Darktown

by Thomas Mullen

  Ellsworth clearly thought Boggs’s questions were ridiculous. Boggs was dying to know more about her job, but he decided to drop this angle and pursue it by reading the letters when he got them.

  “Did she sound happy?”

  “Lily?” The farmer’s eyes were glassy now, like he’d drifted away again. The sound of his girl’s name on his own lips had cast a spell.

  “Yes, sir. Anything in the letters about being worried or scared, or the opposite, was there some event she was looking forward to?”

  “She put on a brave face. Letters were always, ‘the city’s so great, the food is great, the clothes are great, the music great.’ I know her, I know she probably be lonely and confused and maybe scared, but she ain’t gonna say that in no letter, don’t want to let her momma know she was right all along.”

  “Her mother didn’t want her to come to Atlanta?”

  “She always say cities aren’t good for young women. I’d say she right about that.”

  “Why didn’t your wife come in today?”

  Ellsworth looked at his hands. “Too hard. Too hard on her. I don’t . . . I don’t know how I’m gonna tell her.”

  There was something that didn’t sound right to Boggs, but he couldn’t place what it was.

  “When you saw the newspaper story, what made you think it might be Lily?”

  “Friend of mine told me. Saw the story. He knew we were worried on Lily, and the story mentioned that locket. Wife gave it to her long while ago.”

  A baby cried out as a mother surrounded by luggage searched through her bags for something. It was easily ninety degrees in there.

  “To work at the house of a senator, your daughter must have had impeccable manners.”

  “We raise her right.”

  “And she taught you to read, so she had schooling?”

  “Good teacher out there. Only takes the one, get ’em started. He gave her the learning, she and all her friends. Too much learning, probably.”

  “How so?”

  “Head got too big.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She on us to vote.” The searching look in his eyes told Boggs this had been an unreasonable request, and that Boggs was expected to nod along in sympathy. “Brought it up so many times I finally have to forbid her talking ’bout it no more. They beat a colored man two counties over who tried to register. Beat him to death. Policeman did it.” Boggs knew that murder well. It hadn’t made the white papers but had been covered heavily by the Daily Times, and his father had tried to help the slain man’s family hire an attorney. They had chosen to flee north instead. “And Lily wanted us to try the same thing.”

  “So it was important to her.”

  “That teacher was giving her ideas. We do our best to protect her, you know? We try and tell her the kind of trouble she could get us in.”

  The effort to register black voters in Atlanta had been a success, but Boggs knew it had been a different story in the country. Signs had been plastered in small towns warning of retribution if any Negroes tried to vote, and that particular murder had been only one example of what befell some of the tenant farmers who dared step forward. Boggs and Ellsworth lived in different worlds.

  He took down the teacher’s name and school, thinking it might be worth paying him a visit.

  “Did she talk about that sort of thing in public?” Boggs asked.

  “I hope not. We warned her, we told her to watch herself. We try to protect her.” His eyes began to water, and then the announcer’s tinny voice called out that the local to Macon was arriving.

  “I didn’t have to come in like this, you know,” Ellsworth said as they walked to the track. “On a train and walking. I coulda driven my own truck, that’s right.”

  “You have a truck?”

  “Yes, sir. It’s a little beat up but it works just fine. Got it off another farmer just a few weeks ago, gets me where I need. I got me some money, you know.”

  “You’ve been saving a long time?”

  Ellsworth looked out at the small crowd queuing up to the track, and the verbal momentum he’d had before, the fluid bragging, was gone. As if realizing he’d said too much. “I manage.”

  “Surprised Lily would want to run off if you had money.”

  “We get by, that’s all. We get by. But we on to better things. Going off to Chicago. Yes, sir. Living better up there.”

  “When do you leave?”

  “Springtime. After one more harvest, then have to wait out those winters they have. But now that I got enough saved, we can do it. Enough to ride in one of the fancy train cars, too. But I think we’ll drive, drive my new truck, see the country on the way. That’s how to do it.”

  There was much here that didn’t make sense. Did Ellsworth really have any money, or was he just trying to talk big to regain his manhood? He was a sharecropper, not a landowner. What Boggs knew about life on Georgia tenant farms told him it would be noteworthy for the man to have saved anything at all. Where had the money come from, some rare bumper crop—which was unlikely, especially with all the rain this year and the stories of produce rotting in the ground—or something else?

  The train was approaching.

  “Did Lily ever send anything home? Souvenirs from the city, some nice clothes for her sisters?”

  “She don’t have no sisters, just two brothers. They don’t need no nice clothes.” He laughed at that, too hard. It wasn’t funny, and he wasn’t looking at Boggs anymore. He was staring at that train, all but waving for it to hurry up so he wouldn’t have to answer any more questions.

  The train stopped and sighed, the cars for white passengers in back with their windows shut to keep in the cooler air, the Negro cars up front with windows open, those passengers inside who were not disembarking fanning themselves in the now-still air. Off came the porters, and people were moving in all directions, so much so that Boggs put a hand at one of the farmer’s forearms because he was afraid the injured man might get knocked down. The arm was thin but solid as an iron bar.

