Novelists have often chosen to walk the tight rope between fiction and reportage when deciding to base a novel upon real life events. The resulting narrative is often left hanging somewhere between the two. This big, angry, at times confusing, book is based on the horrors of a spree of violence known as the Atlanta Child Murders during which more than 40 black children were killed in that city between 1979 and 1981. Although the gruesome deaths made national headlines, the grief soon became enmeshed with rage at the way the authorities chose to keep everything quiet. It was a race issue, a fact which did not sit easily in a sprawling Southern metropolis which was even then already established as the third conference centre of the US.
Above all it was impossible to ignore the fact that far more official effort would have been expended on the case had the victims been white. Although a black man was eventually, if unconvincingly, convicted of two of the killings, and blamed for the rest, the race aspect was obvious from the way the tragedy was handled in PR-conscious Atlanta, "The City Too Busy to Hate".
Short story writer, documentary film maker, black activist and New Yorker, Toni Cade Bambara, lived in Atlanta at the time and spent the last 12 years of her life researching the background to the killings and chronicling officialdom's lax approach. She died in 1995, aged 56, leaving a 1,300 page manuscript, the equivalent of a 900 page book. Those Bones Are Not My Child would never have been published but for the efforts of Bambara's friend, and one-time editor, 1995 Nobel literature laureate, Toni Morrison.
Among Morrison's many problems when faced with various drafts was the absence of a first page. After eight months, she found it and shaped the text to its present length, just short of 700 pages.
It is an emotive story; Bambara is a passionate, humane writer. For all the facts and detail, she was, however, determined to write a novel. The narrative centres upon a young black woman, Zala Spencer, single mother of three, whose world collapses the morning she realises Sonny, her difficult eldest son, has disappeared. The early sequences, the best in the book, are dominated by her terror and helplessness. The descriptions of her being coldly passed from one bored police officer to the next are brilliantly handled. Bambara enters the mind of a mother, holding down three jobs, torn by guilt and the most recent argument with Sonny which appears to have led to his disappearance. But then connections are made and it appears he has become yet another of the victims.
No sympathy is offered to her. Instead she is humiliated, asked if she has lovers and if her three children share the same father. Police questioning proceeds as if she is the suspect. The fact that her estranged husband is a Vietnam veteran is also a source of suspicion. It is as if ex-soldiers are expected to cause trouble.
Initially the sympathetic and vivid characterisation of Zala as a mother refusing to accept her son may be dead, is the book's strength. Bambara also works very hard at creating a domestic depth to the story: she wants it to seem as if we are standing in the room beside Zala, watching her every move, listening to the children bicker. For the first couple of hundred pages it is difficult to put this novel down, such is the urgency of the narrative.
Yet after a while the sheer force of the author's polemical intent begins to overpower the book. There is the sense of a life lived under seige. "You let us go outdoors" one of her younger children remarks to her. Zala's reply is not exactly that of the average mother/child exchange. "Of course I do, baby. We go lots of places, 'cause a lot of people fought hard for our right to go any damn where we please. But when the children go out like they've a right to and some maniac grabs them, then it's the children's fault or the parents who should've been watching every minute, like we don't have to work like dogs just to put food on the table." Elsewhere the dialogue loses its naturalness and acquires the artificial quality of speeches written for the cameras as more and more characters describe how they were expected to participate in a cover-up to protect the authorities.
There is also the transformation which Zala undergoes; the hardworking mother becomes an astute investigator. In addition to caring for her children, searching for Sonny and juggling her three jobs, she is also studying for a degree. Considering the attention Bambara places on even the most minute domestic detail, she reunites Zala and her husband too quickly for the reader to grasp. It is strange that in a novel of voices and endless talk, there is no resolution with regard to Zala's relationship - the husband who had left, is suddenly back at the heart of the family, leaving the reader beginning to wonder why Zala was presented as a single mother in the first place.
A large cast of characters constantly compete for attention as the canvas becomes broader, increasingly cinematic and didactic. Attempts to solve the mystery leads Zala and the activists she joins, the Committee to Stop Children's Murders, off on several tracks including Ku Klux Klan activities, drugs and child pornography rings. In the midst of all this, the novel gradually loses the intimate quality it had when it seemed Bambara would tell the story as experienced by one distraught mother. Zala degenerates from fully realised character to cheerleader with disappointing speed. A bouncy, "we-will-survive" tone creeps in, as do endless, stagy sequences featuring extended family and friends as if to prove life goes on.
At no time does Bambara attempt to present Sonny as a likeable boy. He is a difficult teenager writ large. A year passes and his absence becomes more a reminder of a crime perpetrated than of a loss suffered. His unexpected return is a plot twist, not a resolution. It is significant that in this atmosphere of threat, it is the secretive Sonny more than any other character who exudes a true sense of menace. Culturally and politically Those Bones are Not My Child is a powerful statement. If she has failed in the sense of creating a fully convincing family drama, she has certainly evoked a community aware of the slights it has endured. She is also being judged here on a book she was denied the time to revise and polish.
Its long gestation suggests her attitude towards her characters changed during the writing process and what may have been intended as a way of achieving fully rounded characters instead leaves Zala, and particularly her husband, as idealised stereotypes. But no one could deny this is a full-blooded, important book and an eloquent final testament of a writer whose art was always dictated to by her humanity and sense of justice.
Eileen Battersby is a critic and Irish Times staff journalist.
