Leaving Atlanta

“Now, Tasha felt stupid. Monica was right. Tasha was immature. And Daddy was in the wrong too. He should have said, Tasha, DeShaun, your mother and I have been playing with matches and your whole life is on fire.”

This feeling occurs shortly after Tasha’s parents announce their separation, divulging information that Tasha had already found out from her classmate, Monica Fisher. The metaphor of playing with matches echoes a warning that a parent might give to a child. Here, it takes on the mode of the apology and confession that Tasha believes her father ought to be making. The sense of destruction that the metaphor evokes conveys how it feels for a child to watch her parents split up.

“Separated was kids who only had a mother to come and hear them say a poem on Black History Day. Or the ones who had stepfathers that they called by their first names.”

Tasha thinks about other kids she knows with separated parents. She looks at how marital separation materializes in their lives. Tasha focuses on the absence of biological fathers in the lives of these children. They “only had a mother,” indicating that this parental bond alone, though common in black communities, isn’t enough. The presence of stepfathers doesn’t help due to the understanding among these children that these men aren’t their fathers, which allows them to assume the unusual familiarity of calling an adult by his given name. 

“She felt tingly, itchy and warm all at the same time, like she was loosely bound in a wool blanket.”

Tasha feels this sensation in response to meeting Jashante Hamilton at school. It’s the first sign of her crush on him. The conflicting sensations within her, as described here, reflect how disorienting the first signs of romantic love are, especially in a young person who is just learning them.

“‘But nothing. You need to know what’s going on in the world, or else, white people could reinstate slavery and you wouldn’t know it until they came to take you away.’ That was something that Daddy liked to say […] It was depressing to hear Mama say Daddy’s lines.”

Tasha’s mother, Delores, is explaining why Tasha and her younger sister, DeShaun, can only watch the evening news during dinner. Her statement is a joke but one that reflects the underlying anxieties of the post-Civil Rights world. Though blacks won rights and were relatively safer, there was also a sense that these changes could disappear at any moment.  

“She cried for her father’s empty dresser drawers and the TV pictures that had brought him back. Her tears were for deserted playgrounds, clothes that didn’t look like they did in catalogs, and words that wouldn’t be taken back. There was no air. Her mouth was open but there was no noise. No air. Asphyxiation. Octavia was out of her seat, shaking her shoulder, shouting, “Mr. Harrell! Mr. Harrell!” Tasha inhaled. Lemonade.”

It’s lunchtime, and Tasha is sitting with Octavia Fuller because her usual group of friends ostracized her for refusing to partner with Jashante (she doesn’t like that he’s from the projects). Not wanting to admit the truth to Octavia, who could also ostracize her, Tasha panics. The episode with Jashante was the last in a series of disorienting episodes in her life. Everything around her is falling apart due to circumstances beyond her control—her parents’ separation, the child killer’s rampage, and even her beautiful jacket getting ruined over what was really a misunderstanding between her and Jashante. The scent of lemonade emanating off of Octavia’s skin symbolizes the bittersweet sensations of Tasha’s recent days.

“Tasha put the little tree inside her pillowcase and, inhaling pine, dreamed of Christmas.”

Tasha has just returned from the roller-skating rink, where she met up with Jashante. They’ve made amends. He presented her with the tree—he sells them at the mall—as a gift. The scent is a memento from what felt like a first date. Its freshness correlates with the new feelings that Tasha is having about boys.

“Recess was postponed indefinitely. No one announced it or made it official. The bell had just rung and nobody moved. Tasha was uneasy in the stillness. She searched her classmates’ faces. Did they remember that she was responsible? All of the kids wore weird expressions, like their eyes had been reversed and they were all staring inside their own heads.”

The news report from the previous evening revealed that Jashante Hamilton was missing. The knowledge that a boy from their own class is now among those missing sends a shock through the fifth-graders, making them prematurely aware of their mortality and, therefore, unable to enjoy the innocent distractions of childhood. Tasha feels guilty because she had wished death at the hands of the killer upon Jashante and knows that her classmates remember her curse. The author’s narration disrupts Tasha’s self-conscious thought: The children are too preoccupied with their own fears to remember anything that Tasha said.

