Darktown: A Novel

by Thomas Mullen

  “Tell us about him,” Lucius asked.

  “Morehouse man. Decided to use his degree to help poor kids out in the country, that’s how he met her. But he never really took to the sticks, so he’s back here. My impression is he left Peacedale because it was in his physical best interest to do so.”

  “He’d been threatened by somebody?” Smith asked.

  “He never flat out said it, but . . . I had that impression.”

  “Or maybe he was following her here?”

  “He’s a married man.”

  Lucius rolled his eyes. “Oh, well in that case—”

  “I can vouch for him. He is not that type.”

  What type? The type that might accidentally fall for a cute young thing who looks up to you and thanks you for opening her world? The type attracted to beautiful young women? Was Timmons too naïve, or was Boggs too cynical?

  “And you’ve never had any contact with Congressman Prescott?” Lucius asked.

  “No. Why, he dead, too?” An awkward laugh.

  “She worked for him,” Smith explained. “We figured, girl works as a maid to a congressman, she’s part of some political group trying to get favors out of him, then she winds up dead. . . .”

  Timmons’s eyebrows shot way up. “We’re not involved in anything that could get a girl killed! ”

  A middle-aged couple had been about to enter from the kitchen, behind Timmons, but on hearing these words they stopped, then turned around.

  “Who has your group written these letters to?” Smith asked. “We’d love to get a list.”

  Timmons shook his head, appealing to Boggs. “Lucius, I’m sorry, but I’m not going to tell you everything we’ve done if it means that you’re going to put the Police Department’s nose in it.”

  “You had to know you’d make enemies,” Lucius said. “There are plenty of folks who wouldn’t agree with what you’re doing, and a lot of them own guns.”

  “I just . . . I just don’t believe that whatever happened to her could have anything to do with us.”

  By which he meant, he didn’t want to believe that his group’s politics might have put her at risk. He didn’t want any guilt on his soul. Lucius knew the feeling.

  “Okay,” Lucius said. “Other than your group, did you ever have any reason to think she was mixed up in anything? Bad friends, loose morals, anything like that?”

  Smith pressed, “She seem like the kind of girl who ran with white men?”

  “Definitely not. She was corn bread pure, man. Wide-eyed and innocent.”

  An hour or so later the party was winding down, Smith was seducing the nineteen-year-old sister of Reginald’s wife, and Lucius had escaped to the cooler air on the front porch. Distracted, he ran the known facts through his mind: Prescott helps with the push for Negro cops, a little. He signals he may be more open to other Negro issues. His Negro maid is involved in a new, younger Negro rights group. She may or may not have talked to him about it. She may or may not have spied on him to report back to her allies. She may or may not have sent a suspicious amount of money home to her family. She later lists a brothel as her return address. She’s spotted one night by me with a white ex-cop and a bruise on her face. She’s shot and killed with a small-caliber gun, possibly that same night.

  “It’s Officer Boggs!” boomed the unmistakable voice of Reverend King. “Put away the moonshine, everyone!”

  He returned from his daydreaming and saw on the porch Reverend King from Ebenezer Baptist, Reverend Holmes Borders from Wheat Street, and John Wesley Dobbs, thirty-year veteran of the post office and Grand Master of the Prince Hall Masons, standing with his father by the small table that held their glasses. They seemed to have been looking over a sheet of paper they could barely read in the dark. These were some of the men who’d been instrumental in the push for registering Negro voters, Lucius knew, and though three of them were rivals for congregants, they were always working on some civic plan or another.

  The others laughed and more good-natured ribbing ensued, comments about why wasn’t he in uniform day and night if Satan never sleeps, and hey that’s quite a scar there on your forehead, how’s the other fellow look, and when are you going to get to drive a squad car?

  The smiles had barely faded when the talk turned serious.

  “We’ve been talking about the James Jameson situation,” Reverend Holmes Borders said. “The community, as I’m sure you know, is very . . . concerned with how the Department has handled things.”

