ONLY HOURS AFTER that awful night, Boggs and Smith were needed at the courthouse for a morning trial. Boggs had expected testifying to be one of his favorite experiences, yet it had proven to be the worst. Not least because of the timing: always in the morning, after their night shifts, and they were denied overtime pay—they made $196 a month, far less than the white cops. Between last night and the previous night finding the body, Boggs had enjoyed maybe five hours’ sleep the last two days combined.
The first time Negro officers had been needed in a courtroom, the judge had refused to let them enter in uniform, demanding that they enter as typical nigras. That had not gone over well at the Y—the officers complained to McInnis for weeks. Only after much back-channel maneuvering by the very reluctant sergeant and after another judge’s vouching for their continued “good behavior” (as if they were dogs whose ability to control their bladders was worthy of compliments), they had recently won a concession: they could now wear their uniforms at trial.
But they still couldn’t wear them on the way to or from the courthouse, just as they weren’t allowed to wear them to or from the Y. The latest policy stated that they could carry their uniforms in garment bags to the courthouse, which they would enter via the colored entrance. Then, in an old custodial closet next to the colored restrooms, they could change into their uniforms. They’d been given keys to the closet, which, though it was no longer in use, maintained the smell of mildewed mops and disinfectant. At least it smelled better than the colored restrooms.
So many of their interactions were fraught, perplexing, dangerous. There was no precedent to follow, no Jim Crow Guide to Colored Policing. They had each survived into adulthood by proceeding warily, yet now they were expected to walk with a heavy step and newfound power through their neighborhoods. In every other part of the city, however, they were still expected to vanish, or worse.
“Your Honor,” the city prosecutor said, “the city would like to call, ah, to call . . .” and some papers spilled onto the floor. The young attorney looked like an actor in a high school play, complete with an unruly cowlick. He was someone important’s nephew, surely, doing a year or two of city work to gain insight into the darkness of the human soul before settling into the family firm. “Ah, yes, here it is, the city would like to call Negro Officer Lucius Boggs.”
“If you must,” said His Honor, the troll-like and perpetually grumpy Judge Gillespie.
Boggs took the stand at the downtown courthouse and waited while a clerk found the colored Bible suitable for Boggs’s hand. Boggs was asked if he would tell the truth etc., and he said he would.
He had a bandage on his forehead and three stitches that he’d received earlier that morning after visiting a Negro doctor and family friend. Shoulda gone to Grady last night, the physician had said, whistling when he’d seen the wound. Lucky this isn’t infected yet. Boggs hadn’t bothered to explain that the last thing he wanted to do was go to the colored hospital’s emergency room, where he would have had to wait hours while surrounded by many of the people he had likely arrested or tried to arrest over the past few months.
Now he looked like a fool, half his forehead covered in white, and still dealing with a headache that the doctor assured him would pass “in a day or two.” The doctor said the scar shouldn’t look too bad. Give your face some character.
On trial was one Chandler Poe, a lanky Negro in his late forties, with reddish hair growing in mangy tufts from his narrow head, and a long nose that betrayed Cherokee heritage.
Boggs and Smith had already noticed that the white detectives who had been assigned the case did not seem to be in attendance. Also disconcerting was the presence of a dozen white civilians, all of them well dressed.
“Now, Boggs,” the kid attorney asked in his genteel Sewanee voice, “according to your report here, you and another officer arrested Poe as he was leaving his residence with several barrels of corn liquor in his possession?”
“Yes, Officer Smith and I made that arrest on June third. Mr. Poe at first denied knowing what was in the barrels, but as we waited for a wagon to arrive he admitted what he was doing.”
Judge Gillespie was a loud breather, Boggs had noticed. Each time Boggs put a “Mr.” in front of Poe’s name or an “Officer” in front of Smith’s, he could hear the judge’s breathing grow louder.
“And what exactly did Poe admit?”
Electric fans blared and windows were open but there wasn’t a shirt that hadn’t been sweated through. The room was slated for air-conditioning next year.
“Mr. Poe said he was in the business of paying wholesalers for corn liquor and then selling it to several drinking parlors.”
Boggs was bothered by the many mysterious white faces in the gallery. Even the Negro Daily Times reporter in the third row, busily taking notes for the next installment of his ongoing journalistic recording of the life and times of the colored cops, felt hostile somehow.
“Did Poe name any of these wholesalers?” the prosecutor asked.
“No, Mr. Poe kept that information to himself.”
Much sooner than Boggs had been expecting, the prosecutor told the judge he had no further questions. The kid had mentioned a fraction of the reams of evidence Boggs and Smith had gathered.
