A Dangerous Road: A Smokey Dalton Novel

by Kris Nelscott

She put her arm around my waist and led me inside. The house was bigger than I expected and had two stories, which surprised me, given that my foster parents were both getting on in years. The front foyer was dark, and I could make out the lines of a large living room, but my foster mother led me to the kitchen. She didn’t show me the house, perhaps because, in her mind, I belonged there and already knew what it was like.

  “I made something,” she said, and as usual, it was not something small. She had put leftover fried chicken in the middle of the plastic tablecloth. Fresh cornbread sat in a basket, covered with a towel, and the kitchen smelled of baking apple pie.

  I had no idea how she had prepared the pie and got it into the oven during my drive over, but she’d managed. She always did.

  The kitchen was light, painted yellow, and spacious. It was warm, and that was good, as Atlanta was unseasonably cold for March. She sat me down, poured me some coffee, and then sat down herself. She pushed food at me, and I ate, startled at how hungry I was, and how much I had missed her cooking.

  “What did you want to talk about?” she asked, her hands folded on the yellow checked cloth. She leaned forward just slightly, like she used to do when I was a young man coming in from a day in the D.C. high school I hated.

  In fact, it felt like those times, and it made me wonder at the power of memory. Even though I had never been in this home before, it felt familiar. She felt familiar. And so did the feeling that I had when I was with her. With her, I was always a perpetual fifteen.

  I swallowed the bite of chicken I had taken, then followed it with a swig of hot coffee. I picked a piece of cornbread out of the basket, more so that I had something to do with my hands than not.

  I broke the cornbread apart, then wiped my fingers on the paper napkin she had provided. I didn’t know how to approach this. “I’m working on a case.”

  She nodded.

  “It seems it might have ties to me.”

  She frowned. “How is that, Smokey?”

  I licked my lips, tasted chicken grease and butter. “Let me ask questions first, then I’ll tell you.”

  She waited, a trait I had always valued in her. She was a steady woman, a woman who hadn’t seemed ruffled by raising another woman’s troubled child. She had never had children of her own and had once said she hadn’t known what she missed until I showed up. By then, she said, it was too late to have any more.

  I took the photos of the Hathaways out of my breast pocket and handed them to her. “Do you know these people?”

  She studied them for a moment, then turned in her chair and held the photos to the light. She started to shake her head, then seemed to think the better of it. Finally she handed them back to me.

  “I’ve never seen them before,” she said. “Are they the ones that hired you?”

  I shook my head. “I’m trying to find out who they are. They lived for years under false identities in Chicago. The trail has led me to Atlanta. I think they were here in 1939.”

  She looked at me sharply, recognizing the significance of that date to our family. “Do you think—”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “The woman left me money in her will. I’ve never seen them before.”

  She picked up the pictures again, got up, and took them to the window, frowning over them. “I’ll show Oran,” she said. “Maybe he’ll remember.” Then she raised her head as if what I had said had just hit her. “She left you money in her will?”

  I nodded.

  “And you don’t know them?”

  “Never seen them before.”

  She sucked in air. “A white woman,” she said softly and sank back into her chair.

  I took the pictures from her and slipped them back in my pocket. “We’ll show Dad tonight.”

  She nodded, lost in thought. “I thought you said you had a case.”

  “I do. Their daughter hired me to find out what this is all about.”

  She glanced at me sideways. She knew me better than I liked to admit. “A white girl.”

  I nodded.

  “And you agreed?”

  I shrugged. “It seems we both could use the information. Better I get paid to look for it.”

  My foster mother smiled at me. The smile was small and sad. She waited. The question hung between us, the question I had never asked, not in all the years I’d known them.

  I swallowed. “What do you know about what happened to my parents?”

  She tapped a long finger on the table, then looked down at her hands. Mine were still ripping up cornbread, even though I hadn’t realized I was doing it. She took a deep breath, then shook her head slightly, as if she weren’t quite sure what to say.

  Finally she took my left hand and held it, cornbread crumbs and all, between both of hers.

  “The Grand called us in February of 1940. Your uncle had contacted him. Things weren’t working out with you in Stone Mountain and he was afraid that you’d get in the wrong kind of trouble. I also got the sense that he was afraid to have you in his home.”

  I stiffened. No one had ever said that, but it had been clear. It was as if I were tainted because my parents were so brutally murdered, as if some sort of pall hung over me. It didn’t help that my cousin was jealous of me, of anyone taking attention away from him, and he was saying the most awful things about the way my parents had died. I beat him up five times in January, and on the first of February I had broken his nose.

  I still didn’t regret that. He had deserved it. And after that, I had never spoken to him again.

  But apparently he thought of me, enough to tell a white detective the name I was hiding under. I wonder how many others he told.

  Obviously, he had told Withers.

  “The Grand was afraid you’d end up in an orphan’s home, or worse.” She rubbed my hand hard, unconsciously, her gaze far away. It was as if she had saved these words up for a long time, and now that she could say them, they simply poured out. “He spoke to several other families, most of whom you already knew, a number from your church. They were afraid to take you.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  She raised her head and looked at me. Her eyes were a very clear, very light brown. “Because of your parents.”