  Holmes Borders handed Lucius the sheet of paper. Lucius stepped back so enough light from the front parlor could seep through the window and make it legible. It was a letter addressed to Mayor Hartsfield, Congressman Prescott, and Herbert Jenkins, chief of the Atlanta Police Department, an allegedly reform-minded man who had acquiesced to the hiring of the colored officers and had even abolished the Klan-­dominated police union a year ago (though Lucius had heard that an unofficial all-white union still existed). It remained to be seen how far such a man was willing to push such reforms, especially if another mayor should take office.

  Lucius himself had proofread for his father many similarly officious letters over the years, their tone ranging from courteous to admonishing to outraged. This letter explained that the colored community was “extremely concerned” about the way the Department had handled the “homicidal apprehension” of Jameson, and noted that there were several “unanswered questions” that needed to be asked. The letter recommended a careful but widespread investigation. It requested some seats at that table. It was signed by these four community leaders, including Lucius’s own father.

  Lucius read the letter once and he read it again and still he stared at the page for a long while, too angry to reply.

  “We were hoping you could deliver this to Chief Jenkins,” Reverend King finally said.

  “With my badge and gun?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  He looked up at them. “Why don’t I just resign? Because that’s what I may as well be doing if I handed him something like this.”

  The men all shifted on their feet, took their hands out of their pockets, crossed their arms.

  “Son, let’s not be so dramatic,” his father said.

  He tried to keep his voice calm. “You’re asking me to throw a bomb at my employer.”

  “That’s hardly a bomb,” Holmes Borders said.

  “We all respect what you’re doing, Lucius,” Reverend King said.

  “Don’t forget who helped you get that job,” Dobbs snapped.

  His father held out an appeasing hand. “Let’s all talk this—”

  “And now you want to take it away, Mr. Dobbs?” Lucius stared.

  “We have been working hard for years to make things better—” Holmes Borders started.

  “I realize that.”

  “Son, don’t interrupt the man.”

  “But just because we finally have some colored men in uniform doesn’t mean we’re going to look the other way when the city pulls something like this.”

  Lucius tried to sound reasonable as he explained, “I didn’t like Jameson’s trial any more than you did, but it happened two years ago and there’s nothing any of us can do about it. Him busting out and getting shot, though, there’s nothing abusive about that. He was an escaped convict and he had a gun.”

  “He was shot in the back, I heard,” Holmes Borders said.

  “They tortured his sister.”

  Lucius shook the letter. “This is not the right battle to fight, gentlemen. I’ve seen plenty you wouldn’t like and plenty that might deserve a letter, believe me, but Triple James getting himself killed is not one of them.”

  “Triple James, huh?” Reverend Holmes Borders shook his head. “So they got you thinking like they do already.”

  “I know how to think, Reverend. I respect all tha
t you’ve done to get me where I am, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to let you use me as some pawn between you and the chief and the mayor.” He looked at his father. “I’m no one’s sacrificial lamb.”

  “You watch your tone.” His father was very still.

  Lucius paused. The angrier he let himself become, the more likely they were to see him as some petulant, ungrateful child. Yet his anger was too great to contain.

  “None of you have any idea what it’s like. If you send this, all it will do is tighten the vise on me and the others. There are some of us, and you do not repeat this, there are some of us who might quit any day now. How do you think that will go over?”

  “This is about more than eight officers,” Reverend Holmes Borders said.

  “You think we don’t know that?” Did they think he’d be all too happy to act as their middleman, their spy into the white power structure? Or, worse, were they jealous to realize that the authority they’d built up over the years had not only crested but been transferred to the eight cops, these undeserving young men, and now the community leaders had to reassert themselves? “You think that hasn’t occurred to us? You think we don’t realize how important everything we do is?”

  He dropped the letter, and the overhead fan accelerated its downward journey to the table, where it instantly stuck to the circle of condensation where someone’s glass had been. The reverends and Mr. Dobbs were all watching that circle spread as Lucius walked off.

