Those Bones Are Not My Child (3 page)

Caravans of independents had begun scouring the outlying environs of the city. The writer James Baldwin, a frequent visitor to Atlanta who’d been conducting his own inquiry, joined the searchers, as did Emory professor Sondra O’Neale, a cult specialist who’d been examining the case from that perspective. In September of ’81, a group had discovered ceremonial grounds littered with animal carcasses and marked by a pile of bloodstained stones heaped in the shape of an altar. A twelve-foot charred cross was found nearby. By that time, though, only one out-of-town magazine expressed interest in the cult story. Atlanta
authorities had already declared the theory groundless in general, the McGill version in particular.

You’re only one block from the school, you tell yourself to spur you on through the brambled lot. You’re on the only halfway-clear path, but can feel the nettles and briars scratch through your clothes. Up ahead a rawbony mutt is nuzzling a pile of trash. The dog looks up, bares its teeth. Hackles stiff, it shivers itself sideways and blocks your way. Skin that bags below its ribs puffs out a few times, but you don’t hear the bark, you’re breathing that hard. The dog plants a paw on a baby doll facedown in the trash. The doll’s
ma-ma
box tears through its gauze-cotton skin. You growl at the dog, you’re feeling that crazed. It moves its rump aside to let you pass. The doll lets out a croaked
ma-ma
that catches you in the back of your knees. You plow through a tangle of weeds and renegade vines looping up from clumps of kudzu and scrub grass. Now that you’ve passed, the dog is woofing at you. Your ears are cocked for attack. But the mutt resumes its raid on the trash and you concentrate on the booby traps the kudzu has set for your feet.

It’s the first time you’ve been in a wooded lot since the wintry weekends with the civilian search teams. Muffler, boots, thick denim, flashlight, and always a stout poking stick for turning things over and moving sharp things aside. You’d rendezvous at dawn with total strangers because that was preferable to sitting slumped over a coffee mug staring at the TV. Someone always brought along an extra thermos or two. Several Chinese restaurants donated lunch. Hundreds of other people were drawn to the task—ministers, students, secretaries, upholsterers, masons, carpenters, lawyers—everyone turned out, got involved, tried to respond to the call, the crisis. By January, the civilian search teams had swelled to the thousands. There was, too, a group of white volunteers on those weekend searches, men in flak jackets whom the community investigators had been monitoring. They toted rifles, carried satchels of jangling equipment, resisted the command of the search-team marshals, and signaled each other through walkie-talkies. The other searchers learned to ignore them, fanning out as directed, letting the tracking dogs take the lead. Shivery people moving over brush-whipped unfamiliar terrain. Glazed ground crackling underfoot. Trees shagged with ice. Every shadowy thing in a hollow a dread possibility.

You stub your toe on brown glass. With the rubbery tip of your tennis
shoe you pry loose a crusty beer bottle. Caked mud and leaves that cradled it break apart when you roll it over. Worms burrow down into the muck. You gauge how long the bottle’s been lying there. The ground covering’s autumnal; beneath the bottle is a rain-blurred Popsicle wrapper.
Late summer
, you figure, moving on, stooped over, eyes scanning the ground. You’re no longer watching out for sharp-edged cans, you discover. When you snap to, you still can’t get your bearings.

“Remains,” they called the discoveries, yellow tape ringing the perimeter of the scene. “Remains” might mean a pouch burial, embalming powder sprinkled into a plastic liner, or it might mean a corpse in a rose satin box. It always meant, first, families gathered around a stainless-steel table. A woman clutching her purse, knuckles bleeding. A man examining surgical instruments in a rectangular basin. White men in white coats, buttonholes sealed closed with starch, standing apart from the families, manila folders tucked under their arms. Relatives outside the coroner’s workroom glued to portholes of the room’s double doors. One of the summoned stepping forward to slip a hand under the rubber sheet. A pierced ear, missing molar, lumpy cartilage in the left knee—the searching hand the only thing moving in the room. A murmur from the white coats. All but one family is dismissed. A tag is affixed to the toe that extends from the sheet. A mother backs away.
Those bones are not my child
. But the tag bears the name heard soaring over rooftops on summer nights of kickball.

Your daughter has a mole on the right shoulder blade, you’re thinking. You have a mole on the bottom of your left foot. There’s a host of scars crosshatching the back of your hands now. You rip through the cobwebs spun between the trees. The wooded lot is just behind the school, but no matter where you look, you can’t spot the aerial on the school roof.

