Walter Lowe, of Playboy, wrote me—to my home in France—suggesting that I go to Atlanta to do a story concerning the missing and (as it evolved) murdered children. I had been following the story—what there was, that is, in the foreign press, to follow. It is not so easy to follow a story occurring in one’s own country from the vantage point of another one.
From afar, one may imagine that one perceives the pattern. And one may. But, as one is not challenged—or, more precisely, menaced—by the details, the pattern may be nothing more than something one imagines oneself to be able to remember.
And, after all, what I remembered—or imagined myself to remember—of my life in America (before I left home!) was terror. And what I am trying to suggest by what one imagines oneself to be able to remember is that terror cannot be remembered. One blots it out. The organism—the human being—blots it out. One invents, or creates, a personality or a persona. Beneath this accumulation (rock of ages!) sleeps or hopes to sleep, that terror which the memory repudiates.
Yet, it never sleeps—that terror, which is not the terror of death (which cannot be imagined) but the terror of being destroyed.
Sometimes I think, one child in Atlanta said to me, that I’ll be coming home from (baseball or football) practice and somebody’s car will come behind me and I’ll be thrown into the trunk of the car and it will be dark and he’ll drive the car away and I’ll never be found again.
Never be found again: that terror is far more vivid than the fear of death. When the child said that to me I tried to imagine the tom-tom silence of the trunk of the car, the darkness, the silence, the speed, the corkscrew road. I tried, that is, to imagine this as something happening to the child. My memory refused to accommodate that child as myself.
But that child was myself.
I do not remember, will never remember, how I howled and screamed the first time my mother was carried away from me. My mother was the only human being in the world. The only human being: everyone else existed by her permission.
Yet, what the memory repudiates controls the human being. What one does not remember dictates who one loves or fails to love. What one does not remember dictates, actually, whether one plays poker, pool, or chess. What one does not remember contains the key to one’s tantrums or one’s poise. What one does not remember is the serpent in the garden of one’s dreams. What one does not remember is the key to one’s performance in the toilet or in bed. What one does not remember contains the only hope, danger, trap, inexorability, of love—only love can help you recognize what you do not remember.
And memory makes its only real appearance in this life as this life is ending—appearing, at last, as a kind of guide into a condition which is as far beyond memory as it is beyond imagination.
What has this to do with the murdered, missing children of Atlanta?
It has something to do with the fact that no one wishes to be plunged, head down, into the torrent of what he does not remember and does not wish to remember. It has something to do with the fact that we all came here as candidates for the slaughter of the innocents. It has something to do with the fact that all survivors, however they accommodate or fail to remember it, bear the inexorable guilt of the survivor. It has something to do, in my own case, with having once been a Black child in a White country.
My memory stammers: but my soul is a witness.
THE CASE AGAINST Wayne Williams contains a hole so wide that the indisputably alert Abby Mann has driven one of his many tanks through it. To discuss his docudrama demands another essay entirely—involving the American sense of history, for example, or Commerce, the evil grown by the tree of the doctrine of White Supremacy and the Tree of Manifest Destiny, and the many shapes collusion or collaboration take. His docudrama, furthermore, and by no means incidentally, demands the services of many people for whom I have the greatest respect.
I will merely point out, and beg my reader to remember, that his portraits of the Mayor, and the Chief of Police, are, to put it with the utmost restraint, irresponsibly wide of the mark and that the role of the White cop is a necessary American invention.
On the other hand, the scene in which the boy calls the Task Force, which did not arrive, is true: this story was told to me by one of the children. Ms. Bell and Ms. Foster, who portrays her, are more complex than the docudrama can imagine or convey. The real meaning of the boiler explosion at the housing project is not conveyed—for the reason that the docudrama is too self-serving to be able to convey the reality of that moment in Atlanta.
Georgia is named for an English King and enters History as a convict colony: which is to say that the people who settled Georgia had no choice but to become White there.
This is one of the keys to that monumentally self-serving fable, Gone with the Wind, and to Scarlett O’Hara’s two most revealing lines: As God is my witness, I’ll never go hungry again, and, over and over, I can’t think about that now, I’ll go crazy if I do—I’ll think about that tomorrow!
History, I contend, is the present—we, with every breath we take, every move we make, are History—and what goes around, comes around.
—JAMES BALDWIN
April 2, 1985
Atlanta, New York, Amherst, St. Paul de Vence