Those Bones Are Not My Child: A Novel - Couverture souple

Bambara, Toni Cade

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0679774084 ISBN 13 : 9780679774082

Editeur : Vintage, 2000

Synopsis

Book by Bambara Toni Cade

A propos du livre

Extrait :

Monday, November 16, 1981

You're on the porch with the broom sweeping the same spot, getting the same sound -- dry straw against dry leaf caught in the loose-dirt crevice of the cement tiles. No phone, no footfalls, no welcome variation. It's 3:15. Your ears strain, stretching down the block, searching through schoolchild chatter for that one voice that will give you ease. Your eyes sting with the effort to see over bushes, look through buildings, cut through everything that separates you from your child's starting point -- the junior high school.

The little kids you keep telling not to cut through your yard are cutting through your yard. Not boisterous-bold and loose-limbed as they used to be in the first and second grades. But not huddled and spooked as they were last year. You had to saw off the dogwood limbs. They'd creak and sway, throwing shadows of alarm on the walkway, sending the children shrieking down the driveway. You couldn't store mulch in lawnleaf bags then, either. They'd look, even to you, coming upon those humps in your flowerbed, like bagged bodies.

A few months ago, everyone went about wary, tense, their shoulders hiked to their ears in order to fend off grisly news of slaughter. But now, adults walk as loose-limbed and carefree as the children who are scudding down the driveway, scuffing their shoes, then huddling on the sidewalk below.

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

You lean the broom against the hedges and stretch up on tiptoe. Big boys, junior high age, are on the other side of the avenue, wrassling each other into complicated choke holds. You holler over, trying not to sound batty. Maybe they know something. A bus chuffs by, drowning you out and masking the boys in smeary gray smoke. When it clears, they've moved on. The hedge holds you up while you play magic with traffic, making bargains with God: if one of the next four cars passing by sports the old bumper sticker HELP KEEP OUR CHILDREN SAFE, then you will know all is well, you'll calm down, pile up the leaves, make a burnt sacrifice, then get dinner on. Two cars go by, a mail truck, an out-of-state camper, then a diesel semi rumbles along. You can feel it thrumming up through your feet. Your porch windows rattle, so do your teeth. An exterminator truck pulls up and double-parks by the cleaner's. The familiar sticker is plastered on the side of the door, the word "children" under the word "pest." Your scalp prickles, ice cold. A stab of panic drives you onto the porch and straight through your door.

You dial the school. The woman who answers tells you there's no one in the building. You want to scream, point out the illogic of that, and slam down the phone. But you wheedle, you plead, you beg her to please check, it's an emergency. You can tell by the way she sucks her teeth and sets the receiver down that you're known in that office. You've been up there often about incidents they called "discipline" and you called "battering." Things weren't tense enough in Atlanta, teachers were sending "acting-out problems" to the coach to be paddled. In cut-off sweats, he took a wide-legged stance and, arms crossed against his bulging chest, asked, since it wasn't your child sent to him for punishment, what is your problem?

Exactly what the principal had wanted to know when the parents broke up the PTA meeting, demanding security measures in the school. Never enough textbooks to go around; students would linger after school to borrow each other's, then, having missed the bus, would arrive home to an hysterical household. The men voted to form safety patrols. The principal went off: "There will be no vigilantes in my school!"

City under siege. Armed helicopters overhead. Bullhorns bellowing to stay indoors. The curfew pushed back into the p.m. hours. Gun stores extending sales into the a.m. hours. Hardware stores scrambling to meet the demand for burglar bars, deadbolt locks, alarms, lead pipes, and under-the-counter cans of mace and boxes of pellets. Atlanta a magnet for every bounty hunter, kook, amateur sleuth, sooth-sayer, do-gooder, right-wing provocateur, left-wing adventurer, porno filmmaker, crack-shot supercop, crackpot analyst, paramilitary thug, hustler, and free-lance fool. But there should be no patrols on the principal's turf. "Unladylike," you heard the gym teacher say when you led the PTA walkout. But how do you conduct a polite discussion about murder?

