by Tayari Jones
Table of Contents
___________________
Introduction by Tayari Jones
PART I: The Devil went down to Georgia
Snowbound
by Tananarive Due
Buckhead
Terceira
by Dallas Hudgens
College Park
The Prisoner
by Brandon Massey
Grant Park
Kill Joy
by Sheri Joseph
East Atlanta
One-Eyed Woman
by Gillian Royes
Virginia-Highland
PART II: Kin Folks & Skin Folks
Selah
by Anthony Grooms
Inman Park
Caramel
by Tayari Jones
Cascade Heights
Comet
by David James Poissant
Stone Mountain
Come Ye, Disconsolate
by Daniel Black
PART III: Nose Wide Open
Mechanicsville
The Bubble
by Jennifer Harlow
Peachtree City
A Moment of Clarity at the Waffle House
by Kenji Jasper
Vinings
Four in the Morning in the New Place
by Jim Grimsley
Little Five Points
Ma’am
by Alesia Parker
Midtown
The Fuck Out
by John Holman
East Lake Terrace
Bonus Materials
Excerpt from USA NOIR edited by Johnny Temple
Also in Akashic Noir Series
Akashic Noir Series Awards & Recognition
About Akashic Books
Copyrights & Credits
To my father and his brothers, who sought their fortunes here
Introduction
Underneath the Scent of Magnolia and Pine
Atlanta, the “city too busy to hate,” may be the noirest town in the nation. When I say “noir” I don’t mean that we are the murder capital, nor do we strive to be. We are the ninth-largest city in the United States. Our airport is the busiest on earth, hosting over 100 million passengers in recent calendar years. (It is said that even on your way to heaven, you must change planes at Hartsfield-Jackson.) An entire school of hip-hop was born here too. But it is not our urbanity alone that makes us noir. We are a Southern city. Margaret Mitchell wrote Gone with the Wind both in and about Atlanta. Martin Luther King’s Ebeneezer still stands proud on the northeast side of town. Just after the Civil War, six colleges were founded to lift the recently emancipated, and these institutions promote black (Southern) excellence to this day.
Atlanta is rife with contradictions. Priding ourselves on not putting all our business in the street, we shelter secrets for generations. At the same time, we have somehow managed to become a reality television hub. TV personality Todd Chrisley serves up his own brand of “bless your heart” backhandedness and family dysfunction for millions of viewers all over the country, yet gossip magazines hint at a scandal hidden in full view. Most of the “Real” Housewives of Atlanta are not even from Atlanta, nor are they housewives, but they have taken our hometown as their own—and housewifery is a state of mind, not a marital status. These ladies fight at baby showers, marry with the cameras rolling, and divorce in the same fashion. T.I. and Tiny of The Family Hustle are ATLiens for sure, and they allow us to be spectators as they negotiate what it means to be recently rich, famous, and black. Kim Zolciak used to be a Real Housewife of Atlanta, sharing the most intimate details of her love life, but drawing the line at being filmed without her blond wig. After the racial tensions on set bubbled over, she moved to her own show, the programming equivalent of white flight—and actually became a housewife.
Atlanta Noir is not a citified version of Southern Gothic. These authors delve deep into the grotesquerie that is embedded in every narrative and character. When we write noir, we don’t shine a light into darkness, we lower the shades. There are no secrets like Southern secrets and no lies like Southern lies.
Keep in mind that there are those who still speak of the Civil War as the “War of Northern Aggression,” perhaps the biggest lie of all. Bronze markers dot the landscape, lamenting the loss, never allowing the past to pass. Yet, in the early 1980s, a serial killer terrorized the city for two years, murdering at least twenty-eight African American children, but this recent history has been put to bed. No memorial stands in honor of the fallen. No one has forgotten, but nobody talks about it, because this is Atlanta and this is how we do things.
This city itself is a crime scene. After all, Georgia was founded as a de facto penal colony and in 1864, Sherman burned the city to the ground. We might argue about whether the arson was the crime or the response to the crime, but this is indisputable: Atlanta is a city sewn from the ashes and everything that grows here is at once fertilized and corrupted by the past.
