Atlanta: The Evidence of Things Not Seen

It's April and I am in St.-Paul-de-Vence, France, eating breakfast and reading the American newspapers. I have been following the unprecedentedly publicized series of murders in Atlanta and now have an uneasy, unwilling feeling that soon I will almost certainly find myself in that city. For one thing, I am an honorary citizen of Atlanta, with the scroll and the key to the city, and have, I am very proud to tell you, an honorary degree from Morehouse College. In other words, I have friends there, people whom I love. I cannot read the news reports without thinking of those people and wondering what is happening to them. Most of them have children.

I have handled a great many children, washed them, spanked them, put them on the toilet, tied ribbons in their hair; and, though I am trying to, I find that I am unable to imagine a child as a sexual object. Yet the murder of a child is a sexual performance, whether or not the child's body bears any of the more obvious marks (apart from being strangled) of sexual aggression; and people who murder children rarely murder men.

Except for a ruthless animal cunning (which is capable of getting a child into as much trouble as it is incapable of getting him out of), children have no defenses. A child believes everything; he has no choice. That is how he sorts out reality. When a child retreats and can no longer be reached, it is not that he has ceased to believe; it is that we, who are all he has, have failed him and now he has no choice but to die. It may take many forms, and years; but the child has chosen and runs to death.

Now, somewhere in Atlanta, some desperate person who must certainly once have been just such a child is seducing children to death. Someone--consider this--gets a bright black boy, a child, into his car. He is astute enough to realize that between poverty and puberty the child has little choice. He knows that the child imagines, as all children do, that he knows the score, that he can get out of any trap. But no child knows that death is real.

And at some point, this child is fed, bathed, clothed and murdered. And someone carries him somewhere and drops him.

When I was a child, I was sometimes very brutally handled. Which means that I will never be able to overcome that matchless wonder and terror that overtakes a child who is assaulted by an adult. And maybe because of that, certainly because of my friends and, perhaps to a greater degree than I care to face, because all of us are fascinated by the things that most repulse us, I know I must return to Atlanta.

•

Terror leads to paralysis and paralysis leads to the end of hope. One's very body begins to be too heavy a weight to carry through the humid air; one longs to click one's heels, like Dorothy in The Wiz, and get the hell out of Atlanta. But to believe in yourself as I believe in you may never again be possible for the children of this city, who are also the heirs, it is worth remembering, of the distilled and dreadful bitterness of the blood-soaked and sovereign state of Georgia. And, though we are discussing the murdered black children of Atlanta, it is important to bear in mind that for every black corpse, there is a white one, or an equivalent actual and moral disaster. There is absolutely nothing new in this city, this state or this nation about dead black male bodies floating, finally, to the surface of the river.

I can't imagine anyone wishing to be in this place now. I certainly don't want to be here and I could have many reasons for being sorry that I came. I don't, on the other hand, quite see how I could possibly have avoided being here and, indeed, precisely at this moment.

Richard Wright once wrote that if Edgar Allan Poe had been born in 20th Century America, he would not have had to invent horror; horror would have invented him. The statement sounded perhaps a trifle excessive, like a gifted actor's extra flourish. But it does not seem even remotely excessive now. On the contrary, it seems relatively mild, even kind. Certainly, nothing in Poe begins to approximate the horror now reigning over the city that gave us Gone with the Wind (which was, and remains, as book and film, a chilling moral horror in itself).

Human life, and especially a child's life, is our most important gift, our only real responsibility, and is more sacred than any temple or any doctrine, anywhere. In this matter of Atlanta, then, one scarcely knows how to begin--and that is because, abjectly, profoundly, one doesn't wish to begin. There is a kind of fire curtain that descends in the mind or the heart, a curtain that attempts to blot out something that one can weakly perceive as horror, but in the face of which horror has no meaning and neither has the word evil; in the face of which all of the disputes concerning good and evil and the nature of God and man become unendurable.

