Those Bones Are Not My Child (77 page)

Jessica Grier wheeled the Herby Curby in from the street as far as her side window. Silas could take it from there; it was too hot to push it. She hadn’t intended leaving the house at all, but she’d found a letter for the Spencers slipped inside the Spiegel catalog the mailman left. Eventually they’d come to the front door and see it. She glanced toward the church on the corner where the piano was being tuned. The tuner was cranking one note, higher, higher, the sound tightening her temples.

Her garden was dying. The greens were crispy. Vines on the A frame Silas had built in the spring were withered. Clusters of blue-gray grapes, dusty underneath and shriveled on top, were trying to hide from the sun under seared leaves. In the next yard a young woman in shorts got up from a deck chair and went inside. Across the fence the woman Mrs. Grier usually saw only during planting time was seated on her back porch, a bowl of ice under the fan on the wringer-type washer beside her, her feet in a basin. Mrs. Grier waved, not really expecting the parboiled woman to respond.

Mrs. Grier walked slowly to her own back porch. Prickly heat had already popped under her brassiere band. She looked at the back door of the unit next to hers, wondering if she shouldn’t knock. The letter might be important. It was from New York, handwritten; might be a friend in trouble. There was so much trouble. She and Silas had been to a memorial program for Walter Rodney, killed by a bomb planted in a walkie-talkie by, many said, one of Guyanese President Forbes Burnham’s henchmen. The loss of Dr. Rodney, scholar, organizer, freedom fighter, was a great tragedy, a terrible loss, not only for the people of Guyana but for thousands outside the Caribbean community as well. Rodney had planned to journey to London in an act of solidarity with the embattled West Indian community there. There was another memorial scheduled by some of the university people. The Griers planned to go to that one too.

Mrs. Grier stepped over the raised brick that divided the back steps of the duplex. Perhaps the letter from New York was cheering news that
she should deliver. Perhaps the Spencers had news to share too, now that the child killer was in jail, where he could be questioned about their boy and the others. She couldn’t be sure with so many radios and televisions going all day and at once, but it seemed that the radio was on in the Spencer kitchen, though no one answered the door. On the back porch by the sack of barbecue charcoal was a stack of papers. On it was a program from a recent Soweto Memorial Rally. Forty-seven children, it said, had been found in mass graves in South Africa. She bowed her head and fingered the rickrack on her apron.

“So much hatred,” she said, and knocked one last time.

She curled her toes to hold her slippers on and stepped back over the brick to her own rear door. There was no danger of the letter blowing away; she’d stuck it behind the front door knob, and there was no breeze at all. She went in slowly, looking over her shoulder at the houses beyond. What would neighbors say of the Griers if television cameras set up in the front by the jade trees? It was hard to believe that the people she saw on the news offering all sorts of comments about the Williams family were real people, not actors in a very bad drama show. All the Williams boy had done that they could prove was drive over a bridge. And who could say if the fibers they were talking about in the papers hadn’t come from the police blankets or the carpet in the coroner’s van or from the clothes the people who handled the remains wore?

Slowly she moved into the shade-drawn cool of her living room and sat down on the sofa, which she’d covered with sheets. She could hear water running next door. She’d ring them up in a minute. She couldn’t blame them for not coming to the door. It was too hot to stir.

Mattie held her glass up and Paulette squeezed the lemon in it, reading the catalog over Mattie’s shoulders. “In the market for a nine-millimeter Luger, are you? Or is the bipod you’re after for your automatic? Feeder belt comes equipped with a ball of beeswax, I see. That’s nice.” She dropped the lemon in her own glass and sat down. “I say we order something from this outfit and see what happens.”

Mattie wet her fingers and turned the page. Zala shook out the extension cord and moved the radio to the table. Paulette searched the out-of-town papers for a scrap of evidence that the packets they’d gone broke assembling had sparked someone’s courage. The news reports on
the radio all resembled each other. They each repeated the “lone wolf” theme, condensed events from May 22 to June 22 into one minute, then used the update since the arrest for a special touch. One commentator, preferring gossip, shrewdly inflected quotation marks around statements potentially libelous and built on what neighbors in the Verbena-Anderson Park district had said; he concluded that the Williams household was pathological, son and father reportedly seen fighting in a downtown parking lot years ago, father and son said to have kept the missus locked in the attic without food or water, alleged affection extended to the family dog of an allegedly unnatural order.