* * *
In this anthology, I am excited to share fourteen writers’ take on the B-side of the ATL. These stories do not necessarily conform to the traditional expectations of noir as several of them are not, by any stretch, crime fiction. However, they all share the quality of exposing the rot underneath the scent of magnolia and pine. Noir, in my opinion, is more a question of tone than content. The moral universe of the story is as significant as the physical space. Noir is a realm where the good guys seldom win; perhaps they hardly exist at all. Few bad deeds go unrewarded, and good intentions are not the road to hell, but are hell itself.
They call it the “Dirty South” for a reason. Here, Waffle House is more than a marker of Southern charm and cholesterol. Yes, the hash browns are scattered, smothered, and chunked, but narcotics, sex, and cash are available, if not on the menu. Just on the outskirts of the East Lake Golf Club is a neighborhood that is not mentioned on the real estate brochures. Perhaps it’s true that servants are just like family, but this is not necessarily an upgrade. Megachurches may save you from sin, but not from the wrath of the past.
That said, this book also engages noir in the old-fashioned sense of the word, hard-boiled and criminal. Judges put hits on citizens, crazy neighbors turn out to be homicidal—and victims of homicide. Drug dealers double-cross each other, and sometimes sweet little girls murder just for the hell of it.
But don’t forget that this is the Peach State, and down here, we like to take our poison with a side of humor. Behind every murder, under every drug deal, beneath each church pew, and tucked into the working girls’ purses is a moment of the absurd and a laugh to be had at the expense of those who can’t handle the truth.
Welcome to Atlanta Noir. Come sit on the veranda, or the terrace of a high-rise condo. Pour yourself a glass of sweet tea, and fortify it with a slug of bourbon. Put your feet up. Enjoy these stories, and watch your back.
Tayari Jones
May 2017
PART I
THE Devil Went Down to Georgia
Snowbound
by Tananarive Due
Buckhead
Monique took the forecast seriously from the jump—snowfall projected in Metro Atlanta and Buckhead. Only a couple inches, but still. She’d hated snow since college, and her childhood in hurricane-prone Miami had taught her to treat meteorology like prophecy, so she spent most of Monday afternoon navigating a motorized scooter through the narrow aisles of her closest Publix to stock up on groceries. The store’s inventory was too big for its space, so even a moderate crowd reminded her of the frenzy of her childhood’s coming storms, Mom pulling her by the hand.
Monique was only forty-five, but with her left foot in a cast, the supermarket aged her by thirty years. Before the roller-rink debacle that had sent her to the ER a mon
th ago—her punishment for showing off her old South Beach moves for her nephew—Monique had never noticed how many of her favorite brands were so high on the shelf, or how difficult it was to inspect packages of meat from a scooter. She’d never faced the indignity of bumping against aisle displays and knocking items to the floor, or noticed the frustrated huffs from shoppers who wanted her to move out of sight. To disappear. Eyes flitted away in a race not to look at her, to render her invisible.
Who wanted to see a middle-aged woman in a baggy sweatsuit riding a handicapped scooter with her foot in a cast? She’d long ago stopped going out to clubs where she had to impress bouncers on the rope line, but even in LA, she’d never been as invisible as she was now. Two more weeks, and she would join the ranks of the visible again. She would not just walk, she would strut everywhere. A six-week taste of infirmity, and then she would never take her own two feet for granted. She would stand upright as long as she could.
The man behind her in line chuckled at the case of bottled water in her basket. He was in his seventies like her father, but his back and neck were straight, and he didn’t use a cane. She regularly envied mobile strangers now.
“People here act like they’ve never seen snow,” he said. “It’s not gonna kill nobody.”
