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Those Bones Are Not My Child plead, you beg her to please check, it’s an emergency. You can tell by the way she sucks her
By Toni Cade Bambara
Chapter One
You’re on the porch with the broom sweeping the same spot, getting the same sound — dry
straw against dry leaf caught in the loose-dirt crevice of the cement tiles. No phone, no
footfalls, no welcome variation. It’s 3:15. Your ears strain, stretching down the block,
searching through schoolchild chatter for that one voice that will give you ease. Your eyes
sting with the effort to see over bushes, look through buildings, cut through everything that
separates you from your child’s starting point -- the junior high school.
The little kids you keep telling not to cut through your yard are cutting through your yard. Not
boisterous-bold and loose-limbed as they used to be in the first and second grades. But not
huddled and spooked as they were last year. You had to saw off the dogwood limbs. They’d
creak and sway, throwing shadows of alarm on the walkway, sending the children shrieking
down the driveway. You couldn’t store mulch in lawnleaf bags then, either. They’d look, even
to you, coming upon those humps in your flowerbed, like bagged bodies.
A few months ago, everyone went about wary, tense, their shoulders hiked to their ears in
order to fend off grisly news of slaughter. But now, adults walk as loose-limbed and carefree as
the children who are scudding down the driveway, scuffing their shoes, then huddling on the
sidewalk below.
The terror is over, the authorities say. The horror is past, they repeat every day. There’ve been
no new cases of kidnap and murder since the arrest back in June. You’ve good reason to know
that the official line is a lie. But you sweep the walk briskly all the way to the hedge, as though
in clearing the leaves you can clear from your mind all that you know. You’d truly like to know
less. You want to believe. It’s 3:23 on your Mother’s Day watch. And your child is nowhere in
sight.
You lean the broom against the hedges and stretch up on tiptoe. Big boys, junior high age, are
on the other side of the avenue, wrassling each other into complicated choke holds. You holler
over, trying not to sound batty. Maybe they know something. A bus chuffs by, drowning you
out and masking the boys in smeary gray smoke. When it clears, they’ve moved on. The hedge
holds you up while you play magic with traffic, making bargains with God: if one of the next
four cars passing by sports the old bumper sticker HELP KEEP OUR CHILDREN SAFE, then
you will know all is well, you’ll calm down, pile up the leaves, make a burnt sacrifice, then get
dinner on. Two cars go by, a mail truck, an out-of-state camper, then a diesel semi rumbles
along. You can feel it thrumming up through your feet. Your porch windows rattle, so do your
teeth. An exterminator truck pulls up and double-parks by the cleaner’s. The familiar sticker is
plastered on the side of the door, the word “children” under the word “pest.” Your scalp
prickles, ice cold. A stab of panic drives you onto the porch and straight through your door.
You dial the school. The woman who answers tells you there’s no one in the building. You
want to scream, point out the illogic of that, and slam down the phone. But you wheedle, you
teeth and sets the receiver down that you’re known in that office. You’ve been up there often
about incidents they called “discipline” and you called “battering.” Things weren’t tense
enough in Atlanta, teachers were sending “acting-out problems” to the coach to be paddled. In
cut-off sweats, he took a wide-legged stance and, arms crossed against his bulging chest,
asked, since it wasn’t your child sent to him for punishment, what is your problem?
Exactly what the principal had wanted to know when the parents broke up the PTA meeting,
demanding security measures in the school. Never enough textbooks to go around; students
would linger after school to borrow each other’s, then, having missed the bus, would arrive
home to an hysterical household. The men voted to form safety patrols. The principal went off:
“There will be no vigilantes in my school!”
City under siege. Armed helicopters overhead. Bullhorns bellowing to stay indoors. The
curfew pushed back into the p.m. hours. Gun stores extending sales into the a.m. hours.
Hardware stores scrambling to meet the demand for burglar bars, deadbolt locks, alarms, lead
pipes, and under-the-counter cans of mace and boxes of pellets. Atlanta a magnet for every
bounty hunter, kook, amateur sleuth, sooth-sayer, do-gooder, right-wing provocateur, left-wing
adventurer, porno filmmaker, crack-shot supercop, crackpot analyst, paramilitary thug, hustler,
and free-lance fool. But there should be no patrols on the principal’s turf. “Unladylike,” you
heard the gym teacher say when you led the PTA walkout. But how do you conduct a polite
discussion about murder?
The woman is back on the line and says again that no one is in the school building. You repeat
your name, say again why you called; you mention the time, remark that you’re calling from
home, and you add that your neighbor across the way is wearing a candy-striped dress and is
packing away summer cottons. Then you hang up and interrogate yourself — establishing an
alibi in case something is wrong? It’s 3:28 and if grilled, you would plead guilty to something.
It’s 3:29 and you’ve got to get a grip on yourself.
From the start, the prime suspects in the Atlanta Missing and Murdered Children’s Case were
the parents. Presumed guilty because, as police logic went in the summer of ‘79, seven or eight
deaths did not constitute “an epidemic of murder,” as the parents, organizers of the Committee
to Stop Children’s Murders, were maintaining; because, as the authorities continued to argue
after STOP’s media sit-in a year later, eight or nine cases was usual in a city the size of
Atlanta; and because, as officialdom repeatedly pointed out, even as the body count rose from
one to twelve, the usual suspects in the deaths of minors were the parents.
Monstrous parents, street-hustling young hoodlums, and the gentle killer became the
police/media version of things. In the newspapers, STOP’s campaign — to mount an
independent investigation, to launch a national children’s rights movement, to establish a
Black commission of inquiry into hate crimes — would be reported, invariably, on the same
page as stories about parental neglect, gang warfare, and drug-related crimes committed by
minors, most often drawn from the files of cities outside of Atlanta. And frequently, photos of
Atlanta’s grief-stricken mothers would appear above news stories that featured “the gentle
killer” — a man or woman who’d washed some of the victims, laid them out in clean clothes,
and once slipped a rock under a murdered boy’s head “like a pillow,” a reporter said. Like a
pillow.

Another pattern you’ve noticed, having kept a journal for nearly two years and your hallway
jammed with cartons of news clippings, bulletins, leaflets, rally flyers, and memorial
programs: Whenever STOP members were invited to lecture around the country, the authorities
would call the parents in for another polygraph. Then a well-timed leak to the press: “The
parents are not above suspicion.” A name dropped: one of the parents most critical of the
investigation, most out-spoken about the lack of trained personnel on the Task Force. In ‘81, as
thousands were scheduled to board the buses for STOP’s May 25 rally in Washington, D.C., an
FBI agent told a civic group down in Macon, Georgia, that several of the cases were already
solved, that the parents had killed their children because “they were such little nuisances.”
The father of Yusuf Bell had been treated as a suspect for more than a year; his wife, Camille
Bell, the murdered boy’s mother, co-founder and prime mover of STOP, was one of the more
vocal critics of the authorities’ response to the killings. A friend of the family of murdered girl
LaTonya Wilson had also been considered a prime suspect; it was LaTonya’s body that the
civilian search team had found on its first outing, embarrassing the professionals, who’d
maintained that they were not dragging their feet, were committed to an exhaustive search,
were “leaving no stone unturned” in their efforts to find the missing children.
The mother of Anthony Bernard Carter was arrested, released, tailed, questioned, dogged for
months, and visited at all hours of the night until she was forced to move. The media kept
harping on the fact that she was a poor, young Black woman who had only one child, “only
one,” as though that were sufficient grounds for suspicion, if not prosecution.
The sun is streaming in your hallway window. It’s hot on your face. Your house smells like
cooked cardboard. A flap on one of the cartons has come loose and is imprinting a corrugated
design on your leg. You can’t go on standing there by the phone, watching the second hand
sweep around the dial. You need to get moving. You are trying. Trying not to think about the
anti-defamation suit that the STOP committee, regrettably, dropped against the police, the
Bureau, and the media. Trying not to think about the rally STOP held in D.C. — all the
speeches, pep talks, booths, posters, buttons, green ribbons, T-shirts, caps, profiling, and blown
opportunities to organize a National Black Commission to call a halt to random, calculated,
and systemic assaults on Black people all over the country. Trying not to remember how
swiftly the arrest came, the authorities collaring a man just as those back from the rally began
clamoring for answers. What about the law-enforcement memo describing castrations? What
about the mortician’s assistant who re-ported, back in the fall of ‘80, the presence of
hypodermic needle marks in the genitalia of several victims? And the phone tipster whose
message, loaded with racial slurs, accurately predicted where the next body would be dumped?
As the grapevine sizzled with charges of hate-motivated murder and official cover-up, the
authorities made their arrest of a man who in no way resembled any of the descriptions in the
Task Force reports, any of the sketched faces pinned to the corkboard in command
headquarters. In no way resembled the descriptions in the reports of STOP’s independent
investigators, or in the reports of community workers investigating well out of the limelight. A
man who bore no resemblance to men fingered by witnesses to homicides kept off the Task
Force’s list despite linkages of race, class, acquaintanceship, kinship, and last-seen sightings
along the killer route. One man, charged with the murders of two male adults. The case against
the arrested hanging by threads — carpet fibers and dog hairs, persistent enough to survive
wind, rain, and rivers. Strong enough to hitch to the arrested man’s coattails as many cases as
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the law would allow and the public would tolerate. A seven-, eight-, some said nine-million
dollar investigation brought to a close.
You’re most especially trying to keep your mind off the murders committed since the arrest in
June, cases that match the six patterns devised by community investigators: Klan-type
slaughter, cult-type ritual murder, child-porn thrill killing, drug-related vengeance,
commando/mercenary training, and overlapping combinations. Your hallway table is tumbled
down with reports you have to double-check before composing the next newsletter. You can’t
afford to think about any of the chores posted on your calendar under the pile. You need all
your energy to figure out who to call, what to do. Where the hell is your child?
I sent him to the store, God forgive me. I should’ve moved right away, but you know, kids
lolligag. The officers kept saying, “His trail is cold.” What kind of thing is that to say about a
child?
You dump your handbag on the floor, grab your key ring and purse, and lace up your tennis
shoes.
I never should’ve grounded her, maybe she wouldn’t’ve run away. Not that I believe what they
say down at Missing Persons. That girl did not run away. She was snatched.
You inspect your purse for cabfare, but reject the idea. A cab can’t jump the gully back of the
fish joint and can’t take the shortcut through the Laundromat lot.
The main thing I got out of those sessions with the Task Force investigators, and none of them
were from Homicide or anything like that at the time, was to keep my mouth shut. Said all this
talking to the press made their work harder. Made them look bad is what they meant. And
those sister detectives down at Missing Persons caught the same flack, except then it was
“hysterical women.” The officers and the parents, including my husband, we were all
hysterical women. Crazy is what they meant.
You take off down the driveway, gathering speed.
The Task Force people wouldn’t talk to me because my boy wasn’t on the list, so I kept asking
how to get him on the list. He’s from Atlanta, he was missing, then they found him under the
trestle with his neck broken. So why can’t he be on the list? Maybe someone after the reward
can do something. They had me so bulldozed, I’d actually apologize for taking them away
from the “real” case to listen to me. Can you imagine?
You are running down the streets of southwest Atlanta like a crazy woman.
It’s over because they’ve locked up one man? Only thing over and done with is that list they
were keeping. Over — what’s that supposed to mean? — go home and forget about it? They
can forget about it. The whole city can forget about it. But I’m the boy’s father, so how in hell
am I supposed to forget about it?
Maybe you are a crazy woman, but you’d rather embrace madness than amnesia.
Less than five months ago, you would not have been running alone. Before Wayne Williams
drove down the Jackson Parkway Bridge and became a suspect, your whole neighborhood
would have mobilized the second you hit the sidewalk. But Williams did drive across the
bridge. And a stakeout officer thought he heard a splash in the Chattahoochee, he would say
days later, a splash he assumed was a dead body being dumped in the river. Though trained in
lifesaving techniques, the officer did not dive in and attempt a rescue. Though equipped with a
walkie-talkie, he did not request equipment to dredge the river. The police did nothing more
that early morning than to stop Williams’s car and ask a few questions. Days later, after a local

