A well-publicized tragedy prompted Rowe’s Atlanta’s Missing Children in early 1981. The drawing consists of five separate “charms,” each with a different significance, collectively intended to protect the African American children who were systematically being abducted and murdered. The charms surround a blue animal, similar to many of the benevolent blue dogs and pigs that populate Rowe’s works. But this animal has cloven hooves and an entirely suspect countenance. It is a malevolent creature. Rowe seems to be warning the children that the killer may well look familiar and friendly. Two of the charms are protective “mojo” hands, probably the artist’s. (She wrote in 1981, “I leave my hand on the wall. I’ll be gone to rest, but they can look back and say “That is Nellie Mae’s hand.’”) A small girl in red, probably the artist as a child, sits in a blue chair in another of the charms. All three are in blue “frames”: further protection. In a small charm framed ominously in black at the bottom of the picture, an unhappy male child appears to be scolded by an older female. Perhaps Rowe senses something about the killer’s childhood that contributed to his pathology.
