Those Bones Are Not My Child (101 page)

You go back to the desk to finish the letter. It’s got to be long in lieu of a visit. Your friend is in a hospital bed in St. Thomas up to her chin in plaster of Paris. She wants news of Atlanta.

Your attention is on the letter. You hit on an idea. By packing up things and mailing them to Flavia, you can answer the letter, and at the
same time clear off the dinner table, and put an end to your daughter’s cracks about ‘stove buffet.’

First, there’s
The List
, the book written by Chet Dettlinger with Jeff Prugh. Originally serialized not in an Atlanta paper but in the
Chicago Sun
in April 1984, the book arrived in Atlanta bookstores in May. An important book, it dismantles the myth of the official version. It (1) offers what should have been the pattern noted by the authorities—the geographical and personal links between the victims; (2) makes more than a strong suggestion that the child-porn ring behind many of the murders was known to the authorities; (3) points out the blunders made by the police, the media, city hall, and the trial judge and attorneys; (4) names a lot of names—suspects under surveillance but never questioned, suspects questioned but then released, witnesses who at their own risk fingered neighbors who’d been seen with victims, who’d been seen molesting victims, who’d been seen going off with victims, who’d been seen carrying child-size bundles, who’d been seen on the phone tipping the authorities to where a body could be found. On local TV and radio, those who interviewed the writing pair together or singly kept the focus on the book’s formal imperfections—the book has no index, the book has no coherent structure, the book the book the book, its tone is bitter, its criticism of police and media methods harsh in general and in particular—and didn’t get into the findings of the detective and the investigative journalist.

You slip the
Sentinel
piece into the cover of
The List
and pack it. You wish you could also pack the Glover book, the long-awaited book by Camille Bell, and the book overdue from Sondra O’Neale, but they’ve not appeared. Baldwin’s
Evidence of Things Seen
, however, did. Had it been a voice in the chorus and not out there alone,
Evidence
would have helped round out the story. Alone, it didn’t fill the expectations of those expecting a hard-hitting look at White House—FBI—CIA machinations in Atlanta as both the Baldwin and Glover books had been rumored to do. You jot a note that the proposed film Nancy Holmes was to do with CBS News and Amnesty International fell through. You clip it together with tearsheets from out-of-town periodicals that covered a petition drive in Atlanta, Tallahassee, Santa Cruz, and other parts of the country calling for stricter child-protection laws based on the Atlanta case. Several
of the articles triggered by the broadcast and rebroadcasts of
Alex
, a teleplay about a missing child case. The program used the same post-play format as other social-problem dramas—
The Burning Bed
, about battered wives;
Consenting Adults
, about gay offspring;
Something About Amelia
, about victims of father rape; and
Surviving Teenage Suicide
—namely, panel discussions or interviews with experts and a hot line furnished by helping organizations.

The sheaf of local and out-of-town articles dated 1985 is fat. In late January ’85, when Abby Mann’s five-hour teleplay of the Atlanta Missing and Murdered Case was previewed, city and state officials went off. How dare Mann say that we were more concerned about image than about the investigation? That really makes us look bad, puts the entire city in a bad light! Those who paid any attention to the teleplay’s promotion, designed and paid for as well as designed and unpaid for, took note of how many verbs of “seeing” and how many synonyms for “image” were crammed into statements by Bush, Young, and others without one mention of children’s well-being. Earlier, when Mann’s point man had been in Atlanta and drawn fire from then Mayor Maynard Jackson, the point man, self-righteous, claimed that Mann’s only concern was the protection of Black boys. Where the hell was that concern, Maynard fired back, during the Inman reign of terror?

In a word, the two-part CBS telecast on February 10 and 12 was vicious. A wholesale attack on the very concept of Black leadership. Dopey lines jammed into actors’ mouths like, “We’ve lost that good white cop, now what do we do,” ad nauseam. On the other hand, the broadcast did reopen the discussion and gave numerous people the opportunity to try to pry the lid off. Because the script was supposedly based on
The List
, both Dettlinger and Prugh got an opportunity to put some information out to the public.

Sometime in the summer or autumn of 1985, the Williams family’s attorney Lynn Whatley must have pulled together the team of William Kunstler from New York, Alan Dershowitz from Cambridge, and maybe Bobby Lee Cook of Georgia to plot strategy based on the GBI files that linked the Ku Klux Klan to the killings. In autumn, the team would file for a writ of habeas corpus for Whatley’s client, Wayne Williams, and demand that Williams’s conviction be overturned. A
new trial was demanded on the grounds that the authorities had withheld crucial evidence about a secret investigation conducted by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. The team would also demand eight additional volumes of material that cover events from 1980 to 1981 and that seems to implicate local, state, and federal authorities in a cover-up that grew out of a relationship between a police informant and a Klan family. In spring, attorney Bobby Lee Cook would take depositions from the GBI and Atlanta Police Special Services. In the fall of 1986
Spin
magazine would publish a three-part series that reviewed the whole case in light of the new evidence. News specials appeared on TV too in this period, focusing most especially on witnesses who’d lied and witnesses who’d died since the trial.

In 1980, a police informant had infiltrated an Atlanta Klan family with ties to J. B. Stoner and to the National States Rights Party and other extremist organizations. Originally, the informant was tracking down weapons stolen from National Guard armories.

