Article: I was almost nine years...
I was almost nine years old when the bodies of fourteen-year-old Edward Smith and thirteen-year-old Alfred Adams were discovered in Atlanta, beginning the official investigation of what became known as "The Atlanta Child Murders." Over the course of the next two years, at least twenty more African American children were murdered. Two of them were students at my elementary school.
People often ask me if my childhood was stolen. I tell them no, but I don't think that they believe me. Maybe after reading Leaving Atlanta, they will. I wrote this novel to make a record of how life was for those of us who were too young to understand the complicated social and political landscape of Atlanta, the "city too busy to hate." Those of us on the playground didn't know that in 1979 Atlanta was the only city in the country that could boast of having a black mayor, police chief, and school board president. We had no idea that we were the heirs of the civil rights movements. When children's bodies were found strewn in wooded areas, creeks, and dumpsters, most of us had no knowledge of the history of lynching in the American south. What we knew were the things that mattered to us as children. Like all other children, we worried that we wouldn't be accepted by our peers, we fretted that our parents might divorce, but we also worried that a faceless predator might murder us.
During my freshman year at Spelman College, an eight-year-old boy didn't show up as scheduled for tutoring. I panicked, scouring the campus, shouting his name and asking everyone if they had seen a little boy with jug-ears. Some people simply indicated that they hadn't seen him but others put down their notebooks, abandoned their boyfriends and helped me look. I soon realized something about everyone who helped me-- the young women who looked under bushes, placed desperate calls to public safety, and retraced the route from the bus stop to the campus gates. We were all Atlanta natives. We remembered.
As the survivors, we have a responsibility to tell the story. James Baldwin wrote about the murders in The Evidence of Things Not Seen. Toni Cade Bambara's opus, Those Bones are Not My Child also revisits this difficult period in Atlanta's history. But the time had come for someone of my generation, to tell the tale from the vantage point of the playground. This novel is a memorial to twenty-nine (or more) who did not survive and it the testimony of the thousands who will never forget.
Copyright © Tayari Jones