Atlanta claims for itself a distinction hitherto unheard of in human history: It is the city too busy to hate. Neither Rome nor Athens, Calcutta, Constantinople a.k.a. Istanbul, nor Jerusalem nor Nazareth, at the height of their power and splendor or at the depth of their indescribable trials, ever dreamed of making a claim so preposterously juvenile, so blatantly dishonest; and there are people in the city now who, remembering that the present city is literally built on the ashes of the city General Sherman put to the torch, believe that Atlanta is being punished for blasphemy. Which may, indeed, be true, if blasphemy means the vilification of that which is sacred. But it is important to point out that the only reason Atlanta is stuck with such a title is that it is the crown jewel of the New South.

Lord. The New South. Do not come down here looking for it. Forget everything you may have heard, or may wish to believe, concerning the New South. There is no New South. The New South is as old as "to lib and die in Dixie!" as cold as grits didn't hold the heat! or gingerbread colored or being a cocktail waitress in the Peachtree Plaza. The New South is as old as the paper-bag test or young Tom in a TV ad or Aunt Jemima in a situation comedy or as that rock of ages in which the South still believes it will be able to hide. The real South (which is the real America) flaunts itself, meanwhile, just outside Atlanta on Stone Mountain, the sacred gathering place of the K.K.K., dominated by the cross of the Nazarene Prince of Peace (on the cross, a trembling soul!), and every evening, when the sun goes down, flees to the suburbs, suburbs as far removed from reality as Byzantium and paler, by far, than the celebrated Georgia marble.

And as of this moment, when the white folks have fled, Atlanta becomes a black enclave. The whites flee by way of the bristling system of freeways--known as "ring around the Congo"--or by means of the rapid-transit system, MARTA, which translates as "moving Africans rapidly through Atlanta," another joke, which might have elicited a girlish giggle from Scarlett O'Hara and a resigned yuk-yuk-yuk from Mammy. The bulk--or the most visible bulk--of the white citizens of Atlanta are fleeing from the niggers, as they always have: God knows where--or if--they will eventually find themselves. For they are also fleeing, by no means incidentally, from all of the poor whites of the region.

The poor whites almost certainly outnumber the poor blacks and, being even more wretched, are yet more volatile and indispensable for the maintenance of the status quo.

One is scarcely, at first, aware of them. That is, in the daytime, when Atlanta is white, they merely look white. There they are, on the streets, along with everyone else, and one has no reason to wonder what they are doing or where they live. But then, while traveling across the city, one may suddenly turn a corner and find oneself facing block after block, mile after mile of hovels, with scrawny white children playing in desolate yards, closed white faces staring from the porch. And the South is not ghettoized, physically speaking, in the same way as the North. Poor whites and poor blacks live on top of one another, live in one another's armpits: They have absolutely no way of escaping one another. Some among them may become friends, but their communities are not, and cannot be, friends: The history, the structure and the purpose of the state forbid it.

This means--putting it as delicately as I can--that white people become, at least for the black stranger from the North, absolutely invisible for the first time. One wonders what they are doing in this dark city, all alone, without, so to speak, any visible means of support. But then, thinking about it another way, one can conclude that they need no apparent means of support. They are white, which is, as one has no choice but to hazard, their raison d'être. They are sustained by their well-to-do white brothers in the far-off splendid suburbs who have left them here to stand watch over this black city until the morning comes; and they are connected, inexorably and forever, by the cross. Their loneliness is as pungent as their sweat; some dreadful sense of loss is as strident or as muffled as their voices. It is impossible not to wonder what they are now doing in a city that has become as black as sin and death and hell and night--as black as the night that is swallowing up our children.

Black people are on the streets, too, mostly young and male. There seems to be no interaction between the blacks and the whites; but it is important to remember that I am talking about the poor.

