Darktown

by Thomas Mullen

  After less than a minute, Smith walked out, his white short-sleeved shirt ironed and tucked into gray pleated slacks. More noticeable was the jumbled blanket laying across his arms. Boggs reached over and opened the door for him.

  The blanket was (barely) concealing a rifle. The gun was so long, part of it poked into Boggs’s right leg as Smith sat down. He’d studied the maps that morning and guessed it would take them ninety minutes if they didn’t get stuck at any train crossings.

  “Don’t shoot my leg, please.”

  “That’s the handle pointed at you.”

  Boggs had borrowed the car under false pretenses, inventing some story about errands he’d needed to run. He was not accustomed to lying to his father, and it added to the sense of disquiet he felt as he drove beyond Atlanta.

  After twenty minutes they were passing through a quiet interval between towns—it did not take long for one leaving that city to feel like they were already in the country. Now that they weren’t at risk of being observed, Smith rearranged his belongings, the blanket falling to the floor. He held in his lap a Winchester rifle. The metal confidently gleamed from a recent cleaning.

  “Cover that up again and put it in the backseat.”

  “That’s too far away. It stays here.”

  “Then cover it again.”

  Smith shook his head, but a moment later he pulled the blanket back onto his lap.

  In the glove box was a .45 revolver Boggs had bought after the war and had barely used in the first two years he’d owned it. Then, after he’d sent in his police application, he’d used it regularly for target practice in the vast backyard of family friends who lived down in Clayton County. He’d trained there for hours over the three-month application process, annihilating countless Coca-Cola bottles, hoping his lack of combat experience wouldn’t doom his chances.

  Smith opened the glove box, nodded at the weapon as if they were old friends, and added his own .38. The box, now crowded with firearms, could barely close.

  They had packed sandwiches and canteens for water rather than risk not being able to find a lunch counter that would cater to Negroes. The guns would stay in the car, Boggs had insisted. Smith was right: he had delayed this trip because he was scared of the Georgia country. Scared of its people and their ways. The only other time he’d ventured this far from Sweet Auburn had been that awful training camp in South Carolina, the three worst years of his life.

  He drove five miles under the speed limit lest he find himself in a rural cop’s doghouse. The windows were down, but all that did was blow sweltering air in their faces. Smith seemed to mind it more, playing with his pomaded hair a few times. They both wore darkened glasses yet Boggs was squinting in the sun and gripping the wheel at ten o’clock and two o’clock. This would be the longest drive he’d ever attempted.

  With every passing mile he felt less safe. He’d read Heart of Darkness at Morehouse and he felt he was on that boat in the river, venturing deeper and deeper into the wilderness of white men, the same effect if the opposite colors of Conrad’s racist views.

  They passed a Congregationalist church whose hand-lettered sign advised that they pray for their weak president.

  “Don’t like it out here, do you?” Smith asked.

  “What gives you that idea?”

  “I don’t think you could be holding that wheel any tighter if you tried.”

  “Do you like it?”

  “No. But I don’t see how it’s worse’n downtown.”

  He was right. Boggs, through his family connections and their car, had been able to live most of his life by avoiding downtown, the insulting buses, the company of whites. Smith hadn’t been so fortunate. For all Boggs’s education, it was his partner who was more schooled in dealing with white people.

  They passed hog farms and silos, endless fields of cotton. Boggs had read in the papers that the summer’s unusually persistent rains were wreaking havoc on Georgia crops, and more than a few times the sun glinted off stagnant water that lined the rows between crops. That year the peaches were all enormous and plump with water, but tasteless as cotton.

  Two white men in a red pickup behind him were unimpressed by Boggs’s adherence to the speed limit. Boggs stuck his left hand out the window and waved the truck to pass. It did so, engine roaring, and he saw an old man in the passenger seat eye him with what looked more like pity than hatred, These damned Knee-grows and their cars not working right.

