Darktown: A Novel

by Thomas Mullen

  And the first time he’d walked with Helton, they had arrested an old Negro who had simply been walking home along Juniper Street at midnight. Helton had demanded the Negro’s work papers, wanting proof that he was employed at a night job and therefore had reason to be out so late. There was no official curfew in Atlanta, yet most of the cops enforced one on the colored population. Helton had made such arrests in Rake’s presence three times now, and every time it happened, Rake silently vowed that next time he would protest, insist that this was ridiculous, or at least refuse to go to the call box. Yet every time it happened, he went along with it, reluctant to win himself a new enemy.

  “Your informant may have actually been wrong about Bayle,” Rake said to Dunlow.

  “Really, now?”

  “Rookie doesn’t seem to understand how valuable it is to have friendships,” Helton said.

  Rake took his time finishing his coffee, then put the mug down. “Don’t call me rookie, Helton. I got four years’ combat experience while you were over here arresting elderly Negroes for illegal-­pedestrianism-after-curfew.”

  After a second of silence, Peterson laughed. “Kid’s got sand, Dunlow.”

  “Damn right he does,” Dunlow vouched. “Had my back at Triple James’s while you two and everyone else was trying to find him on the wrong side of town.”

  “I would like to hear him further explain his opinion on Nigger Bayle,” Helton said, seething from Rake’s comment. “Seemed to me there that he was supporting Bayle over Dunlow. That doesn’t sound like having your partner’s back.”

  Rake realized he was wading deep into waters he’d been trying to avoid. Lord only knew where the sudden drop was.

  “The city isn’t going to change its mind,” he told them. “The Negro cops are here to stay. I’m not saying you have to like it, but I am saying, if we want to keep from driving ourselves crazy, we’ll learn to deal with it.”

  “Oh, we are going to deal with it,” Dunlow said. “Make no mistake on that.”

  “I just mean y’all are looking at this the wrong way.”

  “Enlighten us, Officer Rakestraw,” Peterson said. “Share with us your higher worldview.”

  “Look, you two patrol over in Kirkwood, so what do you care about colored cops? They’re miles away from you. But me and Dunlow are in downtown, just blocks from Darktown every night.” He decided not to add the fact that Dunlow made a point of going into Darktown every damn night to reassert his ownership. “Right now, sure, it’s awkward with us being so close to them. But once they’re up to speed, once they’ve proven themselves decent cops, or close enough, the city’ll hire a few more—”

  “The devil you say,” Peterson nearly spat.

  “—and then they’ll have the manpower to police their part of town by themselves. Which means us white cops can police the white neighborhoods, and we won’t need to spend another moment down near Auburn Avenue or Decatur Street or the West Side.” He paused a moment for them to get the point. “Isn’t that what you want? You’re so huffy about seeing a Negro in a uniform that you can’t see this for what it is: a better kind of segregation. Give the colored cops the colored neighborhoods, and we’ll never have to set foot in there again. They’ll handle their affairs, and we’ll handle ours.”

  Dunlow was watching Rake with a kind of stony silence. The others looked like they were either having trouble following his argument or were wondering if he was deranged.

  “Lord have mercy,” Helton finally said with a shake of his head. He waved to the waitress for a refill. “A white cop saying that what we need is more black cops. Guess you got a little shell shock over there in France, boy. A little weary of fighting.”

  “That’s a mighty nice story, Rakestraw,” Peterson said. “But there are only two ways this little experiment might end. One is them niggers running through burning streets, firing rifles into the air as the whole damned city turns to chaos. The other is us shoving those badges so far down their throats, we’ll be able to cut their balls off with ’em.”

  Rake and Dunlow had been barely driving a minute when Dispatch called in with a report of an assault in Darktown. An old colored woman who lived on Fitzgerald had seen “four or five” men in a fight, some of whom she thought might have been colored officers.

