Those Bones Are Not My Child (64 page)

“Don’t forget,” Mason called out, “if you can’t report back here, we rendezvous at the Hyatt at nine p.m.”

Zala groaned and leaned against Mattie’s shoulder. It was the one piece in the overall operation she’d vetoed. The Hyatt was too conspicuous a place for them to be meeting. The lobby phones were rarely free. The conversation pits were near the fountain, making it hard to talk in groups. She’d argued hard for the Marriott. Parking was easy, and the lot was visible from the wide-paned lounge area. The restaurant-coffee shop stayed open all night. More phones were accessible. But Spence had been persistent, persistent and persuasive, though he’d offered nothing particularly convincing other than “It’s important.” Thinking he’d arranged for Teo to meet them there, she pointed out that the Marriott was as convenient from the highway as the Hyatt was. “Trust me,” he’d said again, not meeting her eyes.

“Damn,” the schoolteacher said. “I can’t get over that.” He beckoned several people over to the map. In addition to a cluster of markings for victims and attempted abductions, there was a large asterisk and a pink dot in the Lakewood Heights section, the stomping grounds of a group of prime suspects fingered by an anonymous witness who’d walked into the STOP office in February. He continued to shake his head.

“Um-believable, as my students would say. Doesn’t anybody in city government check with each other first?”

“No, that’s why they can’t come up with one damn thing,” Alice Moore said.

The others turned in her direction. It was the first word she’d spoken since sounding off at lunchtime. She opened her bag and searched for a tissue, uncomfortable with the attention.

“Heard the one they’re telling down at Simmons’s barbershop?” Mattie called over to Preener and crossed her legs to draw attention away from Alice. “Seems there was this three-time divorcée who couldn’t get laid. Her first husband was a dwarf—he couldn’t reach it.
Her second husband was gay—he didn’t want it. Her third husband was on the APD—he couldn’t find it.”

“Revun Mattie!” Preener said.

“Not in good taste?” Mattie fingered her earrings.

“Not in good taste,” Zala said, checking off item number 4 on the flipchart. She was pleased to see that Alice was chuckling into her tissue, for one split second wasn’t clutching her handbag as though ready to run out at a moment’s notice. “The next item is the upcoming issue of
The Call
. Specifically, is there a conflict between pledged confidentiality and the necessity for informing the community?”

“Aren’t we ready to roll?”

“That’s next, brother.” Speaker reached across the projectionist’s arm and turned off the lamp switch. “I’ve left the lead page free should any of us have a sudden urge to draft some copy tomorrow morning,” Speaker called out to the group.

“We get it,” the sister from SAFE said. “In case we uncover anything tonight.”

The members followed Speaker to the table and began reading as soon as he set down the pasted-up sheets of heavy paper.

Mason caught Zala’s signal and inserted himself between the two people most likely to stretch the critique into an all-night blowout; Mac, with his psychosocial sermonizing, and Baba, the cultural nationalist. With Leah gone, her trigger-ready-Marxist-teacher reflex absent, the probability of another impromptu seminar was reduced considerably. As for Speaker, the film notes inside the suitcase lids had him occupied.

“We need hard, critical feedback, people,” Speaker called out, shuffling through the stacks of video cassettes. “Whether it’s principled, reasonable, or not.”

“Noted,” Mason answered and leaned closer to the pages.

In a glance, it was clear that the issue in progress would continue to do what other recent issues of the newsletter had done: relate all local, national, and international news to the specific situation in Atlanta.

The secret Broederbond, guardian of South Africa’s White National Party, was compared to the ultra-right’s growing influence on United States foreign and domestic policies, suggesting that it was mandatory, the editorial argued, for Atlantans not to be sidetracked by charges of racist paranoia or appeals to good race relations. In Chicago, the lawsuit
being brought by the ACLU and the Alliance to End Repression against the City of Chicago, the FBI, the CIA, and the Defense Intelligence Agency for the illegal surveillance, harassment, infiltration, and intimidation of numerous organizations—active PTAs and local chapters of the League of Women Voters among them—occasioned
The Call’s
editors to suggest that safeguards against agents provocateurs be built into those groups pushing for a civilian review team in Atlanta. The authorities in Chicago had gone so far as to compile lists of people who borrowed public library books by and/or about Black people.