* * *
As she reached the wooded end of the cul-de-sac on her street and drove her car down her driveway—such a steep drop that her seat belt pinched her chest—Monique realized her dream house was a nightmare as long as she was in a cast. With Nate back in LA for last-minute reshoots, the house waited to mock her. And in four months, she hadn’t yet befriended a neighbor who might give her a thought; the other three houses at this end of the street were equally shrouded in old-growth pines, oaks, dogwoods, and magnolia trees, set back from the road to discourage visitors. Just like hers.
Monique hadn’t expected to have a broken ankle when she and Nate bought this two-story, four-bedroom Mediterranean with a tile roof on two wooded acres in Buckhead. The driveway was steep enough to be a hiking trail. Nate was five years younger, and neither of them had been thinking “retirement” when they signed the papers. But what had she been thinking? Now she could only reach the streetside mailbox by car, since her crutches were useless most times. And her four-wheeled “knee walker” with a pad to rest her left knee on so she could glide freely around the house lost its charm on hills—and her yard was all hills. Nate had annoyed her with his constant complaints about the house, but now she realized how right he’d been—it was a beautiful show home, but not a good place to live.
It had taken her two years to wear him down—too late to move before Mom died—and only then after he landed regular directing gigs on a series shooting in Atlanta. Her mother’s brain tumor diagnosis hadn’t been enough to sway him, and the time apart with both of them flying off for weeks at a stretch had started to make them not just roommates, but resentful strangers. In Atlanta, she’d promised, they could have a house worth the million and a half they’d been paying in Santa Monica for a bungalow. They’d both spent the past twenty years bashing their heads against Hollywood to collect a few dollars—him as a director, and her as a producer-turned-screenwriter—so wasn’t it time for a place big enough to raise a family?
She’d miscarried three times in ten years, so Nate had agreed they could fill out adoption paperwork by spring for a newborn, and statistics said they could have a black or brown baby nine months after that. She could finally indulge her desire to live in the Big House—wasn’t that the secret dream of every black child of the South? If Nate hadn’t laughed, Monique’s first choice would have been a black-and-white colonial that could have been in Django, on a flat green lot only missing a row of slave cabins.
She would camp in the house all day Tuesday, she decided. And Wednesday and Thursday too, if she had to. She didn’t want the car gliding down the hill out of control, or to lose her balance trying to maneuver herself around outside. Hell no.
Nate called as she was pulling into the garage. She told him her plan over the Bluetooth. The car was now her favorite phone.
“Why not just go over to your dad’s?”
Nate still didn’t grasp that moving to Atlanta to be closer to her family didn’t mean she wanted to become a child again. His parents were long dead, so he idealized her father. What could Dad do for her in a snowstorm? She didn’t want to spend two or three days in the house where Mom had gotten sick while Dad sat in front of the TV.
“I’m fine here.”
“Will your dad be all right?” Nate had grown up in LA and was suspicious of any weather that wasn’t sunshine.
“He’s from New York. Please. It’s a couple of inches.”
But two minutes after she’d convinced Nate she could be safely independent, Monique lost her balance trying to climb the garage step to the kitchen door, her plastic bag now at her feet instead of under her arm, a can of cat food rolling under the car. She was such an absurd snapshot that she took herself in: legs splayed apart, ass on the floor, heart thrumming hard. The tickle in her throat might be a chuckle or a sob. She wasn’t in pain, thank God—she hadn’t hit her ankle—but her rebellious body was reminding her that she must watch every step. And maybe that would never go away, even once her cast was gone. Her doctor said she might have a few balance issues with her ankle, and a few might be Doctor Talk for You’re fucked.
This is what getting old feels like. The thought came every hour now, the toll of a clock. This was how it had started with Mom: a slow debilitation until she could only wiggle a finger, trapped in a silent body. Mom’s constant falls had alerted them that something was wrong, and something turned out to be four inoperable brain tumors.
This is how it starts.
“I’ve fallen!” Monique called out in her garage in a frail tremolo. “And I can’t get up!”
Just like the old lady in the wrist-alert commercial, or whatever the hell it was.
Her laugh was loud enough to bring her cat, Midnight, meowing to the kitchen door.
