by Tayari Jones
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.
Author’s Note
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.