The mother, back at the house, still insists there’s been a mistake. She holds out her arm to tell her pastor about a scar. The media invades her home, setting up cameras, plugging in cables. A light meter is shoved in her face. She’s asked what she’ll wear to the funeral. A city representative shoulders his way through the crush of neighbors to say that the city will pay for the burial. The mother is showing her arm. Her child had a bad burn from an iron. The body downtown did not. Her pastor pats her. Relatives shush her. Neighbors set down covered dishes and envelopes of money on the table. Everyone who’s kept the
faith through the whole ordeal wants to pay respect and leave. It’s somebody’s child downtown on a slab, so claim the bones, mother. Set the funeral date, mother. Don’t make a fuss, mother. You’re not yourself, mother. Let’s close the lid, mother. Let the community sleep again.

You hear it first as a funeral drum, young schoolmates in new suits and white gloves hefting a coffin down the steps of a church. Then you hear it as band practice and follow the sound to the sidewalk. You can see up ahead to the left the shadow thrown by the school’s flagpole. You lean against the railing of the community center to flick pebbles and dirt from your shoes. You’re winded, out of condition. For a year your child would not go out for a walk even with you armed with a knife, mace, and a slapjack. Voices are coming from around the corner. You push on, hobbled by a rising blister and bits of twigs you couldn’t reach.

A squad car parked on the school lawn has all its doors open, like wings. A trail of blood by the flagpole leads to a book bag sprawled on the curb. In the street by the manhole a group of eighth-graders are gathered around someone down on one knee. It’s your daughter. She’s clutching her chest and she’s bloody. You bump the children aside and are ready to scream.

“Ma!”

She’s hugging a cat. It squirms to get loose. A splint’s on its leg. It bites at the tape.

“You forgot?” Your daughter stands up, passes the cat to a boy in blue sweats, and cocks her chin at you like you’ve done something stupid.

You’re trying to hear her, roaming your eyes over her person for open wounds. But everyone’s talking at once. Behind her two Bloods are slamming a middle-aged man over the hood of a car. The police pull one of them off, but the other keeps saying, “Man, this ain’t the Indy 500.” Hit-and-run driver, your daughter explains. Drunk, the boy with the cat offers. The two men, the cop is telling you, forced the driver to return to the scene. The victim’s the cat, one of the girls says. An elderly woman in a floral bib apron saunters over and sizes you up. A pair of scissors and a roll of tape pull her apron pocket out of shape.

“Mother.” Your daughter, using her too-grown voice, grips your shoulders for a good talking-to. “This is the only free day at the pool. You were supposed to meet me ’cause you’ve got to sign. Forget?”

The woman in the bib apron brushes your shoulder with hers. “Some mother,” she says out of the side of her mouth. “Leaving your girl to wait on the corner.” She sucks her teeth. “This is Atlanta, honey, where is your mind?”

Your daughter drags you away and grabs up her book bag. You follow her through the double doors of the community center. She’s talking a blue streak, using her neck. You lean across the table and sign parental permission. The chlorine fumes draw you across the tiles to the pool area. Your girl is still working her neck and cracking on you. You’ve got twigs in your hair, your clothes are a mess, and what’s with them cornball, old-timey sneaks? She comes to a stop by the door to the lockers and dabs at your scratches with a square of gauze. At seven, she would have disowned you, but at twelve, she’s your mama. Then she rears back, takes you in, and lets loose with more cracks. You let her. You help her. You perform a Raggedy Ann softshoe. She holds her sides and goes through the door. You can hear her throaty laughter ricocheting off metal and tiles long after you drag yourself past the pool to the bleachers.

You’re beat, but she’s laughing. She’s twelve, she’s entitled. For longer than you care to tally, it’s been hard to laugh freely. Though at your house there’ve been no horrible nightmares, no bedwetting, asthmatic emergencies, anxiety attacks, depression, withdrawal, fits of raging or weeping, plummeting grades, or any of the other symptoms mental hygienists described over and over on radio, TV, in newspapers, in safety-ed comics distributed at school, and on panels after the child-safety films shown at community centers, films featuring Black male actors as bogeymen, there’s been, nonetheless, a definite decrease in the kind of clowning around that used to rock your household, leaving you all sprawled, breathless, helpless, in a heap on the floor, dabbing at wet eyes, and talking in preposterous falsettos.