In February 1981, while FBI director Webster was saying “Not racially motivated” and local Atlantans were pressing to have a “redneck” phone call aired on the radio, the informant tipped his contact that a Klan family he’d infiltrated had bragged of their involvement in the child killings—death squad practice.

A month later, in March, while Mayor Maynard Jackson was asking for outside help, in particular for fed dollars to underwrite the no-stone-unturned investigation, the informant, wired now and escalating his activities, was having his info relayed to a GBI official higher up than his contact. The official decided to question the Klan family members on his own.

In April, while the killings continued, the GBI official gave the implicated Sanders family a clean bill of health. Days later, the informant complained to his contact that his cover had been blown.

In May, with Webster still running the same line, and an FBI agent announcing at a public gathering, “The parents did it,” buses left for the STOP-sponsored rally in D.C. and Maynard Jackson was finally getting the fed dollars released to Atlanta. Williams was stopped on the bridge the next day, questioned, released, but kept under quiet surveillance.

By December 1985, network news people and free-lance writers
were filing for access to the new material and conducting investigations of their own, researching old news stories, interviewing people, and trying to make contact in particular with witnesses and jurors, neo-Nazi types and free-lance informants. In 1986, writer Robert Keating and others published articles and produced video documentaries and news specials that cracked the case wide open coast to coast. At least one docu in the making focuses on the weapons—the automatics, the bazookas, machetes, explosives that, according to evidence from the GBI secret investigation, the Sanders family were ordered to obtain and stockpile by Edward Fields, head of the notorious National States Rights Party. Other articles focus on the drugs, again based on evidence in the GBI records, attempting to highlight the link between the paramilitary nature, the ritual cult nature, and the underground-mob criminal nature of the Ku Klux Klan and other extremists on the Right. More locally, writers began to speculate on how the costly Williams trial from December 1981 to February 1982 might have proceeded had the defendant’s attorneys had access to the suppressed files. Others raised the question, would Williams have been picked up at all?

Storage box packed, letter finished, you look around at the TV in time to get a final glimpse of the man being turned into a matinee idol. In addition to arming the thug Savimbi to topple Angola, Oliver North also organized the invasion of Grenada.

You lick the envelope closed and dump your bag on the floor for your keys. It’s 1981 all over again until you two reach the sidewalk heading for the post office. People are shooting off guns still and flinging firecrackers all over the street. They must have foreseen that you two would need an extension of the Independence Day celebrations.

B
ooks begin and end in huge debts. To begin with, Miss Adelaide’s mother used to flag me down on Cascade to inform me that someone had a nephew overseas and also had arthritis. She’d lean in the car window and say, “Well? You’re the writing lady, aren’t you?” After witnessing letters I’d write and contracts I’d draw up for people, she’d tell me that it was unfortunate that I had such a bad hand because there was a lot of writing to be done in the neighborhood. In 1979, we had a bit of an argument about it while folding clothes in the wash-erette there on Cascade near Oglethorpe. The talk of the day was the rash of abductions and murders, and it was her notion that I march myself over, shy or no shy, and write down the mothers’ stories. It was my notion that that might wind up to be a hustle or an appropriation of their tongues, in that my forte was fiction and my fictional impulse tended to override my documentary one. “Chicken shit.” Miss Adelaide’s mother said.

In 1979 and 1980, while I was still in the throes of
The Salt Eaters
, a number of friends nudged me into the realization that the sketches, narrative essays, and stories I’d been drafting about events which would later be called the Atlanta Missing and Murdered Children’s Case were really portions of a book. Special thanks to the Pomoja Writers Group for their pitch-perfect ears and their generous shoulders, which kept my chin, let us say, from dragging during several drafts from ’79 to ’85; especially to Joyce Winters and Malaika Adero, who did some leg work, and to Nikky Finney, whose discipline was such a model; to Alice Lovelace of the Southern Collective of African-American Writers for those talks on the wall at the bus stop near Ebon’s; to Charles Riley and a number of Brothers who covered my back during public readings in various years and who hipped me to tighten my security, and not a moment
too soon; to Ida Lewis, Tony Batten, and other media friends whose calls and questions kept me moving and also prepared me to recruit those who’d call later for “an angle” as research aides.

I was particularly blessed from beginning to end with a sense of familiar care, thanks to my ever-supportive mother, Helen Brehon; my consistently understanding daughter, Karma Bene, and my best friends, Jane and Sarah Poindexter, all of whom kept things rolling even though I frequently failed to hold up my end in the household or my end of the conversations. Thanks too to Jane for continuing to keep an ear out and clip the papers and for bearing up with people’s “Ain’t she done yet?” long after I’d cloistered myself. Special thanks to Karma, who ran the house and didn’t allow me to walk out of doors in my bathrobe. And to Sarah, who makes me think I wasn’t too bad an example, as she writes a mean story among other things wonderful. And me mum, who never doubted that I knew what I was doing, which must have taken a great deal of imagination and grit.

On my visits to New Orleans, my ole high-school pal Pat Carter would jump right in and ask how I was tackling the dodgy business of writing a novel about real events—a question a lot of people ask, but when Pat asks, you answer. I devised a few simple dos, don’ts, and maybes early on.