  “I have an aunt and uncle down in Clayton County,” Boggs said. “He’s a carpenter, has a good plot of land and grows vegetables, watermelon. He likes it down there. We visit now and again. And I can always see my daddy exhaling just a bit when we get back home.”

  They drove past a billboard proclaiming opposition to the United Nations. Keep America safe from foreigners! it warned, against an outline of other flags in flames. A hand-drawn sign on the other side of the street advertised an upcoming religious revival and pig picking.

  “You’ve proven yourself good at keeping secrets, so I’ll tell you another. I was born out here.”

  “Whereabouts?”

  “Small town, Dunsonville.”

  “Why is it a secret?”

  “The part that’s a secret is my daddy was lynched.”

  Boggs was not remotely confident in his driving ability, but he turned his head to see the look on his partner’s face. There was nothing to see but pursed lips and those featureless sunglasses.

  Boggs turned his eyes back to the road and Smith told the story, his father the returning veteran, the parade, the end of one life and the derailing of his mother’s, and then his own.

  “Wasn’t a secret so much as something nobody likes to talk about. Especially my uncle. But it’s a secret now because I didn’t mention it when I applied to the Department. I listed my uncle as my father, which is legally true, since he adopted me when I was a baby.”

  Smith was right, there was no way the city would have hired as one of its first Negro officers a man who’d lost a parent to white hands. During their battery of psychological tests, Boggs himself had been asked countless variations of “How do you feel about white people?” or “Tell me more about your family’s experiences with officers of the law.”

  Boggs couldn’t tell if he was sweating more now because of the story or if it was just the heat and the stress of the drive. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “S’awright. I didn’t even know it ’til I was sixteen. I was raised thinking my aunt and uncle were my parents. Don’t remember a thing about my real folks. Then my mom—I mean, my aunt—passed away when I was thirteen, and things didn’t go so well with me and my uncle then. Fought a lot, and he picked a bad time to drop that little truth on me.”

  The road bent around a curve and down a hill and then it stretched out long and straight, the Piedmont shimmering before them and gradually giving way as they drove deeper into Georgia.

  Smith added, “Though I suppose there ain’t no delicate way of saying it, is there?”

  They knew the address, but it didn’t show up on the one map of Peacedale that they’d been able to find at the Auburn Avenue library, the only branch in Atlanta they were allowed to use. The Peacedale Police Department’s files, which they’d been shown by McInnis, gave them only a rough idea of where the house was. Lucius had even visited his brother Reginald’s insurance office to pore through their files—­municipal rec-ords of Negroes were so haphazard and incomplete, Negro insurance companies were the true source of accurate information about the community. But the company hadn’t done much business in Peacedale, so they weren’t any help.

  When they finally reached Peacedale—twenty minutes later than Boggs had expected—they drove down the small, one-stoplight Main Street, observing the surroundings while trying not to look too curious. A post office, a Methodist church, a soda fountain and pharmacy. A general store. A
rebel flag hanging outside the greengrocer’s. Several windows proudly advertising Coca-Cola and ice. A tiny town square with a stone obelisk memorializing the Confederate war dead (Boggs couldn’t read the inscription, but he’d seen an identical one in his aunt and uncle’s town). Hardly anyone was out, as it was nearing noon and the sun had a serious agenda that no sane person wanted to get involved with. Two older white men walking out of the post office appeared to gaze at these car-driving Negroes for longer than Boggs would have liked, but he couldn’t be sure as he wasn’t looking directly at them. Smith meanwhile had his right arm casually dangling out his window, like he was going out of his way to display as much colored skin as possible. Boggs considered asking him to pull his arm back in but could already anticipate Smith’s reaction, so he didn’t bother.

  The post office might have been able to help find the address, but the clerks might tip off the local cops that two black Atlantans were in town, so Boggs drove past it without stopping.

