Those Bones Are Not My Child : A novel

Rating:
Summary: Tense Novel Probes Killings in Atlanta
Review: ... Zala Spencer has waited up all night for Sonny, her 12-year-old, to come home. Lately he's been hard to manage, but he's never stayed out overnight, and this morning she won't let him stroll in and talk his way around her. As Zala paces the house, she represses the knowledge currently terrifying Atlanta's black community: this summer its children, one by one, are being murdered. Thus readers enter the life of a fictional family whose son disappears during the Atlanta child killings of 1979-1981, when 29 black youths were slain.

Author Toni Cade Bambara was living in Atlanta at the time of the murders, and after several children's bodies were found but officials seemed unconcerned, she began keeping a journal. She filled twelve notebooks, which she spent more than a decade revising into a historical novel. By the time she died in 1995, she had drafted an imposing manuscript, animated by her vexed fascination with America's latest racial Catch-22: that blacks who suspect authorities of prejudice are paranoid, or themselves prejudiced, because our society is now color-blind.

Bambara isn't a one-sided social critic. "Those Bones Are Not My Child" blames black communities for their quietism after the Civil Rights movement: "The ballot secured, reps in office, … folks had laid down their weapons in the public square and sauntered off to read the papers." In Bambara's view all Americans today are chasing the good life instead of social justice. Still, in Atlanta between 1979 and 1981, hundreds of black citizens became activists like Bambara's protagonist, Zala. Weary from the difficulties of raising Sonny in a world dangerous to black males, and now traumatized by his disappearance, Zala is feisty, too. She and her husband join STOP, a group of parents trying to energize a lukewarm, lagging investigation into the killings.

Readers are plunged into the daily round of a community in crisis whose situation is ignored, misunderstood, or exploited by powers-that-be. STOP urges civic leaders to declare a public emergency - something is menacing Atlanta's children, even if it's not an organized vendetta against black youth. But the official view is that systematic or racist violence can't happen in "the city too busy to hate." Stories about serial killings would be bad PR for an Atlanta ambitious to be a world-class location for corporations, conventions, even a future Olympics. Zala finds it infuriating that the minimal publicity given the case treats the parents as primary suspects. Worse, when evidence clears the parents, officials speculate that the children were narcotics runners murdered by ghetto druglords, or runaways from family poverty and neglect who met with fatal accidents.

Bambara shows that when citizens can't trust authorities to be diligent or impartial, rumors multiply. Someone in the black community hears that whites are kidnapping their boys to use in porn films and snuff flicks, but that all evidence implicating whites is being suppressed. Others say that an official deliberately lost a recording of a Klansman's boasts about participating in the murders. Still others insist that the 1980 explosion in a black daycare center that killed four children must be from KKK dynamite, not a flaw in the building's ancient boiler. The arrest of a black man looks like a predictable gambit in a white cover-up, especially because now newspapers jump to give the case daily front-page prominence at last.

Small wonder that Atlanta's black community comes to view the trial of the accused man, Wayne Williams, as a white frame-up. Williams is charged with two killings and convicted on the basis of circumstantial evidence, mainly fibers found on the bodies of victims. According to the grapevine, Caucasian hairs were also found but prosecutors ignored that detail, and they apply the fiber evidence to the other murders only because they want all the cases closed even if a killer is still at large. In sum, Bambara's novel shows us what it's like to live hours, days, and years in the midst of beleaguered fear, mistrust, and indignation.

So it's an important story for all Americans, although the book is overlong - the anguish of parents as they seek their missing children, build theories, and witness official inaction is a slender plot on which to hang 600+ pages. Had Bambara lived longer, she might have cut the manuscript. She does try to heighten drama by elaborating sensory detail and starting chapters like short stories whose temporarily withheld explanations might tantalize a reader, but these strategies often prove distracting. Still, the first half of the book compels attention, and domestic scenes with the Spencer family are deft and moving throughout the narrative. The final two chapters become gripping as the mystery of Sonny's disappearance is solved.

In any case, we choose a historical novel for more than just its novelistic technique, and we can't choose a different novel on the subject - there are no others. I'm grateful that Bambara wrote the manuscript before she died and that Nobel-winning novelist Toni Morrison shepherded it through posthumous publication.

Rating:
Summary: Proustian pain flourishing
Review: I found this book by accident. I went out to buy toilet rolls and bought a book that changed my life instead. Although this reads at times like a draft version with all the glitches it gives a much closer picture of Bambara's need to get this story told. It is filled with a Proustian slowness even stillness that can be overwhelming but the end result is that, for me, I can never read a book again in quite the same way. The content of the book is appalling enough but the casual, even matter of fact way in which a great deal of it is written brings the whole case into your own neighbourhood. Books are about us, they reflect a world we all inhabit and that it what makes this such an important book. Bureacracy chokes us and hides the truth from us; frustrates us. Bamabara and Morrison have produced this volume that will alter the perspective of anybody who reads it through. There is never a final answer. Such crimes can not have an easy explanation. Books of this calibre must be written and read

Rating:
Summary: The Ending?
Review: I plowed through Bambara's huge book on the subject of the Atlanta child murders - and I stuck with it out of a loyalty to two of my favorite writers: Bambara and Toni Morrison. It was beautifully written in parts and very tedious in others. My question is this: what happens at the end? I don't get it. Whose voice does Zala hear inside that causes her to rush into Gitten's house. I really have puzzled over this. Clues?

Rating:
Summary: The Ending?
Review: I plowed through Bambara's huge book on the subject of the Atlanta child murders - and I stuck with it out of a loyalty to two of my favorite writers: Bambara and Toni Morrison. It was beautifully written in parts and very tedious in others. My question is this: what happens at the end? I don't get it. Whose voice does Zala hear inside that causes her to rush into Gitten's house. I really have puzzled over this. Clues?

Rating:
Summary: Those Bones are Not My Child
Review: This novel is over 600 pages long, yet one feels driven to complete it like a piece of history made personal and real. Using cinematic structure, sharp revealing dialogue, and authentic and winning characters, Bambara creates a work of character and truth. The book maintains a vibrant and resilient vision of a family, a community, a country in crisis. Her gifts at creating empathy are transforming acts.

Rating:
Summary: Another heartfelt one-star review.
Review: Toni Cade Bambara has written an incisive book about a time of terror for black families living in Atlanta at the beginning of the 1980's. A monster was loose, and its prey was black children. Was this monster singular or plural, and was its name Wayne Williams or KKK? We don't know for sure, and we may never know. But Toni Cade Bambara has effectively caught the sense of a community under siege by a nameless, faceless killer on the very first page of the book's prologue: "It's 3:23... and your child is nowhere in sight." Bambara lets the reader share the mood of the people who lived through it -- the parents whose children disappeared; the parents whose children were spared, wondering if their child might be next; the children, some of whom had friends among the victims, living in fear that it could happen to them too. Was Wayne Williams the true killer or a convenient scapegoat? Those who believe the former point to the fact that the murders stopped when he was arrested. This is a powerful, disturbing, controversial book. All the better. The Atlanta child murders needs all the light shed on them that they can get.