  “I’ll be by as soon as I can to pick up those letters. And maybe talk to your wife.”

  “You don’t need to trouble yourself. We just got to mourn and make our way.”

  Was Ellsworth hiding something, or was he just so used to his place at the bottom of life’s pecking order that he was acting awkwardly when presented with someone who actually wanted to help him? Boggs explained that it was no trouble at all, but the expression on the farmer’s face was not gratitude, just a kind of dire acceptance that triggered something deep in Boggs’s gut. As if it were easier for Ellsworth to meekly accept the latest plague the Lord had unleashed than to scream into the dark maw of life, demanding explanations.

  Lily’s father limped up the stairs, his fingers gripping the rail with each step.

  Once Ellsworth was off, Boggs walked out of the station, tapping his notebook on his thigh. He needed to talk to Smith and figure out his next move, carefully. As a Negro officer, there were many duties he was now authorized to perform, but conducting investigations was not one of them.

  He had broken plenty of rules today. If he wasn’t fired for it, he would break a few more.

  12

  PAST MIDNIGHT AND Rake walked slowly through his own neighborhood, clad in jeans and a T-shirt. It was warmer outside than in his bedroom but at least he wasn’t sweating anymore—he had woken from a bad dream absolutely drenched. So he had come out for some air, some space, some new thoughts to dispel whatever had been plaguing his subconscious. He had become such an odd night crawler. In a way, perhaps the war had been training for his new vocation, as there had been weeks in Europe when it was only safe for him to move at night, and he’d slept in barns and attics by day.

  He forgot the dreams almost the moment he woke up, every time.

  They came maybe once a week.
There seemed no rhyme or reason to why they visited when they did. When he first opened his eyes, he would see a shard of that other world, the mud in France or a certain house in Germany, or sometimes it would be a sound that had woken him, the canons and guns and screams and whines, but then they vanished. He told himself it was better that way, but their very unknowingness made them all the more disquieting.

  A dog barked a few times, too far away for it to be directed at him. Owls cooed from invisible branches. The locusts sounded even louder in his neighborhood than they did over in Darktown, which made some sense since there were more trees here. Boughs heavy with wide summer leaves hung low over the sidewalks.

  He’d been out ten minutes when he heard the sound of broken glass. Not glass breaking, but already broken glass being dropped, or poured.

  He looked to his left. There was a figure crouched outside a house, beside a trash can. Something long and thin there, and for a moment Rake froze, taking it for a rifle. Then he realized it wasn’t a firearm but the handle of a broom. Someone was sweeping a yard. At midnight.

  Then the man stood up, and where before Rake had seen only a hunched back and the broom, now he saw a man standing to dump a dustpan full of glass shards into a trash can. Because he was standing just beside an illuminated window, it was hard to make out much more than his basic shape. Only after Rake’s eyes adjusted to the trick of the light did he notice the funny outline around the man’s head, a fuzziness that he’d at first attributed to his own eyes and now realized was the hair of a Negro.

  Rake put a few things together then. This was the new neighbor, the Negro who had somehow bought an empty lot and built a house on it, a few blocks on the wrong side of the unofficial color line.

  Three of the windows in the man’s house were illuminated. The light that poured out through one of them did so through a series of jagged lines.

  No other house had any lights on, and Rake hadn’t seen or even heard a single car drive by since he’d been out.

  The man probably hadn’t noticed him yet. Rake could just walk away, go home, get back in bed. Such an act, he realized, would be an expression of weakness. He crossed the street. Keeping his voice quiet enough not to wake any neighbors but loud enough for the man to hear him, he asked, “Are you all right, there?”

  The man had been crouched down, but now he looked up. He had a beard, and his forehead was shiny with sweat.

  “I’m fine, sir.” The Negro kept watching Rake.

  “I’m a police officer, sir. I live nearby, just happened to be out for a walk. Do you need anything?”

  The man carefully assessed him. “I’m all right, Officer.”

  Though he had not been invited, Rake stepped onto the man’s property. He felt it would be seen as a sign of neighborliness.

  “Careful where you step, I don’t think I’ve gotten it all.” The man was down on his knees, feeling around for glass. There was a flashlight beside him.

  “When did this happen?”

  “I don’t know. I came home from work about twenty minutes ago and this is how it was. This and the other ones.”

  “What other ones?”

  “One on the other side, and one in the back.”

  Rake wondered if it would have been one person or a group, timing it just right. He thought of teenagers having fun, of lintheads after a few drinks, of his brother-in-law, Dale. He felt various kinds of disappointment at the last thought.

  “My wife had taken the kids to her sister’s for the night. Thank God, too, because a brick landed in my little boy’s bed.”

  The Negro neighbor let Rake borrow his flashlight to inspect the periphery of the house. Rake didn’t find anything suspicious or incriminating, no bottles or cigarette butts, though the latter would have been difficult to spot without sunlight.

