Darktown: A Novel

ISBN-13: 9781501133879

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Publication Date: 06-06-2017

Pages: 384

Product Dimensions: 5.30(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.10(d)

Series: The Darktown Series #1

Thomas Mullen is the author of The Lightning Men, Darktown, and The Last Town on Earth, which was named Best Debut Novel of 2006 by USA TODAY. He was also awarded the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for excellence in historical fiction for The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers and The Revisionists. His works have been named to Year’s Best lists by The Chicago Tribune and USA TODAY, among others. His stories and essays have been published in Grantland, Paste, and the Huffington Post, and his Atlanta Magazine true crime story about a novelist/con man won the City and Regional Magazine Award for Best Feature. He lives in Atlanta with his wife and sons.

Read an Excerpt

Darktown

1

IT WAS NEARING midnight when one of the new lampposts on Auburn Avenue achieved the unfortunate fate of being the first to be hit by a car. Shards of a white Buick’s headlight fell scattered across the sidewalk below the now-leaning pole.

Locusts continued their thrum in the thick July air. Windows were open throughout town, the impact no doubt waking many. The lone pedestrian on that block, an old man on his way home from sweeping floors at a sugar factory, was no more than ten yards away. He had stepped back when the car jumped the curb but now he stopped and watched for a moment, in case the pole should come crashing the rest of the way down. It didn’t. At least not yet.

The Buick reversed, slowly, the front wheel easing off the curb. The movement caused the pole to lean the other way, too far, and then back again, a giant metronome.

The pedestrian could hear a woman’s voice, shouting. Something about what on earth do you think you’re doing, just take me home, that sort of thing. The pedestrian shook his head and shambled off before something worse might happen.

Whether or not the lampposts were new, exactly, was a matter of perspective. It had been a few months now, but considering how many years it had taken the leaders of Atlanta’s colored community to convince the mayor to install them, and considering the many, many years in which Negroes had walked down even their busiest and most monied street in darkness, the celestial presence of those lampposts still felt new.

None of which was known to the Buick’s driver.

He had been attempting to turn around in the middle of the otherwise empty street but had misjudged his turning radius, or the width of the road, or general physics. He also perhaps hadn’t noticed that two blocks away were two Atlanta police officers.



Five minutes earlier, Officer Lucius Boggs finally confronted his partner, Tommy Smith, about his limp.

“You did not hurt yourself playing baseball. Own up.”

“It was a hard slide,” Smith said.

“But you told McInnis you were rounding third.”

At roll call, Smith had assured their sergeant, McInnis, that his knee was fine, just a tweak he’d felt in a game he’d played with some buddies. You know how those sand lots are, sir, no traction. McInnis had listened to this stone-faced, as if experienced enough at hearing colored flimflam but deciding the truth of this matter was not worth prodding into.

“I fell out a window,” Smith now admitted to Boggs. They were standing on Hilliard Street, three blocks from the Negro YMCA whose basement served as their makeshift precinct. At that hour the sun was long gone but it had left more than enough heat to last until it felt like showing up again. Both officers had sweated through their undershirts, and even their uniforms were damp.

“Yours?”

“What do you think?”

Boggs folded his arms and couldn’t help smiling. “And who was the lady you were impressing with your acrobatics?”

“I was in the middle of entertaining her with my acrobatics, matter of fact. When her man busted into the apartment.”

“Are you crazy?”

“She’d told me he’d left her, pulled up stakes for Detroit. She talked about needing some lawyer to do her divorce papers or something.”

Atlanta police officers were ordered to abide by a strict moral code—no drinking, even at home, and no womanizing—but that had not entirely sunk in with Tommy Smith. The Negro officers dutifully avoided alcohol, as they knew all too well that a witness could report them and get them suspended, but for Smith the idea of suddenly becoming a chaste man was altogether too much.

“You’re going to get yourself killed.”

“I do not go after the married ones.”

“Except for her, and the girl who did that thing with the candied pecans, and—”

“That’s different, she and I went way back.”

They started walking again.

“So then what happened?”

