Those Bones Are Not My Child.

• Author: Jones, Tayari
• Position: Brief Article

Those Bones Are Not My Child by Toni Cade Bambara Pantheon. 848 pages. $27.50.

Toni Cade Bambara's posthumous novel, Those Bones Are Not My Child, revisits the Atlanta child murders of 1979-1980. In spite of the horrifying scope of this killing spree (at least twenty-seven black youths were murdered in a twenty-four-month period), few remember the terror that paralyzed the "city too busy to hate." Bambards novel, which details one fictional family's search for its lost son, remembers it.

The novel opens as Marzala Rawls Spencer and her estranged husband, Spence, discover that their son, Sonny, is missing. Their efforts to search for their missing child are hindered by the Atlanta authorities...