“Wake up, Africans,”
The Call
warned in bold type. “If Black books are considered a threat to national security now, what will tomorrow bring? Organize! For if conditions had fundamentally changed, would things like this be going on in Chicago, would the killings be going on in Atlanta with local, state, and federal agents continually hindering the investigations?”

Mason exchanged a look with Zala. The paper was at its best when Speaker’s rhetoric was subordinated to analysis, Mason felt. For example, there was a two-inch discussion of U.S. aid to El Salvador that was crisp and brief. Thousands of unionists were being murdered in El Salvador, a situation that American industrialists, greedy for union-free areas, found convenient. Mason slid that page to the side of the table where Mac stood reading. Let him read too how Mellon Bank was investing in South Korean steel while workers in Pittsburgh “despaired.” Maybe that page would wake Mac up. Runaway capital had nothing to do with coffee breaks or poor job skills.

“You should send a copy of this edition to Mary Davis,” Mattie called over to Speaker. She held in her hand the story devoted to clandestine prisons in Argentina and the demonstrations by the Women of the Disappeared. The same page contained the list Inquiry had compiled.

“Davis?” Alice started.

“She’s the chair of the city council’s Public Safety Committee. The parallel drawn with Atlanta is right up her alley. The list, I mean. She’s in a position to demand from Commissioner Brown a list of all the disappeared and dead.” Mattie removed that page from the table and walked over to Speaker to confer.

Mason spread out the centerfold. On one half, surrounding a photo
of the SCLC’s Reverend Lowry castigating Reagan for $1.5 million federal aid to Atlanta as compared to $2.5 million foreign aid to fascists in Central America, was an exposé of U.S. support to repressive regimes, to right-wing torture squads, to elite death corps, to terrorist policies of disappearance and murder. The other half centerfold, surrounding a collage of photos of white commando units and mercenary training camps, once again spelled out the implications of the country’s antidemocratic alliances abroad to domestic life in the States.

“Wouldn’t it be more encouraging,” Mac asked, “if
The Call
focused on successful community organizing? This material tends to overwhelm.”

“I appreciate that criticism, brother.”

Speaker’s response sounded perfunctory. From the way he was helping the mass-com intern, it was clear that he was now as anxious as the young college student to see the films.

“And the Klan still ain’t on the FBI list of terrorist organizations,” Dave said, passing one of the paste-ups to the youths behind him to read.

A chronicle of lawlessness by the ultra-right was interrupted by a penciled-in note about the Atlanta wiretaps. In lieu of verified particulars, the editors were going to discuss instead those cases that community investigators laid at the feet of Klan-like formations—the Bowen Homes deaths and the Lubie Geter murder. There was another two inches of space, with “RMVAB” penciled in.

“What’s this?” Mason pointed.

Marzala read upside down. “You haven’t seen copies of that newsletter? Two or three pages stapled together?” She went to Speaker, the person most likely to have a copy of the pseudonymous broadside that had been appearing around the city that documented acts of “Racist-Motivated Violence Against Blacks” throughout the country.

“No,” Mason heard Speaker telling Zala. “I don’t know who the editor is, but I’m glad whoever it is has taken on that responsibility.” He pulled a batch from his backpack and Zala laid the copies in the center of the table for members to pick up. Mason reached for one, then continued looking over the paste-up of
The Call
’s next edition.

“Hey, Marzala.”
He looked up. “You’ve got part of the what-you-call-it.”

“Byline,” Speaker said from the front of the carriage house. “She did the interviews with the Griers.”

“You never cease to surprise me.” Mattie reached across the table to pat Zala’s arm.

The top half of the solidarity page of
The Call
was dominated by a photo of the Day of Action demonstration in London on March 2, organized by the African and Asian women’s organizations, the West Indian Federation groups, Black trade unionists, and community and youth leaders. In what was the largest manifestation of Black political power in thirty years, twenty thousand Black Britons and supporters marched in support of the New Cross Massacre Action Committee, which currently was petitioning the Court of Appeals for a new inquest into the South London bombing in January. The bottom half of the page was dominated by photos of the Atlanta march and the Harlem Mothers’ March, both held the week after.

“Did you conduct the interviews with the folks in London too, Marzala?”

“Yes. And before we break up, Mattie, I may be passing the hat to pay the phone bill.”

