Darktown: A Novel

by Thomas Mullen

  “I’m saying we don’t like it any more than you do, but the idea of taking action against uniformed officers of the law don’t seem like such a great idea, all right? I know they ain’t real cops and you know it but the mayor doesn’t seem to agree and neither does our chief.”

  “You’re turning yellow, that it?”

  “I ain’t yellow.”

  “Yellowness is goddamn seeping out of this phone every time you open your mouth.”

  “It ain’t being yellow, Dunlow. It’s knowin’ there’s a time and a place, and this ain’t it.”

  The next thing Dunlow knew he wasn’t holding his phone anymore; it was smashed to pieces all over his bedroom. He would not lower himself to beg his fellow white men to aid him. He would not plead his case and he sure as hell would not repeat his mistake with Rake, trying to level with them and reveal things about himself he’d previously told no one. The time for talking was goddamn past.

  He changed into fresh clothes, grabbed his keys and his gun.

  34

  “EVERY TIME WE tried to help that family, we only made it worse.”

  Boggs had hoped Smith might disagree, but his partner was silent.

  “I never should have gotten the murder in the paper. I should have left the family alone out there to just wonder whatever happened to her. They would have thought she’d disappeared, married some fine schoolteacher, and disowned them. They would have used that money to go north. The local cops wouldn’t have been on the lookout for them.”

  Why were they doing this? Why continue with the sham of being “Negro officers”? They could do no real good. They were not permitted to correct the biggest problems, and when they dared try, they created worse disasters.

  “It’s not worth it,” Boggs concluded as he pulled up to Smith’s apartment building. So much had occurred since he’d picked him up that morning, it was amazing the sun hadn’t yet set on the same day.

  “We’ll try to get in touch with them again tomorrow. See if there’s anything we can do for them.”

  “If they’re alive.” He shook his head. “I wish I’d figured it out sooner. I would have known then, known to just stay away.” Instead, he’d wanted the satisfaction of solving it, of being the hero. That pride had already destroyed one family—what would it destroy next?

  “Just go home. Get some sleep. Things won’t seem as bad in the morning.”

  Smith didn’t sound like he believed his own words.

  At home a note from the reverend explained that he and Lucius’s mother were at a wake a few blocks away. At least one thing had gone right, then, since Lucius desperately needed to be alone.

  He sat in the parlor for a good while. He hadn’t turned on any of the lamps, and later twilight passed and he was sitting in darkness.

  He walked into the kitchen, picked up the phone, and called Rake.

  “I know why Lily Ellsworth was killed.”

  “Tell me.” A baby was crying in the background and it sounded like Rake was walking into another room.

  “She was Prescott’s daughter.”

  “What? Says who?”

  “One of her brothers said that their mother told Lily a few months ago. Lily and her brothers always knew she had a different father, and she’s much lighter than her siblings. They’d wondered if her father was a white man. She was teased about it a fair amount. Then one day Emma Mae told Lily the story: when Emma Mae was fifteen, she and her family had moved to the city. A couple of years later she was working as a maid for the Prescott family. This was back in the twenties. The head of the household—the father of Congressman Prescott—was a state senator at the time. Billy Prescott himself was a young man, still in law school, and one day he took advantage of Emma Mae.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “According to Lily’s brother, their mother didn’t explain how it all came to pass. But she said she stopped working for them soon after that, and then when her own parents saw she was pregnant, they moved back out of the city. That’s why she never wanted her own daughter to move here. Bad memories.”

  “So Lily just happened to wind up working for the same household? Why, so she could confront her father? Extort money out of him?”

  “Maybe she did try to extort the family, and that’s how she came into that money. Or maybe she just wanted to meet the man, look her daddy in the eye. Maybe she didn’t have money on her mind at all, but once he laid eyes on her he saw who she was immediately, and he panicked and offered her the money to hush her up, and she was just too stunned to say no.”

  Silence for a few beats. “How could she have confronted the congressman?” Rake asked. “I thought he’s been in Washington the whole time she was in Atlanta.”

  “I spent some time in the library the other day. A lot of time, actually, over a lot of days, and I finally found a short note in the Constitution that says Prescott came to town in late May, around Memorial Day. Went to some gala downtown, in honor of the Confederate war dead. He headed back up to the city two days later.”

  “And about two weeks later, Lily was shuttled off to Mama Dove’s.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Prescott’s son lied to me,” Rake said. “He claimed she’d stolen from them but they hadn’t wanted to report it, and that’s why they fired her.”

  Then Rake told him what he’d learned about the Rust Division.

  Boggs tried to work it through in his head again. Maybe Lily had tried to blackmail Prescott, threatened to publicize her paternity. So he paid her off, hence the money, and hence the junior Prescott’s lie to Rake about her stealing from them. Maybe Prescott hadn’t killed her, and hadn’t called in Underhill’s help. Maybe one of Prescott’s political friends had. Maybe Prescott had told someone else about his illegitimate daughter. Perhaps Prescott was softening his stance on Negroes precisely because of Lily, the memories she brought back of Emma Mae Ellsworth. Perhaps his affair with Emma Mae had been more than a dalliance—he’d buried all remnants of it, but they’d come back nonetheless, and now he was realizing that the races weren’t so far apart as many liked to think.

