Capitalist Abstraction and the Body Politics of Place in Toni Cade Bambara's Those Bones Are Not My Child

Abstract

The autobiographical Prologue to Toni Cade Bambara's Those Bones Are Not My Child (1999) provides an intensely localized narrative cartography of a working-class, African American neighborhood in southwest Atlanta circa 1981. We witness the authorial figure “running down the streets of southwest Atlanta like a crazy woman” – running because “[a] cab can't jump the gully back of the fish joint and can't take the shortcut through the Laundromat lot.” Bambara does not detail these quotidian geographies just for the sake of it: her novel is immersed in the period (1979–81) when Atlanta's black community was both torn asunder and brought together by the disappearance and death of a number of local children. The Prologue's protagonist walks through the wooded lot because, in such secluded spaces, she might find evidence that will help to solve the Atlanta Child Murders: “You stub your toe on brown glass … you pry loose a crusty beer bottle … beneath the bottle is a rain-blurred Popsicle wrapper. Late summer, you figure, moving on.” The narrator runs frantically because she is supposed to collect her twelve-year-old child (apparently Bambara's own daughter, Karma) from school in a time and place when local youths are going missing, and being found murdered.