Those Bones are Not My Child - Softcover

Toni Cade Bambara

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0704346540 ISBN 13: 9780704346543

Publisher: Pantheon Books, 2000

Synopsis

Those Bones Are Not My Child is a staggering achievement, a major work of American fiction: the novel that Toni Cade Bambara was working on at the time of her death in 1995 -- a story that puts us at the center of the nightmare of the Atlanta child murders.
    
It was called "The City Too Busy To Hate," but two decades ago more than forty black children were murdered there with grim determination, their bodies found -- in ditches, on riverbanks -- strangled, beaten, and sexually assaulted. Bambara was living in Atlanta at the time, and Those Bones Are Not My Child is the result of twelve years of first-hand research, as she delved into the murders and the world in which they occurred.  Evoking the culture of the late 1970s and early '80s with a keen eye -- the Iranian hostage crisis, disco, Travis Bickle of Taxi Driver -- Those Bones Are Not My Child powerfully dramatizes the story of one black family surviving on the margins of a seemingly prosperous city.
  
On Sunday morning, July 20, 1980, Marzala Rawls Spencer awakens to find that her teenage son has gone missing, even as the Atlanta child abductions are beginning to be reported. As she and her estranged husband frantically search for their son, the story moves with authority through the full spectrum of Atlanta's political, social, and cultural life, illuminating the vexing issues of race and class that bedevil the city.

Suspenseful, richly dramatic, profoundly affecting, Those Bones Are Not My Child explores the complex relationships within one family in dire crisis. And as Toni Morrison, who edited Bambara's manuscript, has observed, it is also "the narrative revelation of a major Southern city of the '80s, a revelation of what clogs the bloodstream of 'The City Too Busy to Hate.' "

About this title

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 the Back Cover:

"Riveting. . .a carefully crafted mystery [that is] difficult to put down." -The Boston Globe

"Magnificent. . . . A powerful culmination of Bambara's career." -- The Denver Post

"Luminous and rich in sensory images . . . haunting and surprising. . . . [Bambara] has managed to combine a complex murder mystery, a sophisticated commentary on race relations, and a wonderful tapestry of dozens of memorable characters." --USA Today

"Truly worthy of being called an epic. . . . Anyone who ever thought it does
not take a special kind of courage to write a great novel should read Those Bones Are Not My Child." --Chicago Tribune

About this edition

• Publisher: Pantheon Books
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0704346540
• ISBN 13: 9780704346543
• Binding: Paperback