Another station took a scientific turn, interviewing a serologist who said that though sexual activity had long been denied in all of the cases, one should not rule out the possibility that semen might still be detected in the anal cavities of the victims and through analysis be linked to Williams’s blood type. A guest on another news show was a forensic specialist who stated that the scanning electron microscope, or SEM, could magnify specimens such as hairs from an Alaskan malamute or German shepherd to a powerful degree. A more dramatic specialist on another station described the ability of the gas chromatograph and the mass spectrometer to analyze and make matches between material samples such as paint.

The three women propped their elbows on the table, drank iced tea, glanced at the weapons catalog, and brooded about equipment they did not have in order to examine their samples thoroughly.

Paulette recommended once again that they make use of what they did have, the catalog from the 6 Star warehouse. “For twenty-four ninety-five we could order a canister of mustard gas. That includes postage and handling.” She smiled wryly. “Should I get the phone? Might be Stuff-’n’-such.”

“That’s Alice, I can feel it.” Zala set her glass down, hungry for a soda cracker.

“Could be Dave calling to say goodbye. He’s packed up and ready to move out. I need to pack myself and see my mama. If that’s your pastor, I’ll tell him you can’t stir. You need all your strength for suffering.”

“Go to hell,” Zala said. “It’s Alice. She’ll give up after a while.”

“So what do we do, wait for the printer to release the issue of
The Call?
”

“We could hold a press conference. Everybody else does.”

“It’s more than a notion.”

Mattie turned pages. Paulette read over her shoulder. And Zala changed the station once again. One station wrapped up its news report with stab-in-the-dark theorizing about Williams’s reasons for killing. He was jealous of children, having once been a celebrated child prodigy and now an unemployed adult. He hated the little street hoodlums; they offended his sense of race pride. He despised the ability of unremarkable children to hustle money while he, with his superior IQ, had yet to make a killing.

“Please,
please
change that, Marzala.”

The wrap-up on the next station called attention to White House interference in the case. The meeting between Vice President Bush, Governor George Busbee, the FBI, and Fulton County District Attorney Lewis Slaton had “the aroma of politics about it,” the newscaster said, dropping his voice low.

The three women moved the news clippings to the side and placed the radio in the center of the table. One DJ was rapping the rap, saying that those who’d boarded the buses for the STOP rally in D.C. on May 21 came home all fired up and had Atlanta turning on the spit for a month. That’s why the brother had been bagged: things were getting too hot. Police in the various counties weren’t getting any of the federal money for overtime. A lot of other sectors were threatening insurrection and mutiny. But especially fired up were the people back from the rally. For openers, they were determined to get answers to their questions about the rumored LEAA memo and the redneck phone call. The first thing they learned was that STOP was being hassled by the consumer affairs office for illegal solicitation of funds. The next thing they knew a Blood was in cuffs and white commentators were grinning all over themselves.

Many Atlantans were returning from D.C. in the early morning hours of Friday, May 22, when an FBI-conducted stakeout squad of local, state, and federal officers focused on a 1970 white Chevy wagon driven by a young Black man. He was questioned as to why he was driving across the Jackson Parkway Bridge at that hour, then let go. Newspaper readers would not hear of the incident at the bridge until June 4, after the man was called in for questioning by the FBI. Commissioner Brown continued to echo the refrain “no connection,” “no suspects,” “no arrest expected,” up to the moment Williams was taken into custody.

One DJ was saying, as Marzala fiddled with the tuning knob, that the FBI was conducting the murder investigation because the White House wanted to see something for the money it was pumping into Atlanta. On another station, the word was: “The White House was pissed about all the demonstrations in the capital and were calling for blood, Bloods!”