On the other hand, what is meant by the New South is as aggressively visible and superbly photogenic as a Cecil B. (continued on page 308)Atlanta(continued from page 142) De Mille extravaganza, or the wonderful world of Walt Disney, or The Birth of a Nation, or Tara. It is a brutally mercantile endeavor, created for commerce and the camera. Both Dali and Warhol would love it: It is just about as new as they are. Squares, tubes, vials and bubbles assault the patient sky, ruthlessly connected to the sweeping lawns and steps and columns and verandas of the Big House, immortalized, like Lot's wife, behind the Big Gate. These squares, tubes, vials and bubbles, with their outside panoramic elevators, revolving cocktail lounges and exotic restaurants, perpetually incarcerate thousands and thousands of cheerful conventioneers, who, both dutiful and avid and, in any case, trapped, trample Miss Scarlett's lawn and climb her steps and pose before the columns. (These antebellum masterpieces are also for sale, I am told, and a couple of movie stars are investing in real estate down here--which, all things considered, is just about the least a grateful movie star can do.) These conventioneers are the lifeblood of the city and do not, after all, stay here very long--not at a stretch, anyway, which may be why they always seem so cheerful.

Atlanta boasts of itself--quite accurately--as a national and regional trade center: "Atlanta successfully maintained its dominance of wholesaling in the Southeast," according to the Atlanta Regional Commission, which also informs us that "during the decade of the Sixties and the early Seventies, the Atlanta region experienced a tremendous surge in national recognition and a continued healthy population and economic growth. Three contributing factors were the desegregation of its public facilities, the expansion of its transportation network and an excellent geographic location."

The desegregation of its public facilities: a statement as discreetly, not to say desperately, self-effacing as that nigger in the woodpile must have been.

•

I have a peculiar relationship to this city. It has hounded me, I sometimes feel, like mysteriously unfinished business, some terrifying and inescapable rendezvous. Two of my younger brothers were part of a quartet down here more than 30 years ago, having been, in effect, shanghaied by Henry Wallace's Progressive Party, which was determined to get on the ballot by any means necessary. I came later, from Paris, in 1957. Here I met Martin Luther King, Jr., who sent me on to Montgomery, Alabama, to Ralph David Abernathy--and to that indescribable road on which one discovered that one's ancestors had paid already for the present and knew that you would take what they had bequeathed you and hand it down the line. Which is a mightily liberating apprehension, however terrifying: It offers an option beyond the prison of the self. Or it helps one begin to bear--and use--both the terror of life and the fear of death.

On the civil rights road--which is an inept way to refer to the period and the passion, but, for the moment, it will have to serve--there was no way to get up South or down South without going through Atlanta. It was a waiting room, a clearinghouse, where one caught one's breath, went to the bathroom, washed one's face, compared notes, calculated one's next move, said hello and goodbye. It sounds insane now, but if you had managed to get out of Birmingham, Tallahassee or Jackson and all the way to Atlanta, you felt that the gods were with you and you'd live to see your home and those you loved again.

But I, as a reporter--my cover, if you like, in those days--realized that the city of Atlanta loathed us just as much as did the state of Georgia. But they could not afford to keep lynching us--publicly--and hope to keep on making money, too. Business is business.

If memory serves, Hartsfield was the name of the mayor when I first came down here, and his éminence grise was a very remarkable white woman named Helen Bullard. They wanted, for the sake of the city of Atlanta, to accomplish the necessary storm of desegregation with as little thunder and lightning as possible--without test cases and protracted legal battles. They did not want Atlanta to become another Little Rock, for example, or another Tuskegee or Montgomery.

