Those Bones Are Not My Child by Toni Cade Bambara

First published: 1999

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Historical realism

Time of work: Sunday, July 20, 1980, to Wednesday, July 8, 1987

Locale: Atlanta, Georgia; Epps, Alabama

Principal Characters:

• Marzala (Zala) Rawls Spencer, an African American mother of three children
• Sundiata (Sonny) Spencer, Zala’s eldest child, whose disappearance is the central event of the novel
• Nathaniel Spencer (Spence), the African American father of the three children, who is sometimes separated from his family
• Kofi Spencer, Sonny’s eight-year-old brother
• Kenti Spencer, Sonny’s seven-year-old sister

The Novel

Those Bones Are Not My Child dramatizes the plight of one inner-city African American family in Atlanta, Georgia, during and after a period from roughly 1979 until 1982 when some forty African American children were kidnapped and murdered. Marzala “Zala” Spencer is the mother of three children, the eldest ofwhom, Sonny, disappears in mid-1980 without explanation. Zala begins a quest to find her child with the help of her then-estranged husband Spence, the child’s father. She quickly becomes aware of and involved in the frustrations and agony of other inner-city African American families whose children have either turned up dead or are missing—or whose lives are dominated by the fear that such a fate is impending.

Marzala and Spence gradually realize that the city officials, the local police, the federal authorities, and Atlanta’s business leaders are more interested in placating angry relatives and keeping a positive image for the city, for purposes of economic development and tourism, than they are in actually solving the cases of the missing and murdered children. In fact, the leaders and police agencies seem to be more involved in turf wars among themselves than anything else. They therefore ignore the growing evidence of connections among the murder victims and perpetrators that hint at an organized effort to exterminate African American children based upon racial hatred, drug-cult violence, sexual exploitation, or some combination of these and other factors.

After realizing with the help of Kenti, Marzala’s youngest child, that the routes along which the murders have occurred form the shape of a boot when connected, Marzala, Spence, and other interested citizens begin to patrol the boot and shadow suspicious individuals, groups, and organizations. These efforts generate evidence of right-wing paramilitary or Ku Klux Klan involvement in the murders that creates significant public pressure on federal and city officials. The progress made by the citizens’ group is stymied, however, by the arrest of a single alleged murderer, a young African American man named Wayne Williams, who is subsequently convicted of two of the murders by a predominantly African American jury. The Spencers and most of their associates believe that Williams is just a scapegoat, not the real murderer of the children.

Soon after Williams’s arrest, Marzala and Spence are contacted about a boy who has been found wandering in a daze on a highway near Miami, Florida, barefoot, badly beaten and brusied, emaciated, and virtually naked. The child turns out to be their son, missing for almost a full year. After extensive convalescing of the child at his grandmother’s home in Alabama, the Spencers return to Atlanta. Although Sonny never tells them who kidnapped him, he hints at sexual exploitation, including rape, and continually makes wax keys that lead Spence to believe that he knows more than he has revealed. Through the wax keys and by following his son, Spence learns that Sonny has been visiting a suburban home and that the owner is the Spencers’ landlord, who had Sonny kidnapped and made him part of a child pornography enterprise. The novel ends with the Spencers having rescued Sonny from the landlord’s control but without any clear resolution of the child murders. Wayne Williams remains a scapegoat to quiet the city and conceal the identity of the real murderers.

The Characters

Marzala Spencer is the center of Toni Cade Bambara’s novel, which chronicles the character’s reaction to her son’s disappearance and her growth from a struggling single mother with two jobs into a confident, powerful spokesperson for the oppressed African American citizens of inner-city Atlanta. As symbolized by the T-shirt reading “Question Authority” that she wears during her last speech, Marzala becomes a courageous activist working to better the lives of the hitherto powerless citizens around her. She organizes tirelessly and relies upon Gwendolyn Brooks’s wisdom that “we are all each other’s harvest, we are all each other’s business,” conveying Bambara’s message that freedom and justice are a continuing struggle that has yet to be won. Thus, despite what Bambara perceives as the ultimate corruption in Atlanta that prevents discovery of the real child murderers, Marzala represents a ray of hope. She clearly will continue her struggle to discover the truth and to protect the victims in American society, especially inner-city African American children.

Critical Context

Those Bones Are Not My Child is not Bambara’s best novel. It is too diffuse, with too many tangential characters and questionably relevant details and events, reflecting what one critic lamented as a lack of effective editing of the text after Bambara’s death. It was four years after Bambara’s passing before the novel appeared, which may indicate that Bambara did not have enough time to polish the text as she would otherwise have done.

The novel’s position that Wayne Williams was a scapegoat for the real murderers is somewhat problematic, given that he was convicted by a predominantly African American jury and that no credible evidence has surfaced since his conviction to question it. This latter problem may derive from the difficulty of combining actual historical events and characters with fictional narrative and purposes. Still, Bambara’s last novel is not a failure. Indeed, in its powerful depiction of the fundamental psychological reality of an African American family under siege, as those families still too often are in America, Those Bones Are Not My Child is an important work of African American literature.

Bibliography

Ashe, Bertram D. From Within the Frame: Storytelling in African-American Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2002. Inclusive study of narrative techniques in African American fiction, with an entire chapter devoted to Bambara’s short story “My Man Bovanne” as an example of the liberation of the African American story from its traditional narrative framework.

Benjamin, Shanna Greene. Review of Those Bones Are Not My Child, by Toni Cade Bambara. African American Review 35, no. 2 (Summer, 2001): 338. Balanced review of Bambara’s final novel, noting both its strengths and its weaknesses.

Dickson-Carr, Darryl. The Columbia Guide to Contemporary African American Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Includes a biographical overview of both Bambara’s multidimensional public life—as a community activist, social worker, political activist, and documentary filmmaker—and her literary career as a fiction writer and editor. Provides specific analysis of Those Bones Are Not My Child.

Holmes, Linda Janet, and Cheryl A. Wall, eds. Savoring the Salt: The Legacy of Toni Cade Bambara. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007. The most comprehensive and best resource on Bambara’s writings, including a detailed examination of Those Bones Are Not My Child.

Taylor, Carole Anne. The Tragedy and Comedy of Resistance: Reading Modernity Through Black Women’s Fiction. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. Creative application of modern and postmodern literary theory to selected texts by African American women, with much discussion of the Medusa myth as utilized by Bambara in The Salt Eaters.