  The neighbor explained that he’d already picked up the glass from the other two windows. And anyway, most of the glass had fallen in the house.

  Rake asked the man’s name.

  “James Calvin.” He looked forty, Rake guessed. A green Plymouth pickup was parked in the driveway. He was an inch shorter than Rake and slimmer, though his T-shirt showed arms sculpted by hard work.

  “Do you mind if I asked you how you came to own this land, Mr. Calvin?”

  Rake had been calling him “sir” and he hoped that and the “Mr.” showed that he took this man seriously, that he was not like some of the others. Mr. Calvin did not seem to be in the mood to thank him for it, however.

  “The land was left to me. The house I built with my own money, saved over many years.”

  “Who left it to you?”

  “Mr. Red Westerly.”

  Rake knew the name. Westerly was one of the cousins of the heirs to the Coke fortune and had owned much of the real estate in this area. “You did work with him?”

  “I helped build about two dozen of his houses, yes, sir. There were times, when his business wasn’t doing so well, that he couldn’t pay me what he’d said he would, but he always promised to make good on it. When he passed last year, he’d willed me this plot, and two others I’m renting out in Summerhill.”

  Rake hadn’t even noticed that there had been an empty plot on a corner, at least not until the day people were clearing out the bushes and laying the foundation that became this house. He was surprised to hear Westerly would leave any land to a Negro, and more surprised to hear that a probate judge hadn’t moved to stop it somehow.

  Most real estate agents knew enough not to try selling property in a white neighborhood to a Negro. Having land willed to you by an eccentric benefactor was a novel way to dodge that problem.

  “You’re a carpenter?”

  “Started as a mason. Had occasion to pick up pretty much everything else as I went along. Can build the whole house myself these days.”

  Rake motioned to the broken window. “Would you like me to take a look inside?”

  They were standing just outside the first window. Rake had glanced around the neighborhood a few times now, and no other lights had turned on. Of course, if someone was watching them, they’d be doing so from an unlit room for a better view.

  “What for?”

  “Just to . . . look for anything.”

  “Nothing to see. Just three bricks and a lot of glass. You sure you didn’t hear or see anything before you got here?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Midnight’s a strange time to be out for a stroll.” He said this with a slight smile, and without looking at Rake, as if to make extra sure it didn’t sound like an accusation.

  “It is. Trouble sleeping. Plus, I walk around at night for a living. So I suppose it isn’t so strange to me.”

  But Rake felt tired now, as if his body was finally remembering that it had been sleeping a little while ago and would very much like to get back to it.

  “Would you like to file a report, Mr. Calvin?”

  “To you?”

  “No, it would be other officers who’d take the report. I don’t patrol this neighborhood.”

  “Where do you patrol?”

  He was about to say “near Darktown” when he caught himself. “Downtown, and near Auburn Avenue.”

  “So they’ll write me up a report and, what, they’ll try to find who did this? You think that would happen?”

  “No, sir. I honestly don’t.”

  “Then I won’t make them waste their time.”

  Rake nodded. “I think I’ll head home then.”

  “All right.”

  “I’m sorry that this happened, sir. I’m glad your kids are okay.”

  Rake realized that Calvin had never asked his name. Perhaps he’d expected Rake to volunteer it and found it odd that he hadn’t. The omission had not been deliberate, but now that Rake realized it, he decided he’d keep it to himself.

  Instead
of a name, Calvin asked, “Whereabouts do you live?”

  “On Prospect, three blocks that way.”

  “You like it?”

  “I do. It’s a good community. Nice place for kids.”

  “Glad to hear that. That’s what I want. My wife and I, that’s all we want.”

  He was looking at Rake more intently than before.

  “Aren’t there other good neighborhoods?” Rake asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It just seems to me, sir, that you might be needlessly provoking people.”

  “This is the property that was left to me.”

  True, Rake thought, but you could always sell it and buy a house more appropriately located. He was too tired to make this argument, too anxious to end the conversation.

  Calvin said, “I’m not breaking any laws by being here.”

  “I understand that.”

  “The people that threw those bricks are the ones broke the laws.”

  Calvin was getting angrier now, as if he’d watched Rake long enough to decide that he could reveal more of himself to the white man, as if Calvin was now free to say things to this stranger that he perhaps should not.

  “I understand, sir,” Rake said. It was so difficult to walk this line. To let colored people know that just because you were the same color as fire-breathing racists didn’t mean you agreed with them. And at the same time, just because you were talking to a colored person and desperately trying to impart some wisdom and necessary advice, that didn’t mean that you agreed with what Calvin was doing to his wife and kids, or to your own neighborhood.

  “All I’m doing is living,” Calvin said. “Working my job and sleeping at night. That’s all I ask and all I expect.”

  A car approached. Going the usual speed, and as it neared Rake felt himself stiffening. He turned to watch it pass, and pass it did, the form at the wheel too nebulous to make out. He didn’t bother memorizing the tags, as it pulled into a house three doors down, and Rake heard the car door open, shuffling footsteps, keys jingling.