Memory and perception being what they are in this country, it may be worth pointing out that I am speaking of the moment before the sit-in movement--before the young altered and redefined the dimensions of the struggle; and before the multitudes; that is, the poor--hit the streets of Birmingham. I am speaking of the moment before the Kennedy brothers decided to channel the struggle into the impasse, the dead end, of voter registration. And I describe the issue of voter registration in this grim way because this issue was at the heart of the battle between the mayor of Atlanta and the governor of Georgia (for that matter, it still is). The governor of Georgia did not need, could not afford, no niggers voting: He had made a solemn vow to his neighbors to that effect, as had Wallace, for example. But the mayor of Atlanta would be returned to the boondocks if he didn't have no niggers voting for him: They had made a solemn vow to that effect. This was the era of the boycott: The Montgomery bus company was being brought to its knees, as were, among others, the merchants of Tuskegee. And this was also, finally, the city of Martin Luther King, Jr., and his formidable father, the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church. I don't think that Martin ever led any demonstrations in this city: From a certain point of view, his presence, his legend, his world-wide effect were more than demonstration enough.

This meant that the white city fathers and the then Negro, now black middle class saw eye to eye on one thing, which was that desegregation had to be accomplished with a minimum of drama and a maximum of style. I want to make it clear that I am not sneering, I am not being sardonic: I do not see how responsible people, in such a cruel and narrow place, could possibly have come to any other conclusion or have acted in any other way. But it is important to realize that I do not have a sardonic intention when I say "then Negro, now black middle class." Whatever one may imagine oneself to think about these terms, the terms imply a journey.

The black middle class were the only black people in the city of Atlanta (there being, effectively, no black middle class in the state of Georgia) even to be remotely considered or consulted in this matter. It is also worth pointing out that in a country as desperately and socially incoherent--paranoid--as the United States, no one has the least idea of what class means, especially when it is preceded by the word black. In the American polarity, one is looked up to or one is looked down upon; there is nothing in between. When the word class, which is a mystery, is preceded by the word black, which is anathema, Americans simply become spiritual basket cases and head for the nearest cliff, needle, swastika or cowboy.

Finally, it is important to realize that neither the poor-black population nor the black middle class had the remotest interest in integration. We were integrated in the womb, which is why the blacks can use the word motherfucker with such a vertiginous and matchless range. The black demand was for desegregation. And it was very clearly stated: To be forced to be separate is to be judged and rendered unequal. In other words, desegregation, for all black people, was a demand that the criminal American boundaries that menaced all black life and deliberately, with icy intent and calculation, destroyed black children be abolished. The demand was that the criminal intention be faced, and the criminal act undone, and it is, indeed, worth putting it in Biblical terms: Turn ye from evil and do good.

We, the most despised offspring of the sinking Western house, were not beseeching those responsible for our captivity--who refused to be responsible for our captivity and refused to be responsible for their own--for yet another missionary blanket. We were perfectly capable of taking care of ourselves and our own; what was meant by desegregation was that we no longer be hindered from doing so. The black dentist, preacher, teacher, college president, poppa, momma, sister, brother, uncle were not asking white people to take away our duties and render us obsolete. Black Americans were not asking for any help from white Americans--or, more accurately, from that republic that considers itself to be white--to raise our children. We, after all, had been doing that for a while. We just wished to be allowed--which is fair enough--to keep on keeping on.

Desegregation was the black demand for autonomy. White Americans, just as though they could not see the many colors of Hagar's children, translated that demand into a plea for integration. Smiling, liberal missionaries, good Lord, friends like these! used this one word and their pretended misunderstanding of what I will call Martin's plea to destroy black institutions--all of them--with the intention of destroying black life.

I have come a long way round the barn, but Atlanta is coherent only in this context. Atlanta, furthermore, happens merely to be in the news, to have caught the light. It happens also to have a black administration, which is at the mercy of the state of Georgia--which is at the mercy of the real intentions of the interests that are attempting to rule this country and the world. Atlanta is not unique. Ask any black citizen of this country, walk into any black housing project or any prison. Ask the Mississippi.

•

Edward Hope Smith, 14--reported missing July 20, 1979; found dead on July 28 of gunshot wounds along a road in a wooded area. He was last seen at Greenbriar skating rink eight days earlier.

Alfred James Evans, 13--last seen July 25, 1979, waiting to catch a bus. He was believed to be en route to a theater on Peachtree Street. Police identified Evans' body October 13, 1980, after it was found July 28 near the body of Edward Hope Smith.

