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10. Capitalist Abstraction and the Body Politics of Place: Toni Cade Bambara’s Those Bones Are Not My Child Between 1979 and 1981, Atlanta’s black community was both torn asunder and brought together by the mysterious disappearance and death of a number of local African American children. Fresh from the critical success of her novel The Salt Eaters (1980), writer and Atlanta resident Toni Cade Bambara responded to the traumatic events going on around her, and fulfilled her uno∞cial role as southwest Atlanta’s “writing lady,” by embarking upon a novel about the so-called Atlanta Child Murders. Bambara became, by her own admission, obsessed with the missing-and-murdered case, and the manuscript grew incrementally. She continued to work on the novel into 1983 and 1984, even as media interest in the child murders receded dramatically following the arrest and imprisonment of a local black man, Wayne Williams. Ultimately, Bambara never completed the manuscript, which expanded to approximately eighteen hundred pages. Those Bones Are Not My Child did not appear in bookshops until 1999—four years after Bambara’s death, and a few months after the publication of A Man in Full—and then only because of the diligent editorial work of Bambara’s friend and fellow novelist Toni Morrison.1 The di∞cult history of Those Bones Are Not My Child meant that, although Bambara had begun the book as events were still unfolding, it was not the first published “Atlanta novel” to feature the child murders. In 1992, Marilyn Dorn Staats published Looking for Atlanta, a mass-market novel centered around Margaret Bridges, a Buckhead-born, self-confessed “lapsed Southern Belle” going through a midlife crisis in her new home in “Arcadia Heights: Atlanta ’s Most Exclusive New Suburban Subdivision.”2 Described by Anne Rivers 1. Bambara comments upon her role as the community’s “writing lady” in the acknowledgments to the published book, which also indicate quite clearly the travails involved in writing Those Bones. See Toni Cade Bambara, Those Bones Are Not My Child (New York: Pantheon, 1999), 671. All subsequent page references will be incorporated into the main text. 2. Marilyn Dorn Staats, Looking for Atlanta (1992; reprint, New York: Warner Books, 1993), 11, 29. All further page references will be incorporated into the main text. Siddons as perhaps “the single best-drawn Southern woman I’ve encountered in fiction,”3 Margaret is almost as bewildered by the transformation of Atlanta as Siddons’s own Gibby Bondurant—though unlike Peachtree Road, Looking for Atlanta plays the protagonist’s response to the city’s redevelopment primarily for laughs. The novel’s more serious side has to do with the accidental death of Margaret’s teenage daughter and its traumatic repercussions. Sporadically throughout the narrative, Margaret projects her mourning on to events elsewhere in the city. She comments that “I’ve become obsessed with the missing and murdered case. . . . I study the pictures of grieving mothers in the newspapers , watch them being interviewed on television, feel their anguish, know the sudden blankness that falls over their faces” (149). Margaret’s response to the child murders is far more sympathetic than that of her wealthy white friends in the Buckhead Garden Club, who dismiss “[t]his so-called list of missing and murdered children [as] just another example of nigra paranoia,” and reassure themselves with the thought that “[a]nyway, they’re not killing children in Buckhead” (158). To this degree, Looking for Atlanta identifies the racial fault lines that remain in the city and which the child murders brought into media focus. But the novel’s representation of the missing-and-murdered case, and its impact on the city, is only conveyed from Margaret’s perspective, “looking for Atlanta” from afar. This limited perspective is rather literally figured through the motif of Margaret gazing at the distant downtown skyline from a suburban rooftop in Arcadia Heights, accompanied by “my yardman” (23) Harold. Other than servants like Harold and the cook Annie D, Margaret, like Siddons’s Gibby, knows no black Atlantans; also like Gibby, she finds it hard to imagine the servants’ lives back home in southwest Atlanta, independent of their domestic labor in Buckhead and Arcadian Heights (215–16). At one point, Margaret observes that “nobody from Atlanta goes downtown anymore ” (14), by which she really means no rich white people. When she does venture into the city, her somewhat understandably self-centered response to the child murders seems to merge with a...

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