fisherman did spot a body in the river, the authorities visited the Williams family’s home,
ransacked it, and hauled young Williams off for questioning. Before the media began calling
Williams “weird” and “cocky,” the whole of Simpson Road would have responded to your
distress.
The tailor, hearing the pound of your feet on the pavement, would have picked up the phone
for the block-to-block relay. Mother Enid, Reader & Advisor, would have taken one peek at
you from under her neon and dropped her cards to flag down a car. The on-the-corner
hardheads, heroes for a time when they formed convoys to get the children to and from school,
would have sprung into action the minute you rounded the corner. Brother Chad, who turned
his karate studio over to the self-defense squads, would have turned the bar next door out the
moment you raced past his window. Everyone would have dropped everything to find a
missing child, for when mumps have been replaced by murder, alarm is no longer a private
affair.
But it’s November, not spring. The Emergency Hot Line posters are gone from the phone
booth at the corner of Ashby, removed too from city buses, school buses, MARTA (Metro
Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority) stations, and schools. The Williams trial has not yet begun,
but the reward signs have been taken down, extra police detail withdrawn from the
neighborhoods, state patrol personnel returned to highway duty, the Task Force staff reduced
from a hundred and seventy to six, out-of-town reporters told to go home. There is no sign of
the Community Watch network along the avenue. Decals have been scraped off the windows.
“Let the Community Mend Again,” says the sign under the glass in the churchyard where you
turn.
It’s 3:40 by the clock in the taxi shed. You wave your arms as you run past the first window.
An old-timer brushes the brim of his hat and keeps talking. His cronies, lounging in chairs of
busted green vinyl and aluminum tubing, salute you with their bottles of C’Cola. You keep
moving, hoping they’ll figure it out and come on. But they’re cabbies, and cabbies have good
reason to turn a glass eye on any gestures that seem to spell “crisis.” Cab drivers, who like so
many others under the veil, now support the official drive toward closure.
Last spring, through Roy Innis, a witness had offered self-incriminating testimony that
featured a cab-driving boyfriend. A member of a cult engaged in drug-induced sex and ritual
murder, he’d boasted to the woman about his role in the child murder case. The witness,
Shirley McGill, had been involved in the drug-traffic end of the cult’s operations; she’d
witnessed the torture of youths and adults, bound-and-gagged couriers who had tried to defect
or had tried to shortchange. When a co-worker was killed, she’d fled to Florida. Her former
boyfriend, the hack, had phoned her in the winter of ‘80-’81, bragged that the kidnap-murder
ring would be changing its procedures in the spring. When the Task Force in spring began
placing adults on the list of Missing and Murdered Children and reported that the pattern of
killings was changing, she’d read that as confirmation of the cabbie’s boast and sought the
protection of Roy Innis’s group. Cabbies joined the roster of suspicious characters -- Vietnam
vets, karate experts, dog owners, owners of vans with carpeting, anyone capable of lulling a
child into carelessness or ordering a child into obedience — and remained there, even after the
Task Force issued an all-clear bulletin: witness not credible, information unrelated to the case,
cabbie not a suspect.
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A number of community investigators, struck by McGill’s drug-sex-murder-cult descriptions,
and by the self-incriminating nature of her story, were not so quick to dismiss her as a
showboating hysteric. She was willing, she said, to be questioned under hypnosis. She claimed
that she could locate sites used by the cult responsible for a number of abductions and murders
of both children and adults, some of whom made the Task Force list, others who were only on
the victim list assembled by independents. Further discussions with McGill had produced
another reason to credit her story. Her account of threats and tortures shed light on the
mysterious entries in various coroners’ reports: “death by asphyxiation, precise method
unknown.” The method, disclosed in McGill’s version, was a plastic bag shoved down the
victim’s throat, then withdrawn after.
Caravans of independents had begun scouring the outlying environs of the city. The writer
James Baldwin, a frequent visitor to Atlanta who’d been conducting his own inquiry, joined
the searchers, as did Emory professor Sondra O’Neale, a cult specialist who’d been examining
the case from that perspective. In September of ‘81, a group had discovered ceremonial
grounds littered with animal carcasses and marked by a pile of bloodstained stones heaped in
the shape of an altar. A twelve-foot charred cross was found nearby. By that time, though, only
one out-of-town magazine expressed interest in the cult story. Atlanta authorities had already
declared the theory groundless in general, the McGill version in particular.
You’re only one block from the school, you tell yourself to spur you on through the brambled
lot. You’re on the only halfway-clear path, but can feel the nettles and briars scratch through
your clothes. Up ahead a rawbony mutt is nuzzling a pile of trash. The dog looks up, bares its
teeth. Hackles stiff, it shivers itself sideways and blocks your way. Skin that bags below its ribs
puffs out a few times, but you don’t hear the bark, you’re breathing that hard. The dog plants a
paw on a baby doll facedown in the trash. The doll’s ma-ma box tears through its gauze-cotton
skin. You growl at the dog, you’re feeling that crazed. It moves its rump aside to let you pass.
The doll lets out a croaked ma-ma that catches you in the back of your knees. You plow
through a tangle of weeds and renegade vines looping up from clumps of kudzu and scrub
grass. Now that you’ve passed, the dog is woofing at you. Your ears are cocked for attack. But
the mutt resumes its raid on the trash and you concentrate on the booby traps the kudzu has set
for your feet.
It’s the first time you’ve been in a wooded lot since the wintry weekends with the civilian
search teams. Muffler, boots, thick denim, flashlight, and always a stout poking stick for
turning things over and moving sharp things aside. You’d rendezvous at dawn with total
strangers because that was preferable to sitting slumped over a coffee mug staring at the TV.
Someone always brought along an extra thermos or two. Several Chinese restaurants donated
lunch. Hundreds of other people were drawn to the task — ministers, students, secretaries,
upholsterers, masons, carpenters, lawyers -- everyone turned out, got involved, tried to respond
to the call, the crisis. By January, the civilian search teams had swelled to the thousands. There
was, too, a group of white volunteers on those weekend searches, men in flak jackets whom
the community investigators had been monitoring. They toted rifles, carried satchels of
jangling equipment, resisted the command of the search-team marshals, and signaled each
other through walkie-talkies. The other searchers learned to ignore them, fanning out as
directed, letting the tracking dogs take the lead. Shivery people moving over brush-whipped

unfamiliar terrain. Glazed ground crackling underfoot. Trees shagged with ice. Every shadowy
thing in a hollow a dread possibility.
You stub your toe on brown glass. With the rubbery tip of your tennis shoe you pry loose a
crusty beer bottle. Caked mud and leaves that cradled it break apart when you roll it over.
Worms burrow down into the muck. You gauge how long the bottle’s been lying there. The
ground covering’s autumnal; beneath the bottle is a rain-blurred Popsicle wrapper. Late
summer, you figure, moving on, stooped over, eyes scanning the ground. You’re no longer
watching out for sharp-edged cans, you discover. When you snap to, you still can’t get your
bearings.
“Remains,” they called the discoveries, yellow tape ringing the perimeter of the scene.
“Remains” might mean a pouch burial, embalming powder sprinkled into a plastic liner, or it
might mean a corpse in a rose satin box. It always meant, first, families gathered around a
stainless-steel table. A woman clutching her purse, knuckles bleeding. A man examining
surgical instruments in a rectangular basin. White men in white coats, buttonholes sealed
closed with starch, standing apart from the families, manila folders tucked under their arms.
Relatives outside the coroner’s workroom glued to portholes of the room’s double doors. One
of the summoned stepping forward to slip a hand under the rubber sheet. A pierced ear,
missing molar, lumpy cartilage in the left knee — the searching hand the only thing moving in
the room. A murmur from the white coats. All but one family is dismissed. A tag is affixed to
the toe that extends from the sheet. A mother backs away. Those bones are not my child. But
the tag bears the name heard soaring over rooftops on summer nights of kickball.
Your daughter has a mole on the right shoulder blade, you’re thinking. You have a mole on the
bottom of your left foot. There’s a host of scars crosshatching the back of your hands now. You
rip through the cobwebs spun between the trees. The wooded lot is just behind the school, but
no matter where you look, you can’t spot the aerial on the school roof.
The mother, back at the house, still insists there’s been a mistake. She holds out her arm to tell
her pastor about a scar. The media invades her home, setting up cameras, plugging in cables. A
light meter is shoved in her face. She’s asked what she’ll wear to the funeral. A city
representative shoulders his way through the crush of neighbors to say that the city will pay for
the burial. The mother is showing her arm. Her child had a bad burn from an iron. The body
downtown did not. Her pastor pats her. Relatives shush her. Neighbors set down covered
dishes and envelopes of money on the table. Everyone who’s kept the faith through the whole
ordeal wants to pay respect and leave. It’s somebody’s child downtown on a slab, so claim the
bones, mother. Set the funeral date, mother. Don’t make a fuss, mother. You’re not yourself,
mother. Let’s close the lid, mother. Let the community sleep again.
You hear it first as a funeral drum, young schoolmates in new suits and white gloves hefting a
coffin down the steps of a church. Then you hear it as band practice and follow the sound to
the sidewalk. You can see up ahead to the left the shadow thrown by the school’s flagpole. You
lean against the railing of the community center to flick pebbles and dirt from your shoes.
You’re winded, out of condition. For a year your child would not go out for a walk even with
you armed with a knife, mace, and a slapjack. Voices are coming from around the corner. You
push on, hobbled by a rising blister and bits of twigs you couldn’t reach.
A squad car parked on the school lawn has all its doors open, like wings. A trail of blood by the
flagpole leads to a book bag sprawled on the curb. In the street by the manhole a group of
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eighth-graders are gathered around someone down on one knee. It’s your daughter. She’s
clutching her chest and she’s bloody. You bump the children aside and are ready to scream.
“Ma!”
She’s hugging a cat. It squirms to get loose. A splint’s on its leg. It bites at the tape.
“You forgot?” Your daughter stands up, passes the cat to a boy in blue sweats, and cocks her
chin at you like you’ve done something stupid.
You’re trying to hear her, roaming your eyes over her person for open wounds. But everyone’s
talking at once. Behind her two Bloods are slamming a middle-aged man over the hood of a
car. The police pull one of them off, but the other keeps saying, “Man, this ain’t the Indy 500.”
Hit-and-run driver, your daughter explains. Drunk, the boy with the cat offers. The two men,
the cop is telling you, forced the driver to return to the scene. The victim’s the cat, one of the
girls says. An elderly woman in a floral bib apron saunters over and sizes you up. A pair of
scissors and a roll of tape pull her apron pocket out of shape.
“Mother.” Your daughter, using her too-grown voice, grips your shoulders for a good talking-
to. “This is the only free day at the pool. You were supposed to meet me ‘cause you’ve got to
sign. Forget?”
The woman in the bib apron brushes your shoulder with hers. “Some mother,” she says out of
the side of her mouth. “Leaving your girl to wait on the corner.” She sucks her teeth. “This is
Atlanta, honey, where is your mind?”
Your daughter drags you away and grabs up her book bag. You follow her through the double
doors of the community center. She’s talking a blue streak, using her neck. You lean across the
table and sign parental permission. The chlorine fumes draw you across the tiles to the pool
area. Your girl is still working her neck and cracking on you. You’ve got twigs in your hair,
your clothes are a mess, and what’s with them cornball, old-timey sneaks? She comes to a stop
by the door to the lockers and dabs at your scratches with a square of gauze. At seven, she
would have disowned you, but at twelve, she’s your mama. Then she rears back, takes you in,
and lets loose with more cracks. You let her. You help her. You perform a Raggedy Ann
softshoe. She holds her sides and goes through the door. You can hear her throaty laughter
ricocheting off metal and tiles long after you drag yourself past the pool to the bleachers.
You’re beat, but she’s laughing. She’s twelve, she’s entitled. For longer than you care to tally,
it’s been hard to laugh freely. Though at your house there’ve been no horrible nightmares, no
bedwetting, asthmatic emergencies, anxiety attacks, depression, withdrawal, fits of raging or
weeping, plummeting grades, or any of the other symptoms mental hygienists described over
and over on radio, TV, in newspapers, in safety-ed comics distributed at school, and on panels
after the child-safety films shown at community centers, films featuring Black male actors as
bogeymen, there’s been, nonetheless, a definite decrease in the kind of clowning around that
used to rock your household, leaving you all sprawled, breathless, helpless, in a heap on the
floor, dabbing at wet eyes, and talking in preposterous falsettos.
So you laugh a little too, brush the leaves from your clothes, and nod hello to the grown-ups on
the benches above. Leaning forward, wrists loose between their knees, they’re watching
youngsters splashing in the shallows and preteens doing laps on the deeper side of the pool
divided by a rope of blue-and-white buoys.
You settle down and rummage around in your daughter’s book bag for an apple or a stray
carrot stick. You find one of your journals. Once again, she’s mistaken it for her math