So you laugh a little too, brush the leaves from your clothes, and nod hello to the grown-ups on the benches above. Leaning forward, wrists loose between their knees, they’re watching youngsters splashing in the shallows and preteens doing laps on the deeper side of the pool divided by a rope of blue-and-white buoys.

You settle down and rummage around in your daughter’s book bag for an apple or a stray carrot stick. You find one of your journals. Once again, she’s mistaken it for her math notebook, same color. When she
enters the pool area, stuffing her hair under her cap, you hold it up and smirk. She rolls her eyes and prepares for a dive where the stenciling says six feet. You’re not sure you want to watch that. You flip open the wine-colored spiral wondering how she fared in fifth-period math with your Missing and Murdered notes.

You began that first journal in September of 1979 with nothing particular in mind, journal keeping a habit. But you recorded the fact that your mailman had rapped on your screen back in summer to ask if you’d heard about the kidnappings reported in the McDaniel-Glenn area. Didn’t you use to work at Model Cities over there? A few weeks later, Mother Enid, Reader & Advisor, had stopped you at the newspaper box to tell you about a psychic, a white woman in Waco, Texas, who’d been “seeing” a Vietnam vet in Atlanta relive the blasts of hand grenades lobbed by Vietnamese children, a white vet who was now on the rampage killing colored youngsters and depositing them near bodies of water. And did you see in the papers the case of two dead Black boys found out on Niskey Lake Road?

You recorded a third event that occurred in late August. The aunt of one of your students mailed you a copy of an in-house memo that had come across her desk down at Missing Persons, Youth Division. The memo referred to a rash of disappearances, attempted abductions, accidents where foul play was suspected, and several definite homicides in a twenty-block radius in the Black community. The memo writer, a female officer, had suggested to her superior that the cases not be regarded as normal runaways, that they seemed related. The response to the memo, if there’d been one, was not attached. But a yellow stick-on note called your attention to a magazine article enclosed celebrating 1979 as the United Nations Year of the Child. “Some celebration,” the note ended.

Overheards and ruminations about men, women, and children mysteriously vanishing from the community are sprinkled throughout the first half of the notebook in between entries about books, movies, jobs, meetings, and your dreams. But sometime in the spring of 1980, entries on the case take over. Mothers of several murdered children happened to meet that spring at a community gathering and they compared notes. Weeks later, a group of them staged a sit-in. Organized as the Committee to Stop Children’s Murders, they camped out in media and law-enforcement offices, demanding a special investigation of “the epidemic
of child murders.” During their press conference, they charged that the authorities were dragging their feet because of race; because of class; because the city, the country’s third-busiest convention center, was trying to protect its image and was trying to mask a crisis that might threaten Atlanta’s convention trade dollars.

“Know what they told me?” one mother asked, taking the floor at a community meeting. “They said it was my civic duty to cooperate because all hell might break loose with this news. In other words, to shut up.” In July 1980, city hall responded to STOP’s direct action tactics by forming the Metropolitan Atlanta Emergency Task Force to Investigate Missing and Murdered Children. Their staff was made up of not homicide detectives, but community relations personnel.

The second half of your journal begins with minutes of neighborhood meetings and comments on the skimpy items that appeared in the back pages of the dailies. Increasingly, the disappeared begin to crowd out everything else you normally log in your journals. Even your dreams revolve around the women found dead out on pistol ranges, men found facedown in culverts, children stuffed under floorboards of abandoned buildings.

Marked-up photocopies of bulletins the Task Force published on demand about the case are stapled to left-hand pages, factual errors circled, discrepancies in the children’s names, ages, and dates of disappearances noted. In the margin you remark, “Doesn’t someone proofread the copy before sending it out?” On the right-hand side, you’ve stapled fact sheets that were circulated by community workers who had examined police depositions, were in attendance at the STOP office, and who were dogging the steps of STOP’s three volunteer detectives. The three white former APD homicide detectives had served under the notorious police chief dispatched when Maynard Jackson became mayor and ushered in, as folks were prone to say, the Second Reconstruction. One of the volunteer PIs, Chet Dettlinger, would make the first real breakthrough in the case by plotting the killer’s or killers’ route and charting the connections between a dozen or more victims. He was hardly rewarded for his efforts, however. The Atlanta police would eventually pull him in for questioning. The community workers remained to the end no less suspicious of his interest in the case.