  “This sounds good,” Dunlow said to Rake after telling Dispatch they were on their way.

  It was a side street five blocks south of Auburn, Dunlow driving so fast he nearly drove over the scrum of Negroes in the center of the road, braking just in time. Rake wondered if maybe he’d been toying with hitting them on purpose.

  Negro Officer Little was cuffing one of two Negroes who were lying facedown on the sidewalk. The other was already cuffed, his hands slick with red.

  Negro Officer Boggs was a few feet away, on one knee, a blue handkerchief held to his forehead.

  “What these niggers do?” Dunlow barked.

  Little looked up after cuffing the second man, eyes livid. He and Boggs were both out of breath.

  “This one stabbed that one,” Little said. Rake didn’t know much about Little, who was black as pitch and wiry thin, other than the fact that his uncle ran the local Negro paper. “And when we tried to break it up, the one who’d been stabbed threw a bottle at Officer Boggs.”

  One of the men on the ground wasn’t so much out of breath, Rake realized, as moaning in pain.

  “Well, well,” Dunlow laughed. “That’s why I always let niggers fight it out amongst themselves before getting involved.”

  “There were two children and a woman with them, so we didn’t think that was a good idea.”

  Boggs’s eyes looked dizzy. A streak of blood ran down his forehead and the handkerchief wasn’t doing a good job sopping it all. He did not appear to be in a rush to stand all the way up. He managed to say, “Call an ambulance, please.”

  “Ah, you look all right,” Dunlow said. “Better work on your reflexes, though.”

  “Not for me. For him.”

  Boggs, with the elbow that was attached to the hand applying pressure to his own wound, indicated one of the two men lying on the ground.

  “Gut stabbed,” Little explained. “Pretty bad.”

  Dunlow kicked at the gut-stabbed one. “Roll over, nigger.”

  Rake felt he should go into the squad car and call the ambulance, yet Dunlow himself hadn’t moved to do so. The door was open, the radio only a few feet away.

  The stabbed Negro could not roll over on his own. So Dunlow kicked him in the ribs.

  Little backed up, outraged. “He can’t roll over, Dunlow, he’s cuffed!”

  Dunlow kicked the Negro again. The Negro howled in pain.

  Boggs stood up. “Call the ambulance.”

  Dunlow ignored him. Rake considered making the call himself. But didn’t move.

  Little carefully pulled the stabbed man to his knees, then turned him so he was leaning against a telephone pole. The car’s blue lights strobed the scene. The man’s howl had gone back down to a moan. He wore a white sleeveless T-shirt and the lower left-hand side was black with blood, glistening.

  “Yeah, he did get you pretty good.” Dunlow whistled. He still wasn’t making a move for his car radio, clearly enjoying how he could drag this out. “Why you throw a bottle at an officer of the law come to help you, boy?”

  Judging from the Negro’s scrunched eyes and locked jaw, he was in too much pain to talk.

  Boggs took a ginger step and said, “I’ll call the ambulance.”

  “Don’t you go near my car, boy,” Dunlow warned.

  They stared each other down. Rake was behind Dunlow and he could see the look on Boggs’s face, the anger there. Pain and the blood seemed to have washed a certain veneer from the preacher’s son.

  Then Dunlow kicked the stabbed Negro directly in his wound.

  The man scream
ed and at least one of the Negro cops yelled, too. Dunlow laughed. Rake realized one of his own hands was clasped around the handle of his billy club.

  “What you think you were doing, boy, throwing a bottle at an officer of the law?” Dunlow demanded. “Or maybe you don’t think they’re real officers of the law, do you?”

  The Negro had fallen onto his side and was gasping for air, the act of breathing too painful now.

  “And you know what?” Dunlow said. “You’re right.”

  Dunlow loomed over the Negro. Rake was still gripping his billy club. The two Negro officers were standing exactly where they’d been before but they both seemed crouched, bracing for what might come next.