* * *
Every time Monique moved into a new home, she had recurring dreams about imaginary spaces hidden from her sight during her waking hours. Her first apartment had a phantom second kitchen that was always clean, unlike her real one; the Pasadena town house she bought with her Fox money had an imaginary third level with entire rooms in disrepair, including a soaking bathtub black with grime. When she and Nate got the overpriced little place in Santa Monica, the dream wing had at least two upper levels, with narrow staircases and twisted warrens and every inch crammed with papers and keepsakes from the previous owners.
In therapy after her third miscarriage, while Mom was dying and life had turned vicious, a shrink had suggested that the missing rooms represented her past, or unfinished business. But Monique didn’t think so. She had reasoned that if she finally bought a house the size her mind was truly longing for, she would stop craving spaces to explore. The atrium with a skylight, library, gym with a mirrored wall, master bedroom worthy of royalty, finished daylight basement the size of an apartment, multiple pantries and cubbies, and backyard woods with its own city of raccoons, possum, rabbits, chipmunks, and screaming bird life would let her stop creating imaginary spaces.
But she’d been wrong: instead, she dreamed the new house had a second basement one floor beneath the real basement, with a narrow stairwell with a flickering light, damp, slick gray walls, loose cobblestone floors, and multiple creaky doors that led nowhere good. She often approached the closed doors, but she had never fully opened one—
And in her dream Monday night before the storm, she was nudging one of the imaginary basement doors an inch wide to a pool of blackness when she heard the crash from downstairs.
She woke with a gasp, her heart a drill in her chest. She would not have heard the sound if she’d been upstairs in the master bedroom, a world away from the basement, but she’d taken to sleeping on a sofa in the atrium now that she couldn’t manage the stairs—the spot closest
to the half-bathroom between the basement door and the kitchen, where she often washed in the sink. Ordinarily, she liked the atrium and the shadowy tree branches swaying above her. But that night, the overall effect was frightened confusion: Where am I? The new house. In Atlanta. Sleeping downstairs. Mom is gone. (That was always near, a slap.)
But what had made that crashing sound?
The cat, she told herself, but she felt Midnight leap from his usual sleeping spot between her knees, always skittish and ready for some shit to go down. Midnight’s feet pattered as he scurried across the living room to hide in the library. Maybe she’d spooked him when she woke up. Monique listened for new noises to confirm that she hadn’t dreamed the crash. She held her breath, waiting. And heard . . . nothing. Even the crickets who had invaded the house in the fall were silent, their population long ago killed off by winter.
If Monique had been more certain of which basement had produced the sound—the real one or her dreamscape—she would have gotten up, rested her bad leg on the knee walker’s sure cushion, and propelled herself to the basement door to make sure it was locked. (Of course it was, wasn’t it? Why wouldn’t it be?) She never decided not to get up to check the basement door; she just took so long to decide that sleep fell again.
It wouldn’t dawn on her until much later, after the snow, that the sound she’d heard was breaking glass.
* * *
Like most people in Atlanta, Monique’s Tuesday morning began as usual: for her, the English Breakfast tea she’d adopted when her doctor said to give up coffee, her traditional boiled egg, yogurt, and toast at her desk while she caught up on police shootings and social injustices on Twitter. Next, her struggle to tear away from social injustices on Twitter so she could work on her spec comedy script she’d promised herself she would finish by the time her cast was off. Since she kept seeing local weather tweets, she turned on the TV in the living room so the morning newscast could fill up the downstairs with constant updates and companionship.
Nate wasn’t home, so she didn’t bother to dress or shower (though she brushed her teeth). She propped herself up on the sofa beneath her blanket with her laptop, not even moving back to her desk in the library to sit upright. She didn’t love her library office yet, with its bare shelves and unpacked boxes. Still, it was a good writing day: the kind where you start writing at nine sharp and look up and it’s nearly noon. For three hours, she hadn’t checked social media, gone to the bathroom, or foraged in the fridge out of boredom.