Yusef Ali Bell, nine--reported missing October 21, 1979. Found strangled to death November eighth at the abandoned E. P. Johnson Elementary School. His body was found in a crawl space beneath a classroom.

I went to several sites. The E. P. Johnson school was the first enclosed one, the first, as it were, domestic one. Quite unconsciously, without daring to think of it at all, one can defend oneself--and one does--against the horror dragged out of the river: Just about here, I think, body got tangled up in that, oh, what do you call them weeds? or the roadside or the bank of the river or the bridge. But the school was something else.

It had been an eminent black school, smashed by the hammer of integration, looking now like something out of Edgar Allan Poe. We walked the unsteady floors, climbed through broken windows, the abandoned property where people of all ages and colors came to eat and drink and smoke pot and piss and shit and fuck. But somebody had carried this child here and placed a heavy board on top of him and walked away. I wondered if the child had been dead already or had been forced to wait for death here; and though I met his mother, the very remarkable Camille Bell, I found that I could say nothing whatever to her that would not have sounded trivial, disrespectful, in my own ears, obscene. (I do not mean to imply that anyone I talked to, or tried to talk to, treated me as an intruder, for they didn't. I found them beautiful; but I found that I couldn't cope. Even now, attempting this sketch, or this inadequate report, with a very heavy heart, I realize that it will be a very cold day in an unimaginable August before I will be able to cope with, articulate, an anguish I have never felt so bitterly, so keenly, before.)

Well. Atlanta was naturally vivid with speculation, most of which, I find, I am not now willing to repeat. Finally, when one forced oneself to listen both to the inward voice and to the relentless surrounding cacophony of wonder, guilt and terror, it was all centered on the question of the children, a question that boomeranged into our faces, the faces of the elders. We were not really confronting a Jack the Ripper fantasy, or an Agatha Christie puzzle: We were being confronted with the concrete result of the choices we had made. In the face of the accumulating horror, it really made no difference that we had once been young, had not known what we were doing, had been betrayed, smashed, defeated by the circumstances of our lives. However rigorous and bloody the mathematics, whatever had been borne by us, the elders, at the hands of those who required of us a song could not be handed down to the children, for that inheritance was death. And we had never acquiesced in the slaughter of our children before.

In hermetic, schizophrenic and terrified Atlanta, therefore, it was fascinating to listen to black voices, from the so-called bottom to the hopeful, hypothetical top. If, for example, the administration of the city had been white, the blacks would have known themselves to be, and with every conceivable justification, the victims of a reign of terror: That cross on Stone Mountain would have taken the weight--to storm the Bastille, however hazardous, would not have been complicated by not knowing where to find it. But it is a very different matter when black people on the bottom--in the streets--accuse the black police department of not caring about black children. I am perfectly willing to tell you, and categorically, that I do not believe this accusation to contain any truth at all: The point is that the accusation can be made, and believed by many people.

You will forgive me if I quote myself--I think I have no choice at the moment. Many years ago, in the title essay of Nobody Knows My Name, I wrote:

Atlanta's well-to-do Negroes never take buses, for they all have cars. The section in which they live is quite far away from the poor Negro section.... They see very little of the white world; but they are cut off from the black world, too.... Now, of course, this last statement is not literally true.... I am talking about their position as a class--if they are a class--and their role in a very complex and shaky social structure.

That was 1957 and this is 1981. It was not written then, nor can it be read today, as anything resembling an accusation. I was describing, I hoped, the dimensions of a trap. My notes, from this most recent of my journeys to Atlanta, indicate that someone said to me, "For more than a year, none of the old-line civil rights leaders said anything about the dead or missing children." Well, I don't doubt it, nor can I imagine what they would have said, they being so largely responsible for the integration of the city--quite apart from what they themselves might have intended. Nor is it unfair, I think, to ask just how many "old-line civil rights leaders" are left. I can see, certainly, whether or not I agree, how old-line civil rights leaders might have hesitated to jump on the black administration they had helped put into what then seemed like power, might have hesitated to add their voices to the white, demeaning Stone Mountain chorus. Furthermore--and, again, whether or not I agree--there is a reason that Abernathy and Hosea Williams, who are neither whores nor fools, opted for Reagan. It is difficult to make bricks without straw.

