Leaving Atlanta (29 page)

I turned over to page one. There was a picture of Rodney’s mama with crying eyes.

“Mama, did you see Rodney mama crying?” Every time I looked over at her, she looked beautiful and calm as Coretta Scott King.
She had the same long hair and the same black hat with a little net over her face. And even a little girl laying across her
lap.

“No, she wasn’t crying,” Mama said. “She was too busy trying to be Jackie Kennedy.” She turned the brush as she pulled it
through my hair, making the curls smoother.

Why did she sound so irritated? Granny always said that Kennedy was the best president we ever had. He was even friends with
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “I thought we liked the Kennedys.”

“Jackie not crying is one thing. When your husband die, and you don’t cry, that’s good. That’s strength. You see what I’m
talking about?”

I nodded my head. “Like Coretta Scott King?”

“Hold your head still,” Mama said. “But when you lose your
baby
and you don’t cry? Then you got a problem.”

“Why everybody always say you lost somebody? Rodney not lost. They make it sound like you mislaid your lunch box or something.”
Now I was the one irritated. People need to say the words they mean. Rodney not
lost
, he
dead.
And Mama need to stop tearing up because she not about to
lose
me, she throwing me away.

“Sweet Pea.” She pressed her lips to the top of my head. “You lose your child not like you lose a watch. You lose your child
like you lose your sight. Lose your mind.”

“Like Miss Viola?” The sadness in her voice pressed against my chest, stealing my air.

Mama let me go and pulled a cigarette from the pack on my dresser. “Just like Viola.” She turned her lips to the side so as
not to blow the smoke right in my face.

From the church’s balcony, Rodney’s funeral was like a service for Jashante too. Everyone knew Jashante was dead, but since
they didn’t find him yet, Miss Viola couldn’t have a funeral for him. Rodney’s family and all the money people were down on
the bottom floor where the casket and choir was. But everyone that stay where we live, took a place in the balcony. When we
got there, Mama didn’t even check to see if there was any seats down below; we just climbed the stairs. When we got up there,
that’s just where our people was. Nobody up there knew Rodney Green except for me. But all of them knew Jashante and Miss
Viola, his mother.

When Cinque Freeman starting singing “Lord I’m Not Asking” in a voice so full of tears that the music sounded wet, the ushers
downstairs stood four on each end of the family pew. And Miss Darlene and another neighbor moved in closer to Miss Viola.
Cinque didn’t get too far into the song before he started crying all the way. It spread like measles.

I had never heard a whole room full of people cry before. The sound is loud and rolling, like when I cross the street halfway
and have to stand on the yellow line while cars whoosh by on either side. A dangerous sound. I wiped my face with my sleeve
and looked down from the balcony. Almost everybody held a fan with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the front and the funeral
home on the back. As the fans flapped, the crying got louder like it was a train and the fans pushed it on.

Then Miss Viola said, “Jesus.” The first time, she said it like He was standing at the front of the church and she was trying
to get His attention before He went back up to heaven with Rodney. I looked at the black Jesus in the window glass. Then she
hollered it out how like when you call after somebody and say
you know you hear me.
The window Jesus wasn’t black like anybody I know. His skin was just a little browner than a regular Jesus and His black
hair hung straight to His shoulders.

The casket that Rodney was in was silver-gray and closed. I knew he was the one in there because, after all, it was his funeral.
And the program in my hand had that same photo of him on the cover. But if you don’t think too hard about it, it could be
anybody in that box. Anybody that you don’t know where they at.

Miss Viola didn’t wear a hat with net, but her sadness covered her face just as well. And her daughters looked like mourning
women, not seven- and eight-year-old girls. Each one sat on one side of their mama, wrapping themselves around her like kudzu.
Miss Viola held her hands up in the air. “My child.” She heaved forward like she trying to get up to go downstairs. But the
girls held her tight like they were trying to hug each other but their mama’s body was in the way.

Miss Darlene and the other ladies from our neighborhood moved in around Miss Viola as she called Jesus out of His name, and
the little girls reached for each other. Then my mama held me to her. She grabbed me fast and suddenly like she was sweeping
me out of the way of a crazy driver. She squeezed the air out of my chest and I thought that maybe she was killing me. “Lord,”
she said into the top of my head. Then she sang one of the songs we sing at our church. Moaning songs that don’t have words.

Mama sang her song until everyone around us joined in. Downstairs, the choir sang, “I’ll Fly Away,” but the people sitting
around me paid it no mind. The music from the balcony was the kind of music that was meant for crying like some other kind
of music was meant for dancing. I was crying too, now. I wanted to keep my mind on Rodney so my tears would fall for all the
right reasons. But I cried because it seemed like everything good in the world was locked in a box, like a backward Pandora.
“Mama, let me stay,” I whispered.

“No,” she said. “I can’t.” She pressed me closer to her, hurting my neck. I felt tears dripping from her chin onto my freshly
pressed hair.

Tears dripped from her chin right now too. But they weren’t landing in my hair. Mama caught these tears in her own empty hand.
I watched her like she was someone on TV. Not like she was my own mother sitting here on my own bed crying like somebody just
died.

I got up from the bed and stepped into the heavy blue dress. I reached around my waist to scoot the zipper up. Then I stretched
my arm over my shoulder to finish closing it but I couldn’t reach.

“Come here,” Mama said. “Let me help you.”

She was still sitting on my white bedspread and I stood between her knees. She pulled the zipper and I felt the dress tighten
around me. Mama hugged me hard at my middle, leaning her face against my shoulder blade. “It’s gonna be okay,” she whispered.
“I’m not sending you up there to be nobody’s maid. Nobody’s baby-sitter. You his
daughter.
You
family.”

I’m her daughter too.
We’re
family. What about that?

“I love you,” she said.

But she lies. Her words are like a chocolate mint, soft and delicious, melting on my tongue; but I can’t swallow it.

I wiggled out of her grip. “Taxi be here in a minute.”

The wind is mean as me and Mama stand on the corner waiting for the yellow cab.

“You look pretty,” she says.

What she means is that I look like someone else. Nikky’s dress, new Sears and Roebuck coat. Frilly panties that never touched
my body before.

“One thing is missing.” She digs in her purse and comes out with a little bottle of her perfume. Mama sprays my neck and wrists
with her favorite scent like she’s sending me to the kind of party I never get invited to.

The smell of my mother is all over me now. It rises from my skin and forces itself up my nose and down my throat. I try not
to take in air, but I know that I have to breathe her in or die.

I take small sips of Mama and cry. The water in my eyes blurs her like a dream or a ghost.

She speaks and the lies curl from between her lips like smoke, getting into the fabric of my clothes and twining through my
hair. “I love you,” she says.

Today is an ugly day. The clouds, dark and cold, hang close to the ground, like they might start raining gray ice and broken
glass.

I turn my face away from Mama and look toward Fair Street. I don’t see the yellow taxi. For Mrs. Grier, all it took was a
car trip and a eyelet pillowcase to make her forget home. But not me.

I’ll be missing my mama for the rest of my life.

Though the events and characters in this novel are fictional, the serial murders described on these pages are based on a string
of ghastly murders that began in the summer of 1979, 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. (There were several other
child killings in Atlanta during this period, but they were deemed “unrelated” although many of the victims matched the demographic
descriptions of the “official” victims.)

On June 1, 1981, Wayne Williams, a twenty-three-year-old African American, was charged with the murder of two adults, twenty-one-year-old
Jimmy Ray Payne and twenty-seven-year-old Nathaniel Cater. Though he is officially accused only of these crimes, it was largely
understood he was believed to be responsible for the two-year killing spree. On February 27, 1982, Williams was convicted
of the murders and sentenced to a double term of life imprisonment. The next month, the “child murders” task force officially
disbanded. The courts have rejected all appeals filed on behalf of Wayne Williams. Many Atlantans believe that the child murderer
is still at large.

I have made slight alterations to the chronology as it suits the purposes of the novel.