  She had told me that before, a long time ago. I had accepted it then. I thought I understood it now. Why take the child of a couple who was so hated that they were lynched together?

  “The Grand thought it was better that you didn’t go back to Atlanta. He wanted you out of the city, out of the state if possible. He called everyone he knew. Then he called us.”

  “I still don’t know why you took me in when all those others didn’t,” I said, voice soft.

  “Because we’d seen you before, when we were visiting here once. At Ebenezer Baptist. You don’t remember, but I do. You had such a beautiful voice.” She smiled. “And then there was Oran. He didn’t want a baby. We thought we could help you, calm you down, make sure you got an education. We did that.” There was regret in her voice, as if she felt she had failed.

  “What do you know of my parents’ death?” I asked again.

  Her lips tightened together, and for a moment I thought she wasn’t going to tell me. “It was pretty ugly. Everyone knew the men who killed them. No one did anything about it. The white folks thought it was justified, and so did some of the blacks.”

  “How can a lynching be justified?” I snapped.

  She didn’t pull away from me. She just stared at me for a long moment, the sadness that had always been present in her eyes when she looked at me even more pronounced. “It can’t be,” she said.

  “Then why—?”

  “Times were different, Smokey.” She bowed her head. “They wanted us to adopt you before we took you in. Legally adopt you. And change your name. They insisted on it.”

  I frowned. I still remembered that day, all those adults surrounding me, telling me I wouldn’t have a home unless I changed my name. I always felt that my name had been the only gift my parents
had given me, the only thing I was allowed to keep, and even that had been taken away from me. They let me keep Billy, but that was when folks started calling me Smokey, to hide even that.

  I had blamed my foster parents for the name change. I hadn’t realized they had been forced into it. No wonder no one wanted me. How can someone reasonably adopt a half-grown child without getting to know him first, without knowing what they had signed on for?

  My foster parents had and had never uttered a word of regret.

  “You always resented us for that.” She spoke softly, without a trace of blame.

  “Why didn’t you tell me that they insisted?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “Too many questions. You were going to ask too many questions, and you weren’t ready for the answers.”

  “How do you know?” I hated the way they made decisions for me. I still hated it.

  “Smokey,” she said. “You were ten. There are just some things ten-year-olds, no matter how worldly, no matter what their experience, don’t understand.”

  I slipped my hand from hers. I believed that, as an adult, but there was still an indignant boy in me, a boy whose world was destroyed in a single evening, and he didn’t understand. He didn’t understand at all.

  “Then,” she said, “as you got older, you stopped asking. You stopped trying. I even tried to bring the topic up once, and you walked away from me. You said—”

  “‘Who cares about dead people anyway?’” I remembered that, the flat anger that was hidden behind the words. It was too late. It had been too late by then. I wasn’t going to speak of my parents to anyone. It was very hard now.

  I swallowed, tried to distance myself, made myself think as I would if this were a case, someone else’s case, something I was investigating.

  I thought back over what she had said, tried to analyze it critically, tried to see what didn’t fit.

  “Why would they want you to adopt me?” I asked finally. “First, with no time spent to see if we were compatible?”

  For a moment, I thought I saw fear in her eyes, but it was banked down quickly. She glanced at the empty chair near the cookbooks, my foster father’s chair, as though wishing she weren’t have this conversation with me alone.

  Then she said, “Because they weren’t sure anyplace was safe for you.”

  “What did they think? That the mob would search me out, and string me up to a tree?”

  “Eventually,” she said through thin lips.

  I hadn’t expected her to say yes. My heart was pounding so hard that I could barely think. “Why? Why would they do that to me? I was ten.”

  She licked her lips, then took a deep breath. “They thought you knew.”

  “Knew what?”

  Her eyes filled with tears. “Where your parents buried the baby.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  I FROZE IN PLACE. The fragment of a memory rose: the phone, ringing on that cold winter morning, waking me out of a sound sleep, my father’s voice rising—“You’ve got to be kidding”—and then fading into that subservient tone he used with white men in authority, men he was afraid would do something to him, his home, his family. “Yes, yes. Of course you can come here.”

  My foster mother caressed my cheek with the back of her hand. “Smokey?”

  I focused on her face, her dear familiar face. I didn’t remember seeing that many wrinkles before. Worry lines. She had worry lines. “What baby do you mean?” I whispered.

  “Scarlett Ratledge,” she said. “The daughter of Susan and Ross Ratledge.”

  Ratledge. One of Atlanta’s oldest and most respected white families. My mother—my real mother—had worked for the Ratledges up until the day she died.

  I was cold, even though the kitchen was warm and smelled of apple pie. “The Ratledge’s baby?”

  “She disappeared that Friday night. Your mother was supposed to be watching her.”

  I couldn’t get my breath. “They thought my mother killed the Ratledge’s baby?”

