Darktown: A Novel

by Thomas Mullen

  “If you must,” said His Honor, the troll-like and perpetually grumpy Judge Gillespie.

  Boggs took the stand at the downtown courthouse and waited while a clerk found the colored Bible suitable for Boggs’s hand. Boggs was asked if he would tell the truth etc., and he said he would.

  He had a bandage on his forehead and three stitches that he’d received earlier that morning after visiting a Negro doctor and family friend. Shoulda gone to Grady last night, the physician had said, whistling when he’d seen the wound. Lucky this isn’t infected yet. Boggs hadn’t bothered to explain that the last thing he wanted to do was go to the colored hospital’s emergency room, where he would have had to wait hours while surrounded by many of the people he had likely arrested or tried to arrest over the past few months.

  Now he looked like a fool, half his forehead covered in white, and still dealing with a headache that the doctor assured him would pass “in a day or two.” The doctor said the scar shouldn’t look too bad. Give your face some character.

  On trial was one Chandler Poe, a lanky Negro in his late forties, with reddish hair growing in mangy tufts from his narrow head, and a long nose that betrayed Cherokee heritage.

  Boggs and Smith had already noticed that the white detectives who had been assigned the case did not seem to be in attendance. Also disconcerting was the presence of a dozen white civilians, all of them well dressed.

  “Now, Boggs,” the kid attorney asked in his genteel Sewanee voice, “according to your report here, you and another officer arrested Poe as he was leaving his residence with several barrels of corn liquor in his possession?”

  “Yes, Officer Smith and I made that arrest on June third. Mr. Poe at first denied knowing what was in the barrels, but as we waited for a wagon to arrive he admitted what he was doing.”

  Judge Gillespie was a loud breather, Boggs had noticed. Each time Boggs put a “Mr.” in front of Poe’s name or an “Officer” in front of Smith’s, he could hear the judge’s breathing grow louder.

  “And what exactly did Poe admit?”

  Electric fans blared and windows were open but there wasn’t a shirt that hadn’t been sweated through. The room was slated for air-­conditioning next year.

  “Mr. Poe said he was in the business of paying wholesalers for corn liquor and then selling it to several drinking parlors.”

  Boggs was bothered by the many mysterious white faces in the gallery. Even the Negro Daily Times reporter in the third row, busily taking notes for the next installment of his ongoing journalistic recording of the life and times of the colored cops, felt hostile somehow.

  “Did Poe name any of these wholesalers?” the prosecutor asked.

  “No, Mr. Poe kept that information to himself.”

  Much sooner than Boggs had been expecting, the prosecutor told the judge he had no further questions. The kid had mentioned a fraction of the reams of evidence Boggs and Smith had gathered.

  “Hmmpf?” Judge Gillespie said. He’d stopped paying attention a while ago and had been filling out some municipal paperwork. “Oh, yes. Ah, would the defense like to cross-examine?”

  “No, we certainly do not,” replied Poe’s attorney, a tall older man wearing a smart blue suit and wingtips, altogether too well dressed to be a public defender.

  Boggs was dismissed, and with the prosecution prematurely resting its case, the defense attorney called a Mr. Henry Jefferson. An older white man with a shock of colorless hair falling across his forehead took the stand.

  Under questioning, Mr. Jefferson explained that “Chandler” was a docile handyman who worked a number of jobs for the family. And quite a good banjo player to boot. In fact, ol’ Chandler had recently performed at a particularly grand family reunion that the Jefferson clan had held a few months ago, entertaining nearly a hundred people.

  “He’s a good boy,” Mr. Jefferson told the judge. “Now, I’m sure he’s liable to get himself into trouble now and again, and we’ve talked to him about that. But he means well.”

  The defense attorney thanked Mr. Jefferson for taking time from his busy schedule as vice president of the Marshall & Sons Textile Mill to come out here and offer his testimony.

  “That’s all right,” Jefferson said, “but I wanted to make sure Chandler wasn’t punished unnecessarily for a momentary lapse in judgment. He’s a good nigra and it’s a shame to see the city wasting resources on a hearing like this for what’s clearly just a misunderstanding between the coloreds.”

  Boggs was clenching his jaw. Smith made fists in his lap.

  Mr. Jefferson turned out to be but the first in a parade of character witnesses, all of them concurring in the benign nature of the accused, all of them agreeing that he posed no threat to society so long as he had a stern white hand to guide him, and all noting that the city would be much the poorer if it was deprived of his musical skills. The fact that the prosecutor cross-examined the white citizens into admitting that they could not dispute any of Boggs’s evidence hardly mattered.

  After the last witnesses, the judge got on with his ruling. He ­portentously informed Poe that he should tread lightly from here on out. Then he acquitted Poe of the charges, and down came the gavel.

  Poe made eye contact with the Negro officers and, though he didn’t actually wink or smile, something about the roundness of his eyes and the angle of his head managed to convey it all the same, an invisible wink. Then the bootlegger filed out.

  Boggs and Smith approached the young prosecutor as he gathered his papers.

  “First time in a courtroom?” Smith asked.

