Telling Run Away: Novel Testimony in Toni Cade Bambara’s Those Bones Are Not My Child

This essay on Toni Cade Bambara’s little-studied final novel, Those Bones Are Not My Child (1999), examines the centrality of the novel form to Bambara’s investigation of testimony as a response to racial violence in the United States. As a novel, Bambara’s account of the real-life case of Atlanta’s Missing and Murdered Children can house opposing methods of giving testimony—a mother finds her voice, a son suffers and exercises the power of his silence, and writer and reader conspire to witness without hope of conclusion—and call attention to the complications of playing representational roles in the context of racial injury. Those Bones thus points the way to a more complex notion of agency and a reformulated theory of testimony calibrated to the particular challenges of responding to historical and immediate violence against black Americans.