On the college station, a student read from notes she’d taken at the STOP rally in D.C. Thousands had been there to protest the erosion of affirmative action, of the Voters Rights Act, of legal aid to the poor programs. There to protest the efforts of the Senate Judiciary Committee, headed up by Strom Thurmond, to set up a Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism and Security and usher in a new McCarthy witch hunt / HUAC era. There to protest Senator Jeremiah Denton of Alabama’s charge that Mobilization for Survival was a mob ruled by the KGB. There to protest the expulsion of the Libyan embassy from the United States and Mobil and Exxon’s pressure to escalate the government’s terrorist moves against Qaddafi. There to protest the role of USAID in the infant formula controversy in the Third World. And thousands representing the National Anti-Klan Network and similar organizations had been there to demand that fascist terrorists groups be outlawed and their training camps prohibited. The student had been there with a green ribbon and STOP button to protest the obvious coverup going on in Atlanta. “Now we find out,” she said, “that they’d picked out a scapegoat before most of us got back to the city.”

A community worker was being interviewed on a call-in show, offering his version of the events that had turned Atlanta into a tinderbox and Williams into a scapegoat. In May, while Mayor Jackson was in Washington getting the pledged federal dollars released, the FBI had once again announced that they’d solved the case, and Maynard had hit the ceiling. Within hours, seventeen-year-old William Barrett had disappeared from the McDaniel-Glenn area, where John Porter and Nathaniel Cater and several younger victims on the TF list had lived. Barrett was found the next day, strangled and stabbed on Glenwood Road near I-20, where six others on the TF list had been either last seen or finally found. He was called the twenty-seventh victim in twenty-three months.

“If the FBI was on the case and ready to wrap things up, why
weren’t they staking out those two obvious areas?” the community worker asked. “Now all the bureaus agree that the case is solved. But all they mean is that they’ve turned their attention to Williams and are no longer investigating cases of disappearances and murders. If people have information about missing children or adults from the area, I invite you to call in,” he said.

Then he turned his attention to another case, the police murder of Fenton Talley.

“I don’t argue that Talley should be on the official list. But the fact that we’ve heard so little about what occurred the day before the announcement came over the air that the Missing and Murdered case was solved should make responsible people wonder.”

In pursuit of Fenton Talley, twenty-six, who allegedly had hit the back of a school bus with a stick, SWAT and a corps of one hundred APD regulars and an armed helicopter had occupied a four-block area in the Black community. After a two-and-a-half-hour, one-way barrage of bullets and tear gas, Talley was dead. And his friend, cowering in the wreckage of his home, was charged with resisting arrest.

“Before Maynard Jackson took over,” the community worker said, “Atlanta was the leading city in per-capita deaths by the police. In 1973, the APD gunned down twenty-nine people; all but two were Black males. Fourteen of those twenty-seven were under twelve years of age. I’d like to know a few things. How many of those cops last month who shot up the neighborhood and killed Talley had been among those demoted by Reggie Eaves for having brutal records? My second question is, Are we on the threshold of a new reign of police terror now that the state and federal authorities
think
they’ve pushed Maynard Jackson aside?”

“I recognize his voice,” Mattie said. “He was on the air when the Techwood bat squad was arrested. He called Deputy Eldrin Bell and City Attorney Mays on the carpet for misleading the squad about their right to carry weapons, then turning around and arresting them.”

“When did the Fenton Talley thing go down?” Paulette sucked on the lemon. “We must’ve been busy developing the photos and getting the 6 Star packets ready for distribution. What he said makes you think. Who is keeping track of disappearances now that the Task Force is busy building its case against Williams?”

“I don’t wish my next comments to be misconstrued,” the worker said on the air, “but of course they will be, because we’ve all been indoctrinated against communism. No, let me correct that: indoctrinated with the phantasm of communism, and that’s not the same thing.”

On May Day, he explained, the Revolutionary Communist Party had burned flags at Techwood and were roughed up by the police who made little distinction between demonstrators, the Techwood Squad, tenants, and onlookers. Many of the same officers who’d jumped the RCP when they doused the TF office with red paint and later raised a red flag over Bowen Homes had asked for the Techwood assignment on May I. Since the media failed to go out and cover the event in a responsible manner, residents had had no opportunity to say whether they regarded the RCP as a nuisance, the police as brutal, or whether they felt police action and red-baiting were being used to discourage and discredit every attempt at community organizing.