  “You think I enjoyed that? I spent hours on this case.” His voice had far more authority and conviction than he’d managed before the judge. “I don’t appreciate my record being besmirched by shoddy paperwork, let alone having the deck stacked against me.”

  He had spent hours on the case? Perhaps eight or nine? Boggs and Smith had followed Poe for two months, on and off duty. Weeks of their lives had just vanished with that gavel bang, for nothing.

  “Sorry we besmirched you,” was all Boggs could get out.

  The young lawyer looked at the officers as if for the first time, finally seeming to realize he’d insulted them. There was a glimmer in the kid’s eyes of something that Boggs realized, to his surprise, he did not hate. Some morsel of humanity, some shame at his failure, perhaps a sense that he had let down these hardworking, if inferior, police officers.

  “You really want to be helpful?” the lawyer said. “Next time y’all want charges to stick on someone, make sure your Department sends in white officers to testify against him.”

  “So what happened in there, fellows?” Jeremy Toon asked them in the hallway. He had been two years ahead of Boggs at Booker T. Washington, Atlanta’s sole high school for Negroes. He’d been skinny then and he was skinny still. His fingers clutched a notebook and pencil, which is exactly how Boggs had always remembered him.

  “You’re a smart man,” Smith said. “Figure it out.”

  “C’mon, now.” Toon was a reporter for the Atlanta Daily Times. He was a good, decent, ambitious person, and neither Boggs nor Smith could stand him. “Need some comment from you two.”

  “You know we aren’t supposed to be talking,” Boggs said, keeping his voice down, very aware of the lawyers and bureaucrats walking past. In a louder but polite voice, he said, “Go to our commanding officer if you need a comment.”

  The scribe lowered his notebook. He was wearing a brown tweed coat that didn’t match his thick black tie. “You know they don’t talk to us. Look, I’ve been covering this since you filed your first report. Y’all had tons of evidence the prosecutor didn’t use, and all the judge wanted to hear about was banjos? What do you want our readers to think?”

  Smith took one step toward the reporter, halving the gap between them. “Are you asking us to call out our prosecutor in your paper? Or com
plain about our superior officers? Or maybe you have a pink slip in that notebook, and we can just sign our jobs away and be done with it? That’d be easier, wouldn’t it?”

  One of the many complications the Negro officers faced was the fact that one of them, Xavier Little, happened to be nephew of the owner of the Daily Times. After the officers were sworn in, the Times ran an extensive interview with him. As far as Boggs could tell, Little said nothing remotely controversial in the story, yet the day after it hit the stands, McInnis excoriated them all. Do not talk to the newspapers again, ever. You are not spokesmen for your people. You are goddamn beat cops, and that’s all you will be, or you will be unemployed. The fact that the paper had been an early champion of the push for colored officers, and was eager to chronicle their every move, made this an especially delicate dance for the eight of them.

  Toon held out his hands. “I’m on your side here, gentlemen.”

  “Whose side?” Smith looked in every direction. “Which side? How’s that work again?”

  Boggs’s head was pounding and he desperately needed sleep. He was not thinking clearly. Surely that explained why he then said, “You really want to be helpful? I’ve got something for your paper, but you didn’t get it from me. Understood?”

  “What is it?”

  “We have a body,” Boggs said, “a colored girl, teens or maybe early twenties. Found dead, shot in the chest. No ID or anything.” Smith paced a few steps away, loudly sucking in his breath, all but yelling Mistake, mistake, mistake. If McInnis knew Boggs was saying this, they’d be in serious trouble. But Boggs was livid at the judge, livid at Dunlow from last night, livid about the fact that white investigators had done nothing to look into the murder. “All she had was a yellow dress and a heart-shaped locket. We could wait around until someone thinks their daughter or wife is missing, but if you put a note in the paper somewhere . . .”

  “What else?”

  “That’s all we know.” He didn’t want to tell Toon they found her in garbage. If a husband or parent had to learn that, they should hear it from an officer, in person.

  Toon had an impressive stare. “There’s something you’re not telling me.”

  It was a mistake to have said this much. But Boggs felt such rage, he hadn’t been able to hold himself back. White cops had just let his case against Poe die. Dunlow had beaten a man in front of him the other night. And apparently someone, most likely his own superior officer, had retyped his report on the colored Jane Doe. Falsified it by deleting the reference to Brian Underhill, the last known person seen with the victim, probably to protect the ex-cop. People were undercutting Boggs at every turn, making him look stupid and helpless. He refused to be helpless.

  “The last known person to be with her was a middle-aged white man,” he said. “Do not disclose that.”

  Toon nodded slowly. “Okay, I’ll run something. Call me when you have more.”

  This was hardly the first time they had been humiliated in court, but that didn’t make it any easier. In fact, they’d spent so much time preparing for this case because they’d thought that their efforts would finally overwhelm the hard-breathing judge’s bias. They had thought that what they did mattered.

  “I thought you locked it?” Smith said, opening the former custodial closet’s door.

  “I did.”

  Smith hit the switch as Boggs closed the door behind him. Their civilian clothes, which they had hung on pegs, were strewn on the floor.

  “For God’s sake.” Smith picked up his shirt and his slacks, shaking the dust bunnies from them.