Furthermore, let us face it, poverty is poverty, habit is habit and time is real. Or let us put it another way: The inescapable and irreducible danger of being a black man or woman in this country is being forced to live with so vast a horror, day in and day out, that one finally ceases to be able to react to it. Another man done gone; and one clicks on the television set.

The missing or murdered children were generally described as "hustlers," "runaways." Well, I was a hustler, along with my brothers: We fought to buy day-old bread, sold shopping bags, shined shoes, collected bottles for deposit, ran errands for whoever would give us a nickel or a dime, and stole. We had no choice--we were poor--and we carried every penny home. We were much too poor to be afraid of anything on the streets--this is precisely what people do not understand about poverty: If anything on the streets frightens you, you will not make it to the corner and might as well lie down and die.

And we were runaways, too. Four or five to a bed, 12 to a hovel, the battle to get into the bathroom makes one long for the horizon. To say nothing of the effect of all this on Momma and Daddy. If both of them are home, there is a decided risk of child abuse. In the case of the murdered children, Daddy was usually absent; one child was in the charge of his grandmother; and, in one case (Patrick Baltazar), the father had moved from Louisiana to Atlanta. His son went to live with him, and to die.

Don't think I don't understand, one black city official said to me. I can take care of my kids. They ain't got to be out there. But in the silence that followed, I watched his eyes and his eyes seemed to say, But I don't know if I can protect them.

He meant that his children didn't have to hustle: out there. He wasn't rich, but he wasn't poor; he could provide for his children. But only he and his wife knew that--better than the children, who didn't have his grim gamut of comparisons. Whoever was slaughtering the children saw only a black child. Furthermore, whoever was slaughtering the children was almost certainly black. There aren't that many friendly white people in black neighborhoods, they don't go unnoticed, certainly, and black children aren't likely to jump into a white man's car--especially not as their peers, their schoolmates, are being dragged out of the river or being found dead all over town. I asked ten-year-old Gregory Tyler, inanely enough--adults can be superbly inane when attempting not to confront a child's trouble--"What would you say to the murderer if you met him?"

The child thought for a moment, far away from all of us, all by himself. Then, "Well, first of all, please stop it."

The terror in Atlanta begins to alter, or to reveal, the relationships among black people. The black middle class of Atlanta believes itself to be the oldest and the noblest in the South--which means the nation--and it probably is; and who cares? I mean, who gives a flying fuck about all this genteel house-nigger ancestry if it cannot save our children or clarify a town? I have always contended that Mammy had far better things to do with her time than to fret over the utterly intolerable Scarlett O'Hara, who needed only a fine ass kicking and a job and a man.

Whoever is murdering the children must, on the evidence, be dark enough to pass unnoticed, is someone who has been driven mad by the double inheritance of house nigger and field nigger, of genuine bondage and promised freedom; who is both the son of the white master and blood brother to the black castrated corpse; brother and pimp and nephew to the high-yellow or chocolate or ebony whore; nephew and foster son and occasional lover to that dispenser of milk and pancakes, Aunt Jemima; mercilessly pursued and bewildered sexual object and ruthlessly helpless sexual aggressor, hippie, drug dealer and thug; dog soldier and failed mercenary in anybody's army; violently chaste, repressed and repentant soldier in the army of the Lord. He is Andy Hardy, acquiring or losing a tan.

He is, in short, what our history has made of us, and we must take our children out of his hands.

•

Many years ago, my sister, Gloria, who was my man Friday then, and my secretary, Lucien, who was her man Friday, and myself were taking care of business in our separate offices in my big West End apartment in New York. It was a Sunday, I think; Gloria's three young daughters were there. The three girls had gone out for a walk.