notebook, same color. When she enters the pool area, stuffing her hair under her cap, you hold
it up and smirk. She rolls her eyes and prepares for a dive where the stenciling says six feet.
You’re not sure you want to watch that. You flip open the wine-colored spiral wondering how
she fared in fifth-period math with your Missing and Murdered notes.
You began that first journal in September of 1979 with nothing particular in mind, journal
keeping a habit. But you recorded the fact that your mailman had rapped on your screen back
in summer to ask if you’d heard about the kidnappings reported in the McDaniel-Glenn area.
Didn’t you use to work at Model Cities over there? A few weeks later, Mother Enid, Reader &
Advisor, had stopped you at the newspaper box to tell you about a psychic, a white woman in
Waco, Texas, who’d been “seeing” a Vietnam vet in Atlanta relive the blasts of hand grenades
lobbed by Vietnamese children, a white vet who was now on the rampage killing colored
youngsters and depositing them near bodies of water. And did you see in the papers the case of
two dead Black boys found out on Niskey Lake Road?
You recorded a third event that occurred in late August. The aunt of one of your students
mailed you a copy of an in-house memo that had come across her desk down at Missing
Persons, Youth Division. The memo referred to a rash of disappearances, attempted
abductions, accidents where foul play was suspected, and several definite homicides in a
twenty-block radius in the Black community. The memo writer, a female officer, had suggested
to her superior that the cases not be regarded as normal runaways, that they seemed related.
The response to the memo, if there’d been one, was not attached. But a yellow stick-on note
called your attention to a magazine article enclosed celebrating 1979 as the United Nations
Year of the Child. “Some celebration,” the note ended.
Overheards and ruminations about men, women, and children mysteriously vanishing from the
community are sprinkled throughout the first half of the notebook in between entries about
books, movies, jobs, meetings, and your dreams. But sometime in the spring of 1980, entries
on the case take over. Mothers of several murdered children happened to meet that spring at a
community gathering and they compared notes. Weeks later, a group of them staged a sit-in.
Organized as the Committee to Stop Children’s Murders, they camped out in media and law-
enforcement offices, demanding a special investigation of “the epidemic of child murders.”
During their press conference, they charged that the authorities were dragging their feet
because of race; because of class; because the city, the country’s third-busiest convention
center, was trying to protect its image and was trying to mask a crisis that might threaten
Atlanta’s convention trade dollars.
“Know what they told me?” one mother asked, taking the floor at a community meeting.
“They said it was my civic duty to cooperate because all hell might break loose with this news.
In other words, to shut up.” In July 1980, city hall responded to STOP’s direct action tactics by
forming the Metropolitan Atlanta Emergency Task Force to Investigate Missing and Murdered
Children. Their staff was made up not of homicide detectives, but community relations
personnel.
The second half of your journal begins with minutes of neighborhood meetings and comments
on the skimpy items that appeared in the back pages of the dailies. Increasingly, the
disappeared begin to crowd out everything else you normally log in your journals. Even your
dreams revolve around the women found dead out on pistol ranges, men found facedown in
culverts, children stuffed under floorboards of abandoned buildings.
5
Marked-up photocopies of bulletins the Task Force published on demand about the case are
stapled to left-hand pages, factual errors circled, discrepancies in the children’s names, ages,
and dates of disappearances noted. In the margin you remark, “Doesn’t someone proof-read
the copy before sending it out?” On the right-hand side, you’ve stapled fact sheets that were
circulated by community workers who had examined police depositions, were in attendance at
the STOP office, and who were dogging the steps of STOP’s three volunteer detectives. The
three white former APD homicide detectives had served under the notorious police chief
dispatched when Maynard Jackson became mayor and ushered in, as folks were prone to say,
the Second Reconstruction. One of the volunteer PIs, Chet Dettlinger, would make the first
real breakthrough in the case by plotting the killer’s or killers’ route and charting the
connections between a dozen or more victims. He was hardly rewarded for his efforts,
however. The Atlanta police would eventually pull him in for questioning. The community
workers remained to the end no less suspicious of his interest in the case.
The last few pages of the journal, written in October of 1980, are hurried but lengthy. An
international convention of white supremacists had been hosted in nearby Cobb County by
self-proclaimed racist and convicted bomber J. B. Stoner. Not fourteen hours after the
convention adjourned, the Gate City-Bowen Homes Day Care Center blew up; four toddlers
and a teacher died. That explosion, on Monday, October 13, 1980, brought the case of the
Missing and Murdered Children — the tip of an iceberg that involved scores of men, women,
and other children — to citywide, nationwide, and finally worldwide attention. While the Task
Force called in forensic specialists to produce a victim profile, everybody else, most especially
independent investigators, focused on the killers. There was widespread speculation about
their identity and their motives: White cops taking license in Black neighborhoods again? The
Klan and other Nazi thugs on the rampage again? Diabolical scientists experimenting on Third
World people again? Demonic cultists engaging in human sacrifices? A ‘Nam vet unable to
make the transition? UFO aliens conducting exploratory surgery? Whites avenging Dewey
Baugus, a white youth beaten to death in spring ‘79, allegedly by Black youths? Parents of a
raped child running amok with “justice”? Porno filmmakers doing snuff flicks for
entertainment? A band of child molesters covering their tracks? New drug forces killing the
young (unwitting?) couriers of the old in a bid for turf? Unreconstructed peckerwoods trying to
topple the Black administration? Plantation kidnappers of slave labor issuing the ultimate pink
slip? White mercenaries using Black targets to train death squadrons for overseas jobs and for
domestic wars to come?
Splashes of green reflecting from the pool bob across the pages in your lap. Seasick, you close
your eyes. In a minute, your stomach’s less swarmy. But your mind won’t let go. It battens
down on the heavy three-ring looseleaf in one of the cartons at home. That binder contains the
other journals, separated by manila envelopes that bulge with scraps of letters, tear sheets from
magazines and social science journals, news clippings, safety-ed comics, LEAA (Law
Enforcement Assistance Ad- ministration) circulations, The Caped Crusader and other Klan
periodicals, and the various flyers and bulletins issued in fall ‘80 and winter ‘80-’81 which
signaled, as early as Christmas of ‘80, that you would need cartons to hold the material that
came pouring in from all over the world.
Reporters everywhere were trying to make sense of what was happening in Atlanta. Gone With
the Wind Atlanta. New International City Atlanta. Atlanta, Black Mecca of the South. Second