The woman is back on the line and says again that no one is in the school building. You repeat your name, say again why you called; you mention the time, remark that you're calling from home, and you add that your neighbor across the way is wearing a candy-striped dress and is packing away summer cottons. Then you hang up and interrogate yourself -- establishing an alibi in case something is wrong? It's 3:28 and if grilled, you would plead guilty to something. It's 3:29 and you've got to get a grip on yourself.

From the start, the prime suspects in the Atlanta Missing and Murdered Children's Case were the parents. Presumed guilty because, as police logic went in the summer of '79, seven or eight deaths did not constitute "an epidemic of murder," as the parents, organizers of the Committee to Stop Children's Murders, were maintaining; because, as the authorities continued to argue after STOP's media sit-in a year later, eight or nine cases was usual in a city the size of Atlanta; and because, as officialdom repeatedly pointed out, even as the body count rose from one to twelve, the usual suspects in the deaths of minors were the parents.

Monstrous parents, street-hustling young hoodlums, and the gentle killer became the police/media version of things. In the newspapers, STOP's campaign -- to mount an independent investigation, to launch a national children's rights movement, to establish a Black commission of inquiry into hate crimes -- would be reported, invariably, on the same page as stories about parental neglect, gang warfare, and drug-related crimes committed by minors, most often drawn from the files of cities outside of Atlanta. And frequently, photos of Atlanta's grief-stricken mothers would appear above news stories that featured "the gentle killer" -- a man or woman who'd washed some of the victims, laid them out in clean clothes, and once slipped a rock under a murdered boy's head "like a pillow," a reporter said. Like a pillow.

Another pattern you've noticed, having kept a journal for nearly two years and your hallway jammed with cartons of news clippings, bulletins, leaflets, rally flyers, and memorial programs: Whenever STOP members were invited to lecture around the country, the authorities would call the parents in for another polygraph. Then a well-timed leak to the press: "The parents are not above suspicion." A name dropped: one of the parents most critical of the investigation, most out-spoken about the lack of trained personnel on the Task Force. In '81, as thousands were scheduled to board the buses for STOP's May 25 rally in Washington, D.C., an FBI agent told a civic group down in Macon, Georgia, that several of the cases were already solved, that the parents had killed their children because "they were such little nuisances."

The father of Yusuf Bell had been treated as a suspect for more than a year; his wife, Camille Bell, the murdered boy's mother, co-founder and prime mover of STOP, was one of the more vocal critics of the authorities' response to the killings. A friend of the family of murdered girl LaTonya Wilson had also been considered a prime suspect; it was
LaTonya's body that the civilian search team had found on its first outing, embarrassing the professionals, who'd maintained that they were not dragging their feet, were committed to an exhaustive search, were "leaving no stone unturned" in their efforts to find the missing children.

The mother of Anthony Bernard Carter was arrested, released, tailed, questioned, dogged for months, and visited at all hours of the night until she was forced to move. The media kept harping on the fact that she was a poor, young Black woman who had only one child, "only one," as though that were sufficient grounds for suspicion, if not prosecution.

The sun is streaming in your hallway window. It's hot on your face. Your house smells like cooked cardboard. A flap on one of the cartons has come loose and is imprinting a corrugated design on your leg. You can't go on standing there by the phone, watching the second hand sweep around the dial. You need to get moving. You are trying. Trying not to think about the anti-defamation suit that the STOP committee, regrettably, dropped against the police, the Bureau, and the media. Trying not to think about the rally STOP held in D.C. -- all the speeches, pep talks, booths, posters, buttons, green ribbons, T-shirts, caps, profiling, and blown opportunities to organize a National Black Commission to call a halt to random, calculated, and systemic assaults on Black people all over the country. Trying not to remember how swiftly the arrest came, the authorities collaring a man just as those back from the rally began clamoring for answers. What about the law-enforcement memo describing castrations? What about the mortician's assistant who re-ported, back in the fall of '80, the presence of hypodermic needle marks in the genitalia of several victims? And the phone tipster whose message, loaded with racial slurs, accurately predicted where the next body would be dumped? As the grapevine sizzled with charges of hate-motivated murder and official cover-up, the authorities made their arrest of a man who in no way resembled any of the descriptions in the Task Force reports, any of the sketched faces pinned to the corkboard in command headquarters. In no way resembled the descriptions in the reports of STOP's independent investigators, or in the reports of community workers investigating well out of the limelight. A man who bore no resemblance to men fingered by witnesses to homicides kept off the Task Force's list despite linkages of race, class, acquaintanceship, kinship, and last-seen sightings along the killer route. One man, charged with the murders of two male adults. The case against the arrested hanging by threads -- carpet fibers and dog hairs, persistent enough to survive wind, rain, and rivers. Strong enough to hitch to the arrested man's coattails as many cases as the law would allow and the public would tolerate. A seven-, eight-, some said nine-million dollar investigation brought to a close.

