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 c… - Toni Cade Bambara

The greatest challenge in writing, then, in the earlier stages was to strike a balance between candor, honesty, integrity, and truth-terms that are fairly synonomous for crossword puzzlers and thesaurus ramblers but hard to equate as living actions.

It was Grandma Dorothy who taught me critical theory, who steeped me in the tradition of Afrocentric aesthetic regulations, who trained me to understand that a story should be informed by the emancipatory impulse that characterizes our storytelling trade in these territories as exemplified by those freedom narratives which we've been trained to call slave narratives for reasons too obscene to mention, as if the "slave" were an identity and not a status interrupted by the very act of fleeing, speaking, writing, and countering the happy-darky propaganda. She taught that a story should contain mimetic devices so that the tale is memorable, shareable, that a story should be grounded in cultural specificity and shaped by the modes of Black art practice-call-and-response but one modality that bespeaks a communal ethos. I would later read Fanon on the subject-"To speak is to assume a culture and to bear responsibility for a civilization." Later still, I read Paolo Freire, speaking on activist pedagogy, engaged cultural work. "The purpose of educational forms is to reflect and encourage the practice of freedom."

Certain kinds of poisons, for example-rage, bitterness, revenge-don't need to be in the atmosphere, not to mention in my mouth.