Reconstruction City. Home of a bulk of Fortune 500 companies. Scheduled host of the World’s
Fair in the year 2000. Proposed site of the World University. Slated to make the Top Ten of the
world’s great financial centers. Local, out-of-town, and overseas media all relied first and
foremost, however, on information supplied by the Metropolitan Atlanta Emergency Task
Force. For a long time, media was unaware — or rather, made uninterested in the fact — that
there were numerous other bodies of investigators conducting inquiries and coming up with
findings more plausible than the explanations offered by the Task Force, which hobbled itself
early on by insisting that there was nothing that linked the cases.
For all the authorities — city hall, the APD, the Task Force, the GBI, the FBI — agreed that
the important thing was that the idea of a serial murder case not take root. A serial murder
panics the public. Embarrasses law enforcement. Makes professionals look outsmarted. Serial
murders are bad for tourism. Handling serial murders requires a coordinated effort, a spirit of
cooperation on the part of the various departments, bureaus, and agencies that careerists prefer
to run as private fiefdoms, rewarding true-blue border guards, not liaison officers. Worse,
tracing a race-hate-motivated conspiracy would demand a no-squabbling truce between the
various branches of the law-enforcement industry. Well aware of the pecking order, locals
resist “serial” lest the feds become in charge of the yard.
On complaints of civilian search team members, APD officials had approached federal agents
about the blustering, arrogant behavior of the white commando types who attached themselves
to the search teams and tried to bogard their way into meetings on the south and northwest
sides of Atlanta. “Counterterrorist units,” muttered one fed, then exited quickly, perhaps
because he had breached security. In any case, the situation was not negotiable. The APD
officials backed off. And until a Black man was collared, it was unacceptable to speak of hate.
The Task Force itself was under the command of Commissioner of Public Safety Lee Brown, a
Ph.D., formerly of Seattle, Washington, a well-respected administrator and family man. Mayor
Maynard Jackson had created the Public Safety post early in his first term, originally to bring
Police Chief Inman under control. Later, the Public Safety Office operated mainly as a liaison
between city hall and the police department. Shrewd maneuver on Maynard’s part, for as
was/is an open secret in most cities, there are two police departments: a Black police force,
comparatively new, having evolved as a result of the civil rights movement; and a white force,
not new, and to a great extent pledged to the old order. Many a newly elected Black mayor has
found him/herself embattled from day one by the reluctance, frequently bitter, ofttimes fierce,
of the old-boy network to honor the voters’ choice.
No one foresaw that Atlanta’s Office of Public Safety would require a big budget, a large staff,
a PR director, and a comprehensive body of policies and procedures. Its work had been, under
Brown and under his predecessor, Reginald Eaves, of a community relations nature. Until the
killers struck.
Eventually, the media began to ask pointed questions about the “conflicts” in the unfolding
drama: bad-mouthing between the police and the community; between official investigators
and community sleuths and out-of-town visitors armed with hunches; between STOP and
organizations self-appointed to raise funds in the parents’ names; between the parents and city
officials; between local, state, and federal authorities, who each complained that the other
agencies were conducting investigations in secret and obstructing their own investigations.
6
Many in the targeted neighborhoods were willing to be cast as passive spectators to the tug-of-
war scenarios written by reporters. But others, not distracted by theatrics, cast themselves as
undercover workers who sorted out the growing roster of characters into major and minor
players. From the day the case became national news, the cast of characters kept growing —
psychics, suspects, tipsters, bat squads, witnesses, hypnotists, journalists, forensic experts, cult
specialists, computer consultants, fund raisers, dog trainers, filmmakers, visiting celebrities.
Hundreds of people with theories, alliances, agenda clotted the arena, which began to take on
the look of a fiendish perception test, challenging the most discerning eye to lift out of the
dense design those players that could lead them to purposeful action. Those community
workers who were not stymied by the cluttered ground design began to chart a particular part
of the schemata — the crisscrossing paths of the feds.
Community sleuths clocked federal agents in and out of Atlanta as early as summer 1980.
There were feds investigating alleged kidnappings even as the official word to the public and
the parents was “runaways.” But other feds, using the Missing and Murdered cases as a cover,
were engaged in COINTELPRO-like operations, particularly against the Revolutionary
Communist Party and the Central American Support Committee. President Carter, who made
no secret of his suspicions and alarm over the dangerously clandestine nature of the
intelligence operations, was the one hope clung to by citizens subjected to FBI break-ins
routinely blamed on burglars. The election of President Reagan, though, changed the picture.
Both the intelligence community and right-wing insurgents stepped up their covert activities,
overseas and on home ground. And community-based detectives moved further away from the
media spotlight in order to keep an eye on the feds.
Agents from the Treasury Department, from the Internal Revenue Service, and from the
Securities and Exchange Commission were unusually active in and around Atlanta. Their
subject of surveillance was a ring of counterfeiters, credit-card defrauders, junk-bond
hucksters, bank robbers, and states’ rights tax protesters that was bankrolling the ultra-right
network through criminal activity. Agents from Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms crossed their
path. The ATF was on the trail of ultra-right gangs that were knocking over armories in the
Southeast and stockpiling weapons in and around Atlanta in preparation for race war. ATF
agents, in turn, were covering the same ground as narcs, staking out private airports in the area.
Both the ATF and narcs crossed the paths of INS agents. Immigration and Customs came into
the picture in the fall of 1980. Violations of the Arms Export Control Act had been reported in
Florida, Georgia, and Texas. Those in Atlanta were keeping watch on the comings and goings
of international right-wing terrorists who’d been issued visas by the State Department to attend
Stoner’s convention the weekend before the Black day-care center exploded.
“Faulty boiler,” city hall said. Black vets, other community workers, as well as a number of
tenants who’d spotted white men on the roof of the day care, said otherwise. “Not related,”
said the six o’clock news, quoting the mayor and Commissioner Brown. But enough people
felt a connection between the observation “white men on the roof” and the old question “Who
would kill Black children?” to give the media a lead.
“Clean bill of health,” came the announcement from the governor’s mansion in spring after a
three-week look at Georgia Klans. “Hothead,” said the reporters, quoting no one in particular,
in response to Julian Bond’s outrage over the “whitewash” report. “War,” screamed the
Thunderbolt and other fascist rags of the region when the National Anti-Klan Network was

formed in Atlanta. “No connection,” said FBI director William Webster later that spring as
Black citizen groups all over the country were documenting incidents of bigoted violence. “No
evidence of conspiracy,” as various fight-back groups demanded that the Justice Department
check into and stop the escalation of attacks throughout the country based on race, class,
gender/sex, religion, nationality, and sexual orientation.
“Opportunists,” say the media when STOP persists in its efforts to ally with children’s rights
lobbyists around the country. “Mercenary motives” and “limelight greedy,” the media says of
the Atlanta parents. No one seems to remember anymore that prior to the arrest, a member of
the Atlanta City Council, not totally persuaded by the Task Force version of the case(s),
requested Lee Brown to submit by June 30 a list of all unsolved homicides in Atlanta. Suspect
Wayne Williams was formally charged on June 22, making the report moot, as they say - that
is, forgettable. Meanwhile, the slaughter continues.
Your daughter calls you from the pool. You close the notebook, rise, and look. Arms spread,
legs wide, she’s facedown in the water, in a dead man’s float. Can you applaud?
A woman hands you the notebook you’ve dropped and you sit back down on the bench. Your
daughter jackknifes under the water and kicks off. She swims under the rope like an arrow,
surfaces, and turns to grin at you. Your joints settle back into position and you grimace a smile.
Will you find your voice before she climbs out of the pool?
Agents from the Treasury Department, from the Internal Revenue Service, and from the
Securities and Exchange Commission were unusually active in and around Atlanta. Their
subject of surveillance was a ring of counterfeiters, credit-card defrauders, junk-bond
hucksters, bank robbers, and states’ rights tax protesters that was bankrolling the ultra-right
network through criminal activity. Agents from Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms crossed their
path. The ATF was on the trail of ultra-right gangs that were knocking over armories in the
Southeast and stockpiling weapons in and around Atlanta in preparation for race war. ATF
agents, in turn, were covering the same ground as narcs, staking out private airports in the area.
Both the ATF and narcs crossed the paths of INS agents. Immigration and Customs came into
the picture in the fall of 1980. Violations of the Arms Export Control Act had been reported in
Florida, Georgia, and Texas. Those in Atlanta were keeping watch on the comings and goings
of international right-wing terrorists who’d been issued visas by the State Department to attend
Stoner’s convention the weekend before the Black day-care center exploded.
“Faulty boiler,” city hall said. Black vets, other community workers, as well as a number of
tenants who’d spotted white men on the roof of the day care, said otherwise. “Not related,”
said the six o’clock news, quoting the mayor and Commissioner Brown. But enough people
felt a connection between the observation “white men on the roof” and the old question “Who
would kill Black children?” to give the media a lead.
“Clean bill of health,” came the announcement from the governor’s mansion in spring after a
three-week look at Georgia Klans. “Hothead,” said the reporters, quoting no one in particular,
in response to Julian Bond’s outrage over the “whitewash” report. “War,” screamed the
Thunderbolt and other fascist rags of the region when the National Anti-Klan Network was
formed in Atlanta. “No connection,” said FBI director William Webster later that spring as
Black citizen groups all over the country were documenting incidents of bigoted violence. “No
evidence of conspiracy,” as various fight-back groups demanded that the Justice Department
7
check into and stop the escalation of attacks throughout the country based on race, class,
gender/sex, religion, nationality, and sexual orientation.
“Opportunists,” say the media when STOP persists in its efforts to ally with children’s rights
lobbyists around the country. “Mercenary motives” and “limelight greedy,” the media says of
the Atlanta parents. No one seems to remember anymore that prior to the arrest, a member of
the Atlanta City Council, not totally persuaded by the Task Force version of the case(s),
requested Lee Brown to submit by June 30 a list of all unsolved homicides in Atlanta. Suspect
Wayne Williams was formally charged on June 22, making the report moot, as they say - that
is, forgettable. Meanwhile, the slaughter continues.
Your daughter calls you from the pool. You close the notebook, rise, and look. Arms spread,
legs wide, she’s facedown in the water, in a dead man’s float. Can you applaud?
A woman hands you the notebook you’ve dropped and you sit back down on the bench. Your
daughter jackknifes under the water and kicks off. She swims under the rope like an arrow,
surfaces, and turns to grin at you. Your joints settle back into position and you grimace a smile.
Will you find your voice before she climbs out of the pool?
It was called ‘the city too busy to hate’, but in the early 1980s more than forty black children
were murdered in Atlanta, their bodies found strangled, beaten and sexually assaulted. Toni
Cade Bambara was living in Atlanta at the time and this extraordinary novel, published
posthumously, is the result of twelve years of first-hand research, as she delved into the
murders and the world in which they occurred.
The narrative focuses on one black family living on the margin of a seemingly prosperous city,
whose son goes missing just as the child abductions are beginning to be reported. As the
distraught, already estranged parents search frantically for their son, the story moves through
the full spectrum of Atlanta’s political, social and cultural life, illuminating the complex issues
of race and class that bedevilled the city.
Suspenseful, richly dramatic, deeply emotional, this is an epic work of fiction.
Death in Atlanta
By Sven Birkerts
THOSE BONES
ARE NOT MY CHILD
By Toni Cade Bambara.
676 pp. New York:
Pantheon Books. $27.50.
When Toni Cade Bambara died in 1995, she left behind a massive, nearly completed novel,
which her longtime friend and editor, Toni Morrison, has now prepared for publication.
Morrison’s contribution, unlike that of John F. Callahan, who worked with Ralph Ellison’s
myriad drafts to effectively create the novel “Juneteenth,” seems to have been mainly one of

