EVIDENCE OF THINGS NOT SEEN - JAMES BALDWIN

There has been a bit of a Baldwin renaissance over the last few years. He was one of the Black writers who was chosen by the YT liberal PMC class as an essential writer that one had to read in order to “do the work” (which of course, means to do nothing material) in the midst of the summer 2020 protests. Typically, folks recommend The Fire Next Time, I hadn’t even heard of this book until very recently. I knew that Baldwin had also written a book about Hollywood but not that he’d written this short book on the Atlanta Child Murders. Since the ACMs are quite interesting to me and, to my mind, strangely under talked about given America’s love of Serial Killers (there’s a whole other essay on this website about that dynamic), and since Baldwin is such a talented and original writer, this book was pretty narrowcasted to my interests. It did not disappoint. I really like the format of this book. It's a long essay, about 125 pages, but short as a book. It isn’t true crime, in the sense that Baldwin is trying to give you a blow-by-blow of the crimes and investigations and trials, and while he does discuss the crimes and gives his thoughts and feelings about the guilt of Wayne Williams (the person who sits in prison for these crimes) as well as his ideas about some of the other major theories about what the fuck was going on in Atlanta. Mostly, he digresses and loops around and goes on beautifully worded tangents where he discusses US race relations since the late 60’s, family dynamics, the nature of evidence, relationships between men and women and a million other things. It’s one of the most engaging and well-written essays I’ve ever read which really shows the strength of the form and illustrates how, when you’re a genius, you can weave anything together. As far as the crimes themselves, I know that Atlanta is currently reopening the cases, so maybe someday we’ll learn something. Baldwin seems very dismissive of the idea of ring of folks trafficking in kids, with one of these traffickers at one of the nodes killing because they’re a sadist, one of the main alternative theories (and for this, look no further than the John David Norman connection between John Wayne Gacy and Dean Coryll) but he also doesn't believe the main Wayne Williams centered narrative. Baldwin does a brutal and bare examination of Williams but he doesn’t believe he’s the main killer. He runs through all the other major alternative theories, Klan involvement, never really ended, multiple people involved but if you’re looking for a real deep dive into the crimes, this ain’t that. To my knowledge, that book hasn’t been written, though I’d love to read it. This is great though, I wish more writers worked in this form, and were as good at it as Baldwin was. Great summer read.