You're most especially trying to keep your mind off the murders committed since the arrest in June, cases that match the six patterns devised by community investigators: Klan-type slaughter, cult-type ritual murder, child-porn thrill killing, drug-related vengeance, commando/mercenary training, and overlapping combinations. Your hallway table is tumbled down with reports you have to double-check before composing the next newsletter. You can't afford to think about any of the chores posted on your calendar under the pile. You need all your energy to figure out who to call, what to do. Where the hell is your child?

I sent him to the store, God forgive me. I should've moved right away, but you know, kids lolligag. The officers kept saying, "His trail is cold." What kind of thing is that to say about a child?

You dump your handbag on the floor, grab your key ring and purse, and lace up your tennis shoes.

I never should've grounded her, maybe she wouldn't've run away. Not that I believe what they say down at Missing Persons. That girl did not run away. She was snatched.

You inspect your purse for cabfare, but reject the idea. A cab can't jump the gully back of the fish joint and can't take the shortcut through the Laundromat lot.

The main thing I got out of those sessions with the Task Force investigators, and none of them were from Homicide or anything like that at the time, was to keep my mouth shut. Said all this talking to the press made their work harder. Made them look bad is what they meant. And those sister detectives down at Missing Persons caught the same flack, except then it was "hysterical women." The officers and the parents, including my husband, we were all hysterical women. Crazy is what they meant.

You take off down the driveway, gathering speed.

The Task Force people wouldn't talk to me because my boy wasn't on the list, so I kept asking how to get him on the list. He's from Atlanta, he was missing, then they found him under the trestle with his neck broken. So why can't he be on the list? Maybe someone after the reward can do something. They had me so bulldozed, I'd actually apologize for taking them away from the "real" case to listen to me. Can you imagine?

You are running down the streets of southwest Atlanta like a crazy woman.

It's over because they've locked up one man? Only thing over and done with is that list they were keeping. Over -- what's that supposed to mean? -- go home and forget about it? They can forget about it. The whole city can forget about it. But I'm the boy's father, so how in hell am I supposed to forget about it?

Maybe you are a crazy woman, but you'd rather embrace madness than amnesia.

Less than five months ago, you would not have been running alone. Before Wayne Williams drove down the Jackson Parkway Bridge and became a suspect, your whole neighborhood would have mobilized the second you hit the sidewalk. But Williams did drive across the bridge. And a stakeout officer thought he heard a splash in the Chattahoochee, he would say days later, a splash he assumed was a dead body being dumped in the river. Though trained in lifesaving techniques, the officer did not dive in and attempt a rescue. Though equipped with a walkie-talkie, he did not request equipment to dredge the river. The police did nothing more that early morning than to stop Williams's car and ask a few questions. Days later, after a local fisherman did spot a body in the river, the authorities visited the Williams family's home, ransacked it, and hauled young Williams off for questioning. Before the media began calling Williams "weird" and "cocky," the whole of Simpson Road would have responded to your distress.

The tailor, hearing the pound of your feet on the pavement, would have picked up the phone for the block-to-block relay. Mother Enid, Reader & Advisor, would have taken one peek at you from under her neon and dropped her cards to flag down a car. The on-the-corner hardheads, heroes for a time when they formed convoys to get the children to and from school, would have sprung into action the minute you rounded the corner. Brother Chad, who turned his karate studio over to the self-defense squads, would have turned the bar next door out the moment you raced past his window. Everyone would have ...

Présentation de l'éditeur :

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.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Vintage
• Date d'édition: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0679774084
• ISBN 13: 9780679774082
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 688