  Figuring that Negro farmers were less likely to be spies for the local police—a supposition they knew was risky indeed—they pulled into a long driveway when they saw two colored men rolling a wheelbarrow behind a small dilapidated house. More like a shack, the wood old and warped in places, a lone window in the front.

  The farmers wore overalls without T-shirts and seemed on their way to the front porch, where a small overhang offered only a sliver of midday shade. They looked up as Boggs drove toward them. He left the engine running and Smith stayed in the car.

  “Morning,” Boggs said, though it wasn’t anymore. “I’m having trouble finding the Ellsworths’ place.”

  He saw now that this was a father and son, one of them a lanky teenager and the other thin and grizzled, both of them sweaty and rank. The father asked, “You kin to them?”

  He didn’t want to lie, so he dodged the question. “I wanted to pay my respects.”

  It was so quiet and bright out here. Boggs’s running auto may have been the only one for miles.

  “That ain’t right what happened,” the man said.

  “You know anything about it?”

  “You his brother? Cousin or something?”

  “I knew Lily.”

  The man paused, then told his son, “Go on and fetch the water.” After the teenager had walked out of earshot, the man said, “It ain’t no secret. Ever’body knows. Sheriff don’t like him, want to say he killed his girl even though he was miles from where she was, so sheriff gets two no-counts to say he said he done it one night when he was drunk. And ever’body know Otis ain’t never take to liquor.”

  Boggs nodded along like he knew all this. “Why did the sheriff have it in for him? Could it have happened to anyone, or they take a special dislike to Otis?”

  “I don’t know what he was thinking buying that truck. It’s a damn shame.”

  High above, three vultures were looping in vaguely concentric circles through a sky bleached white by the heat.

  “Didn’t know things had gotten so bad in this town.”

  The farmer looked offended by that, as if insulting the local white people was only acceptable if you lived here. “Most of us know how to get along.”

  Boggs’s city accent and car were marking him an outsider. He asked again where the Ellsworths lived, realizing as he asked it that there couldn’t be too many Ellsworths left alive.

  The Ellsworth property was the sort of place that made Boggs deeply grateful for his many blessings. It looked like it had once been a one-floor house, its attic since expanded to become a bedroom, the nave a few feet taller than seemed proportionate. The white paint was chipping and the steps leading up to the porch were leaning to the right. Rusty wheelbarrows and pieces of boards that had once been an unrealized carpentry project leaned against the side of the building. The front lawn was recently mown and quite large—the house was set a good fifty yards from the road—and in the back Boggs saw rows of cotton and vegetables filling out what must have been a five-acre plot, or larger, shaped like a wide bowl, dipping a bit in the center and then opening out again to bake in the sun before hitting up against piney woods on three sides.

  They hadn’t passed an electric or telephone pole in miles. The furrows in the ground had no doubt been ploughed by mules, not tractors. And the truck that had aroused so much envy in his neighbor was not in the driveway.

  They could see one figure far off in the cotton, but apart from that there was no sign of life except the loud barking of a dog.

  Boggs drove to the end of the driveway and shut off the engine. Before they could get out, two enormous hounds, one of them dark brown and one a lighter, mottled white-and-tan mix, were circling the car and furiously trying to tell them something. The lighter dog leaped up onto the passenger side, spittle streaking Smith’s window.

  “Maybe I’ll take my gun back out,” Smith said.

  Sweat was rolling down Boggs’s cheek when he heard a voice calling out.

  The dogs let out a few more barks, as if to warn the newcomers that their opinions still counted, but they otherwise calmed as a man walked toward them. He was slight and not tall, yet the beasts had been transformed to mere pets by his command. He wore a wide-brimmed straw hat, a white T-shirt, and dungarees gone deep orange in the legs from kneeling in Georgia clay. He walked closer to the car and Boggs could see now he was young, in his teens, with the same sad but watchful eyes Boggs had seen on Otis’s face.

