A letter from Toni Morrison
Dear Reader
Those Bones Are Not My Child is the result of twelve years of work and first-hand research by Toni Cade Bambara, who lived in Atlanta during the years of the Atlanta child murders - a period when more than forty black children were slaughtered, found in ditches, on riverbanks, strangled, tied-up, beaten, and sexually assaulted - events which created media, political and enforcement fever, and which culminated in the unpersuasive conviction (based on a few fibbers) of a young black man.
Ms. Bambara on the spot, actively involved, taking notes, doing field research and interviews, used her unassailable talent as a writer and her intimate relations with all levels and facets of the Atlanta scene to construct what I believe is a magnum opus.
This novel does several things:
1. It puts the reader at the heart of the horror that came to be called the Atlanta child murders. This is not the politically expedient story - nor the news stories written by visiting journalists; not the district attorney's official account. It is the inside story as lived in the neighbourhoods and on the streets by people gripped in its terror yet determined to survive it;
2. It also dramatises the story of a local family when right at the start of the abductions their teenage son goes missing;
3. It is the narrative revelation of the workings of a major southern city of the 1980s, a revelation of what clogs the bloodstream of "The City Too Busy to Hate".
These Bones Are Not My Child is a big book, as large as the events that took place, with the breadth of the Invisible Man, the depth of Their Eyes Were Watching God, and the humanity of Crime and Punishment.
Toni Morrison