Those Bones Are Not My Child: A Novel

Description

Written over a span of twelve years, and edited by Toni Morrison, who calls Those Bones Are Not My Child the author's magnum opus, Bambara's last novel leaves us with an enduring and revelatory chronicle of an American nightmare.

In a suspenseful novel of uncommon depth and intensity, Toni Cade Bambara renders a harrowing portrait of a city under siege. Having elected its first black mayor in 1980, Atlanta projected an image of political progressiveness and prosperity. But between September 1979 and June 1981, more than forty black children were kidnapped, sexually assaulted, and brutally murdered throughout "The City Too Busy to Hate."

A separated mother of three holding down several jobs, Zala Spencer has managed to survive on the margins of a flourishing economy until she awakens the morning of Sunday, July 20, 1980, to find her teenage son Sonny missing. As the hours turn into days, Zala realizes that Sonny is among the many cases of missing children just beginning to attract national attention. Growing increasingly disillusioned with the authorities, who respond to Sonny's disappearance with cold indifference, Zala and her estranged husband embark on a desperate search. Through the eyes of a family seized by anguish and terror, we watch a city roiling with political, racial, and class tensions.

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On a Friday night in July 1979, the first victim in what would come to be called the Atlanta Child Murders disappeared. Over the course of two years, more than 40 African American children would die--abused, mutilated, strangled--before an arrest in 1981 apparently settled the issue. Wayne Williams, a black man, was accused, tried, and convicted of the murders, and the good citizens of Atlanta breathed easy again, assured that the crimes had not been racially motivated after all, and that the criminal was behind bars.

Or was he? In her posthumously published novel, Those Bones Are Not My Child, Toni Cade Bambara revisits the summer of 1980 and suggests a chilling alternative:

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 is 3:23 on your Mother's Day watch. And your child is nowhere in sight.

The protagonist of Bambara's novel is Marzala Rawls Spencer, an African American mother of three who is managing--just--to raise her family, hold down three jobs, and attend night school. When her 12-year-old son, Sundiata, doesn't return from a camping trip, Zala finds herself plunged into the nightmarish possibility that he has become the latest victim in the series of murders rocking the "City Too Busy to Hate." As she and her estranged husband, Spence, frantically attempt to discover what has happened to their child, the book takes them through the complicated morass of politics, race relations, and class that bedevil Atlanta--and perhaps obstruct the search for the true killer.

Bambara worked on Those Bones Are Not My Child for 12 years before her death in 1995. Toni Morrison edited the manuscript for publication, and though the occasional rough edge shows through, the well-drawn characters and inherent human drama in this stranger-than-fiction tale overcome its minor weaknesses. This is the novel Toni Cade Bambara will be remembered for, and rightly so. --Alix Wilber

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Customer Reviews

A Worthy Subject ...but too disjointed
I read the opening lines of this book in a book review and was hooked. The beginning chapter is so compelling and since I remember those days of the Atlanta Child Murders, I wanted to read this book.

Let's start with the title, "Those Bones Are Not My Child"...when I read the chapter in which those words were uttered by a parent of a missing child it gave me chills. That anyone would have to identify a child of theirs by reaching under a sheet and feeling a skull, knee or shoulder bone to seek recognition is heart wrenching. The writing, in parts is so good I could not put it down. In other areas there was so much detail about things not really related to the story that I found myself skipping pages just to get to the next informational part (something I never normally do). I also found it hard to follow some of the characters. Names of people would pop up without any detail of who they were and how they were related, which forced me to back track looking for a previous reference - which I rarely found.

I have stuck it out to the end with this book and it was worth the effort. I gained insight into the investigation. I was 20 at the time these incidents occured and accepted the fact that Wayne Williams was guilty of this awful killing spree. Reading this book, and living another 25 + years has taught me that things are seldom what they seem. Does it seem likely that one person could be responsible for the numerous missing and murdered children? NO. Could there be a connection to child pornography &/or the KKK? Absolutely. Will the truth ever come out? Doubtful.

2007-06-02 (New Jersey) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 3

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Proustian pain flourishing
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

2002-06-09 (Brighton United Kingdom) | Helpful Votes: 3 | Rating: 5

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The Ending?
I plowed through Bambara's huge book on the subject of the Atlanta child murders - and I stuck with it out of a loyalty to two of my favorite writers: Bambara and Toni Morrison. It was beautifully written in parts and very tedious in others. My question is this: what happens at the end? I don't get it. Whose voice does Zala hear inside that causes her to rush into Gitten's house. I really have puzzled over this. Clues?

