Darktown, a crime novel by Thomas Mullen, takes off from a real event. In 1948, Atlanta hired its first eight black cops to police "Darktown," the derisive name for black neighborhoods. Black cops were not permitted to drive or arrest a white person. For their own protection -- as a quarter of Atlanta's cops belonged to the KKK -- they could not wear their uniforms to and from work, could not patrol without a partner, and could not enter the police station. Their HQ was the basement of the YMCA.
[Photo collage: Atlanta 1948, Darktown, and the real-life cops who inspired the novel.]
In the novel, Officer Lucius Boggs is one of the eight. A college-educated son of a preacher, he still lives with his parents on Auburn Avenue, the actual neighborhood of Dr. Martin Luther King, Sr., "a private world" of wealth, culture, and fine homes cultivated after a white rampage through Atlanta's black neighborhoods in 1904 to be "a protective bubble keeping them safe from the rest of the city, the South, America" (216). To his uncle, Boggs claims to have built up antibodies to racism around him. His uncle grips him by the shoulders and pleads, "Bleed those antibodies from your veins!" Boggs opens his heart to be more vulnerable, and more angry, during the course of this story.
His partner Tommy Smith comes from darker places but has a lighter touch. When we first meet him, he's limping from "acrobatics," i.e., his jump from a third-story window to escape his girl friend's boyfriend (2). Boggs shrinks back when Tommy uses his fists and baton to shut down a petty criminal. In one of Mullen's great scenes, full of atmosphere, tension, and humor, Smith lays a loaded gun on a barroom table within reach of his adversary, daring the crook to shoot him while a blues band plays on. In this scene, we learn that Smith has direct experience of lynchings, which are just family lore for Boggs (155).
Both men are motivated to clean up their neighborhood. In the first chapters of the novel, they investigate gambling and liquor violations. They've set their sights on Mama Dove's brothel. But Boggs is feeling the pull to do something more. In his father's church during the funeral of a black man gunned down by white officers, neighbors confront Boggs: "I thought you were supposed to stop this!" (86)
Stepping out of his protective bubble, Boggs investigates with his partner the death of a young black woman. In the first incident of the novel, ticketing a drunk white man for driving into a light pole, they see her in the passenger seat in a light yellow dress, her face bruised. Days after, they find her corpse in a dump, recognizable only by the dress. When the driver turns out to have been an ex-cop whose name has been expunged from their report, the two cops look for justice off-hours. Their investigation takes them south of Auburn Avenue to Mama Dove's brothel, into the forbidden police station, way out to a farm terrorized by a sheriff and his posse, and the white neighborhood of a Senator.
They find an ally in Officer Dennis Rakestraw, who runs a parallel investigation of his own. Grandson of a German immigrant, he served with American troops at Dachau Concentration Camp, where he gave tours to townspeople who protested they never knew what was going on there (72). Sensitive to pervasive racism, he grows sick of the casual brutality and corruption of his partner Lionel Dunlow. With the discovery of something going on between Dunlow and the ex-cop who crashed the car, Rake goes into partnership with Boggs and Smith. The excitement builds from there.
The writer Thomas Mullen creates sympathetic characters. The more we learn about the victim, Lilly Ellsworth, the more we appreciate her courage and faithfulness to her family back on the farm. The Ellsworth father maintains his dignity facing unrestrained racist cops; the teenage brother is crushed by the weight of responsibility and sadness, and his stoic mother rebuffs the cops with suppressed rage (ca. 285). Mama Dove handles the cops with ruthless sarcasm (186). Even deplorable Dunlow, drunkenly spilling his story to Rake in a baking hot toolshed, reveals a side to his story that makes him understandable, though not forgivable (Ch. 31). We glimpse this other side early on, following a raid on the family of a black jailbreaker, where Rake, afraid for his life, has splashed scalding grits into the sister's face: Dunlow hugs his shaken partner (33). Dunlow feels some kind of sympathy for Rake, though we don't yet understand why.
Atlanta radio host Lois Reitzes opined during an interview with Mullen that Atlanta's weather is another character in the novel (City Lights, WABE FM). Mullen, who lives here, agreed. He conjures the morning light, relentless heat, sweat, the sounds and atmosphere of steamy nights.
Since May, it seems that we white people have felt like the heroes of noir detective fiction, described by Lucius's Uncle Percy as "good men who discover their environments are far darker than they realized" (216). Disturbed by videos of whites confident that the law will stand by them when they claim to have felt threatened by an unarmed black man - Ahmad Arberry, Chris Cook, and George Floyd -- we are coming to perceive the dark truth behind the glib phrases we've come a long way, post-racial America, and a few bad apples.
- Related links
- I respond to the second book in Mullen's Darktown series, Lightning Men.
- See my Crime Fiction page for a curated guide to other fiction in the genre.
- My reflection on the movies Chinatown and LA Confidential (07/2016) specifically focuses on "noir" crime fiction. It ends with links to other reflections that explore the noir approach to storytelling, including the series by wonderful Walter Mosley about Easy Rawlins, a black man pursuing justice in LA after the Second World War.
- In an interview with NPR's Karen Grigsby Bates, Mullen tells her that he'd already started the novel in 2014 when the police killing of Michael Brown made headlines. When Bates asks if a white author Thomas Mullen can write a fair account of the black experience, he tells how the manuscript was sent around without his name or any mention of his previous historical novels, so that the story was accepted on its own merits. Hear the interview with Mullen and his publisher, 9/23/2016
- The image of Atlanta, ca. 1948, is from a blogger's review of the hardback edition at Jolene Grace Books
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