I don't know, or remember, how long it took. I remember only looking up from my desk, from whatever I was doing, and hearing, as it were, another silence. I walked out of my quarters to the living room. Gloria and Lucien had already left their offices and were leaning out the windows that overlooked West End Avenue.

Now, this was, for me, the time of hate mail and quite unbelievable phone calls, nightshade creatures threatening to murder me and mine; but you have to throw such nonsense out of your head if you intend to continue functioning. I must add, too, that whoever wrote--writes--such letters, which are rarely signed, or those voices humming out of limbo, could scarcely be called frightening, or not, at least, in the way they intended to be. It was simply not to be believed, and we used to joke about those maniacs. I even saved a few of the letters and read them aloud to friends.

But now, on this Sunday, I really was hearing a new silence, for my sister's daughters were my nieces, and those maniacs were no laughing matter. They were real.

Without a word, Lucien and I left the apartment, leaving Gloria at the window. At the street door, we parted, he going in one direction, I in the other.

Every soul on the street that afternoon was a menace, was the enemy. Everything and everyone was suspect. The doorman across the street, who knew, me and who waved--who always waved. What did he mean by waving at me today? Was it a signal? Did he know where the children were? On what floor of that building, behind what window? Or were they in that car, which had seemed to wait until I appeared before suddenly gunning its motor and roaring down the avenue? Had the children been carried to the river, which was before me, or to Central Park, which was behind me? We couldn't hope to cover the island. I looked up and saw Gloria leaning out the window. I will never, ever forget the absolute stillness and silence of that afternoon, that brief moment that seemed longer than all of recorded time. Atlanta was like that; it was in the faces of mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, helpless small children, helpless friends. Yet, since only we could help each other, we could not afford to be helpless.

My nieces came smiling toward us from the river, where they had been picking flowers for their mother; no one had the heart or the energy to scold them.

•

One of Atlanta's architectural triumphs is called the Omni. The name is scarcely more ambitious than the place, which is a kind of frozen, enclosed suburb. It is about five minutes away from a sprawling, poor-black neighborhood called Vine City. A child can walk here from his home in less than five minutes; some of the murdered children were last seen in this place.

One enters through a galaxy of shop-windows selling clothes that your momma and your poppa can't buy; the entire place is honeycombed with overpriced tourist items--I was about to say overpriced tourists. There are several levels: One finds oneself standing beneath an enormous dome and the building stretches above one, tier by tier. Among the establishments on the ground level, there is a "French" bakery and a pin-ball, video-game arcade: a space that contained a staggering array and variety of game machines. In the center of all this is a tremendous open ice-skating rink and, at the opposite end of the floor, facing the arcade, is the moviehouse, a complex containing, I believe, six theaters.

The place is so vast and so cold that it seemed empty each time I was there; but, in fact, it is probably never empty, neither on the main floor nor on any of the shadowy tiers above.

The Omni has two office towers, and security (for the offices) is very tight. But it would be virtually impossible to maintain any kind of security on this main floor, in this vast space that is nothing less than a magnet for children and for those who prey on children. And, in spite of the curfew, here were the boys--utterly idle, unable to remain in their wretched homes, unable to make coherent the circumstances in which they and their flesh and blood were entangled, looking for respite and, like their more advantageously placed white brothers, looking for a narcotic, for money for the movies, for the pinball machines, for the skating rink: looking for change.

And, indeed, what a slap in the face, what an insult, to place this Roman excrescence in the very path of the wretched, who must daily go through it or find a way around it. Such structures are defended by those responsible for them as ultimately benefiting the poor by breathing new economic life into the community or, more simply, by creating new jobs. This, alas, is nonsense. Very few among the young urban poor wish to be turned into a new serving class; a serving class, furthermore, that can be perceived as already obsolete, and not only that, which is bad enough: These newest hewers of wood and drawers of water will be yet more menaced than our black ancestors. Our ancestors raised us to be men, to be men and women: People forget that Martin's dream did not begin with Martin. But if the sinking Western world has its way with us now, there will be no children to raise: raise to what, and by what standard?