  Boggs did the same with his shirt. He looked around for his pants. “You’re kidding.”

  He checked the shelves, which were half-stocked with old containers of cleaning solutions and boxes of what appeared to be years-old newspapers and legal transcripts. His pants were gone.

  They stood there in silence for a moment, then Smith swung and batted a box of moth balls from a shelf. Little toxic spheres ping-ponged in every direction.

  Boggs closed his eyes for a moment. He wanted to hit something, too. Yet he held it in.

  “Easy,” he said, to himself as much as to his partner.

  “Easy? You’re the one with no britches.”

  “Which is why you should be cooling down. You’re the one who’s going to have to fetch me some slacks.”

  “You’re going to hide in here?”

  “I am going to wait in here for you to get them, yes.”

  “The hell with that. Let’s both go to the Y, in our uniforms. Hell with their rules.”

  “No. I’m not getting written up for something like that. Not after what just happened.”

  “Five dollars says your britches are in the judge’s chambers.”

  “He can have them.” Boggs reached into his pocket and dug out a key. “I have an extra pair in my locker. Hurry up and we can get some sleep before next shift.”

  Smith leaned against one of the shelves. He stared at his feet.

  “Remind me why we’re doing this.”

  Boggs breathed. “To be upstanding citizens and paragons of our race,” he said, his voice gently mocking the mayor’s speech from their first day.

  “Give me a better reason.”

  “To provide a good example for colored kids.”

  A phone rang from an unseen office.

  “A better reason.”

  “There aren’t any better jobs.”

  Smith closed his eyes. “A better reason.”

  Boggs thought for a moment, then said, “Maceo Snipes.” Shot in the back for being the first Negro voter in Taylor County. “Isaac Woodard.” War veteran, blinded two years ago by South Carolina cops for daring to wear his army uniform. “The Malcolms and Dorseys.” Two married couples, including another veteran and a pregnant woman, ambushed and murdered on a bridge over the Apalachee River.

  Smith opened his eyes. “Give me those keys.”

  7

  RAKE WAS FLIPPING burgers at the grill when his nephews, Brooks and Dale Jr., cautiously approached. The fact that they held their hands behind their back meant either that they were about to throw something at him or that they were trying to impersonate harmless children with an innocent question.

  “Uncle Denny?” Dale Jr., the six-year-old, asked.

  Rake took a pull on his Coke. “Yes?”

  “Is it true you were a Boy Scout in the war?”

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  “Mother and Father said you were a Boy Scout,” said Brooks, the freckled four-year-old.

  “I was a scout. But yes, I suppose you could say it was like being a Boy Scout.” It was not remotely like being a Boy Scout. “It was more like I was a tour guide.” That was actually true, at the end.

  Sunday cookout at the Rakestraws. Rake and his wife, Cassie, playing the hosts, as they usually did. Cassie was inside with baby Margaret and two-year-old Dennis Jr., as well as Rake’s sister, Sue Ellen, and his brother-in-law, Dale, who was on his third or eighth beer.

  Rake looked through the window into the kitchen and caught Cassie’s eye. She winked at him. He wished these next two hours could vanish. It was a rare night off for him, meaning he was roughly on the same schedule as she was, and the baby was finally giving them some time to themselves.

  Through another window he could see his old man, Colson, playing with Dennis Jr. and doing a reasonably good impression of a happy granddad.

  The boys had been cagey, asking Rake about the war when their grandfather was not in earshot. Rake seldom discussed it, especially when Colson was present. Funny how even marauding brats like these picked up on that.

  “Did you kill people?” Brooks asked.

  “Brooks!” Dale Jr. popped his younger brother behind the head, then promptly gave Rake the kind of extremely attentive look that showed he was actually thri
lled the question had been asked and could not wait to hear the answer.

  “Ask me something else.”

  Dale Jr. seemed deeply disappointed. Borderline crushed. It took him a moment to think of a new question. How many days or weeks or years had they been wondering these things?

  “What does a scout do?”

  “Well, your grandmother, who you never knew because she passed before you were born, she was born in Germany, and moved here when she was a teenager. So she spoke German, and taught it to me when I was not much older than you. I kept with my studies to the point where I could speak it like a native. When the war came, there was a need for fellows like me who could get by over there.”

  And, years later, after the surrender, he’d been a tour guide. Stationed at the concentration camp in Dachau, he was tasked with ensuring that every civilian in the surrounding towns visited the camp. This is where some of them were incinerated. This is where some of them were gassed. These are the cages they were kept in. For two months. We had no idea, the “tourists” always claimed. We didn’t know. And the tour guides like Rake had replied, This is why we are here. This is why we have taken over your country. This is what your government was doing. We are here to save you from them.

  Rake opened the grill and flipped the burgers again, though they didn’t need it. His wife liked the things damn near scorched.

  “Did Uncle Curtis speak German?”

  He closed the lid.

  “No. Uncle Curtis had never been much for his studies.”

  The boys pondered this for a moment, amazed that their mythical, deceased uncle was being discussed. He’d survived two years in the Pacific. It was doubtful even the older of these boys had much memory of him.

  Then Rake noticed that his nephews were holding hands.