Those Bones Are Not My Child

I found this book by accident. I went out to buy toilet rolls and bought a book that changed my life instead. Although this reads at times like a draft version with all the glitches it gives a much closer picture of Bambara's need to get this story told. It is filled with a Proustian slowness even stillness that can be overwhelming but the end result is that, for me, I can never read a book again in quite the same way. The content of the book is appalling enough but the casual, even matter of fact way in which a great deal of it is written brings the whole case into your own neighbourhood. Books are about us, they reflect a world we all inhabit and that it what makes this such an important book. Bureacracy chokes us and hides the truth from us; frustrates us. Bamabara and Morrison have produced this volume that will alter the perspective of anybody who reads it through. There is never a final answer. Such crimes can not have an easy explanation. Books of this calibre must be written and read

This novel is over 600 pages long, yet one feels driven to complete it like a piece of history made personal and real. Using cinematic structure, sharp revealing dialogue, and authentic and winning characters, Bambara creates a work of character and truth. The book maintains a vibrant and resilient vision of a family, a community, a country in crisis. Her gifts at creating empathy are transforming acts.

Toni Cade Bambara has written an incisive book about a time of terror for black families living in Atlanta at the beginning of the 1980's. A monster was loose, and its prey was black children. Was this monster singular or plural, and was its name Wayne Williams or KKK? We don't know for sure, and we may never know. But Toni Cade Bambara has effectively caught the sense of a community under siege by a nameless, faceless killer on the very first page of the book's prologue: "It's 3:23... and your child is nowhere in sight." Bambara lets the reader share the mood of the people who lived through it -- the parents whose children disappeared; the parents whose children were spared, wondering if their child might be next; the children, some of whom had friends among the victims, living in fear that it could happen to them too. Was Wayne Williams the true killer or a convenient scapegoat? Those who believe the former point to the fact that the murders stopped when he was arrested. This is a powerful, disturbing, controversial book. All the better. The Atlanta child murders needs all the light shed on them that they can get.

This book is overwhelmingly important. At times, it is almost unbearable to read not for style, but because its topic was hoped to be forgotten and buried. I cannot think of a single adult alive during the Atlanta Child Murders who really believed it was Wayne Williams who killed all of those children. It seemed so obvious to most of us that there must have been KKK or some sort of child pornography ring involved. This book smashes the all-too convenient package of that conviction to bits, and tears open old wounds, refusing to cover them up with nonsense.And yet it's a novel, with rich characters, real and reacting with the human complexity necessitated by the terror of that time.Can we read this book? All the way through? Are we better off continuing the cheap wallpaper job over the very real problems that exist in America? To me, the way in which the truth of these children and their beleagured mothers and fathers has been swept aside makes the history so much worse. Can you, dear reader, imagine that many people knew about what happened in Atlanta but did nothing with that information that would reveal the truth? And for what? Cheap, short-term convention dollars and electoral politics? It is just enfuriating, and, ultimately demoralizing.But Toni Cade Bambara is a moral force, a moral hurricane, spitting out eloquent fury, forcing the children back into history, forcing the debate to begin all over again, and, hopefully, forcing someone somewhere to bring this thing to justice.