editorial condensation. Bambara’s manuscript, reportedly some 1,800 pages long, was shaped
down to a relatively less unwieldy work in which the author’s intentions are clearly on view.
Or so one supposes, for “Those Bones Are Not My Child” moves with an almost
monomaniacal intensity along a strictly chronological track, the main narrative progressing in
a series of dated sections from July 20, 1980, to July 11, 1982. The setting is Atlanta during the
period when more than 40 black children were abducted and murdered. Between these dates
unfolds a drama that is at once harrowingly private and revealingly public at every level.
On that first day, Zala Spencer, separated mother of three children, awaits the return of her
eldest, Sonny, from a Boys’ Club outing. As the hours pass and her irritation changes slowly to
anxiety, Zala finds herself obeying the universal parental reflex, testing and rejecting
scenarios: “Sonny hit by a truck. Sonny hitching a ride with a lunatic. Sonny ducking in an
abandoned building . . . crazy junkies jumping him.” What she is fending off, of course, is the
worst fear – that her boy may have become the latest in some deranged killer’s string of
victims.
Over the days that follow, through the lens of Zala’s now rapidly escalating panic, we start to
make out the contours of her life. Estranged from Spence, a Vietnam veteran and sometime
limo driver, Zala takes in sewing at home and watches over her children. Though now it seems
to be her two youngest, Kofi and Kenti, who must watch over her, frightened and confused, as
friends and neighbors parade through their house and police officers make their preliminary
inquiries. Slowly, carefully, with a sense of intensifying implication, Bambara begins to
enlarge the scale of her plot, bringing into view not just the dynamics of Zala’s own circle of
family and acquaintances but the complex political structure of Mayor Maynard Jackson’s
Atlanta, the self-styled “City Too Busy to Hate” – a telling counterpoint to the Atlanta that
appeared in Tom Wolfe’s novel “A Man in Full.”
Zala’s Sonny is not the first child to have disappeared. A growing number of people in
Atlanta’s black community are convinced that some cult or conspiracy is at work, and that the
motive for the killings may well be racial. In an atmosphere of mounting collective suspicion,
Zala and Spence reconnect, helping to mobilize a grass-roots search, independently
investigating leads, correlating patterns of data, publicizing what they have discovered and
putting as much pressure as they can on what often appear to be deliberately obstructive moves
on the part of the official investigators.
Bambara builds up a racking suspense through the opening sections of the book. Zala,
impelled by what feels like an almost visionary paranoia – she seeks and sees connections
everywhere – devotes herself utterly to the case. Yet although this is psychologically plausible,
it leads the author into what becomes a narrative morass. The novel’s long middle section –
much of its real heft – is given over to dense and somewhat confusing documentary accounts,
all relating to the collective search for clues about the killings. The reader must either become
a fellow obsessive or fall by the wayside. What makes matters more difficult is the fact that the
Spencer family, whose travails impart dramatic character to this horrifying chaos of evidence
and speculation, all but disappears from view. Was this, we wonder, where the editor did her
most judicious pruning? Could Morrison have trimmed even more without sacrificing any
artistically essential material?
Fortunately, just when the novel threatens to disappear under the weight of all this reportage,
the plot is retrieved. News comes about a “John Doe Jr. in observation in Pediatrics, found
8
wandering in a daze on the highway, barefoot, in khaki shorts and a ragged child’s undershirt
four sizes too small,” a child “so badly battered, it was difficult to isolate one area of damage
from another.” Utterly traumatized, he will not talk about what has happened to him. Nor does
he reveal anything much when, a short time later, a young black man named Wayne Williams
is charged with some of the murders.
Events that might, in a less subtle author’s hands, be treated in climactic ways are here
subjected to a different sort of pressure. Unwilling to push for the ease of closure, Bambara
creates a persuasive psychological ambiguity. The novel’s last long section is a tour de force in
which the full intensity and complication of family life emerge. Bambara, much praised for the
shaded depth of her characterizations – in the stories of “Gorilla, My Love” and other works –
rarely builds a scene toward a simple explosion. She relishes, instead, the power of
accumulation, the visceral immersion that deepens as life’s difficulties are compounded and
carried forward. “Those Bones Are Not My Child” moves toward its conclusion via episodes
of tense disequilibrium. The reader feels buffeted by the lives that rear up on all sides.
On the larger, public level, the charging of Williams in a number of the killings does not set
matters to rest. The divided city continues to roil – politically, racially. Contrary to the logic of
pop psychology, neither communities nor cities, let alone families, return to the status quo after
a catastrophe like this. The damage is permanent, and all concerned can only hope to make the
worst of the hurt endurable.
Of course, few people ever believed that “Case Closed” could be stamped on the mountains of
files in Atlanta Police Headquarters. Until the whole truth – the complete system of interlinked
facts – is known, a terrible ache must remain. When people are still missing, or their murders
remain unsolved, true grieving is not possible. Bambara’s achievement – in this masterly if not
yet fully balanced work – is to voice this sense of loss, to give full human dimension to events
that for too many of us flashed by like billboards at highway speed.
Sven Birkerts is the author of five books of essays, most recently “Readings.”
Published: 01 - 02 - 2000, Late Edition - Final, Section 7, Column 1, Page 17
A letter from Toni Morrison
Dear Reader
Those Bones Are Not My Child is the result of twelve years of work and first-hand research
by Toni Cade Bambara, who lived in Atlanta during the years of the Atlanta child murders - a
period when more than forty black children were slaughtered, found in ditches, on riverbanks,
strangled, tied-up, beaten, and sexually assaulted - events which created media, political and
enforcement fever, and which culminated in the unpersuasive conviction (based on a few
fibbers) of a young black man.
Ms. Bambara on the spot, actively involved, taking notes, doing field research and interviews,
used her unassailable talent as a writer and her intimate relations with all levels and facets of
the Atlanta scene to construct what I believe is a magnum opus.
This novel does several things:
1. It puts the reader at the heart of the horror that came to be called the Atlanta child murders.
This is not the politically expedient story - nor the news stories written by visiting journalists;

not the district attorney’s official account. It is the inside story as lived in the neighbourhoods
and on the streets by people gripped in its terror yet determined to survive it;
2. It also dramatises the story of a local family when right at the start of the abductions their
teenage son goes missing;
3. It is the narrative revelation of the workings of a major southern city of the 1980s, a
revelation of what clogs the bloodstream of “The City Too Busy to Hate”.
These Bones Are Not My Child is a big book, as large as the events that took place, with the
breadth of the Invisible Man, the depth of Their Eyes Were Watching God, and the humanity of
Crime and Punishment.
Toni Morrison
Atlanta’s Killing Season
July 16, 2000
(CBS) This week CBS News Sunday Morning’s John Leonard reviews Who Killed Atlanta’s
Children?, which premieres July 16 on Showtime. The docudrama recalls Atlanta’s serial
killings in the 1980s, also the subject of Toni Cade Bambara’s new novel, Those Bones Are
Not My Child.
During the all-star baseball game last Tuesday night, nobody mentioned the Atlanta child
murders. Atlanta moonlights in amnesia.
It has forgotten the early 1980s, when dozens of black children disappeared from parks,
streets, movies and schools, to be found bludgeoned, lynched, drowned and mutilated. The
City Too Busy to Hate was a magnet for bounty hunters and supercops, and a war zone of
helicopters, drivebys and gun sales. In the garrison state of denial, law enforcement agencies
squabbled about jurisdiction while its pols worried about losing convention dollars to a serial
killer panic.
Didn’t all that end with the conviction of weird Wayne Williams? Well, it shouldn’t have,
according to a furious new docudrama on Showtime.
Who Killed Atlanta’s Children? begins with a flashback to the paranoia, the arrest, and the
disbanding of the task force in 1982. It then skips to 1986, when an editor and a reporter for
Spin magazine, Gregory Hines and James Belushi, are persuaded to take another look at the
case by Assemblywoman Mildred Glover.
They have their own not very interesting office and family issues, but fly south anyway and
are immediately hooked by rumors of child porn and political clout, of sex rings and
something fishy about the original “Missing and Murdered” list.
9
Outside their motel room, someone drops secret police files. An anonymous phone tip is
followed by a meeting in a lowlife bar with Sean McCann, a retired Atlanta cop with guilt
feelings.
He will tell them about an undercover informant in the Ku Klux Klan and a wiretap. After
which, Spin magazine is no longer safe on the streets.
I’m leaving out a lot more menace and the cover-up shredding of a paper trail that suggested
some of these children were target practice for the Klan. Spin did publish a good article, to no
avail.
Who Killed Atlanta’s Children?
How much more we don’t know than we do is clear from Toni Cade Bambara’s amazing novel
on the subject, grand and grueling, exhaustive and exalted. Those Bones Are Not My Child is
written from the point of view of the mothers of the disappeared, among whom Bambara lived
during the killing seasons.
It is a bill of indictment of an entire political culture and a broadloom weave of lost children
and child sacrifice, from Isaac and Abraham to Iphigenia and Agamemnon, to the Pied Piper
and the Gingerbread Boy. The Ku Klux Klan and maybe Nazis! Diabolical scientists,
organized child molesters, snuff moviemakers, psychopathic Vietnam vets! Slave-labor gangs,
satanic cults and turf-poaching drug dealers killing off the competition’s couriers.
However unlikely you find these lurid scenarios, they are less obscene than the declared
opinion of the guardians of public order at the time, that the kids were street hustlers who
deserved what they got, or maybe their own parents wasted them.
Thanks to Showtime for remembering not to forget.
Television Review
Truth or Dare
A magazine editor and reporter look for the real story behind the murders of more tha n
29 black children in Atlanta
By John Leonard
So, according to Spin magazine and Who Killed Atlanta’s Children? (Sunday, July 16; 8 to
10 p.m.; Showtime), the Klan did it. At least one of the many McCullough brothers, all of them
night riders in the Invisible Empire’s ragtag army, bragged about killing some black children in
a tape recording of a wiretap arranged by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, inspired by a tip
from an undercover informant for the intelligence division of the Atlanta cops. And the GBI