  “Because, boy, if you did throw a bottle at a white officer, you’d damn well be a dead nigger right now.”

  “Why are you even here, Dunlow?” Boggs asked. “We didn’t call for help.”

  “I’m here because this is my city, boy. I’m here because the good nigra citizens of the area called the police asking for help. That’s why I’m here. The better goddamn question is why you’re here.”

  Then Dunlow pulled at his belt buckle, as the kicking had caused it to slide a bit beneath his gut. “You want an ambulance for the nigger, you can call it your damn self.”

  Rake followed Dunlow back to their car, then he said, quietly, “Dunlow, they need an ambulance.”

  Dunlow stared at him. “You ain’t calling one from my radio.”

  Rake stood there, thinking of what he could do.

  Dunlow asked, “What’s your damn problem, son?” He was just quiet enough so that the Negroes couldn’t hear this dispute among white men. “You want to help the niggers so bad? What about your ‘better kind of segregation’?”

  Rake had no answer.

  Dunlow opened the driver’s door and got in. “There’s a call box a block away. Call it your damn self.”

  He slammed his door and drove off, nearly driving over one of the fallen Negroes.

  Rake felt he had crossed a line he had meant only to toe, and now he’d been abandoned.

  Neither of the Negro officers were looking at him when he told them he’d call for an ambulance and a wagon. He ran to the call box as fast as he could.

  For twenty minutes Little applied pressure to the man’s wound while Boggs sat on the sidewalk denying that he needed medical treatment. Rake, after making the call, knew he should seek out the witnesses the officers had referred to, a woman and some kids, but this situation before him seemed plenty volatile enough and he felt the need to stay. He hadn’t been able to stop Dunlow from attacking the man. Yet he needed to believe that, if something like that were to happen again, he would stop it. He would not let events outrace him like that, like they always did.

  Other than the nonstabbed Negro, who occasionally chimed in with claims of his innocence and mistaken identity and this just being a spat among kin that really ought not trouble officers of the law, no one spoke for a while.

  Finally the ambulance came and the three officers helped the orderlies load the injured man, whose moaning had become distressingly quieter. Rake and Little tried to talk Boggs into going in for treatment, too, but he refused.

  “I don’t feel like spending three hours at Grady waiting for a stitch or two. I’m fine.”

  So Little climbed in as the police escort.

  After the ambulance pulled away, Rake indicated the other Negro and told Boggs, “I can wait on the wagon with him if you want to get back.”

  “I’m fine. You can go.”

  But Boggs hardly seemed in condition to be left alone, even with his suspect handcuffed, so Rake lingered. They waited a while.

  Eventually Boggs started pacing, tentatively testing out his legs. His forehead had stopped bleeding so he’d ditched the handkerchief. He looked like hell, though. Rake started pacing, too, and when they were far enough away from the cuffed Negro, Rake decided the silence was too damned awkward.

  “Your first on-the-job injury?”

  “First one that’ll leave a scar.”

  He wanted to apologize for his partner, but why was Dunlow his responsibility? What would such a gesture be worth? And what consequences would come from not vouching for his partner before a Negro he barely knew?

  “It’ll make you look rugged. Girls’ll love it.”

  Boggs’s initial response was a hard look. As if he was offended and was ready to fight over it. Then he looked away.

  Jesus, Rake had only meant it as a harmless tease, like he would have said to any other cop performing a thankless task. That was the thing with these Negroes; either they were jesters who wanted to make light all the time or they were so damned serious, deeply insulted by any perceived grievance. Perhaps humor had been the wrong approach.

  “I wanted to ask you about that body you found,” Rake said. “Report says you searched through the trash?”

  “It wasn’t my favorite shift. Do you know who’s working the case?”

  “No.”

  “News travels slow to the Butler Street Y.”

  “I’ll let you know if I hear anything.”

  “Thank you.” Boggs seemed to mull something over for a moment. “I wonder if they’ve talked to Underhill yet.”

