in the office for yet another appointment, and tripping and falling onto an exposed nail on a bench, splitting the flesh of my cheek open to the bone. I remember crying, the startled pediatrician holding my face, and then blacking out and waking up on a table, strapped to a gurney. Another doctor leaned over and assured me that the stitches he was about to sew into my cheek without anesthesia wouldn’t hurt at all. Needless to say, he lied, and I have hated going to the doctor ever since.

I come from a family with a penchant for eccentric health problems. We map neighborhoods by recalling all the places we’ve vomited or fainted in public while growing up. I thought the fact that my body was usually viewed as a failure was a comment on my character and a misfortune confined to my bloodline. Even though I wrote a whole novel about the legacies of scientific racism, I still blamed myself for every…