“Emmett Till was a little brother in Mississippi; white folks killed him for no reason […] These children don’t know nothing about lynching. They don’t know about white folks burning niggers alive […] This whole thing is because black kids don’t have sense enough to be scared of a strange white man.”

Charles Baxter is explaining to his wife, Dolores, why their children need to hear about the more violent aspects of their history, including instances in which black children were the targets of racist violence. The murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955 was a catalyst for the Civil Rights Movement. Charles’s insistence that Till’s murder was “for no reason” reflects the triviality of the incident that led to something as serious as murder, while allowing him to get around telling the girls about white male fears about black male sexuality—the anxiety that inspired the murder. Though things were much better for black children in the late-1970s and early-1980s, Charles still wishes that his children were as cautious as he had to be growing up. He partly blames the recent child murders on their being overly trustful of white people—many of whom still intend to do black people harm. 

“Only words can undo words. Kids say that to take something back you have to say it backward. Like a filmstrip run the wrong way. Die you hope I. Eighteen of side other. People some to nice be can’t you.”

Tasha still believes that her angry words against Jashante carried the power of a curse. In reversing her words, even only in her own mind, she hopes to reverse time—to go back to the moment before she uttered the words, before she had thought them. Her desire to undo time parallels Rodney Green’s later wish to go back to the time before he was born, to feel what it might be like not to exist. This desire foreshadows his death, while Tasha’s ritual of undoing her words is an attempt to restore Jashante to life. 

“The magic that came from lips could be as cruel as children and as erratic as a rubber ball ricocheting off concrete.”

DeShaun is asking her elder sister, Tasha, to tell her the magic word that will protect her from the child killer. Earlier in the novel, Tasha pulled a prank on DeShaun, telling her that the killer might actually be a creature that they could keep at bay by saying a magic word. Tasha knows that there’s no such thing as magic words, and tells her sister as much. However, she has slight reservations about this, considering how she had wished Jashante death and her wish, it seemed, had come true. Words, she realizes, have power, even the power to cause hurt. However, people are often careless with language, as Tasha had been with Jashante. 

“In autumn, oak trees drop acorns on Atlanta lawns and cover them with a quilt of decaying leaves. LaTasha Renee Baxter held her little sister’s hand after school as they walked across their lawn, forcing the acorns under their feet into the red earth. The air stank of leaves burning in barrels, but Tasha recalled the clean outdoor smell of pine.”

The sight and scent of decaying and burning leaves augurs an atmosphere of death. This scene is especially ominous in the context of recovered bodies being found—decomposing in the woods beneath the debris of the forest. Tasha holds her sister’s hand to provide a sense of safety, despite the stench of death that sits in the air between them. The only scent that brings Tasha comfort is the recalled artificial scent of the pine air freshener, which reminds her of Jashante, and a moment in which something new and hopeful was developing between them. 

“There has been much conversation lately about finding bodies, as if a person’s physical self could be misplaced as easily as a catcher’s mitt. As if Jashante might say You found my body? Where it was? Would he pull it on like a sweater or step into it like a pair of pants? But you know better. Bodies are like the turnstile at Kmart: Once you pass through you can’t change your mind and go back the other way.”

The narrative has shifted to Rodney Green. Rodney is thinking about the recent disappearance of his classmate, Jashante Hamilton. Here, Rodney reflects on the absurdity of the language that’s used to discuss Jashante’s abduction but assumes the voice of Jashante to contemplate the absurdity. Considering the way in which newscasters describe his abduction, it seems as though Jashante has lost something that belongs to him when, really, the abduction compromises his whole self. There is something surreal about this sudden loss of control over one’s own body. 

“[T]he problem was that Mr. Harrell had took Rodney’s chair right out of this row. Like he was never there. That wasn’t right. When my granddaddy died, Granny didn’t go and move his chair from the head of the table. When we went there for Thanksgiving, his place was just empty. So when we got to remembering how much he used to love sweet potato pie, we could look at his place, shake our heads and say, ‘Sho do miss him.’ Moving Rodney’s chair was just plain disrespectful.”

