Those Bones Are Not My Child is part of a distinct tradition of contemporary African American literature. It should not be surprising that connections between Bambara's work and another prominent African American woman writer, Toni Morrison, exist, for the latter was Bambara's editor at Random House for years, and the two became close friends, and admirers of each other's work.

As Bambara expresses in the aforementioned interview, ".. . we're friends ...

Morrison's Beloved (1987) focuses on issues of community, the need for understanding the past for an active future. Both Bambara's and Morrison's novels focus on the loss of the children of the community, though in Morrison's work the death occurs at the hands of the mother, in desperation. But, perhaps more significantly, the source of Morrison's Beloved is an article that the author...