  My foster mother nodded. “Folks in our community who believed it thought it was accidental. Babies are such fragile things. Maybe she squeezed it too hard or put a blanket wrong and let it suffocate. I’ve heard all kinds of theories. The white folks, now they had different theories.”

  I could imagine. I picked up my coffee cup but then had to set it back down. My hands were shaking too badly to hold it properly.

  “They thought she killed it on purpose because she was jealous or because she was crazy. And then she took the baby away and hid the body. Or buried it. And they thought your father helped.”

  I couldn’t imagine my parents doing any such thing. Then or ever. But it explained the fear in my father’s voice that night when the knock came at the door. Had he expected it? And if he hadn’t, why hadn’t he? Why hadn’t we all just left town as quickly as we could?

  I swallowed hard. “I don’t understand. Why did they think my mother took the baby?”

  “She was the last one to see her, the last one to be with her.” My foster mother took my shaking hand in her own. Her fingers were cold. This story bothered her as well. “You remember the Gone With the Wind hoopla, don’t you?”

  I nodded.

  “The baby disappeared the night of the Junior League ball. Your momma was sitting. She was staying late, although she probably wasn’t getting paid for it. She put the baby down and then went down stairs to do her chores. She said she checked on the baby about 8 o’clock and it seemed fine. The Ratledges came home at midnight and let her go. It wasn’t until the next morning that she knew anything was wrong. And to be honest with you, I’m not sure the Ratledges even checked on that child until dawn.”

  But I remembered the night of the ball and the next day. Everything seemed normal. Then I frowned. It had seemed sort of normal. My mother was in the house, but she had been worried. My father had gone to talk to some friends. He had come back saying “If they’re going to do something, they would have done it already.” The knock didn’t come on the door until two days later. I was sure of that.

  “But why didn’t they just call the police?” I asked. Not that the police would have been much better. Not that my parents had a hope or a prayer once it was decided what happened to the child.

  “Oh, the police knew,” my foster mother said softly. “They knew. They just decided to keep everything hush-hush until the national press went away. The day after the movie stars left, that was the day everyone came for your parents.”

  “But my parents should have left.”

  “They believed something else happened to that baby. They thought that they would be all right. At least that was what the Grand said. I don’t know how that could be.” She ran a hand over her face. “I’ve thought through this, over and over, for years. I honestly think your parents were taken that night not to be killed, but to be tortured into confessing where that baby was. The fact that they died showed me that they never did say anything. I doubt they ever knew anything.”

  The buzzer went off behind me, making me jump. My foster mother put her hand on my shoulder as she got up. She turned off the buzzer and removed the pie. It was brown on top, with crisscrossed crust and bubbling apples. It looked magazine-perfect and was the most unappetizing thing I had ever seen.

  “Why didn’t anyone do anything? Why didn’t the Grand help them? Why didn’t they leave? This doesn’t make any sense,” I said.

  She turned to me and sighed. “Because of the timing. If this had happened on any other day, your parents would have been dragged from their beds immediately and probably would have died then and there.”

  She paused, and in that pause, I heard her thought. I would have died then too. They would have taken the whole family, rather than leave witnesses.

  “But this was the New South, and Atlanta was ‘advanced.’ And if something like that happened, even in 1939, the city would have been embarrassed. The baby’s disappearance didn’t even make the newspaper for a week.”

  My
mouth had gone dry. “How did they know the baby was dead?”

  She frowned at me. “Hmm?”

  “How did they know? Was there blood?”

  “Not that I know of,” she said. “The child just up and vanished.”

  “Did they ever find the child?”

  “No,” she said. “And that’s why the Grand always thought you would be in danger. There were folks who believed you knew where she was, and he was afraid they’d come after you. That’s why you left Atlanta the minute the Grand found you, and why we never brought you here. That was part of our agreement. We weren’t allowed to come to Georgia while there was still a chance someone would go after you.”

  “But you came here three years ago.”

  She smiled. “Atlanta was our home. Oran and I met here, went to school here. He couldn’t pass up the opportunity from Morehouse. And we thought it would be safe now. I don’t think most people even know about the Ratledges’ baby, and if they do, they think of you as a little boy, not as a man full grown.”

  I nodded, but I wasn’t thinking about now. I was thinking about what she had told me. “Something about that story’s missing,” I said, and I wasn’t referring to what was obvious to me—Laura. I meant something else.

  “I’m sure there’s a lot to this that’s missing,” she said. “I purposely didn’t learn much about it. I learned enough to answer the questions I thought you would ask, but you never did.”

  “At first I did,” I reminded her.

  She nodded. “At first, I couldn’t talk to you.”

  ‘You thought they did it.”

  She shook her head. “I didn’t know, Smokey. I didn’t want to know. I just wanted you to be happy.”

  “That wasn’t possible.”

  “I know.” She took my hand again. Her touch was comforting. “I know.”

  * * *

  There wasn’t much to say after that. We sat in silence for a while, then my foster mother offered me some pie, as if she were trying to make this afternoon as normal as she could. I forced down a piece, along with the rest of my coffee. Then I thanked her, promised to be back for dinner, and left.