“What do you think? Pulled on my britches and jumped out the window.”

“What floor did she live on?”

“Third.”

“No!”

“One of them places with no fire escape. I’d say I’m walking remarkably well, considering.”

“What happened with the husband?”

“I did not linger around to eavesdrop.”

“Aren’t you at least worried?”

“She struck me as the kind of gal knew how to handle herself and think on her feet.”

Boggs was the son of a minister, and though he had chosen not to follow in his father’s footsteps, the idea of tomcatting across town the way his partner did was utterly foreign to him. His own experience with women had been limited to innocent dates with well-mannered, well-raised young ladies of the Negro intelligentsia, and he was coming off a recent broken engagement to a girl who’d finally told him that the stress of knowing her fiancé might be shot or beaten on any given night was too much for her constitution to handle.

A squad car approached, the headlights strangely off. Hilliard had neither lampposts nor sidewalks. They stopped talking and stood there, each wondering if they should back up a few steps, or would that look weak.

Then the car accelerated, and each of them did indeed take a step back onto the small plot of grass and weeds that served as someone’s front yard. The squad car feinted toward them, swerving a bit, then screeched to a stop.

They caught glimpses of two white officers whose faces they didn’t recognize—cops from other beats who just happened to be driving through, apparently.

The white cops yelled, “Oooh-oooh-oooh!”

“Aaah-aaah-aaah!”

Monkey sounds and orangutan sounds and maybe some gorilla thrown in.

“Woo-woo-woo-boogga-boogga!”

“Watch your asses, niggers!”

Then the squad car sped off, the white cops laughing hysterically.

You couldn’t show fear. They acted like it was all a harmless prank, even when they gunned their engines at you when you were crossing the street, even when they nearly grazed against you. More than once Boggs had stood in the road to flag down a squad car, needing assistance for an arrest, when the car had accelerated toward him until he’d had to leap out of the way. Laughter in its wake. Surely, if the day came when they actually did run over one of the colored officers, they would insist it was an accident.

Neither Boggs nor Smith felt like telling stories anymore as they reached the corner of Auburn, the night silent but for the almost mechanical churn of locusts and the call-and-response of crickets. The marquee over Bailey’s Royal Theater was off, as were the lights of the jeweler and tailoring shops; someone had left on a third-floor office lamp at Atlanta Life Insurance Company, but other than that and the streetlights, all was dark. Then they heard the crash.

They turned, each half-hoping to see that the squad car had hit a fire hydrant or perhaps a brick wall. Instead they saw a white Buick two blocks away, on the curb, and the light pole dancing almost, or at least swaying drunkenly. They watched as the light flickered once, then again, just as each of their homes’ electricity did during thunderstorms.

The Buick backed up. They couldn’t read the tags from so far away. Then it started driving toward them.

They had been police officers for just under three months now, walking the beats around Auburn Avenue (the neighborhood where both had lived all their lives save the war years) and the West Side, on the other side of downtown. Although Atlanta’s eight Negro officers had not yet been entrusted with squad cars, they did have uniforms: black caps with the gold city crest, dark blue shirts on which their shiny badges were pinned, black slacks, and black ties (Smith being one of two cops on the team who went with the bow-tie option, which he found rather dapper). Their thick belts were weighed down by a heavy arsenal of weapons and gear, including firearms, which terrified a number of white people in Atlanta and beyond.

Boggs stepped into the road and held out a palm. The white cops may have enjoyed trying to run over their colored colleagues, but civilians were another matter. Or so he hoped. The Buick was driving slower than was normal, as if ashamed. Its headlights glinted off his badge.

The Buick stopped.

“He’s not turning his engine off,” Smith said after a few seconds.

Boggs walked over to the driver’s door, Smith mirroring him along the sidewalk and stopping at the passenger door. The soles of Smith’s shoes hardly made a sound because the cement had been meticulously swept by someone that very morning, not a twig or cigarette butt in sight.

The glare from the streetlights had prevented the officers from getting a good look in the car until now. All they had been able to discern were silhouettes of a driver with a hat and a passenger without.