2001-07-28 | sfountain@mail.ptsd.wednet.edu (Port Townsend, WA United States) | Helpful Votes: 3 | Rating: 3

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Tense Novel Probes Killings in Atlanta
... Zala Spencer has waited up all night for Sonny, her 12-year-old, to come home. Lately he's been hard to manage, but he's never stayed out overnight, and this morning she won't let him stroll in and talk his way around her. As Zala paces the house, she represses the knowledge currently terrifying Atlanta's black community: this summer its children, one by one, are being murdered. Thus readers enter the life of a fictional family whose son disappears during the Atlanta child killings of 1979-1981, when 29 black youths were slain.

Author Toni Cade Bambara was living in Atlanta at the time of the murders, and after several children's bodies were found but officials seemed unconcerned, she began keeping a journal. She filled twelve notebooks, which she spent more than a decade revising into a historical novel. By the time she died in 1995, she had drafted an imposing manuscript, animated by her vexed fascination with America's latest racial Catch-22: that blacks who suspect authorities of prejudice are paranoid, or themselves prejudiced, because our society is now color-blind.

Bambara isn't a one-sided social critic. "Those Bones Are Not My Child" blames black communities for their quietism after the Civil Rights movement: "The ballot secured, reps in office, … folks had laid down their weapons in the public square and sauntered off to read the papers." In Bambara's view all Americans today are chasing the good life instead of social justice. Still, in Atlanta between 1979 and 1981, hundreds of black citizens became activists like Bambara's protagonist, Zala. Weary from the difficulties of raising Sonny in a world dangerous to black males, and now traumatized by his disappearance, Zala is feisty, too. She and her husband join STOP, a group of parents trying to energize a lukewarm, lagging investigation into the killings.

Readers are plunged into the daily round of a community in crisis whose situation is ignored, misunderstood, or exploited by powers-that-be. STOP urges civic leaders to declare a public emergency - something is menacing Atlanta's children, even if it's not an organized vendetta against black youth. But the official view is that systematic or racist violence can't happen in "the city too busy to hate." Stories about serial killings would be bad PR for an Atlanta ambitious to be a world-class location for corporations, conventions, even a future Olympics. Zala finds it infuriating that the minimal publicity given the case treats the parents as primary suspects. Worse, when evidence clears the parents, officials speculate that the children were narcotics runners murdered by ghetto druglords, or runaways from family poverty and neglect who met with fatal accidents.

Bambara shows that when citizens can't trust authorities to be diligent or impartial, rumors multiply. Someone in the black community hears that whites are kidnapping their boys to use in porn films and snuff flicks, but that all evidence implicating whites is being suppressed. Others say that an official deliberately lost a recording of a Klansman's boasts about participating in the murders. Still others insist that the 1980 explosion in a black daycare center that killed four children must be from KKK dynamite, not a flaw in the building's ancient boiler. The arrest of a black man looks like a predictable gambit in a white cover-up, especially because now newspapers jump to give the case daily front-page prominence at last.

Small wonder that Atlanta's black community comes to view the trial of the accused man, Wayne Williams, as a white frame-up. Williams is charged with two killings and convicted on the basis of circumstantial evidence, mainly fibers found on the bodies of victims. According to the grapevine, Caucasian hairs were also found but prosecutors ignored that detail, and they apply the fiber evidence to the other murders only because they want all the cases closed even if a killer is still at large. In sum, Bambara's novel shows us what it's like to live hours, days, and years in the midst of beleaguered fear, mistrust, and indignation.

So it's an important story for all Americans, although the book is overlong - the anguish of parents as they seek their missing children, build theories, and witness official inaction is a slender plot on which to hang 600+ pages. Had Bambara lived longer, she might have cut the manuscript. She does try to heighten drama by elaborating sensory detail and starting chapters like short stories whose temporarily withheld explanations might tantalize a reader, but these strategies often prove distracting. Still, the first half of the book compels attention, and domestic scenes with the Spencer family are deft and moving throughout the narrative. The final two chapters become gripping as the mystery of Sonny's disappearance is solved.

In any case, we choose a historical novel for more than just its novelistic technique, and we can't choose a different novel on the subject - there are no others. I'm grateful that Bambara wrote the manuscript before she died and that Nobel-winning novelist Toni Morrison shepherded it through posthumous publication.

