Darktown: A Novel Page 10

  He would always wonder what made him say that. It was true that the axle of one of his wooden trains had broken a few days ago, but he hadn’t been all that torn up about it. Yet he said it, and Uncle Richard smiled. Well, let’s see what Uncle Richard can do about that. Where is it?

  Finding one broken train in a room of three boys, in almost complete darkness, was not easy. Yet they found it, and then a screwdriver appeared in Richard’s hand. Richard was a carpenter and had been at work when the virus had taken the white people. He’d run here directly, his pockets crammed with tools. Only after years of retelling the story would Daniel wonder if Richard always had so many screwdrivers in his overalls or had he perhaps loaded up on sharp instruments as protection before fleeing. Uncle Richard assessed the toy and spun the wheel on the busted axle and reached into another pocket and took out a small wooden dowel. It would not have amazed Daniel any more had Uncle Richard taken a white rabbit or a dove from one of those pockets. The dowel proved too thick, but ah-ha, here in this other pocket he had one that fit better. Lord only knew what project the man had been working on, but he was perfectly equipped for repairing toys that day, as if he’d come direct from the North Pole.

  Within minutes, thanks also to some wood glue from another pocket, the train was good as new. Uncle Richard had been leaning against the wall, and he rolled the train across the wood floor to his admiring nephew, who smiled and rolled it back. So Richard rolled it to him again, and they went like that for a while, Daniel laughing (and Richard gently reminding him not to laugh too loudly) and not quite noticing anymore the giant bandages on his uncle’s head.

  Then the virus got louder.

  Daniel sent the train back to Uncle Richard, whose great big hand covered the entire toy. He did not send it back. He picked it up, slowly stood, and slightly parted the curtained window, putting a finger from his other hand to his lips.

  The virus was making the white people sing “Dixie,” and they were close enough for Daniel to make out all the words.

  Daniel wished his uncle would push the train again but he knew something important was happening. Uncle Richard was here, so nothing could possibly go wrong, yet he felt scared.

  The virus was making glass break. Then another popping sound, then another. More glass.

  Someone screamed. Then footsteps and hollers, as if the person who’d screamed was being chased. It was a game, Richard explained in a whisper, just a strange game people are playing. But don’t talk anymore tonight.

  Later, in the middle of the night, Daniel would need to use the toilet, would walk into the hallway and see many of his uncles and cousins gathered there in the parlor and the foyer, the light dim and his brain muddy and his mother shooing him. He would wonder for a while whether he was only dreaming the fact that his father and uncle were holding rifles.

  Two days later, after the white people’s virus had passed, people slowly dared to leave their houses. Daniel’s father returned to work after conferring with friends, and Daniel and his mother and two brothers went out again, hoping to find a grocer’s that was open, as their pantry had gone bare.

  As they walked, Daniel noticed that many of the street poles were wearing hats. The sign at the corner of Juniper and Pierce wore a gray derby. A bus stop sign a block away wore a plaid driver’s cap. A black fedora was perched atop Courtland and Ellis.

  And there on Peachtree and Auburn sat a blue mailman’s cap, as unmistakable as his father’s laugh. Daniel tugged on his mother’s sleeve and pointed it out, Look, Daddy’s cap! and did not understand why her face turned stone blank when she saw it, did not understand why she gripped his hand more tightly then and hurried the boys along and told them with a harsher tone than usual to hush up.

  Daniel would remember those hats for years, recalling them when, as an older boy, he learned they were there because they had belonged to Negroes who’d been killed or beaten by the mob, the headwear tossed up like trophies. One slight remove away from the tribal peoples who’d placed their enemies’ heads on stakes for vultures to pick at. It had not been his father’s hat, but it could have been.

  “It could have been any of our hats,” the reverend told his congregation. “But this time, it was James.”