Boggs opened his mouth and was about to ask for the driver’s license and registration when he saw that the driver was white.

That he hadn’t expected. What he had suspected, that the driver was drunk, was correct. Boggs was bathed in alcohol fumes as the portly white man gazed at him with something between annoyance and contempt.

“May I have your license and registration, please, sir?”

White people were not often found in Sweet Auburn, the wealthiest Negro neighborhood in Atlanta—possibly in the world, boosters liked to say. Adventurous whites looking for gambling or whores in the darker parts of town would normally troll along Decatur Street, by the railroad tracks, a half mile to the south. Or they’d find one of the other, more nefarious areas that the colored officers patrolled. This fellow was either lost or so drunk and stupid that he figured any colored part of town offered the vices he craved, when in fact this neighborhood mostly held churches, real estate firms, banks, insurance companies, funeral parlors, barbershops, and the sorts of restaurants long closed at this hour. A couple of nightclubs did grace the streets, yes, but they were respectable places where respectable Negroes gathered, and they only opened their doors to whites on Saturdays, when Negroes weren’t allowed in.

The driver’s gray homburg was tipped high, as if he’d been rubbing sweat from his forehead. Which he needed to be doing more of, because his skin was still shiny. Hair light gray, blue tie loosened, linen jacket wrinkled. He seemed sweatier than a man driving a car should be, Boggs thought. Like he’d just been doing something strenuous.

On the other side of the car, Smith visually frisked the man’s passenger. She wore the kind of yellow sundress that always made him so thrilled when spring came along, and even here in the depths of summer he was not a man to complain about the kind of heat that allowed the women of Atlanta to walk around half naked. She was short enough to cross her legs in the front seat, the hem above her knee. Light glinted off a small locket that looked stuck to the dampness at the small of her throat.

She made eye contact with Smith for only the briefest of seconds, just enough for him to gather a few facts. She was light-skinned and young, early twenties at most. The right side of her lip looked a shade of red that didn’t match her lipstick. Red and slightly puffy.

Although Smith could not yet see the driver, he divined the man’s race based on the subtle change in Boggs’s voice when asking for the license. Not exactly deferential, but more polite than was otherwise warranted.

The driver answered, “No, you may not.”

Boggs was cognizant of the fact that the man’s right hand was at his side, on the seat, and therefore out of view. Boggs decided he need not comment on this yet. Hopefully Smith could see it. The man’s left hand casually rested on the steering wheel, the engine still running.

“You hit a light pole, sir.”

“I mighta glanced against it.” Not even looking at Boggs.

“It’s leaning over and will need to be fixed, and—”

“You’re wasting my time, boy.”

Nothing but a crescendo of katydids for a moment, and only then did the white man deign to look at Boggs. Just to check out how that had registered on this uppity Negro’s face.

Boggs tried not to let it register at all. His face, he knew, was very good at being blank. This had been commented upon by parents, schoolteachers, girlfriends. What are you thinking right now? Where are you? Penny for your thoughts? He’d always hated those questions. I’m right here. I’m thinking thoughts, any thoughts, who knows. And no, you can’t buy them.

Normally you weren’t supposed to look white folks in the eye. But Boggs was the police. This was only the third time he and Smith had dealt with a white perpetrator. Colored officers only patrolled the colored parts of town, where whites were infrequent visitors.

“I need to see your license and registration, sir.”

“You don’t need to see anything, boy.”

Boggs felt his heart rate spike and he told himself to stay calm. “Please turn your car off, sir,” he said, realizing he should have started with that.

“You don’t have the power to arrest me and you know it.”

On the other side, Smith took this as the proper time to beam the backseat. He didn’t see anything there, other than a road atlas on the floorboards. The car was prewar but in good condition, the vinyl shining. Smith aimed his light at the front seat, where the woman had been staring ahead, her hair blocking his view. He had hoped the light would startle her into looking at him, so he could better study her injury and look for others, but she turned farther away.

Smith, unlike Boggs, had a good view of the space between driver and passenger. He saw that the man’s right hand was resting protectively atop a large brown envelope.