  “We’re assuming the son knew, too,” Rake said. “Maybe he didn’t. Maybe they never told him, didn’t want him to know he had a Negro half sister. Maybe it’s such a family secret that only the congressman himself knows.”

  Silence on the line for a few seconds.

  “But if they paid her off, then why kill her, too?”

  No more than a minute after hanging up the phone, he was sitting at the table when he heard footsteps. His mother walked in from the hall.

  “Sorry to startle you,” she said when she saw his expression. She was tall, only two inches shorter than him, and her straightened hair touched her shoulders. She was getting thinner, almost in proportion with his father’s weight gain over the years.

  “I didn’t realize you were home.” He wanted to ask her how much she had overheard, but was afraid to. Something in her eyes told him that she’d heard quite a bit. Part of the job description of a reverend’s wife is to be discreet enough not to eavesdrop exactly, but be helpful enough to tactfully act on any information she learned.

  She sat down opposite him and watched him for a moment. Her face was very still. She asked, “Are you all right?”

  “Not really.” He realized the light wasn’t on and that it must look strange to his mother for him to be sitting in the dark. But she hadn’t turned the light on either. “Long day.”

  “Wasn’t this your day off ?”

  “I didn’t use it too wisely.”

  She was wearing a plain housedress and wore no makeup, the look she only allowed herself when it was late enough to be sure that no one would be dropping by. No sinners, no grievers, no one seeking counsel or the Lord or another supper.

  “Maybe you should lie down.”

  “Did you t
hink I was a fool when I signed up?”

  “Of course not.”

  “You had this look on your face when I told you.”

  “I was just surprised. You . . . you hadn’t seemed to like the army.”

  “I hated the army.”

  “And I thought the police would be more of the same.”

  “It’s different. It’s better in some ways, and awful in others.”

  “I do know that people are glad you’re out there, Lucius. They tell us all the time.”

  It hurt him, in the back of his throat, to realize how badly he’d needed to hear this.

  “Really? All I hear are the complaints. Hey, why did you bust my brother’s pool hall? Why did you arrest my cousin? How come you haven’t kept the white cops off our backs?”

  “You’ve always been the type to fixate on the negatives. Or maybe people are more willing to tell me the positives about you. Mr. Thompkins said his pharmacy had been broken into four times last summer, but zero this summer. Mr. Royal mentioned he had a few knife fights at his club last year, but none this year, and he said the moonshiners aren’t stealing his business as much. Principal Jones last week, he told me that seven different kids in his junior class wrote term papers about how they were going to be police officers.”

  Lucius nodded. The lump in his throat was getting worse. Sensing this, she stopped talking, and walked over to the counter to pour him a glass of water. She handed it to him, then said, “You don’t have to keep doing it if you don’t want to.” Had she known he was thinking about quitting? Was it that obvious? “But I think you’re doing more good than you realize.”

  He drank the water, washing away the thickness.

  “The scar is growing on me, by the way.”

  He laughed. “Thanks.”

  “I’m sure the girls will love it.”

  “That hasn’t been my experience yet.”

  Then the phone rang. She was about to answer it when he asked her to let him, as if he’d known.

  A woman on the line said, “Is this Officer Lucius Boggs?”

  He recognized her voice and the sassy way in which she said it.

  “Yes it is, Miss Cannon.” Like that, he perked up quite a bit. “What can I do for you?”

  Julie said, “You told me to call you if I ever thought of anything or saw anything. Well, it’s what I haven’t seen that I think might be interesting.”

  An hour later, Lucius, on his one night off, was walking the streets he no longer felt qualified to protect. It felt different to do this now, in his civvies, no partner at his side. He’d hoped to escape from his thoughts but he was doing only the opposite. He realized then that the mere act of walking in his neighborhood at night would never be the same again, that if he truly did hand in his badge now, he still wouldn’t be able to reclaim his old feeling about Atlanta. The experience had permanently marred all his earlier memories, and any possible future would bear at least some imprint of these last few months.

  Unless he left Atlanta.

  There seemed no more illicit thought than that. Leave the city. Leave his family. Leave his connections. Leave the South. Leave his history. Leave his grandmother and her parents who were born slaves. Leave slavery and the War Between the States. Leave everything but the future.

  He had thought that by taking this job, he was helping his people, he was inching the rock of progress up the hill. But maybe he was wrong, and Uncle Percy was right. Maybe he was allowing himself to be fooled here, he was just another Negro casting down his bucket where he was, rather than moving someplace better.

  Every day, thousands of Southern Negroes were doing it. Why not him? He had chosen a different struggle, a different way forward, and it sure as hell hadn’t worked out. Here they were just niggers. Here he lived not in Sweet Auburn but Darktown. Here he was stubbornly holding on to the worst imaginable hand, as if hopeful that the next card would turn it into a royal flush. But the cards could not be read that way, and that perfect next card wasn’t sitting atop the deck. Even if it was, some other hand would snatch it away, a white hand, and Lucius was making a fool of himself by playing along.

