I read everybody I can get to, and I appreciate the way "American literature" is being redefined now that the Black community is dialoguing without d… - Toni Cade Bambara

The short story is a piece of work. The novel is a way of life. When I replay the tapes on file in my head, tapes of speeches I've given at writing conferences over the years, I invariably hear myself saying "A writer, like any other cultural worker, like any other member of the community, ought to try to put her/his skills in the service of the community."

Then the silence. A whole generation silent

But in the storytelling arenas, from kitchen tales to outdoor university anecdotes, "women's morality" was much more expansive, interesting, it took on the heroic-Harriet T. and Ida B. and the women who worked with W. E. B. Du Bois, the second wife of Booker T. and the Mother Divine of the Peace and Co-op Movement, and Claudia Jones, organizer from Trinidad who was deported during the Crackdown, when the national line shifted from "blacks as inferior" to "blacks as subversive" and wound up in a stone quarry prison and wrote "In every bit as hard as they hit me." These women were characterized as "morally exemplary," meaning courageous, disciplined, skilled and brilliant, responsive to responsibility for and accountable to the community. The other type of memorable tale bound up in these women heroics was tales of resistance-old and contemporary-insurrections, flight, abolition, warfare in alliance with Seminoles and Narragansetts during the period of European enslavement; the critical roles men and women played in the revolutionary overthrow of slavery; and in the Reconstruction self-help enterprises founded, the self-governing townships founded, the political convention convened and progressive legislation pressed through; and in days since the mobilization, organization, agitation, legislation, economic boycotts, protest demonstrations, rent strikes, parades, consumer-cooperative organizations.