“Hmmpf?” Judge Gillespie said. He’d stopped paying attention a while ago and had been filling out some municipal paperwork. “Oh, yes. Ah, would the defense like to cross-examine?”
“No, we certainly do not,” replied Poe’s attorney, a tall older man wearing a smart blue suit and wingtips, altogether too well dressed to be a public defender.
Boggs was dismissed, and with the prosecution prematurely resting its case, the defense attorney called a Mr. Henry Jefferson. An older white man with a shock of colorless hair falling across his forehead took the stand.
Under questioning, Mr. Jefferson explained that “Chandler” was a docile handyman who worked a number of jobs for the family. And quite a good banjo player to boot. In fact, ol’ Chandler had recently performed at a particularly grand family reunion that the Jefferson clan had held a few months ago, entertaining nearly a hundred people.
“He’s a good boy,” Mr. Jefferson told the judge. “Now, I’m sure he’s liable to get himself into trouble now and again, and we’ve talked to him about that. But he means well.”
The defense attorney thanked Mr. Jefferson for taking time from his busy schedule as vice president of the Marshall & Sons Textile Mill to come out here and offer his testimony.
“That’s all right,” Jefferson said, “but I wanted to make sure Chandler wasn’t punished unnecessarily for a momentary lapse in judgment. He’s a good nigra and it’s a shame to see the city wasting resources on a hearing like this for what’s clearly just a misunderstanding between the coloreds.”
Boggs was clenching his jaw. Smith made fists in his lap.
Mr. Jefferson turned out to be but the first in a parade of character witnesses, all of them concurring in the benign nature of the accused, all of them agreeing that he posed no threat to society so long as he had a stern white hand to guide him, and all noting that the city would be much the poorer if it was deprived of his musical skills. The fact that the prosecutor cross-examined the white citizens into admitting that they could not dispute any of Boggs’s evidence hardly mattered.
After the last witnesses, the judge got on with his ruling. He portentously informed Poe that he should tread lightly from here on out. Then he acquitted Poe of the charges, and down came the gavel.
Poe made eye contact with the Negro officers and, though he didn’t actually wink or smile, something about the roundness of his eyes and the angle of his head managed to convey it all the same, an invisible wink. Then the bootlegger filed out.
Boggs and Smith approached the young prosecutor as he gathered his papers.
“First time in a courtroom?” Smith asked.
“You think I enjoyed that? I spent hours on this case.” His voice had far more authority and conviction than he’d managed before the judge. “I don’t appreciate my record being besmirched by shoddy paperwork, let alone having the deck stacked against me.”
He had spent hours on the case? Perhaps eight or nine? Boggs and Smith had followed Poe for two months, on and off duty. Weeks of their lives had just vanished with that gavel bang, for nothing.
“Sorry we besmirched you,” was all Boggs could get out.
The young lawyer looked at the officers as if for the first time, finally seeming to realize he’d insulted them. There was a glimmer in the kid’s eyes of something that Boggs realized, to his surprise, he did not hate. Some morsel of humanity, some shame at his failure, perhaps a sense that he had let down these hardworking, if inferior, police officers.
“You really want to be helpful?” the lawyer said. “Next time y’all want charges to stick on someone, make sure your Department sends in white officers to testify against him.”
“So what happened in there, fellows?” Jeremy Toon asked them in the hallway. He had been two years ahead of Boggs at Booker T. Washington, Atlanta’s sole high school for Negroes. He’d been skinny then and he was skinny still. His fingers clutched a notebook and pencil, which is exactly how Boggs had always remembered him.
“You’re a smart man,” Smith said. “Figure it out.”
“C’mon, now.” Toon was a reporter for the Atlanta Daily Times. He was a good, decent, ambitious person, and neither Boggs nor Smith could stand him. “Need some comment from you two.”
“You know we aren’t supposed to be talking,” Boggs said, keeping his voice down, very aware of the lawyers and bureaucrats walking past. In a louder but polite voice, he said, “Go to our commanding officer if you need a comment.”
The scribe lowered his notebook. He was wearing a brown tweed coat that didn’t match his thick black tie. “You know they don’t talk to us. Look, I’ve been covering this since you filed your first report. Y’all had tons of evidence the prosecutor didn’t use, and all the judge wanted to hear about was banjos? What do you want our readers to think?”
Smith took one step toward the reporter, halving the gap between them. “Are you asking us to call out our prosecutor in your paper? Or complain about our superior officers? Or maybe you have a pink slip in that notebook, and we can just sign our jobs away and be done with it? That’d be easier, wouldn’t it?”