  “Who?”

  “Brian Underhill. The last man she was seen alive with.”

  It took Rake a second, but then he remembered the fellow who’d hit the pole on Auburn. He recalled Boggs and Smith claiming that the man had had a Negress in the car with him earlier.

  “I didn’t realize it was the same girl.”

  “I put it in my report.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Again Rake seemed to have set off some alarm in this fellow. He couldn’t tell if Boggs was always this jumpy or if it was the knock on the head or, more likely, the recent exposure to Dunlow. Rake himself was unfortunately used to that.

  “I read the murder report, Boggs. There was nothing about Underhill in it. Nothing about that traffic stop at all.”

  Boggs was staring. “You’re sure you read the whole report?”

  “Yes, I’m sure I read the whole report.” Now Rake was the one getting irritated. “All three pages. I read it tonight, and there was nothing about Underhill.”

  Boggs looked away, then turned completely around, as if he was searching for something. They stood like that for long enough that it started to feel rather strange.

  “What?” Rake finally asked.

  “Nothing.” Boggs turned back around. “I thought I put it in there. I . . . must have forgotten.”

  That’s sloppy work, Rake nearly said. Boggs wasn’t the most likable fellow in the world, but he projected a professional air, as though being a good cop was the most important thing in the world. Rake respected that. The son of a reverend, never dropping his g’s, his uniform pristine and the brass always shining, his posture military perfect. Hearing him admit such a mistake took some of the shine off him.

  “You should refile it,” Rake said. “I don’t think they have any leads.”

  “You mean, you don’t think anyone is working it at all.”

  Boggs said that as if he held Rake personally responsible for the stonewalling of other whites.

  “I guess that is what I mean. But a person of interest’s name in your report would change that.”

  Another uncomfortable silence from Boggs, who finally said, “I don’t think it would.”

  6

  ONLY HOURS AFTER that awful night, Boggs and Smith were needed at the courthouse for a morning trial. Boggs had expected testifying to be one of his favorite experiences, yet it had proven to be the worst. Not least because of the timing: always in the morning, after their night shifts, and they were denied overtime pay—they made $196 a month, far less than the white cops. Between l
ast night and the previous night finding the body, Boggs had enjoyed maybe five hours’ sleep the last two days combined.

  The first time Negro officers had been needed in a courtroom, the judge had refused to let them enter in uniform, demanding that they enter as typical nigras. That had not gone over well at the Y—the ­officers complained to McInnis for weeks. Only after much back-channel maneuvering by the very reluctant sergeant and after another judge’s vouching for their continued “good behavior” (as if they were dogs whose ability to control their bladders was worthy of compliments), they had recently won a concession: they could now wear their uniforms at trial.

  But they still couldn’t wear them on the way to or from the courthouse, just as they weren’t allowed to wear them to or from the Y. The latest policy stated that they could carry their uniforms in garment bags to the courthouse, which they would enter via the colored entrance. Then, in an old custodial closet next to the colored restrooms, they could change into their uniforms. They’d been given keys to the closet, which, though it was no longer in use, maintained the smell of mildewed mops and disinfectant. At least it smelled better than the colored restrooms.

  So many of their interactions were fraught, perplexing, dangerous. There was no precedent to follow, no Jim Crow Guide to Colored Policing. They had each survived into adulthood by proceeding warily, yet now they were expected to walk with a heavy step and newfound power through their neighborhoods. In every other part of the city, however, they were still expected to vanish, or worse.

  “Your Honor,” the city prosecutor said, “the city would like to call, ah, to call . . .” and some papers spilled onto the floor. The young attorney looked like an actor in a high school play, complete with an unruly cowlick. He was someone important’s nephew, surely, doing a year or two of city work to gain insight into the darkness of the human soul before settling into the family firm. “Ah, yes, here it is, the city would like to call Negro Officer Lucius Boggs.”