The Salt Eaters

Content Warning: This novel includes extensive discussions of mental health conditions, especially suicide. This guide refers to, but does not quote, some of the author’s uses of the n-word. The novel also contains references to assault on women, sexual assault, and blackface.

The Salt Eaters centers on the spiritual healing of Velma’s mental health crisis. Velma ends up in the infirmary after an attempt to die by suicide. One line that she thinks multiple times during the healing is “I might have died” (7). She considers a potential future that includes her death, which echoes Fred’s morbid fantasies of driving his bus into the marshes and killing everyone aboard. Velma’s mental health condition does not physically harm the people around her, but it negatively impacts her loved ones. Her husband “[had] grown afraid for her. [...] Then he’d grown afraid of her” (162). However, Obie’s extramarital affair and his potential gathering of guns at the academy add to Velma’s psychological concerns. For her, as a Black activist, “Life [is] a danger” (78). Her mental state is affected by having to fight against racism and for her community, and it also reflects the fractured and troubled state of Black activism and mindsets in the 1970s.