had other evidence pointing in the same direction that the lawyers for Wayne Williams should
have seen but didn’t – because the GBI not only mysteriously closed this file but also
destroyed it.
Not that Who Killed Atlanta’s Children? is suggesting Wayne Williams was innocent. But he
certainly was convenient. He was black and he was weird. (His brief appearance in this cable
movie, as played by Clé Bennett, is one of its creepiest moments.) Convicted in 1982 for
killing two adults, on the basis of some pretty flimsy fiber evidence, he was blamed as well for
the disappearance, from parks, streets, schools, buses, bridges, and movie theaters, and the
slaughter, by bludgeoning, stabbing, lynching, drowning, and/or mutilation, of the 29 children,
mostly boys and all black, whose names and faces on a special-task-force “Missing and
Murdered” list embarrassed Atlanta and scandalized the nation. “The City Too Busy to Hate”
had been turned into a garrison state of paranoia and denial, whose politicians worried about
losing convention dollars to a serial-killer panic while its law-enforcement agencies squabbled
about jurisdiction and leaks. And a magnet for bounty hunters, soothsayers, supercops, and
paramilitaries. And a war zone of helicopters, drive-bys, gun sales, and conspiracy theories.
Of course, the conspiracy theories featured Nazis and the Klan. But they also included
diabolical scientists, organized child molesters, snuff-movie-makers, and psychopathic
Vietnam vets as well as turf-poaching drug dealers killing off the competition’s couriers,
kidnappers looking for slave labor, even alien abduction and satanic cults. And there were
those guardians of the public order who insisted that the missing children must be “runaways.”
Or “retards” who didn’t know where they really were. Or hustlers and prostitutes who just got
what they deserved and should have expected. Or maybe their own parents had disposed of
them.
Among the many problems associated with the Atlanta child murders is that they started before
anybody, even the parents, noticed that something sinister was going on. And there were more
of them than the 29 on the “M & M” list, maybe nearly 70. And there were names on the list
that didn’t fit any of the patterns the task force was pushing, and names omitted that did fit
those patterns. And there are at least 16 and maybe 35 more names that should have been
added to the list after Wayne Williams went to prison for life, but couldn’t be because there
was no longer any such list – the case, once the public-relations crisis was over, had been
prematurely closed. Nor does it seem conceivable that any single person could have committed
all the murders. And so perhaps each of the conspiracy theories has its own dreadful portion of
truth.
Thus Who Killed Atlanta’s Children? is one of those truths. It picks up in 1986, the year after
Abby Mann’s tendentious mini-series The Atlanta Child Murders had cast equal prime-time
doubt on the trial of Wayne Williams and the Atlanta political Establishment (the mayor and
the police commissioner were both black). It is based on the personal experience of producer
Rudy Langlais, who was at the time an editor of Spin magazine and who for some reason
permitted his name to be changed so that Gregory Hines in the docudrama is called Ron
Larson. Nor was the reporter who accompanied him to Atlanta, played by James Belushi,
really named Pat Laughlin. Whatever their reasons, the on-site tension between the two, at first
mildly amusing and later unfortunately distracting, seems more characteristic of relations
between a TV producer and his correspondent than between editor and reporter, maybe
because editors usually stay put at the office, where it’s easier to know everything.
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But the movie is less about Hines and Belushi than it is about the mothers of the children,
understandably far from satisfied; the cover-up of the GBI’s Klan investigation, as embodied
in the slick snarl of Aidan Devine as Agent Jack Johnson; and the guilt-stricken second
thoughts of a retired Atlanta cop, Sean McCann as Melton, who drops his own notes and
confidential police files in a knapsack outside the motel-room door of Spin’s editorial team. In
the bickering, bullying, stalking, and shredding that follow, Hines and Belushi must rely on
Melton for names, on Assemblywoman Mildred Glover (Lynda Gravatt) for entry into black
neighborhoods of the aggrieved, and on the problematic “Dave” (Eugene A. Clark) to lead
them through the Atlanta underworlds of politicians and police, like Virgil leading Dante by
the nose on an escalator down to hell.
Although we are reminded by Charles Robert Carner, who directed Who Killed Atlanta’s
Children? from his own script, of all the questions that have never been answered, we will get
no satisfaction – nor did Wayne Williams get a new trial – even after Spin publishes its story
and Jack Johnson suffers in a courtroom the usual convenient amnesia. Maybe we never will.
It’s too messy, and has, besides, come to symbolize a sort of worldwide open season on black
children and black skin. If this film moves you, please read Toni Cade Bambara’s Those Bones
Are Not My Child (Random House). Bambara was obsessed with the case, knew many of the
mothers, mourned all of the children, and managed to create something grand and grueling,
exhaustive and exalted.
Those Bones Are Not My Child is at once the Atlanta novel Tom Wolfe didn’t write, a bill of
indictment of an entire political culture, and a broadloom weave of lost children and child
sacrifice – from Abraham and Isaac to Agamemnon and Iphigenia to the Prodigal Son and the
Gingerbread Man. You will want to save all the children in her pages from this free-fire zone
of teenage mothers who read True Confessions while their babies drink formula stretched with
Kool-Aid, while all around the Defenders of the White Seed wear T-shirts proclaiming that
gun control is hitting your target, and heroic Zala is last seen at target practice with a sound-
suppressing .22-caliber Walther automatic.
The Lesson
By Toni Cade Bambara
Back in the days when everyone was old and stupid or young and foolish and me and Sugar
were the only ones just right, this lady moved on our block with nappy hair and proper speech
and no makeup. And quite naturally we laughed at her, laughed the way we did at the junk man
who went about his business like he was some big-time president and his sorry-ass horse his
secretary. And we kinda hated her too, hated the way we did the winos who cluttered up our
parks and pissed on our handball walls and stank up our hallways and stairs so you couldn’t
halfway play hide-and-seek without a goddamn gas mask. Miss Moore was her name. The
only woman on the block with no first name. And she was black as hell, cept for her feet,
which were fish-white and spooky. And she was always planning these boring-ass things for us
to do, us being my cousin, mostly, who lived on the block cause we all moved North the same
time and to the same apartment then spread out gradual to breathe. And our parents would
yank our heads into some kinda shape and crisp up our clothes so we’d be presentable for

travel with Miss Moore, who always looked like she was going to church though she never
did. Which is just one of the things the grownups talked about when they talked behind her
back like a dog. But when she came calling with some sachet she’d sewed up or some
gingerbread she’d made or some book, why then they’d all be too embarrassed to turn her
down and we’d get handed over all spruced up. She’d been to college and said it was only
right that she should take responsibility for the young ones’ education, and she not even related
by marriage or blood. So they’d go for it. Specially Aunt Gretchen. She was the main gofer in
the family. You got some ole dumb shit foolishness you want somebody to go for, you send for
Aunt Gretchen. She been screwed into the go-along for so long, it’s a blood-deep natural thing
with her. Which is how she got saddled with me and Sugar and Junior in the first place while
our mothers were in a la-de-da apartment up the block having a good ole time.
So this one day Miss Moore rounds us all up at the mailbox and it’s puredee hot and she’s
knockin herself out about arithmetic. And school suppose to let up in summer I heard, but she
don’t never let up. And the starch in my pinafore scratching the shit outta me and I’m really
hating this nappy-head bitch and her goddamn college degree. I’d much rather go to the pool
or to the show where it’s cool. So me and Sugar leaning on the mailbox being surly, which is a
Miss Moore word. And Flyboy checking out what everybody brought for lunch. And Fat Butt
already wasting his peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich like the pig he is. And Junebug punchin
on Q.T.’s arm for potato chips. And Rosie Giraffe shifting from one hip to the other waiting for
somebody to step on her foot or ask her if she from Georgia so she can kick ass, preferably
Mercedes’. And Miss Moore asking us do we know what money is like we a bunch of retards.
I mean real money, she say, like it’s only poker chips or monopoly papers we lay on the grocer.
So right away I’m tired of this and say so. And would much rather snatch Sugar and go to the
Sunset and terrorize the West Indian kids and take their hair ribbons and their money too. And
Miss Moore files that remark away for next week’s lesson on brotherhood, I can tell. And
finally I say we oughta get to the subway cause it’s cooler an’ besides we might meet some
cute boys. Sugar done swiped her mama’s lipstick, so we ready.
So we heading down the street and she’s boring us silly about what things cost and what our
parents make and how much goes for rent and how money ain’t divided up right in this
country. And then she gets to the part about we all poor and live in the slums which I don’t
feature. And I’m ready to speak on that, but she steps out in the street and hails two cabs just
like that. Then she hustles half the crew in with her and hands me a five-dollar bill and tells me
to calculate 10 percent tip for the driver. And we’re off. Me and Sugar and Junebug and Flyboy
hangin out the window and hollering to everybody, putting lipstick on each other cause Flyboy
a faggot anyway, and making farts with our sweaty armpits. But I’m mostly trying to figure
how to spend this money. But they are fascinated with the meter ticking and Junebug starts
laying bets as to how much it’ll read when Flyboy can’t hold his breath no more. Then Sugar
lays bets as to how much it’ll be when we get there. So I’m stuck. Don’t nobody want to go for
my plan, which is to jump out at the next light and run off to the first bar-b-que we can find.
Then the driver tells us to get the hell out cause we there already. And the meter reads eighty-
five cents. And I’m stalling to figure out the tip and Sugar say give him a dime. And I decide
he don’t need it bad as I do, so later for him. But then he tries to take off with Junebug foot
still in the door so we talk about his mama something ferocious. Then we check out that we on
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Fifth Avenue and everybody dressed up in stockings. One lady in a fur coat, hot as it is. White
folks crazy.
“This is the place, “ Miss Moore say, presenting it to us in the voice she uses at the museum.
“Let’s look in the windows before we go in.”
“Can we steal?” Sugar asks very serious like she’s getting the ground rules squared away
before she plays. “I beg your pardon,” say Miss Moore, and we fall out. So she leads us around
the windows of the toy store and me and Sugar screamin, “This is mine, that’s mine, I gotta
have that, that was made for me, I was born for that,” till Big Butt drowns us out.
“Hey, I’m goin to buy that there.”
“That there? You don’t even know what it is, stupid.”
“I do so,” he say punchin on Rosie Giraffe. “It’s a microscope.”
“Whatcha gonna do with a microscope, fool?”
“Look at things.”
“Like what, Ronald?” ask Miss Moore. And Big Butt ain’t got the first notion. So here go Miss
Moore gabbing about the thousands of bacteria in a drop of water and the somethinorother in a
speck of blood and the million and one living things in the air around us is invisible to the
naked eye. And what she say that for? Junebug go to town on that “naked” and we rolling.
Then Miss Moore ask what it cost. So we all jam into the window smudgin it up and the price
tag say $300. So then she ask how long’d take for Big Butt and Junebug to save up their
allowances. “Too long,” I say. “Yeh,” adds Sugar, “outgrown it by that time.” And Miss Moore
say no, you never outgrow learning instruments. “Why, even medical students and interns
and,” blah, blah, blah. And we ready to choke Big Butt for bringing it up in the first damn
place.
“This here costs four hundred eighty dollars,” say Rosie Giraffe. So we pile up all over her to
see what she pointin out. My eyes tell me it’s a chunk of glass cracked with something heavy,
and different-color inks dripped into the splits, then the whole thing put into a oven or
something. But for $480 it don’t make sense.
“That’s a paperweight made of semi-precious stones fused together under tremendous
pressure,” she explains slowly, with her hands doing the mining and all the factory work.
“So what’s a paperweight?” asks Rosie Giraffe.
“To weigh paper with, dumbbell,” say Flyboy, the wise man from the East.
“Not exactly,” say Miss Moore, which is what she say when you warm or way off too. “It’s to
weigh paper down so it won’t scatter and make your desk untidy. “ So right away me and
Sugar curtsy to each other and then to Mercedes who is more the tidy type.
“We don’t keep paper on top of the desk in my class,” say Junebug, figuring Miss Moore crazy
or lyin one.
“At home, then,” she say. “Don’t you have a calendar and a pencil case and a blotter and a
letter-opener on your desk at home where you do your homework?” And she know damn well
what our homes look like cause she nosys around in them every chance she gets.
“I don’t even have a desk,” say Junebug. “Do we?”
“No. And I don’t get no homework neither,” says Big Butt.
“And I don’t even have a home,” say Flyboy like he do at school to keep the white folks off his
back and sorry for him. Send this poor kid to camp posters, is his specialty.

