3. The Time Bomb in the Nursery
Atlanta, Georgia, is one of the model cities of the New South. The scene of many a crucial battle in the desegregation war, Atlanta has since dubbed itself ‘the city too busy to hate*. The 6oo,ooo population is predominantly black, as is the city administration. The airport, the world’s largest, is designed by black architects, its concourses adorned with the work of black artists. Downtown, among the civic mansions and futuristic hotels, the streets are so clean that you expect to see ashtrays, standard lamps, Hoovers, on every corner.
It was the random nature of the killings which first persuaded Atlanta that the city’s crisis was a racial one. Where else do you find any link or motive? This kid was shot, that one bludgeoned, that one stabbed. None of them had any money. There was no obvious sexual factor in the killings, except perhaps in the case of the two girls (Latonya Wilson was found four months after her death, her body partly eaten by dogs; Angel Lanier was found a week after her disappearance, sexually molested, tied to a tree). All the children were dumped, having been killed elsewhere. Some had been hidden, some had been laid out openly, in natural, relaxed postures. The victims have only three things in common: they were black, they were poor, and they were children.
‘Sure we thought it was racial,’ I was told. ‘Or political anyway. Some movement might be doing this to force a situation. Might be extreme right or extreme left. And with us black folks squeezed in the middle.’
Racial disquiet climbed in the city all last year, until October. Then came the bomb in the nursery. An explosion in a day nursery killed three children and a teacher, all of them black. ‘Now I am a mild man,’ said an elderly negro. ‘I don’t hold with this vigilante stuff. But after that explosion, I was ready to go. I didn’t think it was a bomb. I knew it was a bomb. And it was the Klan put it there.’
The day nursery is on a broad street, one marked by an air of colourful poverty, opposite a run-down school. It is not difficult to imagine the scene on that hot autumn day. Hoax calls forced five nearby schools to evacuate. There must have been a lot of fear and anger milling around on the street.
Mayor Maynard Jackson and Commissioner Lee Brown, the two prongs of the black administration, did what they had to do: they acted fast. Within hours black experts were on the scene, pronouncing the cause of the explosion: old boiler, faulty wiring. ‘If that thing hadn’t been open and shut the same day,’ I was told, ‘well, it could have been a bloody night in Atlanta.’
No one thinks the killings are primarily racial any more. No one thinks the killings are primarily anything any more. Fear and bafflement are very tiring, and Atlanta is a weary city by now. Twenty have died, but the effects of the trauma are incalculable.
In a sense, the bomb in the nursery is heard and felt every day. Children no longer play in the parks and streets. In the housing projects, council estates which combine urban decay with a tang of authentic suburban dread, children stand and talk in groups, and stare at the cars. There have been alarming increases in all symptoms of juvenile anxiety: bedwetting, refusal to sleep alone, fear of doors and windows. Reports go on about children having ‘lost the capacity to trust people’. If the murderer or murderers, the leftist or rightist, the madman or madmen unknown are caught and convicted tomorrow, there won’t be a black child in Atlanta whose life has not already been deformed by these killings.
4. Circus of the Supercops
Last November, Dorothy Allison, known as ‘the vendetta psychic’, came to town at the invitation of the Atlanta police. Dorothy had been fighting crime with her paranormal powers since 1967, when a dream led her to discover the body of a five-year-old boy, stuffed into a drainpipe. She worked on 100 cases, finding 38 bodies and solving 14 murders. But Dorothy drew a blank in Atlanta. Townspeople complain that she spent most of her time here promoting her autobiography on local radio shows. One mother said that the psychic never returned her only photograph of her murdered son.