  In truth, Lucius was so upset by the stares and comments that he wasn’t able to listen to all that his father was saying, never got to hear how the old man drew a parallel between that tragedy and this one. What lesson he was trying to impart, what the train was supposed to be a metaphor for. Whether Uncle Richard, who would also die young, was symbolic of Jameson or someone else, what the point of the story was at all. He’d heard it so many times and it always had a different point, the basic gist being that life might seem terribly unfair and unjust but it wasn’t, not really, because there was a plan behind it. Even if the plan seemed a very poorly written one indeed, and in need of profound revisions.

  After the service ended, Lucius told his brothers he couldn’t join them at the burial. He had to get to the precinct. They all nodded, seeing through the lie and not seeming to blame him.

  Soon he was outside, walking through the crowd, the hats and the suits and clusters of family members. Many of those heads seeming to twitch in his direction. Then someone did more than twitch: a man with gray hair and a thick mustache stopped in front of Boggs, closer than was polite.

  “You’re one of the policemen, aren’t you?” His eyes were red, not like he’d been crying in church but like he hadn’t been sleeping much lately, and had perhaps been crying a lot, just not in the last couple of hours.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Lucius didn’t recognize him; he wasn’t a part of this congregation. He knew everyone in the crowd was staring, registering each word and gesture.

  “I thought you were supposed to do something about this,” the man said. “My son’s in jail and my daughter-in-law’s in there, too, and what are you doing about it?”

  Freddie’s father and Belle’s father-in-law, then. Boggs had heard she’d married well, and this gentleman’s suit seemed to prove it.

  “I’m very sorry about what’s happened, sir, and—”

  “They tortured her. You know that, don’t you? Poured hot grits on her head! And what did she do? What did she do? Trying to protect her brother from them.”

  Boggs felt the blood rushing to his face. He couldn’t tell if the people crowding around them were closer than before or if it only felt that way because everyone had become utterly silent.

  A woman materialized beside the man—she was short and her face was barely visible through the black veil that cascaded from a wide-brimmed hat. Yet the hatred in her eyes burned through.

  The man pressed a finger into Boggs’s chest. “I thought you were supposed to stop this!”

  Lucius looked down at the finger for an extra beat. “We’re doing what we can to make things better, sir.”

  “They shot him in the street like a dog,” the woman said.

  “My brother works very hard for all of us,” William said. Boggs had forgotten his kid brother was there. “I know this is a very difficult time, but pointing fingers at each other will not help.”

  The man’s finger seemed to melt away. The couple’s eyes were on William now, that beautiful unlined face that had soothed tempers and allayed jealousies all his life. Anger did not seem to exist in rooms where William was present. He’d possessed magic as a boy; he was a man now, twenty and with one more year of schooling to go, and his powers were only stronger.

  Boggs stood there and felt cooled by the vast shadow that his younger brother seemed to cast.

  “My son hasn’t seen a lawyer yet.” The man was speaking more to William now, his voice already going from accusatory to plaintive. “I don’t even know if my boy’s alive! ”

  The tears returned. His wife’s hands were gripping his left forearm, as if the crowd were trying to tear them apart rat
her than support them.

  William touched the man’s other forearm. “My father was hoping to get a chance to talk to you, Mr. Simmons. Why don’t we go over and get him now?” With his free hand he motioned back to the church. “Ma’am?”

  Mrs. Simmons nodded, and William calmly yet assuredly led them off. Twenty years old! Boggs watched as his brother’s two hands rested atop the outer shoulders of the grieving couple, and the crowd parted and allowed them to pass, and all those black dresses and hats and somber suits made a point of turning to face each other again, as though they had not been watching.

  Boggs descended the church steps. Trying not to walk too fast. But wishing he could.

  “Hey,” Reginald said from a step behind. “Come on, let’s drop by my office. I got a bottle of whiskey you could use right now.”

  “You know I can’t do that anymore.”

  Reginald laughed. “Oh yeah, sorry. But come on, let’s go cool off someplace. You need it.”

  “I need to be alone.”

