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Toni Cade Bambara. Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions: Fiction, Essays and Conversations. Ed. with a preface by Toni Morrison. New York: Pantheon, 1996. 266 pp. $23.00.
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Alice A. Deck University of Illinois
The posthumous publication of Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions fills the void I felt open up in my intellectual endeavors when I learned of Toni Cade Bambara's death in 1995. Bambara was part of a major late-twentieth-century renaissance of African American women fiction writers which includes Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, ntozake shange, and Paule Marshall. Though she had not published a book in the fourteen years prior to her death (her research, teaching, and writing had turned to African American film and independent black film makers), a re-reading of her two collections of short stories (Gorilla My Love [1972] and The Sea Birds Are Still Alive [1977]) and of her one novel (The Salt Eaters [1980]) shows that Bambara was a very contemporary writer. She believed in the simultaneity of art and politics, and understood the value of what she wrote in service to the black community. Hence, community activists, cultural workers, and social workers figure prominently in all of her fiction. There is a strong undercurrent of mutual love and respect in the black community in Bambara's world: Children can talk to strangers without fear of harm, older...