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On the evening flight on my way to the 2016 annual gastroenterology conference, I am the only one with the reading light on Everyone else sleeps limp-necked, heads drooping, bobbing in the occasional turbulence of the late-winter skies, stabilised by the seat back or a neck pillow The person next to me – a pale young woman with long brown hair, perhaps a medical student attending the conference or a Georgian returning home – puts her head on the seat-back table and her Sherpa-lined khaki jacket over her head to cover her eyes from my yellow light   I am travelling to Atlanta, the city where the cousins that I grew up with have lived since George W Bush’s election, having moved there with their father in search of larger homes and a cheaper life than the one they found in New York On the recommendation of one of my few remaining friends who are not doctors, and out of the desire to learn about the city, I read Toni Cade Bambara’s posthumous novel about the epidemic of child murders in the city Between 1979 and 1981, over 28 Black young people – 24 of them under 18 – went missing and were eventually found dead The violence became a mainstay of regional newspaper headlines, but I get the impression that the child murders never reached national news I certainly did not read about them in my high school history textbook   Bambara titled her novel Those Bones Are Not My Child The phrase conjures images of a police officer presenting a mother an evidence bag – bones linked by decaying sinews, pockmarked with fraying grey muscle fibres, splotches of dark brown, dried blood – and asking her if this is her missing young one Tests – dental records, DNA examinations, and the other forensic assessments of the late twentieth century – could not convince parents the children were who officers claimed they were This uncertainty drives Bambara’s protagonist to insomnia, unable to find rest in her bed, on her couch, in the passenger seat of her car