Darktown

by Thomas Mullen

  Otis exhaled for what felt like the first time in minutes. Thank you, Jesus. But why? He’d thought they were going to take the truck, or shoot him in the woods. Had the sheriff decided there wasn’t enough evidence? Had he decided it was a problem for the Atlanta cops?

  Or were they waiting for later? While wearing different uniforms?

  Otis turned around. Too shaken to run the errands he’d been planning. He needed to think, make a new plan. How was he going to tell Emma Mae? What would the boys say?

  It didn’t matter. Only one thing mattered: getting out.

  He tried to test the best way of saying it to her. Today was Saturday. Tomorrow would be church. They would have to keep this to themselves, not arouse any more suspicions.

  The road ran down a gradual decline and leveled out again, the woods retreating on either side, and there the country was before him, the grass pale green from the wet summer and not hay yellow as it usually was come July. Horses in the distance, gray mules dotting the landscape, the nearest ones inclining their heads as if to ask what newfangled beast Otis was riding on. This had been home all his life, and his parents’ and theirs and Lord only knew how far back it went.

  He wondered what Emma Mae would say, if she’d argue or resign herself to this as she did all the other calamities. He said it out loud, as practice.

  “Baby, we need to put our things in order, right quick. We’re going north Tuesday.”

  21

  THOUGH REVEREND DANIEL Boggs did not live in the grandest house on Auburn Avenue, its deep wraparound porch was frequently filled with the business leaders and ministers who held sway over their community. It was less a home than a portal between other people’s homes, where disputes among neighbors were settled, where theological crises were explicated, where marital advice was meted out and disagreements between siblings were calmed, where the heads of denominations put aside their differences to lay plans for the community’s slow but determined march toward their God-given rights.

  On Lucius’s one night off that week, he was one of at least fifty people in his parents’ house. Cousins and in-laws, children and adults and the elderly milled about the parlor and kitchen and hallways, the porch and the backyard. One of his cousins was moving to Chicago and this party was a bittersweet farewell. Count Basie had been playing on the family record player but by now the crowd had drowned him out. So much small talk had become big talk, everyone loosened by drink even though so many of the attendees were good Baptists who supposedly did not touch the stuff. Their glasses of Co-Colas held more than just cola.

  Lucius felt a hand tap on his shoulder.

  “These are some well-dressed colored folk,” Smith said.

  Lucius shook his partner’s hand. He’d never invited him over before today. Smith wore a light blue linen jacket over a tieless white shirt. “Thanks for coming.”

  “My pleasure. That professor you mentioned here?”

  “Kellen Timmons.” They’d just learned through one of Lily’s former roommates that Lily had been involved in a Negro rights organization. The roommate hadn’t remembered the name, just a few nouns that might have been in the wrong order, the Racial Cooperation League or Race Council of Something. Lucius had placed a few calls to old classmates and friends of friends before arriving at the actual name, the Racial Cooperative Council, one of whose founders was a Morehouse history professor and old friend of Lucius’s brother Reginald. “He’s here. Let’s wait ’til he’s had a drink or two.”

  Then they were intercepted by Lucius’s uncle from Paris.

  “Ah, this must be one of your fellow constables!”

  “Yes, Uncle Percy, this is Tommy Smith, my partner most nights.”

  “A true pleasure to meet one of the gallant warriors of Auburn Avenue!”

  “Pleased to meet you,” Smith said, a half smile on his lips, not sure what to make of the man. Percy had been wearing an impeccably tailored black suit earlier, complete with a monocle dangling from the pocket, but he had since removed his jacket. His armpits were very damp indeed. He had not lived in the South in more than a decade and had lost his tolerance for the humidity, among other things.

  “What’s your weapon of choice, young man?”

  “You mean, what do I carry?”

  Percy laughed out loud. Though much thinner than his brother the reverend, Percy had a similarly imposing voice. His longish hair was combed in a wave that was perhaps the style among the Negroes who lived in Europe, not that Boggs would have known.