“I do,” says Mercedes. “I have a box of stationery on my desk and a picture of my cat. My
godmother bought the stationery and the desk. There’s a big rose on each sheet and the
envelopes smell like roses.”
“Who wants to know about your smelly-ass stationery,” say Rosie Giraffe fore I can get my
two cents in.
“It’s important to have a work area all your own so that . . .”
“Will you look at this sailboat, please,” say Flyboy, cuttin her off and pointin to the thing like
it was his. So once again we tumble all over each other to gaze at this magnificent thing in the
toy store which is just big enough to maybe sail two kittens across the pond if you strap them
to the posts tight. We all start reciting the price tag like we in assembly. “Hand-crafted sailboat
of fiberglass at one thousand one hundred ninety-five dollars.”
“Unbelievable,” I hear myself say and am really stunned. I read it again for myself just in case
the group recitation put me in a trance. Same thing. For some reason this pisses me off. We
look at Miss Moore and she lookin at us, waiting for I dunno what.
“Who’d pay all that when you can buy a sailboat set for a quarter at Pop’s, a tube of glue for a
dime, and a ball of string for eight cents? It must have a motor and a whole lot else besides,” I
say. “My sailboat cost me about fifty cents.”
“But will it take water?” say Mercedes with her smart ass.
“Took mine to Alley Pond Park once,” say Flyboy. “String broke. Lost it. Pity.”
“Sailed mine in Gentral Park and it keeled over and sank. Had to ask my father for another
dollar.”
“And you got the strap,” laugh Big Butt. “The jerk didn’t even have a string on it. My old man
wailed on his behind.”
Little Q.T. was staring hard at the sailboat and you could see he wanted it bad. But he too little
and somebody’d just take it from him. So what the hell. “This boat for kids, Miss Moore?”
“Parents silly to buy something like that just to get all broke up,” say Rosie Giraffe.
“That much money it should last forever,” I figure.
“My father’d buy it for me if I wanted it.”
“Your father, my ass,” say Rosie Giraffe getting a chance to finally push Mercedes.
“Must be rich people shop here,” say Q.T.
“You are a very bright boy,” say Flyboy. “What was your first clue?” And he rap him on the
head with the back of his knuckles, since Q.T. the only one he could get away with. Though
Q.T. liable to come up behind you years later and get his licks in when you half expect it.
“What I want to know is,” I says to Miss Moore though I never talk to her, I wouldn’t give the
bitch that satisfaction, “is how much a real boat costs? I figure a thousand’d get you a yacht
any day.”
“Why don’t you check that out,” she says, “and report back to the group?” Which really pains
my ass. If you gonna mess up a perfectly good swim day least you could do is have some
answers. “Let’s go in,” she say like she got something up her sleeve. Only she don’t lead the
way. So me and Sugar turn the corner to where the entrance is, but when we get there I kinda
hang back. Not that I’m scared, what’s there to be afraid of, just a toy store. But I feel funny,
shame. But what I got to be shamed about? Got as much right to go in as anybody. But
somehow I can’t seem to get hold of the door, so I step away from Sugar to lead. But she hangs
back too. And I look at her and she looks at me and this is ridiculous. I mean, damn, I have
12
never ever been shy about doing nothing or going nowhere. But then Mercedes steps up and
then Rosie Giraffe and Big Butt crowd in behind and shove, and next thing we all stuffed into
the doorway with only Mercedes squeezing past us, smoothing out her jumper and walking
right down the aisle. Then the rest of us tumble in like a glued-together jigsaw done all wrong.
And people lookin at us. And it’s like the time me and Sugar crashed into the Catholic church
on a dare. But once we got in there and everything so hushed and holy and the candles and the
bowin and the handkerchiefs on all the drooping heads, I just couldn’t go through with the
plan. Which was for me to run up to the altar and do a tap dance while Sugar played the nose
flute and messed around in the holy water. And Sugar kept givin me the elbow. Then later
teased me so bad I tied her up in the shower and turned it on and locked her in. And she’d be
there till this day if Aunt Gretchen hadn’t finally figured I was lyin about the boarder takin a
shower.
Same thing in the store. We all walkin on tiptoe and hardly touchin the games and puzzles and
things. And I watched Miss Moore who is steady watchin us like she waitin for a sign. Like
Mama Drewery watches the sky and sniffs the air and takes note of just how much slant is in
the bird formation. Then me and Sugar bump smack into each other, so busy gazing at the toys,
‘specially the sailboat. But we don’t laugh and go into our fat-lady bump-stomach routine. We
just stare at that price tag. Then Sugar run a finger over the whole boat. And I’m jealous and
want to hit her. Maybe not her, but I sure want to punch somebody in the mouth.
“Watcha bring us here for, Miss Moore?”
“You sound angry, Sylvia. Are you mad about something?” Givin me one of them grins like
she tellin a grown-up joke that never turns out to be funny. And she’s lookin very closely at me
like maybe she plannin to do my portrait from memory. I’m mad, but I won’t give her that
satisfaction. So I slouch around the store bein very bored and say, “Let’s go.”
Me and Sugar at the back of the train watchin the tracks whizzin by large then small then
gettin gobbled up in the dark. I’m thinkin about this tricky toy I saw in the store. A clown that
somersaults on a bar then does chin-ups just cause you yank lightly at his leg. Cost $35. I
could see me askin my mother for a $35 birthday clown. “You wanna who that costs what?”
she’d say, cocking her head to the side to get a better view of the hole in my head. Thirty-five
dollars could buy new bunk beds for Junior and Gretchen’s boy. Thirty-five dollars and the
whole household could go visit Grand-daddy Nelson in the country. Thirty-five dollars would
pay for the rent and the piano bill too. Who are these people that spend that much for
performing clowns and $1000 for toy sailboats? What kinda work they do and how they live
and how come we ain’t in on it? Where we are is who we are, Miss Moore always pointin out.
But it don’t necessarily have to be that way, she always adds then waits for somebody to say
that poor people have to wake up and demand their share of the pie and don’t none of us know
what kind of pie she talking about in the first damn place. But she ain’t so smart cause I still
got her four dollars from the taxi and she sure ain’t gettin it Messin up my day with this shit.
Sugar nudges me in my pocket and winks.
Miss Moore lines us up in front of the mailbox where we started from, seem like years ago,
and I got a headache for thinkin so hard. And we lean all over each other so we can hold up
under the draggy ass lecture she always finishes us off with at the end before we thank her for

borin us to tears. But she just looks at us like she readin tea leaves. Finally she say, “Well, what
did you think of F.A.0. Schwarz1?”
Rosie Giraffe mumbles, “White folks crazy.”
“I’d like to go there again when I get my birthday money,” says Mercedes, and we shove her
out the pack so she has to lean on the mailbox by herself.
“I’d like a shower. Tiring day,” say Flyboy.
Then Sugar surprises me by sayin, “You know, Miss Moore, I don’t think all of us here put
together eat in a year what that sailboat costs.” And Miss Moore lights up like somebody
goosed her. “And?” she say, urging Sugar on. Only I’m standin on her foot so she don’t
continue.
“Imagine for a minute what kind of society it is in which some people can spend on a toy what
it would cost to feed a family of six or seven. What do you think?”
“I think,” say Sugar pushing me off her feet like she never done before cause I whip her ass in
a minute, “that this is not much of a democracy if you ask me. Equal chance to pursue
happiness means an equal crack at the dough, don’t it?” Miss Moore is besides herself and I
am disgusted with Sugar’s treachery. So I stand on her foot one more time to see if she’ll shove
me. She shuts up, and Miss Moore looks at me, sorrowfully I’m thinkin. And somethin weird
is goin on, I can feel it in my chest. “Anybody else learn anything today?” lookin dead at me. I
walk away and Sugar has to run to catch up and don’t even seem to notice when I shrug her
arm off my shoulder.
“Well, we got four dollars anyway,” she says. “Uh hun.”
“We could go to Hascombs and get half a chocolate layer and then go to the Sunset and still
have plenty money for potato chips and ice cream sodas.”
“Uh hun.”
“Race you to Hascombs,” she say.
We start down the block and she gets ahead which is O.K. by me cause I’m going to the West
End and then over to the Drive to think this day through. She can run if she want to and even
run faster. But ain’t nobody gonna beat me at nuthin.
Some points to consider as you read “The Lesson”
Children tend not to be naturally aware of inequality; they must come to this knowledge
through experience. “The Lesson” relates one such coming of age in the experiences of a
group of New York children who pay a visit to F.A.O. Schwartz, a famous (and upscale)
toystore.
As you read, you might want to consider...
The story’s voice. Is it believable? Do you find the sometime coarse language (“nappy-head
bitch”) offensive, or do you feel that it adds to the story’s realism?
The question of Miss Moore, who leads the trip to the store: “Imagine for a minute what kind
of society it is in which some people can spend on a toy what it would cost to feed a family of
1
A famous toystore in New York.
13
six or seven. What do you think?” Is this in fact a legitimate question? Or, does wealth
automatically accrue to the deserving and poverty to the undeserving, thus rendering the
question moot?
Toni Cade Bambara (1939-1995)
Toni Cade Bambara, born Miltona Mirkin Cade on March
25, 1939, lived the first ten years of her life in Harlem.
Bambara credits the Harlem community as having a
significant influence on her writing. She learned the power
of the word from “the speakers on Speaker’s Corner in
Harlem” (Tate 28) and credits the musicians of the forties
and fifties with giving her “voice and pace and pitch” (Tate
29). Living on 151st street between Broadway and
Amsterdam, Miltona changed her name to “Toni” around
kindergarten. The rich diverse population of the area
contributed much to Bambara’s life lessons. Always willing to “stop and talk,” Bambara
“adopted people” to fill the place in her life for relatives, especially grandmothers. (Deep
Sightings 208-209). Although the neighborhood was instrumental in forming an important part
of Bambara’s identity, the author’s greatest influence and inspiration was her mother: “My
mother had great respect for the life of the mind” (Deep Sightings 212). In a poignant
dedication to her mother in The Salt Eaters, Bambara writes: “Mama, Helen Brent Henderson
Cade Brehon, who in 1948, having come upon me daydreaming in the middle of the kitchen
floor, mopped around me.”
In 1959, Toni Cade graduated from Queen’s College with a B.A. in Theater Arts/English. She
published her 1st short story, “Sweet Town” and received the John Golden Award for fiction.
From 1962 to 1965, Bambara completed her master’s degree while serving as program director
at Colony Settlement House in Brooklyn. After receiving her master’s degree, she began
teaching at City College of New York in 1965 and continued working there until 1969. During
that time Bambara became involved in many socio-political issues and community groups.
Bambara also attributes her mother’s influence as key to shaping her political being: “My
mother gave us the race thing. [In school] we were to report back to her any stereotypic or
racist remark” (Deep Sightings 216).
In the highly charged political atmosphere of the civil rights and women’s movement, Toni
Cade Bambara edited and published an anthology of non-fiction, fiction, and poetry entitled
The Black Woman. An important product of the Black Arts Movement, The Black Woman was
the first major feminist anthology featuring work by Nikki Giovanni, Audre Lorde, Alice
Walker, Paule Marshall, and others. The genesis of Bambara’s anthology “grew out of
impatience,” the author said, with the lack of writing for Afro-American women by Afro-
American women. Within the anthology Bambara herself contributed three essays. In one of