  He needed to get away, and the house wasn’t far enough, was too full of people, so he walked straight through every room and to the backyard. He was alone, or thought he was for the first minute or two, until his anger and self-possession faded enough for him to see the slender figure standing against the lone maple twenty feet away, smoking a cigarette with the aid of a narrow holder.

  “Are you writing anymore, Lucius?” Percy asked.

  Lucius walked closer to the silhouette. “I don’t really have the time these days.”

  “So your new sword is mightier than your pen. That’s a shame. You have a talent. Or perhaps I should use the past tense?”

  “I didn’t say I’ve given up on it. I just . . . need to spend all my time learning about policing these days. If I go a few weeks without writing anything, that’s okay, I’ll still live. But if I’ve got my head in the clouds while I’m walking the beat, maybe I won’t.”

  Lord, what an evening. And the whole reason for the party was to bid farewell to one of his cousins, a young man who had decided to flee Atlanta and all the Boggs family had built, for the uncertainty of Chicago. The cousin had been rousted by white cops downtown a few months back, right before Lucius had joined the force, and had apparently made up his mind then to leave the South. Earlier tonight Lucius had asked him to stay, had promised him things were getting better. His cousin had replied, I’m happy for you, but no matter what job you get for yourself down here, we’re still just niggers to them. The words were still ringing in Lucius’s ears. No matter how many college graduates and Negro-owned companies we get in Sweet Auburn, they’ll still just call it Darktown. Half the people at this party haven’t been downtown in years. They stay in this neighborhood, where they can fool themselves into thinking they have all they need, and don’t dare wander out where they’ll get knocked down another peg. So what’s wrong with me looking for something better up north?

  Lucius had no answer. Just that afternoon, he had manned a complicated phone tree to see which car-owning relatives could offer rides to which great-aunts and -uncles to Terminal Station tomorrow to see the cousin off. None of his relatives wanted to take a downtown bus. Auburn Avenue was a private world they and their forbears had been cultivating for decades, since even before the horrible riot of ’06. It was a protective bubble keeping them safe from the rest of the city, the South, America. They were the lucky few who could afford not to venture into those lands.

  “How can you stand it here, Lucius?” Percy asked, reading his mind. “The looks on the street. The insanity. They’re all mad here. We defeated the Fascists in Europe, yet here they rule.”

  “It’s getting better,” he said, repeating the empty promise he’d made to his cousin.

  Percy coughed out a laugh, complete with a cloud of smoke. After he’d recovered, he asked, “Have you seen The Big Sleep, or The Maltese Falcon? ”

  “I read the books.” The films had shown only briefly at Bailey’s, the only theater on Auburn. They had played longer downtown, but Lucius would not subject himself to the colored balconies.

  “Chandler and Hammett. Brilliant men. They write about detectives and police officers, so perhaps you’ll find some truth there. Their heroes are good men who discover that their environments are far darker than they’d realized. Grand conspiracies afoot. But I look at you, Officer Lucius, and I can’t imagine a darker place for you. You won’t be the gumshoe who discovers to his horror that he’s in a corrupt world, because you already know it. The evil is so garishly on display here, there’s no mystery to it. It is sunning itself before us, and it will strike if you dare approach it.”

  Percy dropped his cigarette on the ground and stamped it.

  “I suppose that living here all the time makes me tolerate it a bit better,” Lucius said. “I’ve built up antibodies.”

  Percy grabbed him by both shoulders. Even in the darkness, their faces were close enough for Lucius to see the red in his uncle’s eyes.

  “You need to bleed those antibodies from your veins, Lucius. Understand me? Bleed them from your veins.”

  22

  WHAT’S YOUR STORY, Underhill? What were you doing with Lily Ellsworth?

  Rake wondered this while he tailed the man late one night. He’d been staking out his apartment for barely half an hour when, at 11:30, Underhill emerged and walked to his car. Short-sleeved shirt, khakis, straw hat. Rake followed.

