Those Bones Are Not My Child
Read Those Bones Are Not My Child Online
Authors: Toni Cade Bambara
TONI CADE BAMBARA’s
Those Bones Are Not My Child
“Astonishing … [a] triumph of realism.… Bambara dazzles with a prose that rarely flags and has the precision of a scalpel, the grace of a poetic angel, and the horse sense of a coven of grandmothers. She amazes with her wisdom, with the breadth of her knowledge, with the depth and acuity of her characterization … with an insight so piercing it takes the breath away. Rare. Amazing.”
—
Chicago Tribune
“A powerfully told story, likely to become for the Atlanta child murders what Kurt Vonnegut’s
Slaughterhouse-Five
became for the firebombing of Dresden.… A brave achievement.”
—
Time Out
“An impassioned rallying cry … an extraordinary achievement; at turns as poetic as it is vitriolic, as personal as it is political, and always thoroughly heartbreaking.… Empowering and frighteningly real.”
—
Emerge
“Bambara’s posthumous docu-novel conveys the period’s fear and conflict with a powerful blend of fact, fiction and indignation.”
—
Time
“Splendid … a broadloom weave of lost children and child sacrifice.… [A] masterful mix of multitude, solitude, trajectory and vertigo … grand and grueling, exhaustive and exalted.”
—
Newsday
“Haunting.… A multilayered portrayal of black life … a riveting fusion of fact and fiction.”
—
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“[Bambara’s] luminous novel … puts to good use her gifts for passionate storytelling and incisive cultural criticism.… An indelible, intimate and moving portrait of an American family … a landmark work.”
—
Publishers Weekly
“An important book.… [Bambara] has captured the epic horror of life at the crossroads of rabid racism, poverty, child pornography, official corruption, conjugal betrayal and the random slaughter of innocents.”
—
The San Diego Union-Tribune
TONI CADE BAMBARAThose Bones Are Not My Child
Toni Cade Bambara is the author of two short story collections,
Gorilla, My Love
and
The Sea Birds Are Still Alive;
a novel,
The Salt Eaters;
and a collection of fiction, essays, and conversations,
Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions
. Her writings continue to appear in literature anthologies around the world. A noted documentary filmmaker and screenwriter, Bambara’s film work includes the documentaries
The Bombing of Osage Avenue
and
W. E. B. Du Bois: A Biography in Four Voices
. She died in 1995.
TONI CADE BAMBARA
The Black Woman
(editor)
Tales and Short Stories for Black Folks
(editor)
The Salt Eaters
The Sea Birds Are Still Alive
Gorilla, My Love
Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions
FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, OCTOBER 2000
Copyright © 1999 by The Estate of Toni Cade Bambara
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1999.
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of
Random House, Inc.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition as follows:
Bambara, Toni Cade.
Those bones are not my child / Toni Cade Bambara.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-56061-2
1. Afro-Americans—Georgia—Atlanta—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3552.A473t47 1999
813′.54—dc20 99-21534
Author photograph © Joyce Middler
Map design by Jeff Ward
v3.1
We are the light
we are robbed of
each time one of us
is lost
PROLOGUE
Monday, November 16, 1981
Y
ou’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 plead, you beg her to please check, it’s an emergency. You can tell by the way she sucks her 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 cutoff 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!”