  Reginald’s footsteps stopped as Lucius walked off.

  “Brother, you are precisely that.”

  That night at the Y, he received a call from Toon at the Daily Times.

  “We got word on your Jane Doe. Farmer from Peacedale called saying it might be his daughter.”

  “He leave a name and number?”

  “Otis Ellsworth, and he doesn’t own a phone. He was using a pay phone on some small-town Main Street or something. Said he’d come by tomorrow to see the body.”

  “He sound sure of himself?”

  “Said she didn’t own a dress like that, that he knew of, but she’d been living in Atlanta a few months and probably got some new clothes. Said she had that birthmark on her shoulder, and they hadn’t heard from her in a couple of weeks like they usually do.”

  The body was at the morgue, which was at the main headquarters. Neither Boggs nor any of the colored officers were supposed to be there. Ever. “When did he say he was coming?”

  “There’s a train that gets in to Terminal Station at half past noon,” Toon said. “He’ll be on it.”

  Someone falsified Boggs’s report, deleting Brian Underhill, protecting an ex-cop who by all rights should be the principal subject of an investigation. Why? Like at Jameson’s funeral, he felt the wrathful eyes of his neighbors on him, judging him a failure, unworthy. There was nothing Boggs could do about the Jameson case. But the Jane Doe case was different.

  Boggs vowed that, when Mr. Ellsworth showed up at the station, he would be there to meet him.

  9

  AT NOON THE sky above the police headquarters was cloudless, so Boggs hid in the scant shade offered by the colored entrance’s awning. He knew the white cops would be incensed to see him at the headquarters, where his presence was forbidden. Hopefully, this alley-­facing door was the one place where he was least likely to encounter any whites.

  His adherence to the white cops’ ridiculous rules had cost the girl her life—he should have run after her that night, but he and Smith had chosen to follow the white driver, Underhill, instead. At the very least, Boggs would make sure she was identified, and that the father wouldn’t have to do the deed beside some insipid cracker.

  So he waited.

  When he’d first signed on for the job, he had been focused on the momentousness of the occasion, the responsibility and the uniform and the gun and the awesome weight of things he might be called upon to do. The colored eight’s first day had been much-ballyhooed across town, complete with the mayor offering a speech to an overflow crowd. Their first shift practically turned into a neighborhood parade, everyone along Auburn Avenue following their every move, taking photos, writing poems. It seemed so long ago already.

  Boggs had been perhaps too enamored with the romanticism of the moment, not thinking enough about how he would be arresting people for things like gambling and drinking that they felt were their God-given right, intervening in marital disputes that had no true solution, and staring up close at horrific societal problems that seemed almost cocky in their intractability. He’d known what he was getting into, he just hadn’t braced himself for the accumulated weight of doing it hour after hour, night after night. And it had barely been four months.

  He had needed purpose. He had just completed his degree when he’d been drafted for the war, and he had perhaps naïvely believed that the great fight against totalitarianism would be the perfect place for him to put all those Morehouse ideals into action. Yet his time in the army had been torture. He never progressed beyond a South Carolina training camp during those long years, despite his constant appeals to see action. He eventually learned he had been branded a “Premature Anti-Fascist” by his commanding officers. He and his prominent family members had spoken out about the menace of Mussolini ravaging Ethiopia years before Pearl Harbor had convinced the rest of America that the Axis needed to be stopped (his father had written a widely read essay, and Lucius had penned some pieces in the Morehouse newspaper). Because they had dared to be right about the evil that their fellow Americans had been slow to acknowledge, they were considered untrustworthy, their motives suspect. His superior officers had done whatever was necessary to keep him and his fellow PAFs very far away from any battlefields or loaded weapons.