“I do have the authority to issue you a traffic citation, sir, and I intend to do that,” Boggs said. “I also have the ability to call white officers here, should your arrest be required. I wouldn’t have thought that necessary for something as minor as a traffic violation, but if you want to push things up the ladder with your tone, then I can oblige you.”

The white man smiled, entertained.

“Oh. Oh, damn. You’re one of the smart ones, huh?” He nodded, looking Boggs up and down as though finally laying eyes on a new kind of jungle cat the zoo had imported. “I’m very impressed. Y’all certainly have come a long way.”

“Sir, this is the last time that I’ll be the one asking you for your license and registration.”

Still smiling at Boggs, still not moving.

On the other side of the car, Smith asked, “What’s your name, miss?”

“Don’t you talk to her,” the white man snapped, turning to the side. All he could have seen from his vantage was Smith’s midsection, his badge (yes, we really are cops, sorry for the inconvenience), and perhaps the handle of Smith’s holstered gun (yes, it’s real).

“Are you all right, miss?” Smith asked the woman. Let’s see how the white man likes being ignored. Her face he still couldn’t see, though her breaths occasionally made her hair move just enough for him to see the right, bruised side of her lips. Yet she refused to turn.

Smith glanced up at his partner over the car roof. Both of them would have loved to see this blowhard arrested, but they weren’t sure if Dispatch would bother sending a white squad car for an auto accident whose only victim was an inanimate object. And Atlanta’s eight colored officers hated calling in the white cops for any reason whatsoever. They did not appreciate the reminder that they had only so much power.

Smith leaned back down and said, “Your friend isn’t very friendly, miss.”

The white man said, “I told you not to talk to her, boy.”

“Sir,” Boggs said to the back of the man’s hat, trying to regain control (had he ever had it?), and annoyed at his partner for escalating the situation, “if you do not show me your license and registration, then I will call in—”

He didn’t get to finish his pathetic threat, the threat he was ashamed to need and far more ashamed to use, because in the middle of his sentence the white man turned back to face the road and shifted into gear, the Buick lurching forward.

Both cops stepped back so their feet wouldn’t be run over.

The Buick drove off, but it didn’t even have the decency to speed. The white man wasn’t fleeing, he simply had tired of pretending that their existence mattered.

“‘Stop or I’ll call the real cops’” Smith shook his head. “Funny how that don’t work.”



Atlanta, Georgia. Two parts Confederate racist to two parts Negro to one part something-that-doesn’t-quite-have-a-name-for-it-yet. Neither city nor country but some odd combination, a once sleepy railroad crossing that had exploded due to the wartime need for matériel and the necessities of shipping it. Even after the war, all those factories and textile mills and rail yards were still churning, because normalcy had returned and Americans were desperate for new clothes and washing machines and automobiles, and the South was very good at providing cheap, nonunionized labor. So Atlanta continued to grow, the trains continued to disgorge new residents and the tenements grew more crowded and the moonshine continued to be driven down from the mountains and the streets spilled over with even yet more passion and schemes and brawls, because there on the Georgia piedmont something had been set loose that might never again be contained.



Twenty blocks away from Boggs and Smith, Officer Denny Rakestraw was dividing himself in two again.

Standing in an alley off Decatur Street, a colored section of town, though he and his partner were white. Staring up at the sliver of moon above him, perfectly framed between the tops of the two brick buildings. Listening to the sound of an approaching westbound freight train slowly, slowly trudge its way from the downtown yards. Then looking at his shiny cop shoes. Then turning to look behind him at the squad car they had left on the side of the road, lights not blinking because his partner, Lionel Dunlow, said he didn’t want the attention.

Dunlow hit the Negro again. “I said, did you hear what I said, nigger?”

The Negro was trying to say something, Rakestraw could tell, but Dunlow was holding him too tightly around the throat.

Then the sound of soles scuffing, and Rakestraw’s attention was drawn to the mouth of the alley again. Two silhouettes were watching them.

“Dammit, clear that out,” Dunlow instructed his young partner.