Shortly after Rodney goes missing, Mr. Harrell removes his chair. This removal of his reserved space reflects a presumption that he’s dead. Though Octavia also agrees that Rodney is likely dead, she doesn’t appreciate the eagerness with which Mr. Harrell and the rest of the class want to forget Rodney, who was as much a part of the class as her dead grandfather was a part of her family.

“Mama said that he is a junkie. She said that to Granny and they didn’t talk again for two weeks. It’s a stupid word. Junkie. Sounds like he didn’t put his things back in their proper place. Delvis say he hate junkies too. When we see a needle on the sidewalk, he kick it in the street, then wipe his shoe off like he just got through stepping in some dog doo-doo. I don’t kick the needles when I see them because the junkie might come back looking for it and junkies don’t like people messing with they stuff.”

Octavia is recalling how her mother revealed Uncle Kenny’s heroin addiction. Octavia, too, thinks of how the word “junkie” doesn’t adequately describe Uncle Kenny’s problem. Delvis, who regards drug addicts as lower forms of human life, reinforces the connotation that junkies are filthy people rather than sick ones. Ironically, the lie that Yvonne tells Octavia about the hypodermic needles nestled in the grass—that they belong to doctors who have misplaced them—inspires empathy toward addicts in Octavia. 

“‘He say that it’s the boys they want. Because we going to get to be black men pretty soon and if it’s one thing the white man scared of it’s a black man.’ His face looked mad but his voice sounded proud. Like girls wasn’t worth killing.”

Octavia is listening to Delvis repeat what his barber told him about the child killer’s motivations. His comment reflects Charles Baxter’s earlier comparison of the murders to that of Emmett Till. Both suggest a motivation to destroy black manhood, which they deem a more palpable threat to white supremacy than black womanhood. Octavia senses that Delvis is proud that white men are so scared of black masculinity that they feel the need to destroy it before it even has the chance to develop. No one, he thinks, could ever feel so threatened by a black girl or a woman.

“Gloria. Quality. Well, he got another daughter too, but that don’t mean he not still my daddy. His high-quality wife meant that the new daughter, Kiyana, was quality too. I wondered if somebody can be half quality. Like Patrick Fletcher in my class who is half white. But that’s the same as being black. He just light skinned. So am I quality too? Or does it work the other way around? I went to the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. I didn’t look like much quality. Why my teeth have to be so crooked? Mama got a nice smile and Ray teeth may be little and spread out, but they straight. And my hair. Even if Mama was to let me get it pressed, it would take a lot before we got to quality.”

Octavia is thinking about her father Ray and his new family. Her grandmother describes Gloria, Ray’s wife, as “quality.” Octavia thinks about what this word means and if it could describe her, too. Octavia is old enough to know that, in American society, “quality” is often associated with white people, which makes her think of Patrick Fletcher and straight hair. Octavia’s very dark skin, nappy hair, and crooked teeth—her mother cannot afford to give her braces—connote the opposite of anything that might define “quality.” 

“I wanted to pitch a real fit like white girls on TV, throwing dishes against the wall, hollering and cussing between each crash. If I was a white girl, I would chuck a cereal bowl across the kitchen, cussing at Kenny for getting himself kicked out, for putting his hands everywhere when he tickled me. I might break a whole shelf of glasses screaming at Rodney for sharing his candy with me and getting hisself snatched two days later. And last I would destroy Mama’s green punch bowl, cussing at myself for being too stupid to see that nothing lasts. That people get away from you like a handful of sweet smoke.”