  “What do you drink, my good man? We can talk firearms later.”

  “Oh, I’m fine, sir.”

  “Well, I simply must pry you two for some tales. Perhaps my next book will be about you.”

  “You write, sir?”

  Percy was a novelist. Under an assumed name, he wrote historical adventures, and though he occasionally penned an ancient Greek or Roman epic, mainly he set his tales in early America. He was the best-selling Negro writer in America, and probably the world, partly because no one realized the writer of those stories was a Negro. Lucius had started reading Percy’s novels when he was in grade school and had loved them, swashbuckling tales of pirates off the coast of the Carolinas and gold miners in the Georgia mountains, of lost Confederate battalions fighting off alligators in Louisiana swamps and Virginia cavaliers risking all to defeat the colonizing British. Seemingly every chapter ended with a lit keg of dynamite or a train careening dangerously toward a trapped stagecoach. It hadn’t been until Lucius was in high school that he heard his father’s low opinion of the books. That’s when he started noticing that his own people were either absent from the stories or were represented in exactly the way the white readers of an antebellum Southern yarn would expect them to appear.

  In the late thirties Percy had decamped to Paris to live the life of an intellectual unfettered by Jim Crow. How he had survived (and continued to publish a book every year) during the fall of France was a bit of a mystery, and Lucius had been told not to ask.

  “He’s a great writer,” Lucius said, so his uncle wouldn’t have to.

  “I’m just a man with a typewriter. What you two are doing, however, now that is a true epic.”

  “We pretty much just arrest drunk folks and keep men from hitting their wives,” Smith said.

  “Don’t forget the moonshiners,” Percy said. “Your partner here was telling me how you’ve been turning off the illicit taps across town, isn’t that right? Speaking of which, it appears there is a leak in my glass. I must return to the bar, then we shall continue this conversation.”

  “Interesting fellow,” Smith said after Percy’s exit.

  “I have to go make sure he doesn’t drink too much and kill himself.”

  “We all got drunk uncles, man. Mine don’t write, they just sell whatever of yours they can steal.”

  “No, I mean literally. He tries to kill himself every time he comes home.”

  Lucius explained that Percy returned to Georgia annually for a week’s stay. Each time, he seemed more and more disenchanted with the backwardness of the South. On every visit, there was at least one occasion when he drank too much and dramatically claimed that he would end his life. Two years ago he had tried to hurl himself out the third-floor window of a Spelman sociology professor’s apartment, failing only when he couldn’t open the window enough, at which point he was talked out of it, and then he fainted. Last year, at a formal dinner whose single floor offered no potential for deadly falls, he had announced he was going to throw himself before a streetcar. He was physically restrained, barely. Both times he had apologized the next morning and been very, very quiet for the remainder of his stay. This time, he had already been back five days with only two more to go until his return berth for the enlightened, demolished European continent.

  “My father appointed me as his guardian for the evening. I’ll be back.”
<
br />   “Sounds good. I’ma go meet some of your fine cousins.”

  Smith had never been in the company of so many well-heeled Negroes before. He knew they existed, and had caught glimpses of them now and again, but such a collection all in one place was dizzying. He was glad he’d spent most of his savings on this jacket a week ago.

  He felt newly conscious of his dropped g’s and propensity for cursing as he spoke with this doctor and that owner of a barbershop empire. He noticed watches and cuff links. More than once a mildly disdainful look faded when he mentioned that he was one of the city’s new police officers, at which point his unpolished qualities suddenly became praiseworthy.

  “You’re making us all proud,” said an insurance man.

  “We need men like you to protect all we’ve built here,” said the owner of the very haberdashery where Smith had bought his outfit.

  It was nice to impress gentlemen who otherwise would have ignored him, but he was more interested in impressing their daughters. Every time he seemed to be making progress with one, however, another man asked to be introduced to one of Atlanta’s new knights.