Rakestraw took a step toward the two silhouettes. They were either young men or teenagers, tall but slight, hardly a threat. Drawn here by the sound of the beating, not any desire to intervene.

“Beat it!” Rakestraw yelled in his lowest register, bass notes practically shaking dust from the mortar in the brick walls. The shadows beat it.

Then another swing from Dunlow and the Negro was on the ground.

“Thought we didn’t want attention,” Rakestraw said.

This constituted a significant workout for Officer Dunlow. Sweat ran down his cheeks, and his cap was askew. His belt was strained by his forty-some-odd-year-old belly, and he was panting even though he’d thrown only five or six punches. Failed physicals were in his immediate future.

Rakestraw hadn’t thrown a punch himself, had in fact barely moved, yet beneath his uniform his skin, too, was slick. Not from exertion but the opposite, the stress of holding himself back, the anxiety of watching this again.

“You’re right,” Dunlow said, catching his breath. He stepped closer to the loudly breathing mound that, minutes ago, had been a Negro walking alone, a man Dunlow suspected of bootlegging moonshine. Dunlow looked down at the mound. “We come to an understanding, boy?”

This was a phrase Rakestraw had heard his partner use so often now that it echoed in his sleep. Dunlow and perpetrators came to an understanding, Dunlow and witnesses came to an understanding, even Dunlow and the judges before whom he testified came to an understanding. The man seemed confident that he possessed a vast reservoir of knowledge, which he in his goodwill shared with those around him.

“Yeah, yeah. I unnerstand.” It sounded funny because some teeth were missing.

Rakestraw saw that flicker in his partner’s eyes, something he’d seen a few times now. It foretold very bad things indeed. So Rakestraw stepped forward and put a hand on his partner’s shoulder. Dunlow was taller by two inches; that and the age difference made this feel uncomfortably like a son trying to coax his drunk daddy back from the brink of slapping Ma around some.

“Dunlow,” Rake said.

Dunlow looked back at Rake like he barely recognized him for a second, like maybe he’d actually expected to see a son and not his partner. Dunlow did have sons, two of them, in their teens and by all accounts hell-raisers who lacked rap sheets only because of their father’s occupation. The veteran cop’s eyes were fiery and he appeared on the verge of taking a swing at this junior interloper, the way he probably had numerous times to his sons. Then he recognized Rake and returned to where he was.

Rake said, “Made yourself clear, I think.”

“Yeah.”

But not before a final kick in the gut for emphasis, and the lump on the ground hissed a long inhalation, then silence, like he was afraid to let it out. By the time he exhaled, the two cops were gone from the alley.

Rake chose to believe that his partner’s extreme response to the bootlegger was due to a passionate desire to enforce the city’s alcohol ordinances. He chose to believe a lot of things about Dunlow. Such believing took work, not unlike religious faith, the devout belief in things that could not be proven. Because in the case of the not-terribly-­godlike Dunlow, there often was strong evidence to the contrary. In the weeks since Rake had taken his oath, he had seen Dunlow beat at least a dozen men (usually Negroes) rather than arresting them, had seen him instruct a few men on what to say if and when they needed to stand witness at a trial, and had seen him take a handful of bribes from bootleggers and numbers runners and madams.

There was a lot that Rake was learning about his new occupation. He had survived against steep odds for years in Europe as an advance scout, had been alone for long stretches and had wisely figured the difference between threats and opportunities, collaborators and spies. Back home in Atlanta, however, he was finding the moral territory more difficult to chart than he’d expected.

Rake wondered if there was a particular reason Dunlow had beaten this Negro, a particular message he’d been sending, and, if so, was it any more nuanced than the message Rake’s own dog sent whenever he lifted his leg on the neighborhood walk. In such cases, Rake rationalized that his job was just to hold on to the leash, hold on to the leash.

So Rake stood there and tried to divide himself in half. One half of him would hold tight to his moral compass, that small wobbly thing that prevented him from beating a stranger without cause. The other half of him would learn everything he could from Dunlow and his fellow officers, the surprising and often counterintuitive pieces of advice on how to survive in Darktown.

