Those Bones Are Not My Child (review)

A emew$\L Jií Those Bones Are Not My Child by Toni Cade Bambara Pantheon, 1999, 848 pp., $27.50 On Sunday, July 20, 1980, Marzala Rawls Spencer discovers that Sonny, her twelve-year-old son, is missing. Marzala and her husband are separated , and both have developed outside love interests. Sonny, a typical surly adolescent, resents his mother's new lover, so the situation is ripe for his disappearance. The full-scale hysteria of Atlanta's missing and murdered children has not yet become a reality, but it is real enough for Marzala to suspect that her son is among the kidnapped/murdered children. For the nextyearMarzala and her husband must thread their way through a bewildering maze of news reports, rumors, hearsay and urban legend to try to discover the truth about their son's disappearance. The police show a remarkable lack of interest in adding Sonny's name to the official list of missing and murdered children. Credible witnesses are dismissed, probable connections are ignored and contradictions are swept under the rug. Marzala and Spence join a group of community investigators who seem much closer to uncovering the truth than the Atlanta Police Department. Toni Cade Bambara's posthumously published novel reads more like a masterpiece in progress than the masterpiece it could have been had Bambara lived to finish it. The underlying premise, based on Bambara's research into the 1979-81 Atlanta child murders, is compelling and believable: the official version of the Atlanta missing and murdered children 's case is one huge lie. The central characters, the Spencer family, are well drawn and memorable. Individual passages are beautifully rendered , with pitch-perfect dialect and lyrical descriptive detail. Unfortunately, the work is more flawed than it should be. Bambara includes an array of thinly drawn, unconvincing characters. Transitions are frequently missing. Given the extraordinary complexity of the author's subject matter, fragmentation may have been an artistic necessity; however, the reader still demands some sense that the fragments do cohere. In short, this novel badly needed more aggressive editing than that provided by Bambara's friend Toni Morrison. The Missouri Review · 179 In spite of some aesthetic shortcomings , though, Those Bones Are Not My Child, has enormous social and political value. Bambara constantly reminds us that history is only as true as its tellers. She offers compelling evidence that Wayne Williams' arrest and conviction was not the tidy resolution of the case that Atlanta so fervently wanted it to be. Looking back, it is easy to believe that Wayne Williams was a scapegoat rather than a beastly serial killer of children. The evidence that convicted him of killing two adult males and linked him to several child murders does seem flimsy and contrived. If no novel can eradicate our impulse to blame scapegoats , at least this novel makes us look at that impulse more closely. Who knows? Wayne Williams may deservedly reap some benefits from its publication. (NS) When We Were Wolves by Jon Billman Random House, 1999, 239 pp., $21.95 Jon Billman's first book, When We Were Wolves, is a collection of often satirical Western stories whose unlikely characters and small Northwestern towns return to the mind in a kick of dust. Billman's characters live in the short term. They get a notion to do a thing—like build a bobsled or catch fish out of a trout hatchery or scrawl graffiti on a water tower— and they just go and do it. They find ways to earn livings from their diversions : brewing honey meade, for example, or claiming bogus uranium mines, or rainmaking. In general, they act in ways that "sounded good at the time." The protagonists of these stories are mavericks who, as often as not, are forced to suffer the consequences of their eccentric behavior. In "Custer Complex" (a story drawn from Billman 's personal experience as a wildland firefighter), Kurt Strain quickly gains a reputation for being insubordinate by going fishing as flames engulf a forest he should have been protecting. Several demotions later, he is called to a ghost fire: due to some computer glitch at Forest Service management, he must report to a fire he...