2001-07-27 (Seattle, WA USA) | Helpful Votes: 8 | Rating: 3

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Those Bones are Not My Child
I was facinated to start reading about the Atlanta Child Murders but was extrememly disappointed in the way this book was written. Its really a shame that its so thick with various details that take you away from the subject at hand. I cannot think of a more poorly written book, and how unfortunate too since it is about such a heart-felt tragedy to everyone, regardless of race. As intriguing as this subject is, if you wish to learn more about the despicable Atlanta Child Murders, you'll be wise to find it from another source.

2001-04-04 | Helpful Votes: 2 | Rating: 1

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Savoring the Salt: The Legacy of Toni Cade Bambara

Description

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The Black Woman: An Anthology

Description

A collection of early, emerging works from some of today's most celebrated African American female writers

When it was first published in 1970, The Black Woman introduced readers to an astonishing new wave of voices that demanded to be heard. In this groundbreaking volume of original essays, poems, and stories, a chorus of outspoken women -- many who would become leaders in their fields: bestselling novelist Alice Walker, poets Audre Lorde and Nikki Giovanni, writer Paule Marshall, activist Grace Lee Boggs, and musician Abbey Lincoln among them -- tackled issues surrounding race and sex, body image, the economy, politics, labor, and much more. Their words still resonate with truth, relevance, and insight today.

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Customer Reviews

Black woman writers
I haven't finished this book but so far it is for surely a keeper the stories in here are just amazing, and to think the voices comes from northern writers, southern writers simply beautiful and strong and passionate awesome!!!

2010-07-22 | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Great Anthology on Women in The Movement
Until it went out of print, I assigned this book for years in my college course on the civil rights movement. Even though many new books on women in the Civil Rights and Black Power movements are now available, Cade's anthology is an excellent collection of contemporary documents covering issues such as the sexism of welfare, the role of women in the Revolution, and abortion and reproductive rights. Although some of the materials may seem "dated" to younger readers, these are authentic "back in the day" voices of Black women who were in the middle of the feminist and Black Power movements.

2005-12-05 (University of Maryland) | Helpful Votes: 8 | Rating: 4

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The Salt Eaters

Description

Set in Claybourne, a small town somewhere in the South, THE SALT EATERS is the story of a community of black faith healers who, searching for the healing properties of salt, witness an event that will change their lives forever.

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Customer Reviews

The Salt Eaters
This is a book that I read a long time ago and I am revisiting it now that I am older and I am loving it and understanding it even more....enjoyed this read!!!

2010-07-22 | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Want to feel Stupid?
I can't believe that this book got that many stars or good reviews. I've been reading this book for two weeks and it usually doesn't take me that long just when i think I'm about to get it...I don't and there is so much going on I think I've developed ADHD or something. I don't know if there are healing properities in salt, but at this point I don't care if they find out or not. If it weren't for the fact that I hate not finishing a book...I would be just that finished. I'm not an Einstein but im definetely no dummy and this book made me feel stupid. I hope her other books arent as hard to keep up.

2007-04-02 | butterfly (texas) | Helpful Votes: 2 | Rating: 1

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Salt Eaters Requires Much, Rewards Much
This book is best read straight through in one or two sittings. The main action of the story, Velma Henry's healing, takes place in a matter of minutes but requires the entire book to extend through the minds past, present, and future of multiple characters--onlookers and passersby. Each scene requires subsequent scenes to unpack, unfold, and explain it. Toni Cade Bambara has ensured that the attentive reader will be richly rewarded for waiting and wondering. Even the smallest details--a baby bird fallen from its nest--are presented so luminously that when they are revisited pages later they are instantly recognizable. These continual moments of recognition knit together a novel that otherwise might stretch to bursting the limits of time, place, character, and spirit.

This wise novel cares deeply about healing on political, environmental, and personal levels. Salt, the title image, serves as an antidote to poison but embitters a body; it runs through the neck of an hourglass as a moment in time becomes crucial.

In this moment in time, to drumbeats and the strains of popular music, we meet a group of healers, a spirit guide, a bus driver, the doctors at a free clinic, a paperboy, winos, sisters, lovers, all kinds of mothers, tourists, thugs, transvestites, elders, animals--all of them teach us something about the soul of one strong woman broken under the weight of her passion for justice.

Are there weapons stockpiled at the Academy? Is the nuclear power plant slowly killing its employees? What will happen tonight at the carnival? These questions pale beside the central question: Will yesterday's struggle yield fruit tomorrow? Is there hope?