“I’ll drive,” Rake said, opening the driver’s door before his elder could object.

Dunlow sat in shotgun and peeled off his gloves, sucking in his breath.

“Y’all right?” Rake asked.

“Bastard had a hard head.”

“Sounded like it.”

“You know the average nigger skull is nearly two inches thicker’n ours?”

Rake wasn’t the type to indulge such comments. But he didn’t feel he had much choice around Dunlow, so he went for the neutral, “I did not know that.”

“Read it in a journal. Phrenologists.”

“I’ve been reading the wrong journals, I guess.”

“I ain’t surprised, college boy.” Dunlow called him that even though Rake hadn’t graduated, doing only two years before the war changed everything. Fluent in German thanks to an immigrant mother and two years of courses at UGA, his skill had been prized indeed. “Anyway, explains a lot, don’t it? Not just the lack of room for a fully evolved brain, but, you know, your basic hard-headedness and all.”

“His skull looked plenty malleable to me.”

Dunlow made a fist, then extended his fingers. He had double-­jointed thumbs. He could extend them all the way back to his wrists, a gruesome circus trick—he liked to surprise newcomers by doing that after opening a bottle of Co-Cola, crying in pain for a moment, receiving a horrified reaction from the witness, and then he’d bust a gut laughing. He bragged that he’d been the greatest thumb wrestler in his elementary school, which was exactly the sort of bizarre accomplishment only he would boast about.

It also meant that, when wrapping his hands around someone’s throat, he had an extra couple of inches of grip, an advantage which he’d just employed.

Dunlow made a fist again. Rake heard a tendon pop.

“Ah, shit. That’s better.”

Then Dispatch came over the radio, mentioning how Negro Officer Boggs was reporting a traffic violation, and did any real cops feel the need to assist? Dunlow picked up the mike and said he’d love to.



After the white man had driven away, Boggs and Smith had walked to the nearest call box, requesting a squad car to make an arrest. Dispatch had mercifully refrained from commentary as he relayed the information over the wires, and a white squad car, D-152, had immediately called in to say it was coming. Smith and Boggs were surprised—­usually the white cops took their sweet time responding to anything the colored officers requested. D-152 must have been mighty bored that night.

Five minutes later, they were walking a few blocks south of Auburn, approaching the National Pencil Factory and its ever-present smell of wood shavings, when they saw the Buick again. It was actually stopped at the end of the next block, obeying a stop sign. It lingered there.

“What’s he doing?” Boggs asked. “Circling around for something?”

Boggs imagined himself shooting the Buick’s tires. Which of course would get him fired, or worse. No colored officer had yet discharged a firearm in the line of duty.

“Maybe he’s given up?” Smith asked. He hurried toward it, not quite running but moving fast enough that his injured knee was very displeased.

He and Boggs were only ten feet away when they saw the white man hit the girl. Even through the back windshield it was unmistakable, the white man’s gray sleeve lashing out, the passenger’s long hair flailing to the right. The whole car seemed to jump.

Then the Buick drove on again.

“Let’s keep after it,” Boggs said.

The Buick was moving south, and in two blocks they would be near another call box. They could at least update Dispatch as to the car’s location, in case D-152 really was on its way.

They ran. The Buick still wasn’t going a normal speed, as if it was on the prowl for something. Clearly the driver didn’t see the two cops giving chase.

Smith’s knee was giving him a rather clear and unadulterated warning that this whole running business had best stop soon. After another block they reached the intersection with Decatur Street, just north of the train tracks. Again the Buick obeyed a stop sign.

Then its passenger door opened. The woman darted out, her yellow sundress a tiny flame in the dark night until she vanished into an alley.

The Buick stayed where it was, the door hanging open like an unanswered question. Then the white man leaned over, his pale hand appearing outside the car and grasping drunkenly for the handle. He closed the door and drove on.

“Chase him or follow her?” Boggs wondered aloud as he and Smith stopped.

They could have split up. Smith could have pursued the woman and Boggs could have continued his chase of the Buick. But Sergeant McInnis had warned them many times against separating themselves from each other. Apparently, the Department felt