  You’re an ex-cop yet you’re now a pimp? You steal girls from Mama Dove to meet the whims of clientele who don’t want to be seen going into Darktown. What else do you do? And once you take the girls from her, where do they go? Some other brothel? Or something worse? He wasn’t sure whether he was on the verge of discovering some horrific conspiracy to steal, abuse, and kill colored girls, or whether such things happened all the time here, without need of any hidden machinations, and he’d been too naïve to realize it.

  He needed to know more about Underhill. The man clearly had skeletons in his closet, though Rake always preferred the grislier German turn of phrase, Eine Leiche im Keller haben. Having a corpse in the basement.

  They went south on Pryor, driving away from downtown and into the residential district of Mechanicsville, silent at that hour, all the factory workers exhausted. Rake had to hang back a ways, as there was so little traffic here he was afraid he’d be spotted.

  He wondered whether he was doing this at least partially to get his mind off other things. Such as his brother-in-law, Dale. Cassie had warned him that morning that Dale had called for him, the third time in the last few days. Rake didn’t want to hear about whatever nonsense complaint or damnfool errand Dale was thinking about performing. He was certain—certain—that his brother-in-law at least knew something about the bricks that had been thrown through their Negro neighbor’s windows. In fact, the day after that incident was the first time Dale phoned to leave a message for Rake to call him back. A confession? More likely he wanted to know if Rake knew whether their new Negro neighbor, Calvin, had gone to the cops, though of course the odds of that were slim. Dale probably also wanted to know if Rake had changed his mind and wanted to lend his expertise to whatever escalation Dale was planning.

  Up over a hill and then down again, into Pittsburgh, a colored district. They passed rows of bungalows where Rake spotted more than a few Negroes lying on their front porches in the vain hope that it would be less suffocatingly hot out there.

  After Underhill took a thi
rd turn in less than five minutes, Rake began to wonder if he’d been spotted. The man was varying his speed, which Rake didn’t recall him doing before. Maybe Rake was overthinking, maybe he was just desperate for something of note to occur. Or maybe he was a fool to be following a veteran ex-cop, and through such a quiet area no less. Maybe he was making yet another rookie mistake.

  Earlier that day Rake had hiked Kennesaw Mountain with his father. For as long as he could remember, the trek had been an annual tradition for him, his brother Curtis, and their father. Always in the summer, when the air was so thick that they were bathed in sweat before they’d been climbing ten minutes. The battle back in 1864 had taken place in late June into early July, so Colson had felt it necessary that his sons experience what their great-great-grandfather had, at least climatologically. The malarial heat, the mosquitoes, the sense that things were only going to get worse. Once when they were kids, Curtis had complained about the hike, their father’s pace, the blisters on his sore feet from his sweaty socks. So Colson had made the boy take off his shoes and complete the climb barefoot, as a lesson against further whining. Your great-great-granddaddy went without shoes most of those weeks, you can try it for a couple of hours.

  Today the mountain had been the same as it had been in Rake’s youth, the same as it had been for those troops and for the Cherokee before them. The spiked pods of sweetgum trees still littered the ground. The wet earth was still soft beneath their shoes. The mottled bark of pines, armored like alligator skin, still rose high all around them. The canopy still protected them from the worst of the sun, though they knew the sun was out there, patiently waiting for them to reach the top.

  Rake had been amazed by how much he missed the South while at war. Even the crushing heat. Even the sharp pain of a yellow jacket sting. Even the sight of bread gone moldy in a pantry that hadn’t been kept cool enough. Even the orange tint of kids’ bare feet playing in a clay lot. Even the way the ground disappeared from view when so many shrubs and vines grew out of the earth. The thick overwhelming ripeness of the South, the sheer three-dimensionality, the way it grew everywhere and anywhere, vibrant and unstoppable. The beauty of the tulips in March and azaleas in April and the many-hued leaves of November. Even the suffocating humidity of a summer day like this.