-K. Beachy

2004-03-04 | Helpful Votes: 11 | Rating: 5

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Not for the faint at heart...
"The Salt Eaters" by Toni Cade Bambara is definitely not a book for those who are faint at heart. This book is filled with unexpected twists and seemingly extraneous information, and may seem quite confusing at times. There were times when I contemplated not finishing the book, thinking that I was too lost in the thick of the plot to truely garner any meaning. I later realized that the beauty of this classic comes at the end, upon the realization that you were never lost - it was the characters who were lost, they were just bringing you along for the ride. It is much like an excursion through a dense jungle, filled with possible pitfalls and dangerous twists and turns that leads one to emerge upon a beautiful beach, just in time for the sunset.

The possible confusion that one might encounter on a first read through this book is due in part to the fact that it is largely written in the style of an epic poem, rather than in the "traditional" form of a novel. Many of the books subtleties and gems can be discovered upon subsequent readings of the book. As this is my first book by Bambara, I am somewhat unfamiliar with Bambara's usual style - if it can be said that she has one at all - but my experiences with "The Salt Eaters" draws me to dig deeper into her repertoire and learn to appreciate her mastery for her craft.

2001-02-06 (NYC Metro) | Helpful Votes: 19 | Rating: 4

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For people that love reading
You need to be aquipped to enter the world of Toni Cade Bambara. I discovered Bambara because her name was often associated with that of Toni Morrison.Bambara is a strong writer, with strong convinctions, and with a militant kind of writing. What she teaches us in this novel is that everything is organized in a network, that everything goes together. More importantly perhaps, she teaches us that freedom is a matter of choice and that it always carries reponsibilities: do you want to be free and what do you want to do with your freedom? This is the question that the novel underscores, the question to which the characters need to find an answer. You come out of "The salt Eaters" full with questions about your place in the universe and what you want in your life. Bambara does not merely depicts a world of victims, of brutalization, alienation and dehumanization. At the center of the novel is the message that you can do something to better the world you live in if only you choose to be well and take responsibility for what it entails. Bambara also makes clear that though everything's in a network, the individual still has the power to take action that may change not only himself and his community but the world at large. For sure, we may question this somewhat idealistic and utopian vision, but is literature anything else but a big utopia?

Some readers may be beffudled at Bambara syntax and vocabulary (and yes this is hard to decode), but once you get beyond that you're just disappointed that Bambara did not write many novels: you're in the presence of a great artist, that is someone that has a style, a vision, and a message.

1999-08-05 | Helpful Votes: 2 | Rating: 4

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Gorilla, My Love

Description

Ms. Bambara grabs you by the throat...she dazzles, she charms." -- Chicago Daily News

In these fifteen superb stories, written in a style at once ineffable and immediately recognizable, Toni Cade Bambara gives us compeIling portraits of a wide range of unforgettable characters, from sassy children to cunning old men, in scenes shifting between uptown New York and rural North CaroLina. A young girl suffers her first betrayal. A widow flirts with an elderly blind man against the wishes of her grown-up children. A neighborhood loan shark teaches o white social worker a lesson in responsibility. And there is more. Sharing the world of Toni Cade Bambara's "straight-up fiction" is a stunning experience.

"Among the best portraits of black life to have appeared in some time." -- Saturday Review

"Bambara presents situations that build like improvisations on a melody....As drawn with spirit and subtlety. [her characters] are-even in their defeats-a pleasure to watch."

-- Newsweek

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Customer Reviews

Truly wonderful story collection
These stories moved, entertained and enlightened me more than almost anything else I've ever read. Each story describes different aspects of African-American life. The characters are so vivid and strong that I felt I could see them and, eventually, understand them.

Many of the stories feature young adults and are narrated by them. "Raymond's Run" is read in schools throughout America and the world, but many other of her stories are just as good. Although some of the language is strong, I think Gorilla My Love is suitable for children and will help them grow and understand the world they live in.

I wish Toni Cade Bambara had continued to write stories like these. Her later writing was much more overtly political and maybe not as accessible to most audiences. She died too young, but Gorilla My Love will still be read 100 years from now.

2010-05-26 | David Spero RN (San Francisco, CA United States) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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A Gem
I find it interesting that some reviewers think that this book is too mature for kids to read. This has been one of my favorite books since I was 14. The rhythm and flow of each story are flawless. The voice and language are unique and beautiful . While some stories definitely take the cake (Raymond's Run, The Lesson, Gorilla, My Love), the entire body of work is really quite something. It's just unfortunate that more people don't know about Bambara. While I agree that it may be somewhat unreasonable for 13-year-olds to read this, I don't think it's as far a stretch as some may predict. Sometimes, things make more since when you're younger. Sometimes, you learn something different when you read it at different ages. Either way, this collection does not disappoint, and I'd recommend it to everyone.

