Leaving Atlanta

Jones uses the theme of colorism to describe how black children internalize racism from a young age and inflict their self-hatred on each other. The students in Mr. Harrell’s class frequently poke fun at Octavia, calling her “the Watusi”—a pejorative nickname based on the famous early-1960s dance craze. “Watusi” is also another name for the Tutsi people of Rwanda. The Tutsis, like the Hutus, were a minority that held dominance in Rwanda for decades as a result of Belgian favoritism during the colonial era. The Belgians exaggerated a few phenotypical differences between the tribes—praising the Tutsis for supposedly being taller and lighter-skinned, while identifying the Hutus as less attractively dark-skinned and short. Jones uses the cruel nickname to expose how white supremacy sows discord within black communities with children learning, long before they develop an understanding of systemic racism, that being black is a source of shame which automatically implies membership to a lower social and economic class. 

Due to this internalized racism, and being the embodiment of her classmates’ nascent anxieties around Blackness, Octavia thinks that she’s ugly. However, she doesn’t see this ugliness on her father, Ray, whose hair texture and complexion she inherited. This relativism strongly suggests that colorism is particularly detrimental to black girls, who face the additional pressure of conforming to a beauty ideal that often doesn’t include girls and women who look like them. 

Even within Octavia’s family, there’s a tendency to show greater deference toward those with lighter skin. For instance, Octavia’s mother, Yvonne, accuses Octavia’s grandmother of being “color-struck”—that is, of admiring someone who has lighter skin—due to the older woman’s emphasis on how Ray’s wife Gloria is “quality.” Part of this is because Gloria waited until she and Ray were married before having children, meaning that their union has a legitimacy that Yvonne and Ray’s never had. Yet, there is the additional implication that Gloria is more refined or decent. Within black communities, there has been the persistent stereotype of lighter-skinned black women being of a higher class—thus, “quality.” Conversely, people view darker-skinned black women not only as lower-class, but also as more sexually promiscuous. This is the implication that Octavia doesn’t like, though she cannot yet identify what her grandmother means. 

Along with being obsessed about color, the fifth-graders at Oglethorpe Elementary School are also very class-conscious. Tasha Baxter likes Jashante Hamilton but cannot help seeing him as a boy from the projects. When the children suggest that he could be her boyfriend, she becomes averse to him, worrying that she’ll become associated with his poverty. Conversely, Jashante calls Tasha “Fancy Girl,” due to his sense that she comes from better economic circumstances. Jones highlights Tasha’s higher status by showing Tasha with her new fur-lined pink jacket with a matching muff, which her father bought her from Sears to placate her after the trauma of her parents’ separation. When Tasha rejects Jashante’s attempt to partner with her during a relay race—a subtle offer to be his girlfriend—the rebuff feels personal and tied to Tasha’s sense that she’s better than he is. This is why Jashante destroys Tasha’s jacket during the scuffle—it’s symbolic of the materialism that stands between them. It isn’t until Tasha gets to know Jashante better at the roller-skating rink that she realizes what a nice person he is, thereby making his origins irrelevant. 

Similarly, Rodney Green enjoys Octavia Fuller’s company but is shy about other people knowing it, due to his own fear of becoming associated with Octavia’s poverty. As with Tasha, people poke fun at Rodney for supposedly choosing Octavia as a girlfriend. Rodney denies the charge—not because it isn’t true, but because he’s worried about what others will think of his being around someone with a reputation not only for being very poor (Octavia is not as poor as everyone thinks, and also tries to distinguish herself from those who live in the projects) but also for being very black. Rodney censors himself when he speaks to Octavia in an effort not to make her self-conscious about her poverty in relation to his relative wealth. However, it’s Rodney who’s self-conscious about being middle-class because of the expectations this status carries. He’s awed by Octavia’s ability to fling insults at those who offend her, something that Rodney is unable to do. There are rules of propriety that he has learned and must follow, rules upheld by people like the shopkeeper Mrs. Lewis. Shoplifting is his way of thumbing his nose at these expectations and exposing how someone’s class status has nothing to do with who they are. 

The children’s parents, who grew up in the 1950s, come from the South and, sometimes, from Chicago—one of the main destinations of the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to the Northeast and Midwest in the early-20th century. Yvonne Fuller remembers being unwelcome in department stores. Charles Baxter remembers lynchings, particularly that of Emmett Till. Claude Green recalls how his father spent his life illiterate and relegated to working in a sawmill. He then blames his son’s perceived laziness on Rodney never having had to pick cotton. These memories of trauma, passed down from the previous generation to the next in an effort to share the history of the struggle, is the previous generation’s attempt to help their children see that the post-Civil Rights world in which they live is a fragile one. Hard-won rights might disappear at any moment, and the violence that engulfed black communities in previous decades could return. 

The Atlanta child murders evoke this latter fear, as the community has a strong sense that it’s someone white who’s killing black boys. Their mistrust of the police comes from knowledge that white terrorism of black communities often occurred with the knowledge and, sometimes, participation of police officers and sheriffs. Jones illustrates how the murders disrupted any illusion that the struggle for equal citizenship was over. 

Though the novel never resolves the murders, Tayari Jones includes an Author’s Note in which she mentions the conviction of Wayne Williams, a 23-year-old African American man, for the murder of two adults. Atlanta law enforcement also assumed that he was guilty for the child murders, which ceased after his arrest. Many Atlantans, however, are skeptical that Williams, who has denied that he committed the child murders, is the actual killer. More recent investigations of Ku Klux Klan involvement, including the taped confession of Klan member Charles T. Sanders, inform Jones’s infusion of anxieties about racial terrorism within some of her adult characters.