One of the many complications the Negro officers faced was the fact that one of them, Xavier Little, happened to be nephew of the owner of the Daily Times. After the officers were sworn in, the Times ran an extensive interview with him. As far as Boggs could tell, Little said nothing remotely controversial in the story, yet the day after it hit the stands, McInnis excoriated them all. Do not talk to the newspapers again, ever. You are not spokesmen for your people. You are goddamn beat cops, and that’s all you will be, or you will be unemployed. The fact that the paper had been an early champion of the push for colored officers, and was eager to chronicle their every move, made this an especially delicate dance for the eight of them.
Toon held out his hands. “I’m on your side here, gentlemen.”
“Whose side?” Smith looked in every direction. “Which side? How’s that work again?”
Boggs’s head was pounding and he desperately needed sleep. He was not thinking clearly. Surely that explained why he then said, “You really want to be helpful? I’ve got something for your paper, but you didn’t get it from me. Understood?”
“What is it?”
“We have a body,” Boggs said, “a colored girl, teens or maybe early twenties. Found dead, shot in the chest. No ID or anything.” Smith paced a few steps away, loudly sucking in his breath, all but yelling Mistake, mistake, mistake. If McInnis knew Boggs was saying this, they’d be in serious trouble. But Boggs was livid at the judge, livid at Dunlow from last night, livid about the fact that white investigators had done nothing to look into the murder. “All she had was a yellow dress and a heart-shaped locket. We could wait around until someone thinks their daughter or wife is missing, but if you put a note in the paper somewhere . . .”
“What else?”
“That’s all we know.” He didn’t want to tell Toon they found her in garbage. If a husband or parent had to learn that, they should hear it from an officer, in person.
Toon had an impressive stare. “There’s something you’re not telling me.”
It was a mistake to have said this much. But Boggs felt such rage, he hadn’t been able to hold himself back. White cops had just let his case against Poe die. Dunlow had beaten a man in front of him the other night. And apparently someone, most likely his own superior officer, had retyped his report on the colored Jane Doe. Falsified it by deleting the reference to Brian Underhill, the last known person seen with the victim, probably to protect the ex-cop. People were undercutting Boggs at every turn, making him look stupid and helpless. He refused to be helpless.
“The last known person to be with her was a middle-aged white man,” he said. “Do not disclose that.”
Toon nodded slowly. “Okay, I’ll run something. Call me when you have more.”
This was hardly the first time they had been humiliated in court, but that didn’t make it any easier. In fact, they’d spent so much time preparing for this case because they’d thought that their efforts would finally overwhelm the hard-breathing judge’s bias. They had thought that what they did mattered.
“I thought you locked it?” Smith said, opening the former custodial closet’s door.
“I did.”
Smith hit the switch as Boggs closed the door behind him. Their civilian clothes, which they had hung on pegs, were strewn on the floor.
“For God’s sake.” Smith picked up his shirt and his slacks, shaking the dust bunnies from them.
Boggs did the same with his shirt. He looked around for his pants. “You’re kidding.”
He checked the shelves, which were half-stocked with old containers of cleaning solutions and boxes of what appeared to be years-old newspapers and legal transcripts. His pants were gone.
They stood there in silence for a moment, then Smith swung and batted a box of moth balls from a shelf. Little toxic spheres ping-ponged in every direction.
Boggs closed his eyes for a moment. He wanted to hit something, too. Yet he held it in.
“Easy,” he said, to himself as much as to his partner.
“Easy? You’re the one with no britches.”
“Which is why you should be cooling down. You’re the one who’s going to have to fetch me some slacks.”
“You’re going to hide in here?”
“I am going to wait in here for you to get them, yes.”
“The hell with that. Let’s both go to the Y, in our uniforms. Hell with their rules.”
“No. I’m not getting written up for something like that. Not after what just happened.”
“Five dollars says your britches are in the judge’s chambers.”
“He can have them.” Boggs reached into his pocket and dug out a key. “I have an extra pair in my locker. Hurry up and we can get some sleep before next shift.”
Smith leaned against one of the shelves. He stared at his feet.
“Remind me why we’re doing this.”
Boggs breathed. “To be upstanding citizens and paragons of our race,” he said, his voice gently mocking the mayor’s speech from their first day.
“Give me a better reason.”
“To provide a good example for colored kids.”
A phone rang from an unseen office.
“A better reason.”
“There aren’t any better jobs.”
Smith closed his eyes. “A better reason.”
Boggs thought for a moment, then said, “Maceo Snipes.” Shot in the back for being the first Negro voter in Taylor County. “Isaac Woodard.” War veteran, blinded two years ago by South Carolina cops for daring to wear his army uniform. “The Malcolms and Dorseys.” Two married couples, including another veteran and a pregnant woman, ambushed and murdered on a bridge over the Apalachee River.
Smith opened his eyes. “Give me those keys.”