  “Lucius tells me you were in an armored division during the war?” Reverend Boggs asked.

  “Yes, sir, I served in the 761st Tank Battalion.”

  “I’m glad they teamed my son up with a proven warrior.”

  He hated conversations like this. “Well, they don’t have us in a tank, sir. We’re just on foot. Mighty different experience.”

  Then yet another reverend asked for an introduction. Though Tommy could see more than a few ladies admiring him from a distance, he felt his passage to them permanently blocked by important men.

  Later in the evening Boggs found himself in his father’s den with his brother Reginald and Kellen Timmons, who was marveling at the bookshelves that lined all four walls. Lucius hadn’t seen him in years, and the professor’s waistline had grown, as had a goatee that seemed to be fashioned after photos of jazz musicians. They briefly caught up: married, two little girls, fourth year teaching at Morehouse. Timmons flipped through some of the books, asking if Lucius or Reginald had read the latest essay by Richard Wright, or that new poetry collection by Langston Hughes. Lucius realized how quickly he was falling behind on his reading now that he was busy not getting killed on the streets.

  They talked current events, both the good (the ageless Satchel Paige, longtime star of the Negro Leagues, had recently made his major-league debut in Cleveland) and the bad (in South Africa, the newly elected Afrikaner National Party was making moves to further restrict the rights of colored people, calling its system “apartheid”).

  When Timmons asked how things were going with the job, Lucius did his usual routine of mentioning the best parts and omitting the other 95 percent.

  “We’re all just trying to do some good, right?” Timmons asked, his smile a bit too enthusiastic. The ginger ale in his glass was likely half bourbon. “That’s what it’s about.”

  “Speaking of which, tell me about this Racial Cooperative Council thing. My father mentioned it the other day”—a lie, but one that he knew would flatter Timmons—“and it sounded interesting.”

  Bored by politics, Reginald excused himself to make another drink.

  “Well, me and some other professors got to thinking it might be good to have a different approach to encouraging our peers to be active politically. What your father and Reverend Holmes Borders and Reverend King have done, well, they’re wonderful, of course. But we felt other voices should be heard.” Another big smile, almost a laugh. Timmons seemed nervous. Nervous because he didn’t want to offend the son of Reverend Boggs, or nervous for another reason? Boggs was about to tell Timmons that he wasn’t offended, that he couldn’t care less if the man was launching a splinter organization that competed with his father’s for political space. But he liked that Timmons seemed to be struggling, so he didn’t send him a lifeline yet.

  In truth, Reverend Boggs and the other community leaders probably were upset that Timmons had started a new group. In recent years there had been several examples of former allies starting different organizations, or writing letters to editors that had not been approved in advance, or hosting lectures that had not been vetted. Minor disagreements could quickly blow up into blood feuds. Boggs tried to stay on the sidelines, but he knew that his father, for all his emphasis on brotherhood, wanted to know everything that happened in this community, as if seeking to duplicate the Good Lord’s omniscience over these two or three square miles.

  “We want to go beyond the Talented Tenth,” Timmons continued, “you know, people like you and me, and everybody at this party. We want to do a better job educating those less fortunate, the kids who are stuck in the worst schools in the city, or dropping out because there isn’t room for them. The ones out in the country, working in the fields all day instead of being educated.”

  Boggs had spent his entire life around people like Timmons. He could have chosen Timmons’s path, and perhaps he would have, if he didn’t equate such activities so strongly with his father. Part of him envied Timmons’s lack of a family throne to occupy or ignore.