  There were plenty of people he’d spoken to who knew more than they were saying, but he felt he had a decent chance with one of them. He got back in his father’s car.

  “Preacher’s son.” Mama Dove did not look surprised to see him. “But not in uniform. Finally decided to loosen that tight belt of yours?”

  They were standing in the foyer, and though the quarters were small indeed he stepped even closer to her.

  “Time to pick sides, ma’am. If you really feel like it, if you really think it’s a smart thing to do, you could place a call to the Department and have a white cop show up and arrest me for frequenting a whorehouse. That’d be the end of me and the end of the colored cops. And I know you’d like that. You have that fate in your hands right now.”

  “Exciting. So why won’t I do that? And why are you offering yourself to me?”

  “I know that Lily Ellsworth was Congressman Prescott’s daughter. I think they paid her off to keep quiet about it, but days later she’s sent here. Why here? She wasn’t a whore. I’ve talked to enough people who knew her and there’s no way she up and decided to sell herself just days after working in a congressman’s house. I’m thinking you were supposed to watch over her or something. But you didn’t do a very good job.”

  “What a fascinating story.”

  “Whoever it is you think you’re trying to protect, they don’t deserve protection. And whoever it is you think might take you down for talking to me, I can protect you from them.”

  She laughed. “Boy, you had me with the first line, but you should have quit while you were ahead. That second line? I don’t believe that for a second. And you don’t either.”

  She was right, so he moved on: “They sent Underhill because they didn’t want to send real cops, for the same reason they didn’t want her in a real jail and put her here instead.” He wished he had a better idea of who they was. Probably the Prescotts, but could it have been a rival, or a patron, of the congressman? Did anyone have proof? “They didn’t want the publicity, didn’t want anyone involved who might talk. And a colored madam who owes her continued existence to paying off the cops is a lady who knows how to keep a secret.”

  “I am pretty good at that.”

  “So Underhill eventually comes to take her away. That’s what they told you, probably. But he kills her instead. And then someone else from the Rust Division—or, more likely, one of the high-ranking cops who bosses the Rust Division around—killed Underhill, too, to cover up the tracks, because he knew we were getting close to Underhill. And you don’t feel the slightest bit bad about any of this?”

  The mirth was gone from her eyes and her arms were folded.

  “I want you to know two things, preacher’s son. The first thing is that I’d already decided I was going to tell you when you got here, so don’t be thinking you talked me into it or won me over with any of that fast-talking guff, got that?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Then she told him the second thing.

  At a pay phone a block away, Lucius dropped in a coin and dialed Rake’s number.

  “Be there, be awake, be there,” Lucius muttered.

  Rake was. Lucius told him what Mama Dove had said, and they pondered what to do next. To Lucius’s great surprise, Rake was ready to take a chance.

  “I can meet you there,” Lucius said.

  “No, no. Not a good idea. I’m sorry, but . . .”

  “White people only.”

  “I’m sorry. You did your job. Damn if you didn’t. Now I need to do mine.”

  Dunlow couldn’t believe his eyes.

  For more than an hour now he had been circling the neighborhood he knew so well. He had stopped at a few informants’ houses to
ask if they’d seen the man, had finagled a bit more moonshine when he realized his bottle was running low, but apart from that he’d been on the prowl. The alcohol and endless circling making him tired. He’d just about gotten to the point where he was either going to put this off for another day or just break into Boggs’s house so he could lie in wait for him, when who should step out into the street a mere fifty yards ahead of him?

  Thank you, Jesus, for not leaving me.

  He was a block from Mama Dove’s. And there was the man he was looking for, jaywalking without an apparent care in the world.

  Dunlow pressed his foot to the gas.

  Boggs heard the car roaring toward him when he was nearly across the street.

  He was used to this by now, but, to his surprise, this wasn’t a squad car. And he wasn’t in uniform himself, so perhaps this was different from those other times. This was a driver gunning for him, personally.

  The car drove beneath a streetlight and he saw a white hand dangling outside the driver’s window. Somehow he knew who was at the wheel.

  Boggs was still standing in the street. If his rage had been a physical thing, it would have split the car in two. If his anger had been able to make itself solid, it would have been too vast and impenetrable for the Ford to drive through.

  But that’s not how these things work.

  He stood his ground for as long as he possibly could have, then he bolted to his right and the relative safety of the sidewalk just before the car would have run him down.

  Yet it ran him down anyway. Somehow. All Boggs knew was that the air was driven from his body and his body was driven to the air, and when he landed—after spinning around at least once—he landed hard and on his side.

  He heard the car stop but didn’t hear the door open, because it was already open.

  Damned wily nigger had nearly leaped out of the way in time, but Dunlow had been expecting that, so he’d grabbed the handle and threw the door open, using his left foot for extra leverage, and the door had slammed Boggs with enough force to lift him into the air.