Product Description

Written over a span of twelve years, and edited by Toni Morrison, who calls Those Bones Are Not My Child the author's magnum opus, Bambara's last novel leaves us with an enduring and revelatory chronicle of an American nightmare.

In a suspenseful novel of uncommon depth and intensity, Toni Cade Bambara renders a harrowing portrait of a city under siege. Having elected its first black mayor in 1980, Atlanta projected an image of political progressiveness and prosperity. But between September 1979 and June 1981, more than forty black children were kidnapped, sexually assaulted, and brutally murdered throughout "The City Too Busy to Hate."

A separated mother of three holding down several jobs, Zala Spencer has managed to survive on the margins of a flourishing economy until she awakens the morning of Sunday, July 20, 1980, to find her teenage son Sonny missing. As the hours turn into days, Zala realizes that Sonny is among the many cases of missing children just beginning to attract national attention. Growing increasingly disillusioned with the authorities, who respond to Sonny's disappearance with cold indifference, Zala and her estranged husband embark on a desperate search. Through the eyes of a family seized by anguish and terror, we watch a city roiling with political, racial, and class tensions.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #97298 in Books
• Published on: 2000-10-24
• Released on: 2000-10-24
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 688 pages

Amazon.com Review
On a Friday night in July 1979, the first victim in what would come to be called the Atlanta Child Murders disappeared. Over the course of two years, more than 40 African American children would die--abused, mutilated, strangled--before an arrest in 1981 apparently settled the issue. Wayne Williams, a black man, was accused, tried, and convicted of the murders, and the good citizens of Atlanta breathed easy again, assured that the crimes had not been racially motivated after all, and that the criminal was behind bars.

Or was he? In her posthumously published novel, Those Bones Are Not My Child, Toni Cade Bambara revisits the summer of 1980 and suggests a chilling alternative:

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 is 3:23 on your Mother's Day watch. And your child is nowhere in sight.

The protagonist of Bambara's novel is Marzala Rawls Spencer, an African American mother of three who is managing--just--to raise her family, hold down three jobs, and attend night school. When her 12-year-old son, Sundiata, doesn't return from a camping trip, Zala finds herself plunged into the nightmarish possibility that he has become the latest victim in the series of murders rocking the "City Too Busy to Hate." As she and her estranged husband, Spence, frantically attempt to discover what has happened to their child, the book takes them through the complicated morass of politics, race relations, and class that bedevil Atlanta--and perhaps obstruct the search for the true killer.

Bambara worked on Those Bones Are Not My Child for 12 years before her death in 1995. Toni Morrison edited the manuscript for publication, and though the occasional rough edge shows through, the well-drawn characters and inherent human drama in this stranger-than-fiction tale overcome its minor weaknesses. This is the novel Toni Cade Bambara will be remembered for, and rightly so. --Alix Wilber

From Publishers Weekly
At the time of her death in 1995, acclaimed author, activist and educator Bambara (Gorilla, My Love; The Salt Eaters) had spent 12 years working on what her friend and editor Toni Morrison calls a "magnum opus." Bambara lived in Atlanta during the two years in which more than 40 children, mostly black boys under 15, were abducted and gruesomely murdered. Her luminous novel draws on a wealth of investigative material, historical detail and family stories, and puts to good use her gifts for passionate storytelling and incisive cultural criticism. The Spencer family, whose oldest son is missing, serves as the fictional anchor. When 12-year-old Sonny fails to come home one night, his anguished mother, Marzala, finds that the police have a pervasive lack of interest in her missing child. Zala and her estranged husband, Vietnam vet Spence, join the Committee to Stop Children's Murders, an activist citizens' group organized by Atlanta parents who are disillusioned with the authorities' indifference to the killings. The cast of characters includes the Spencers' friends, extended family, police, federal investigators, Atlanta officials and the STOP volunteers who search the city seeking leads and patterns, exploring Klan connections and suspicions of a child porn ring. Bambara's thorough re-creation of the STOP committee's work in the book's long middle section comes at the expense of narrative pacing; the story bogs down while the endless theories, tips, hunches and strategies take center stage. Two crucial developmentsAthe arrest of Wayne Williams and a fateful turn for SonnyArefocus the tale on the Spencers. The difficult truths they face are devastating. Bambara gives us an indelible, intimate and moving portrait of an American family, while at the same time producing a landmark work that achieves a potent immediacy as she sagaciously explores the far-reaching issuesAracial, personal, politicalAat stake in one of the 20th century's most horrifying murder cases. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
This is Bambara's final novel (after The Salt Eaters et al.), published four years after her death and based on the Atlanta child murders of the early 1980s. In haunting detail she describes the plight of one fictional family as they try to find their missing child without support from either the police or politicians. (LJ 9/1/99)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Customer Reviews

The Most Important Book on Race in a Generation
This book is overwhelmingly important. At times, it is almost unbearable to read not for style, but because its topic was hoped to be forgotten and buried.

I cannot think of a single adult alive during the Atlanta Child Murders who really believed it was Wayne Williams who killed all of those children. It seemed so obvious to most of us that there must have been KKK or some sort of child pornography ring involved. This book smashes the all-too convenient package of that conviction to bits, and tears open old wounds, refusing to cover them up with nonsense.

And yet it's a novel, with rich characters, real and reacting with the human complexity necessitated by the terror of that time.

Can we read this book? All the way through? Are we better off continuing the cheap wallpaper job over the very real problems that exist in America? To me, the way in which the truth of these children and their beleagured mothers and fathers has been swept aside makes the history so much worse. Can you, dear reader, imagine that many people knew about what happened in Atlanta but did nothing with that information that would reveal the truth? And for what? Cheap, short-term convention dollars and electoral politics? It is just enfuriating, and, ultimately demoralizing.

But Toni Cade Bambara is a moral force, a moral hurricane, spitting out eloquent fury, forcing the children back into history, forcing the debate to begin all over again, and, hopefully, forcing someone somewhere to bring this thing to justice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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