her essays, “On the Issue of Roles” the author’s feelings that “in a capitalist society a man is
expected to be an aggressive, uncompromising, factual, lusty, intelligent provider of goods,
and the woman, a retiring, gracious, emotional, intuitive, attractive consumer of goods” (Black
Woman 102) not only epitomizes the themes of many of the works within the anthology, it also
explicitly reflects the emerging attitudes of the times.
In 1971, Bambara edited her second anthology entitled Tales and Stories for Black Folks while
teaching at Rutgers. The first seven stories of the book fall under the category Bambara calls
“Our Great Kitchen Tradition”ăin reference to “stories of the family” that are an inextricable
part of the African-American heritage and tradition of orality. Stories about “how Cousin Cora
met and married the preacher from Atlanta, how Uncle Bubba would play the harmonica for
country picnics, [or] how Grandaddy Johnson used to ride the Baltimore and Ohio . . .”
became the meaningful heritage of memories passed on “ in the family kitchen among elders”
(Tales “Preface”). These stories are also representative of the kinds of stories “I wished I had
read growing up,” remarks Bambara (Sturdy Black Bridges 240). Included within the
anthology, a work by Bambara herself, “Raymond’s Run” resonates with community, family,
and a girl named Squeaky who takes a giant leap of personal growth. As Martha Vertreace
states in “The Dance of Character and Community,” Squeaky becomes Bambara’s metaphor
for an aggressive approach to life that involves problem solving within a communal context”
(American Women 160). Bambara’s contribution within the collection underlines the need to
write a bildungsroman (coming of age) story in which actions speak louder than words.
A year after editing Tales and Stories for Black Folks, Bambara released her first book written
entirely on her own -- a collection of short stories entitled Gorilla, My Love. The short story
genre is Bambara’s favorite mode of written expression. Bambara says for her the short story
“makes a modest appeal for attention, slips up on your blind side and wrassles you to the mat
before you know what’s grabbed you” (Sternburg 164). The stories in Gorilla, My Love, as
described by Bambara are “on-the-block, in-the-neighborhood, back glance pieces” (Tate 24)
that argue the strength and empowerment of community. Not only does community fare as a
common thread that binds the stories in the collection together, but also the identity of women
within the context of community appears as a significant theme throughout. Bambara is deeply
concerned with how the wisdom of the community passes on from generation to generation
and how it “manifests itself in the living” (Tate 66).
One of the stories entitled “My Man Bovanne” reflects Bambara’s strong belief in the African-
American oral tradition as a conduit for keeping the “strength of [the] past, available in the
present, able to move our future” (Tate 69), while also embracing the value of elders to the
younger generation of the community. The protagonist of the story, Miss Hazel, a mother
pushing sixty, is confronted by her children about “makin a spectacle of [her] self” (Gorilla 5)
by dancing with an elderly blind man. The thoughts of Miss Hazel at the end of the story
reveal Bambara’s own feelings about preserving the valuable voice of the elderly: “Cause you
gots to take care of the older folks. And let them know they still needed to run the mimeo
machine and keep the spark plugs clean and fix the mailboxes for folks who might help us get
the breakfast program goin, and the school for the little kids and the campaign and all. Cause
old folks is the nation” (Gorilla 9-10). “My Man Bovanne” is one of Bambara’s most
14
endearing stories and representative of her “straight-up fiction” (Gorilla “Preface”) that
persists throughout her stories. Gorilla, My Love was accepted enthusiastically and received
favorable reviews especially within the African-American community.
From the release of Gorilla, My Love (1972) to the publication of Bambara’s second collection
of short stories, The Sea Birds Are Still Alive (1977), the author traveled extensively. In
particular, her visits to Cuba in 1973, a move to Atlanta with her daughter, Karma, in 1974,
and a visit to Vietnam in 1975 had a powerful impact on many of the stories in the collection.
In Cuba, she met women working in factories, on the land, and in the street who were able to
resolve class and color conflicts. In Vietnam, she was “struck by the women’s ability to break
through traditional roles, traditional expectations” (Bell 238). In reflecting back on that period,
Bambara refers to herself as “a nationalist; . . . a feminist” (Tate 14) and her political voice
roars more loudly with themes of the injustices inflicted upon children and minority women’s
struggle against oppression. In particular, three of the protagonists in the stories in Sea Birds
resonate with a strong feminist voice: Virginia in “The Organizers Wife,” Lacy in “Broken
Field Running” and the narrator in “The Apprentice.”
“Broken Field Running” vociferates with the intersection of the oppressive forces weighing on
the African-American community and the injustices leveled upon the children living there.
Strong images throughout the story symbolizing the history of the European White race that
continues to oppress them are prevalent; a “Gothic cathedral looms” and “gargoyles peer[ing]
down on the children”(Sea Birds 52) as they walk through the streets. Lacy, who continually
struggles with the predicament of the African-American children, realizes the system hinders
them for a reason: “We blind our children . . . Blind them to their potential, the human
potential. Cripple them, dispirit them. Cripples make good clients, wards, beggars, victims”
(Sea Birds 52). Lacy, aware of how oppression is the juggernaut that prevents the children and
her community from escaping the status quo, fights for their survival. Lacy is what Bambara
would call a “warrior” because the women in her stories are fighters and survivors. Bambara
understands and believes in surviving because she grew up listening to stories about “Harriet
Tubman, Ida B. Wells, and [Bambara’s] grandmother, Annie” (Sternburg 163), and so the
women in her stories not only survive, they inspire.
Although Bambara’s preference for the short story was responsible for the publication of her
first two books of fiction, the author began writing her first novel, The Salt Eaters, in 1978.
Published in 1980, Bambara says the novel “came out of a problem-solving impulse.” She was
interested in bringing together the activists, warriors, and medicine people within her
community to “fuse those camps” (Tate 16) into a venerable force. Set in Claybourne, Georgia,
the novel is about a community of black people searching for the healing properties of salt. In
a recorded interview with Kay Bonetti (1982), Bambara reflects on the symbolism of salt and
the African flying mythăboth critical metaphorical components in the novel. Her reflection in
itself wonderfully representative of the eloquent oral tradition of the African-American
community: “We got grounded because we ate too much salt, but some folks say it, we got
grounded because we opened ourselves up to horror -- invited it onto the continent -- that
created tears. And it was that salt that drowned our wings and made us earth-bound.”

The novel centers on Velma Henry, a community organizer who experiences both a mental and
emotional crises, and Minnie Ransom, a faith healer. However, according to Ruth Elizabeth
Burks (“From Baptism to Resurrection”) “the characters speak little, because they have lost the
desire to communicate through words. Their thoughts, as conveyed by Bambara, are more real
to them than that is real” (qtd. in Butler-Evans 173). For Bambara this is purposeful; she
looked for “a new kind of narrator -- narrator as medium . . . a kind of magnet through which
other people tell their stories.” The Salt Eaters was met with mixed reviews. Her experimental
technique appealed to some but not to others.
After publishing The Salt Eaters, Bambara wanted “to explore more sense-ably” another kind
of medium that would enable her to expand her repertoire of rhetorical skills. In “Salvation is
the Issue” (Black Women Writers), Bambara states that she “wanted to experiment with new
kinds of writing materials and writing forms and to pick up another kind of pencil -- the
camera” (44). Bambara went to Philadelphia and met Louis Massiah, founder-director of the
Scribe Video Center. There, she not only learned about the art of editing, she also became
involved in teaching other’s about filmmaking. Three of Bambara’s short stories, “Gorilla, My
Love,” “Medley,” and “Witchbird” have been adapted to film. In Deep Sightings and Rescue
Missions, Bambara openly criticizes previous films made in Hollywood about Blacks. She
says, “the tools of my trade are colonized . . . the global screen has been colonized. And the
audience -- readers and viewers -- is in bondage to an industry” (139-140).
Bambara’s need to challenge the industry provoked her first film/documentary project The
Bombing of Osage Avenue in 1986. She won the Best Documentary Academy Award for the
film about the May 13th, 1985 bombing of the headquarters of an emerging Black
organization, MOVE in Philadelphia. The mayor at that time, W. Wilson Goode ordered the
attack. With more than 500 police officers surrounding 6221 Osage, a 90-minute gun battle
ensued, and a bomb dropped from a state helicopter ignited not only the MOVE headquarters,
but also another sixty-one houses in Cobb’s Creek. Eyewitness accounts and interviews are the
backbone of Bambara’s Bombing of Osage Avenue. Falling back on Bambara’s ideology “to
tell the truth” in her writing, the author exposed the brutality and inhumanity of an event that
left eleven -- six adults and five children -- dead.
15
Bambara’s second posthumous publication, Those Bones Are Not My Child (1999) was the
result of about twelve years of work and research. Bambara’s close friend and editor, Toni
Morrison, edited the book. Those Bones Are Not My Child, a novel about the Atlanta child
murders that took place in the early eighties, centers around the Spencer family. Nathaniel
(Spence) and Zala Spencer, the separated parents of three children, find themselves pulled into
a living nightmare when their eldest son, Sonny is missing. The events in the story, based on
the true accounting of the murders that claimed over forty children, was seen by many as “a
class thing” (These Bones Are Not My Child 103) and the main reason it took almost two years
to solve. The novel uncovers the unbelievable corruption and cover-up that took place in
Atlanta at that time amid political, racial, and class tension.
Toni Cade Bambara was a writer, activist, feminist, and filmmaker. In 1982, in a taped
interview with Kay Bonetti, Bambara reflected on her work: “When I look back at my work
with any little distance the two characteristics that jump out at me is one, the tremendous
capacity for laughter, but also a tremendous capacity for rage.” Bambara spent her entire life
writing about both. Her ability to laugh and imbue laughter into her stories came from her
strong conviction and belief in family and community. Her rage came from the injustices she
saw in the treatment of children, elderly, and the oppressed Black community. As she wrote in
“What It is I’m Doing Anyhow,” writing was “one of the ways [she] participate[d] in struggle”
(The Writer on Her Work 154). She witnessed that struggle between old and young, Blacks and
Whites, and men and women. Bambara worked to change the oppressive existence for Blacks.
She worked to destroy illusions, demolish myths, and celebrate struggle within an exploitive,
strangling, capitalist society. But she never gave up; she knew there was “lotta work ahead of
us” (Black Women Writers at Their Work 14).

In 1993, at what seemed the height of her career, Bambara was diagnosed with colon cancer.
Pulling herself up after diagnosis and treatment, she was determined to “kick cancer’s ass” and
get on with her work. During the process of recovery, Bambara began working with Louis
Massiah on her next documentary, W.E.B. DuBois: A Biography in Four Voices about the long
and remarkable life of Dr. William Edward Burghardt DuBois (1868-1963). The film was
released in early 1995. Bambara succumbed to colon cancer December 9, 1995 in
Philadelphia. However, Toni Cade Bambara’s work lived on -- two posthumous publications
are proof of her enduring spirit and legacy. In 1995, Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions:
Fiction, Essays, and Conversations was released. Within the collection, an important interview
by Bambara’s long-time friend, Louis Massiah entitled “How She Came by Her Name” offers
an in-depth and valuable look into the author’s personal history and the formation of the
unique identity she came to claim as her own. She reflects on growing up in Harlem, the
importance of her mother’s influence in her life, her political insights, and her writing.