This is the subject of another essay, but it is also the question that vexes and, in some way, begins to unite all of black Atlanta.

•

Gregory Tyler, age ten, member of Boy Scout Troop 154, a very remarkable young person:

"We don't talk about it unless they discover a body, and then they don't say anything else. Sometimes I feel scared...."

"Do you have any idea who it is?"

"We really have no idea. We don't talk about who the person might be, we just know that it is some crazy idiot running around snatching kids off the street and killing them."

"You are never alone, then."

"Not usually. Maybe if I walk a block away from a scout meeting."

"Do you think it's a white person?"

"No. Because there are some blacks who have hatred of other blacks."

Melanie, one of his neighbors, a little older than Gregory:

"If they call a cop to take the child home [safely], then the cop might be the killer."

And another girl:

"He [one of the murdered children] didn't have good parents. [One of the parents] went to the home to see the mother and there were two babies in wet diapers. She was there two hours and they were never changed and the lady was smoking and drinking all the time. The kids fixed their own food. She said she didn't care, because he [the murdered child] ran away from home."

And another girl:

"[Another murdered child's mother] said that she waited two days to report him missing because she thought he was at his grandmother's house. She should have been concerned. I have to let my mother know where I'm going."

But, on the other hand:

"When [one of the murdered children] called the task force, they said they had to wait 48 hours."

And, according to Melanie:

"He was outside and it was dark--he went back up and called the task force. He said, 'Someone is following behind me--will you please come?' They wouldn't. [The task force officer] said, 'Where are your parents? I'm sorry, I can't help you.'"

And Gregory says:

"I was thinking that it was the parents that did it. My mother told me about a mother who killed her child because she was crazy one day--so I was thinking that it was just the parents who are doing this."

Eleven-year-old Dietra hazards:

"I think that most parents nowadays just don't care about their children that much, and the killer knows it. He says, 'Well, why should I care?' Your neighbor, the policeman, firemen, MARTA bus drivers--it could be someone you least suspect and you really can't tell, because nowadays people don't have looks that are saying what kind of people they are."

•

My friend the invaluable Toni Morrison has pointed out that one man can't raise a child, one woman can't raise a child, nor can the man and the woman together raise the child: It takes the entire village to raise a child.

That statement is as unanswerable as a blow with a hammer and leaves even less time for resentment. "If the race is to survive," Toni adds, "it has to take care of its own--that's not an agency's job."

Somewhere, in the brutal Western desert, in the long American night--which will become darker yet before it is realized that a nation (to say nothing of a people) is not merely a collection of hardware and plastic--somewhere, the blacks of this nation began to lose faith in what had produced and sustained us. Do not imagine that I am suggesting a return to the past, which is never, anyway, possible. I am suggesting merely that whoever does not know what is behind him cannot decipher what is around him. When that happens, chaos is come again: If the father is irrecoverable, the son is lost. That this vacuum cannot be filled by the American dream is suggested by the relentlessly rising black suicide rate (though we are still behind our white brothers) and by the actual and moral state of the country for which we have paid so much and loved so deeply.

When one of my nephews was two years old, he was sitting on my lap in his mother's house and we happened to be watching his uncle Jimmy (me) on television. One forgets that we knew nothing when we got here; one forgets how the world opens (or closes) before a child not merely every day but every hour of every day. Little Gebril kept looking at the TV screen, where, unmistakably, his uncle--eyes, face and, above all, voice--was present; but he was also sitting on my lap and I had my arms around him. He kept looking from the TV screen into my face, and the only way he could frame his enormous question was continuously to ask me, Where you been?

I think we'd better take it from there.

"The city of Atlanta loathed us as much as did the state of Georgia but couldn't afford to keep lynching us."