  After he’d returned to Atlanta, the push to register Negro voters had felt like a calling, something to help take his mind off the boring numbers counting that constituted his job at the insurance company where Reginald worked. At his crammed little desk he’d tabulated how long each Negro in a given neighborhood might live based on current age, schooling, past diseases, wars fought, crimes committed. Reginald insisted this was important work, that colored people deserved insurance just like white folks did, but to Lucius it was like being some clerical mercenary.

  He had always felt marked for something bigger. That was the curse of being raised by a reverend. Even if you decide not to follow him to the pulpit, you have been raised by a man who constantly drilled into you the fact that you are special, that you will lead your people somehow, that there is some crucial victory waiting to be won.

  So when the successful voter registration drive finally led the mayor to post eight job openings on the police force, things suddenly seemed to make a strange kind of sense.

  Still he waited for Mr. Ellsworth.

  Occasionally people walked through the police station’s colored entrance, but one glance and Boggs could tell they weren’t farmers from Peacedale. Maybe they were janitors, or errand boys, or they were here to inquire about their recently arrested son or father. It bothered Boggs that they had to come to this back door to be insulted by white cops and clerks. Boggs and his colleagues would be allowed in the station “eventually,” McInnis had said a few times, but when was “eventually”? Next year, or when Boggs was forty? Had they made it to the double-l in “eventually” yet, or were they still on the first e?

  It was a scorching day, and his shade was shrinking. Air conditioners hummed above him, condensation dripping on either side. He was not in uniform, instead wearing khaki pants and a crisp white shirt. His pants pocket hid his badge. He still wasn’t used to the bandage on his face and couldn’t wait until his return visit to the doctor to have the stitches removed.

  Finally he saw a man who looked the part hesitantly approach the old wooden steps. The wooden steps that were warped on the sides because they hadn’t been sealed right, so warped that Boggs was tempted to ask the station to rebuild them, though he wasn’t sure if it was worth the effort. (To repair them would be to acknowledge that a separate colored entrance was necessary.) The wooden steps that audibly creaked as the man in jean overalls and an off-white work shirt with red clay stains at the elbows and thick, clay-caked boots rose upon them.

  “Mr. Ellsworth?” Boggs would have guessed the man was not yet forty, but a very old kind of not-yet-forty. Thin but not gaunt, with
lines spiderwebbing the dark skin around his light brown eyes.

  “Yeah?”

  Boggs took his badge out of his pocket and held it there a moment. “I’m Officer Lucius Boggs. Thank you for coming in.”

  Ellsworth’s eyes seemed hollow, not all there. He didn’t reply. There was no adequate response to being thanked for coming in to identify the body of your daughter.

  Sensing this, Boggs dispensed with any small talk and said, “Why don’t you follow me.”

  Ellsworth had been wearing a brown driver’s cap, but he removed it now and held it awkwardly at his breast, as if hearing the national anthem or watching a casket pass. Two inches above his left ear a thin scar curved hairlessly like an upside-down smile.

  Boggs opened the door and the air felt cooler immediately. He led Ellsworth down the hallway, passing the white clerk, a white-haired old man who kept to himself his objections to this colored officer entering the inner sanctum. Too shocked to speak, perhaps.

  The door to the basement was about ten yards away. The hallway was narrow, with occasional head-high windows offering views into the bullpens, through which, surely, some cops at their desks could see him. He would not look. He didn’t hear any cries or curses as he continued, didn’t hear his name called out or anything worse.

  He reached the basement door and opened it. He exhaled a little more deeply.

  When they reached the bottom of the stairs, Boggs faced Ellsworth again. The farmer’s head had been on a swivel before, turning this way and that, taking in all the sights, but now it seemed that his neck had contracted, his shoulders protectively high.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah. First time in a police station is all.”

  Boggs had only dealt with a few grieving parents at this point in his career, but still, something in Ellsworth’s manner seemed off. Boggs had seen other fathers turn inward, silent and stony, but even then there was always some telltale evidence of misery and dread on their faces, some sign that this rocklike facade was being held up only by extreme effort. Ellsworth seemed not so much devastated as down.