2007-05-26 | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Not What I Had Hoped For
I bought this collection of short stories based on "The Lesson," which is a tremendously good short story...one that is at the top of my list of many. However, the rest of the stories, with the exception of "The Hammer Man" fell short for me. Some seemed a little off track and nonsensical, and some, I am sorry to say, seemed a bit banal. Perhaps the problem lies with me and I am simply not making the connections necessary to feel "close" to the literature...
I will always love "The Lesson," and the fact that Bambara's storytelling in authentic black vernacular is raw and unparalleled... but there were stories here, in my opinion, that simply did not move me. When I finish reading something...anything... I expect it to have taught me something new (like a "lesson") or to have made me think differently in one way or another. For the majority of these stories, this just simply did not occur.
Nevertheless, the collection is worth purchasing if only for "The Lesson" and "The Hammer Man."

2006-06-18 (Royal Oak, Michigan United States) | Helpful Votes: 3 | Rating: 3

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The title story is amazing.
I sympathize with all the thirteen and fourteen year olds who have to write about this book. You are all morons. I have to write an essay on it too and I am a sophomore in college. (I think the lesson here is don't go to college. Seriously, you're wasting your time and your parent's money. You'd be better off taking up smoking crack as a hobby.) But, I still think this is a good story. And I will enjoy writing this paper. And I will enjoy the crepe I eat tomorrow morning for breakfast. And I will be satisfied for as long as I live for crepes exist and they are made to be eaten by people with teeth and jaws, both of which I possess. I suppose you could say crepes were made for me and I was made for crepes.

Love, and God speed, weary travelers,
The Pooper

2005-03-25 | pooper (New York, NY) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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"Here we are . . . the Johnson girls."
The posted reviews make clear that students are being asked to read this book at too young an age. I teach the book to my college students, and they too struggle with the stories, which are sometimes puzzling. At a first go-through, the reader is in the position of the two Northerners in "Mississippi Ham Rider," who go down South to interview a famous blues singer and get tested by locals who won't make the task of locating the singer easy. In fact, the book teaches you how to read it as you move through it. Rarely has a collection of stories been more tightly unified and balanced. The stories vary point of view, and do not reflect the perspective of one person, although some characters come back in various stories.

Perhaps the hardest one in the book is the title story ("Gorilla, My Love"). Here the author uses a difficult stream-of-consciousness style to convey the mental condition of Hazel, a young girl heartbroken to learn that her uncle ("Hunca Bubba") is not going to marry her like he promised he would. Hazel innocently believed that that when you say something, you stick by it. The point of view initially obscures the problem Hazel has, but finally reveals it: she hasn't grown up yet. Bambara introduces difficult flows of thought and unclear words into the story to confuse the reader and make her feel like Hazel does. Thus the reader identifies with the character just by reading the story. (By the way, the film Hazel sees named "Gorilla, My Love" is about the crucifixion of Jesus, and it has no gorilla in it--which is exactly the point: you often don't get what you expect out of life, but must take what it gives and work with it.)

The strongest stories here are "My Man Bovanne," "Gorilla, My Love," "Raymond's Run," "The Hammer Man," "The Lesson" (my personal favorite), and the final story, "The Johnson Girls," which pulls the themes of the book together when Gail stands up and says that as a group, all the women can come up with "a sure-fire program" to help one of them win back the man she wants. That's the author's ultimate message: in isolation we lose out, but together there is nothing we can't accomplish. Of course, Bambara is right.

2004-05-08 | michaeleme (MO, United States) | Helpful Votes: 15 | Rating: 5

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The Sea Birds Are Still Alive

Description

Ten stories of Black life written with Ms. Bambara's characteristic vigor, sensibility and winning irony. The stories range from the timid and bumbling confusion of a novice community worker in "The Apprentice" to the love-versus-politics crisis of an organizers wife, to the dark and bright notes of the title story about the passengers on a refugee ship from a war-torn Asian nation.

Young girls, weary men, lovers, frauds and revolutionaries -- Toni Cade Bambara handles them all the expertise, passion and huge talent. As the Chicago Daily News said, "Ms. Bambara grabs you by the throat...she dazzles, she charms."

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