  As Boggs sat in the Ellsworths’ cramped parlor, he realized that he’d been so preoccupied with the physical risks he was taking that he had failed to brace himself for how emotionally difficult these conversations were going to be.

  It hit him when he saw Jimmy Ellsworth’s eyes up close. The kid was far too young to have eyes like that.

  The water Jimmy had handed them was barely cold and there was no ice and it tasted of the earth and Boggs would have gladly drunk ten more glasses like it, but he made himself nurse it slowly so he wouldn’t have to ask Jimmy to fetch more.

  The parlor was spartan, the furniture obviously homemade, some with threadbare upholstery and others with none. Extinguished candles in the corner gave evidence to the lack of electricity. The light was provided by open windows, which let in air and flies. In an unframed photo on one wall, Jesus looked down beatifically from what may have been the torn-out illustration from a magazine, and nearby were old photos of kin. A few throw rugs curled up at the edges from the humidity. It was threadbare, yet no dirt or rocks crackled beneath Boggs’s shoes as he walked across the wood floor. They didn’t have much, but they’d taken care of what they had.

  Jimmy told them his mother wasn’t feeling well. She was in her bedroom upstairs and hadn’t been about much lately. He and his brother had been taking turns tending to her, with help from neighbors, but those neighbors were at their homes right now.

  “My brother, David, he out in the fields with a buddy of his. He’s helping us out, there’s a lot to do and just the two of us now.”

  He had looked tall and in his element outside, but now that he sat indoors his lanky physique vanished into a slouch and he fidgeted in the seat. It was like he reverse-aged ten years by entering the house.

  “Y’all really policemen?”

  “Yes, from Atlanta,” Boggs said. “So to be up front about things, we don’t really have any authority out here. In fact, I can about guarantee you that your local cops wouldn’t want us here and wouldn’t want you talking with us. So you can tell us to git if you want to. We’ll respect that.” The kid had broken eye contact after speaking and was staring at the floor. “But we’ve been looking into what happened to your sister, and now that we’ve heard what’s happened here, we wanted to see you.”

  “Did the police come by after your father was killed?” Smith asked.

  Such a long pause, Boggs wondered if the kid hadn’t heard.

  “They come by the
next morning, tell Mama to come fetch his body.” Jimmy’s voice broke. The hounds wandered over and protectively sat on the floor beside him.

  Smith asked, “What did they tell you happened to your father?”

  Eye contact, blurred by tears. “They didn’t need to tell me anything. I know what they done.”

  “Tell us,” Smith said. Neither officer held a notebook, trying to keep this as informal as possible.

  “We were going to leave for Chicago next day. But we couldn’t tell, Pa said. We went to the general store to buy a few things he say we’d need for the trip. It was just me and him. We went there round lunchtime and the owner, Mr. Snelling, was asking him all these questions, why you buying all this, what you need that for, that kinda thing. Pa . . .” The kid wiped his eyes.

  Waiting for him to regain his composure was about the hardest thing Boggs and Smith had done.

  “Pa was nervous. He didn’t seem so good at lying.” Then the damnedest thing: the kid managed a half smile. “He always tell us not to lie, and he was there doing it, and he wasn’t too good at it.”

  The half smile didn’t last long.

  “This Mr. Snelling give you any trouble before?”

  “No, sir, not usually. He’s not all friendly but he never be like that before.”

  “Then what happened?” Boggs asked.

  “We’d almost made it back home when the police pulled us over. Said we’d stolen something from the store. Pa didn’t want to get out, but they made him. They told me to walk home, and they put him in the back of their car. They wouldn’t let me carry the groceries home, neither.”

  The ceiling creaked from footsteps above.

  “We were up most that night, waiting. Me and my brother wanted to go to the neighbors and get a ride to the police station, but Ma forbid it. Lot of cars on the road that night, lot of them just stopping up there,” and he pointed out the window, toward the end of the driveway, “like they watching us. Then in the morning, the sheriff come by.”