  While at Morehouse, Lucius had envisioned himself becoming a professor just like the dignified, competent men he so painstakingly tried to model himself after. He had loved the place—and not just because Morehouse was on the West Side, which, like Sweet Auburn, was an oasis from Jim Crow. But what he’d loved even more than that was how it felt to be surrounded by other colored men with aspirations, to be encouraged so boldly by professors who pushed him harder not only to imagine a better world but to create it. That message, though inspiring, was compromised by those same professors’ warnings to stay in the colored districts, to avoid the white neighborhoods, to avoid even the downtown movie theaters where Negroes were relegated to the balconies. “I wouldn’t go to a segregated theater to see Jesus Christ Himself,” one teacher had proclaimed. During Lucius’s sophomore year, another Morehouse student who made extra money delivering papers confronted a white grocer about a delinquent bill, and the grocer shot him in the back. Boggs and his fellow students had protested outside City Hall for an afternoon, and Reverend Boggs and his fellow leaders had written letters to the mayor, but that grocer still happily ran his business and was never even arrested. Now his papers were delivered by some other paperboy.

  “Are any politicians talking with your group?” Lucius asked, hoping to rhetorically lead Timmons to Representative Prescott. “Mayor Hartsfield, City Council? Senators?”

  “Hartsfield only talks to Negroes when he fears we’ll vote for someone else, and he knows that isn’t going to happen right now, not after ‘giving us’ eight colored officers.”

  “How about Prescott? Have you talked to him?”

  “We have written him a few letters, asking for better funding for Negro schools, in Atlanta and in the country. But I’m not holding my breath. Sometimes it’s the ones who claim they’re progressive who are the worst, because they act like they are the very boundary between the possible and the impossible, and they never let you cross them. Know what I mean?”

  At which point Smith entered the den, smiled, extended his hand, and introduced himself to Timmons. Boggs briefly recapped what they’d been talking about.

  “Oh yeah,” Smith said. “I understand there’s a girl who was involved in your group, Lily Ellsworth? Just moved to Atlanta from Peacedale. Very country.”

  It seemed to take Timmons a moment. “Oh yeah. Young girl, right?”

  “Nineteen. Pretty, very light-skinned. New in town.”

  From the front parlor, a woman cried out and a glass shattered. Laughter.

  “Yeah, that’s right. Nathaniel’s old student.”

  “Who’s that?” Boggs asked.

  “Nathaniel Hurst. He was her teacher out in Peacedale, said she was smart as a whip. She’s exactly what I’m talking about, kind o
f kid who could really be something if only she was given the right tools. Lucky for her she winds up with a decent teacher, he opens her eyes, and she’s off to better things. Nathaniel’s an old classmate of mine, he’s been helping our group out.”

  “He lives here now?” This was news. Lucius remembered Otis Ellsworth shaking his head angrily at some teacher who’d filled Lily’s head with crazy ideas like equality and voting rights.

  “Yeah, moved a few months ago maybe.” Timmons stopped, as if he hadn’t realized this was important information, or as if he hadn’t meant to give it away. “How did you say you know Lily?”

  “We don’t, actually,” Boggs answered. “She was murdered.”

  Timmons’s face was fixed in place for a good second or two. Then his eyes widened, and his neck contracted a bit as he lowered his jaw, and he repeated the last word Lucius had said.

  “Happened about two weeks ago. We were wondering if you might have heard anything.”

  “I don’t— You mean . . . you’re investigating a girl’s murder?”

  “Yes,” Lucius said.

  “You could have said that from the beginning!”

  “We could have, you’re right. There never seems to be a good way to say someone’s been killed. Maybe we’ll figure out how after a few more months. We’ll probably get a lot of practice.”

  “Damn. But, why are you asking me about it?”

  “We don’t know much about her,” Smith said. “One of the only things we know is she was reportedly very bright, she was new to Atlanta, and she was involved in this group of yours.”

  Timmons issued the kind of theatrical half laugh one does when someone else has the wrong idea and they’re desperate to correct it. “I wouldn’t say she was involved. I mean, she might have come to a meeting or two.”

  “Yet you remembered her name,” Lucius said.

  Timmons lowered his chin. “She was a very fine girl. Yes, I remember her. But I can hardly think of another thing about her, other than that Nathaniel had been her teacher.”