take care of your blessings: Toni Cade Bambara and a Spell for Our Mutual Survival

On the eve of Toni Cade Bambara’s birthday we celebrate and uplift a Black feminist ethic of care.  Toni Cade Bambara would sign letters and books with the phrase “Take Care of Your Blessings” as a sincere but playful spelling of her name TCB.  Toni Cade Bambara. Take Care of Business.  She would encourage people who’s book she signed to “Take very good care of your energies.” She would also sign letters to her fellow participants in the Black art of transforming the world (June Jordan, Octavia Butler, Cheryl Clarke, Nikky Finney) “Black Blessings.”

In this time of heightened fear what are our practices of care?  On her own birthday, March 25th 1981 Toni Cade Bambara wrote a letter to June Jordan about care.  She affirmed June Jordan’s book of essays Civil Wars (she also wrote an affirming review of the book publicly) and said it gave her an insight about why it was important to document her own life, not from a place of ego, but as an acknowledgement that her own life, and the insights that could come from examining it with the values of her own political vision, would be a contribution to the long political movement, our history.  And I am so grateful.

In that same letter she discusses how the two writers are struggling to quit smoking.  She asks her friend to light a candle and say a prayer for her as she starts again her dance practice, the only thing that has effectively kept her from smoking for any period of time.  What are the intimate forms of care we can practice when we remember that care, this revolutionary stewardship of our blessing, is a shared task.  What will we create in this moment when remember the longer history of Black feminist care, and the path of intergenerational blessings we are accountable to now?

This workshop is for anyone interested in a supportive space of reflective writing centered on a Black feminist ethic of care.  We will continue to learn from Toni Cade Bambara herself, but also from her nurtured relationships as documented in her archival letters, (which I have had the honor of researching at the Spelman College Archives) her legacy of mentorship (which I write about in my essay “The Sweetness of Salt” in Pleasure Activism) and her spiritual practices, best documented by Akasha Hull in Soul Talk. This webinar will be recorded, but is best experienced live.  The audio version of the recording will be available to participants the day after the workshop.

Sign up here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/take-care-of-your-blessingstoni-cade-bambara-a-spell-for-mutual-survival-tickets-99711794662

There are no refunds.  All registration fees go to the ongoing life of Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind.