“Joan Crawford’s straight, narrow, and lonely back.” My first encounter with James Baldwin occurred in this opening line of The Devil Finds Work. More than thirty years on, I remember that terse opening with perfect clarity—the introduction to a memoir that served as a fitting gateway to the intricacies of his mind, to his nimble, rancorous explorations of the inherent contradictions in our lived experiences. Since then, Baldwin’s books have become a steady fixture in my reading habits, augmented by his caustic, honest television interviews and his wide-ranging commentaries.
First published by Baldwin nearly forty years ago, The Evidence of Things Not Seen offers a searing disquisition on race, class, identity, and community, not unfamiliar territory to him but uniquely approached. Framed as a journeyman’s investigation of the Atlanta child murders from 1979 to 1981, Baldwin’s work explores how privilege sacrifices the young and vulnerable, especially black children, denying them voice and possibly vengeance. His masterful rendering of a complex case that did not pretend to have an answer—even at the time it went to trial—continues to prod the conscience. In fact, Atlanta’s mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms, ordered a reexamination of the case in 2021, and investigators have raised questions about the number of victims claimed during the murderous spell.
Forty years ago, the tumult that surrounded the vile killings of Atlanta’s black children tangled notions of guilt and accountability, reality and sharp relief, which remain snarled in both the public imagination and in the vagaries of what constitutes justice. But, at the core of his incisive writing, Baldwin issues a weary, pointed challenge to the reader, asking if we are ever truly in search of the truth, decades on. At the core of his analysis is our duty of care for the lives of black folks. Atlanta, Georgia’s legendary status as a mecca for black wealth, talent, and political acumen tacitly argues that this obligation should have no better keepers. Yet, Baldwin juxtaposes this mythology with the spectacle of Wayne Williams’s murder trial for the slaying of two men, as proxy for the killings of more than two dozen black children.
I cannot claim to know the Atlanta Baldwin encountered during his visit in 1985; although I have claimed Georgia as my home since 1989, and I eventually worked with or for some of the folks included in his commentary. Born in Wisconsin, and raised in Mississippi, I moved to Decatur, Georgia, in the autumn with my parents and five siblings. By then, the specter of the serial killings had long since faded from headlines. When the Williams trial began in 1982, I had just reached the age of eight, the same age as some of the youngest victims; and with the safety of two states’ distance, I was blithely unaware of the stark, relentless terror that had gripped the black families of Atlanta in my early youth.
Nevertheless, Baldwin’s account of the social peril, the discord between power and poverty, the tenor of the investigation and trial immediately thrusts the reader into a cultural maelstrom, audited by his distance as an interloper and raconteur. He cites familiar tropes about the African-American enclaves that comprise Atlanta, and his fluency anchors us in the Southern dichotomy that birthed Atlanta mayor Maynard Jackson, Wayne Williams, and the KKK. Baldwin effectively guides the uninitiated through the stoic grief of the slain victims’ families, urging us to recall how the anguish of black parents can be too easily overlooked. With pointed genius, he inveighs against the comfortable dismissal of the broken policies that allowed nearly thirty children to perish.
The Evidence of Things Not Seen channels the cri de coeur of the slain and their beloveds and pours their indignation into the twenty-first century. Baldwin’s indictment of how economic paucity and race can doom us echoes, as it must, with the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery in 2020. Millions have watched the endless replays of Floyd’s public execution by a dismissive police officer who knelt on his neck until his breath choked away. While the catharsis of trial put Derek Chauvin into a prisoner’s cell, the antidote to this brutality remains mired in legislative limbo. The U.S. Congress, no longer hostage to national protests, has abandoned its pledge of “never again” despite the regular stories of law enforcement misdeeds. Baldwin’s cautions in The Evidence of Things Not Seen warn us of the difference between individuals and systems—a difference that demands we judge officers of the law fairly by their actions but requires that we indict the impermeable protections of qualified immunity, racial profiling, and violent policing practices like choke holds.
The murder of Breonna Taylor, while she nestled in her bed, came at the hands of Louisville, Kentucky, law enforcement that randomly fired rounds of ammunition into her home after failing to give Breonna a chance to offer a token defense. This horrific miscarriage of policing power animated her mother, Tamika Palmer. Ms. Palmer’s crusade—like Camille Bell’s demand back then that Atlanta leaders protect black children despite their failure to protect her own—is the legacy of what Baldwin exhorts of those who read his reportage. Our systems place unfair burdens on victims’ families to bring righteousness to the process—regardless of the color of the bad actor. Just as Bell decried inaction, Palmer forced changes to no-knock warrants and trained a fine eye on a fumbling state attorney general whose blackness could not be used to excuse his flawed leadership on Breonna Taylor’s case.
Closer to home, in Brunswick, Georgia, the vigilante murder of Ahmaud Arbery implicated a district attorney who refused to indict the killers or truly mount an investigation. Two white men chased jogger Ahmaud through the streets of town on suspicion of being too black for the neighborhood. Their cavalier shootings—captured on video—nearly went unattended. Black families in Brunswick, Georgia, refused to be ignored by political leaders and banded together to demand action. As of this writing, the state’s murder case resulted in a guilty verdict against all three defendants, but the federal hate crimes charges are still wending their way through the courts. The consequences have been more telling than Baldwin might have presaged: the murderers convicted in a trial of peers, the disgraced district attorney deposed and under indictment, and the repeal of Georgia’s citizen’s arrest law. That particularly depraved statute received initial codification in Georgia in 1863 to aid in the enforcement of slavery—when black skin meant chattel property, not humanity.
The humanity of black children, of black men and women, of black lives, has ever been a conundrum for America. Forty years on, Baldwin’s writing reminds us that we have never resolved the core query: Do black lives matter? Unequivocally, the moral answer is yes, but James Baldwin refuses such rhetorical comfort. The persistence of mass incarceration, criminal injustice, voter suppression, environmental racism, COVID disparities, and the host of ills that inevitably gain stronger purchase in black communities begs the question be given more urgent action. Whether the proof is introduced in trials, in the streets, or in the halls of power, we are devoid as a nation until we answer with a single voice. Until then, we continue to grapple with the evidence of things not seen.
—STACEY Y. ABRAMS