Octavia is angry over her mother’s insistence that she move to Orangeburg, South Carolina, where her father, Ray, lives. Octavia feels that she must suppress her anger. She can’t destroy things like the white girls on TV because her family doesn’t have things that one can destroy and easily replace. She also knows that her anger won’t change any outcomes. She’s angry with her uncle for giving up on life. She’s also coming to terms with her anger about him sexually abusing her. She’s angry with Rodney for disappearing just when they were becoming friends. In accusing him of “getting hisself snatched,” she seems to have a sense that Rodney chose to go off with a stranger, which he did. Finally, Octavia is angry to learn a difficult fact about life: None of our relationships last.

“Sticks and stones are not the only things somebody can throw at you. Telling a lie is bad enough. It’s embarrassing in a private way. Like if you wet the bed but can change the sheets before anyone gets home. But when someone takes your lie and throws it in your face, it’s embarrassing like catching a whipping in front of your whole class.”

Delvis has confronted Octavia over not telling him that she was moving away. Octavia contemplates the children’s rhyme, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me,” comparing the palpable impact of these objects to the impact of telling lies. For Octavia, though she’s getting into the habit of lying to protect people, she is still contemptuous of the practice. Delvis’s anger is akin to Tasha’s at the beginning of the novel—he is more hurt by Octavia’s unwillingness to tell him the truth.

“When somebody die, people like to sit around and say all the things the dead person used to do […] But I didn’t really have that much to say about Rodney in that way. We only really talked three or four times, but I could tell that we were fixing to be friends. And not just because he didn’t talk to nobody and I didn’t really have no friends either. But because we liked each other. I don’t mean like people that be going together. When a girl go with somebody she start acting like somebody else. Putting all this Vaseline on her mouth and stuff like that. But when you just friends with somebody you start really acting like yourself. You can be public the way you can be at home. And that’s how it was with me and Rodney. Well, that’s how I think it was going to be, at least.”

Octavia contemplates what Rodney’s death means for her. In this instance, Jones shows us what a precocious and insightful person Octavia is. The girl whom everyone is eager to discount or avoid because of her color is also the most intelligent person in the novel. Her reference to a girl putting Vaseline on her lips describes the difference between her friendship with Rodney and Tasha’s friendship with Jashante, which, though sincere, was still rooted in the performance of courtship rituals. With Rodney, Octavia could “be public the way [she] can be at home.” The paradoxical juxtaposition of “public” and “at home” indicates that, with Rodney, she could show herself freely and comfortably. A good friend gives one the sense of feeling at home.

“Once you seen your mama cry, everything is different. Kind of like when you see a picture and it looks like one thing. But then you find out there are twelve apples hidden in the drawing. Once you find the apples, all you can see when you look at the pictures is apples. You forget the main picture you were looking at in the first place. That’s how it was with Mama. When I look at her now, I can always see the tears.”

Yvonne has returned home from Rodney Green’s wake. The shock of seeing the dead boy causes Yvonne to curl up in bed beside Octavia and bawl. Octavia realizes that her mother is as vulnerable as she is. The vulnerability was always present but obscured by other things, like strength and authority. Part of growing up, Octavia realizes, is seeing one’s parents beyond their parental roles. 

“‘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.”

Octavia echoes a sentiment shared earlier in the novel by Rodney Green, who was similarly annoyed at how people described Jashante Hamilton’s disappearance. She finds euphemisms like “lost” exasperating because they avoid the truth. Octavia is also annoyed with her mother for sending her to live in South Carolina, not understanding that the decision is rooted in her mother’s sense of futility over being unable to provide Octavia with a better life. 

“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.”

Octavia is at Rodney Green’s funeral. Though she’s deeply in mourning over his death, she’s also in mourning for what she believes will be the eventual loss of her mother and her hometown. Rodney, who’s body is “locked in a box,” or coffin, becomes symbolic of everything that Octavia has cherished now dying and taken away. 

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

It is the day of Octavia’s departure. She and her mother are waiting outside for a taxi. Yvonne tells her daughter that she loves her. Octavia feels the warmth in her mother’s words, but she can’t accept that her mother means them—not in the context of sending her to live with strangers. The simile of a chocolate mint evokes the feeling of something that is both sweet and cool. Loving words are sweet, but there is something cool about the decision to separate from one’s child.