Deep Sightings & Rescue Missions: Fiction, Essays, and Conversations

On December 9, 1995, Toni Cade Bambara died at the age of fifty-six, a profound loss to American culture. In its obituary the New York Times called her “a major contributor to the emerging genre of black women’s literature, along with the writers Toni Morrison and Alice Walker.” The author of many acclaimed works of fiction and nonfiction, among them three pioneering and timeless volumes: Gorilla, My Love and The Seabirds Are Still Alive, both collections of stories, and The Salt Eaters, a novel, Bambara had not published a new book in the fourteen years prior to her death. She developed during that time a keen interest in film – as a scriptwriter, filmmaker, critic, and teacher – and collaborated on several television documentaries, including The Bombing of Osage Avenue, about the police assault on the MOVE headquarters in Philadelphia, and on the W. E. B. Du Bois Film Project. Bambara also helped to launch the careers of many other black women filmmakers. Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions is a brilliant distillation of Bambara’s original sensibility and a confirmation of her status as one of America’s great post-World War II writers. Here is a rich selection of her writings, many of which have never before appeared in print: stories (“Madame Bai and the Taking of Stone Mountain, ” “Ice, ” “Luther on Sweet Auburn”), essays (“Language and the Writer, ” “The Education of a Storyteller), film criticism (“School Daze”), and a revealing interview.