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The African American discourse has frequently converged with that of disability studies as both seem to have much in common. However, the intersection of race, gender and disability is not additive, it points to forging multi-layered identities that must endure marginalization, pain and stigma on myriad levels. African Americans have been linked historically to disability since the time of slavery to justify their racial oppression and 19th-century slave narratives teem with such disabled characters. The African American canon continued to display disabled characters whose physical impairments symbolized the violence and institutionalized exclusion blacks have been subject to. Throughout the 20thcentury, disability in African American literature became a politicized metaphor for victimization and isolation, and grew into another oppressive social construction like race and gender. Published in 1980, Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters delineates a plethora of African American characters suffering from disabilities or illnesses. The novel focuses primarily on the healing of its traumatized protagonist Velma Henry and her sessions with Minnie Ransom the district healer. This chapter is trying to answer the following questions: how does Velma’s narration of her story help her therapeutically? Is the novel a narrative of overcoming or an expression of the protagonist’s alterity and otherness as a literary invalid? Is Velma’s disability from that perspective oppressive or liberating? Hegemonic systems of representation have featured a lot of mad women in the attic who are negatively pitiable and stereotypically undesirable, how does Bambara conceptualize and negotiate disability in her novel for an African American woman: is she racializing and gendering disability or does she conceive race and gender themselves as disabilities? And how does the black woman, who had long been seen as the ‘mule of the world’ to borrow the phrase of Zora Neale Hurston, handle her disability and express her pain?
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