63 of 67 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Most Important Book on Race in a Generation, October 23, 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: Those Bones Are Not My Child: A novel (Hardcover)
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.
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Tense Novel Probes Killings in Atlanta, July 27, 2001
This review is from: Those Bones Are Not My Child: A novel (Hardcover)
... 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.
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