In many ways Toni Cade Bambara is one of the best representatives of the group of Afro-American writers who, during the 1960s, became directly involved in the cultural and sociopolitical activities in urban communities across the country. Like James Baldwin, Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Nikki Giovanni, June Jordan, Sonia Sanchez, and Alice Walker, she immersed herself in civil rights issues by lecturing to and helping to organize rallies within the black community, while at the same time using these experiences as the nucleus for her essays and creative writing. Like others of that era, Bambara wrote from a stance of near defiance--pushing the cultural assumptions of the larger American society aside to show her audience what she believed to be the distinguishing characteristics of Afro-American culture. Her fiction reflects the Afro-American idiomatic expressions, habits of interpersonal relationships, and, most important, its myths, music, and history. While some...