“Don’t pay it, sister,” the brother in the cufi said. “When it gets up into the thousands and they still don’t cut it off, you’ll know you’re being tapped.”

Several members of the group looked up to see if Baba was kidding. He was looking at the solidarity page, and his expression was anything but humorous.

In the middle of solidarity-with-Black-Britain was a boxed-in section with two columns: the officials on the right, the community on the left. Hours after the fire on New Cross Road, the police said that it was the partying youth who’d burnt down the building. The community contended that members of the British National Front had thrown a firebomb at the house. Two days later, the papers ended coverage and quoted the police as saying the crisis was over. But three hundred people showed up for a community meeting that day, and thousands turned out for the first demonstration protesting the roundup of Black youths. British authorities continued to ignore the massacre in New Cross but issued condolences to victims of a fire in Ireland. Commissioners from Africa, the Caribbean, the United States, mainland Europe, and England expressed outrage at the authorities and announced their willingness
to participate in a fact-finding commission organized by the New Cross Massacre Action Committee.

The alliance, the article continued, caught the police manufacturing evidence and charged the media with complicity; parents then sought an injunction against the coroner, who’d used the police report at the inquest but would not read NCMAC’s Fact Finding Commission Report. The police sought to close the case by naming the party host’s boyfriend as the perpetrator, said Black man unavailable for questioning, having fled to the U.S. Whereupon the community had mobilized the demonstration on Monday, March 2. And on March 15, NCMAC began organizing an International Commission of Inquiry. Readers of
The Call
were invited to draw parallels between New Cross, and Atlanta: slow acknowledgment of the crime, blame-the-victim, denial of racist motives, the Black-man-as-culprit ploy, and the discrediting of people’s right to mobilize, organize, and investigate.

“This is a good place,” the Academy brother said, “to say how the city won’t deal with the community except through them patrols the Justice Department’s Community Relations Council set up. That’s how they’re trying to pull the rug out from under us. Like, undermine our leadership.”

“They give their patrols flashlights and walkie-talkies that don’t even work,” one of Dave’s boys said. “Chumps.”

“It might do well to include a criticism of the Techwood Squad in this issue,” Mac said.

“Now, wait a minute, brother,” Baba said.

“Mac’s right,” Speaker told Baba. “If your analysis leads you to charge some of the Techwood members with adventurism, write it up. But the presence of a few undisciplined cowboys doesn’t mean we don’t have the right to organize in our interest.”

“That was some goofy shit,” the boy in the green visor said to Dave. “First they tell the New York Guardian Angels to get lost. Then they turn around and help them. And then call people who live here outside agitators.”

“Maybe Marzala here can interview you as a panel,” Mattie suggested, just as Mac brushed by her, muttering. He’d been reading, she noticed, the end of the solidarity article, a report of the uprising in the Brixton district of London. The article predicted insurrections in London’s Southall district and in Liverpool’s Toxteth, where police
repression was said to be particularly brutal in response to broad-base organizing by West Indian, Pakistani, Indian, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan, Tasmanian, Sudanese, and Ethiopian peoples.

“I take it
The Call
is recommending street rebellions in Atlanta,” Gaston said. “Is that what’s implied?” He looked from Mac to Zala to Speaker, then smoothed the wrinkles out of his jacket where he kept his lug wrench.

Speaker muttered something about collective responsibility.

“There’s a question on the floor,” Mac persisted.

Unusually quiet, Dave wandered away from the table to look over the suspects chart. Zala followed. Mason too left off reading and joined them near the potbelly stove.

Utilizing information gleaned from the DA’s office, from TF headquarters, from Dowell’s police informants, from the newsrooms, from the vets who’d maintained ties with the Bowen residents, from tenants council members who monitored the Justice Department spies who in turn were monitoring their city-controlled patrols, from a Community Watch captain who was keeping tabs on the Laundromat attendant named in summer, from three youth workers keeping tabs on the house on Gray Street, and from community workers on the case since Roy Innis’s witness had sessioned with the authorities, they’d drawn up a list of suspects. Eight of the seventeen names were marked three times, meaning they had been cited by three separate sources. Several had more than three checks by their names. Five were asterisked, indicating connection to more than one victim. Color-coded dots designated seven suspects who palled around together on a regular basis.