The Killings (7 page)

Robert walked up and took a flier from one of the officers. Robert had seen the fliers appearing in his neighborhood.

“You want to join the police force, boy?” one of the officers asked. He was a young, red-haired man with freckles who looked like he barely weighed a hundred pounds. He had a large bucktoothed smile and an unpleasant gleam in his eyes. He was twirling a police baton absentmindedly in one hand while handing out fliers with the other.

Robert looked at the flier. They were looking for colored men to join the Atlanta Police Department, but it wasn’t exactly what Henry had told him or what the colored pastors and businessmen had been calling for. The flier said the Atlanta Police Department was hiring “undeputized security” to patrol the Negro community for clues leading to the arrest of the Ripper, for which they would pay a weekly stipend of ten dollars.

Robert looked at the redheaded officer and asked, “Excuse me, sir. What does ‘undeputized security’ mean?”

The officer smirked and looked down his nose at Robert. It was the type of superior expression Robert had seen on the faces of Whites all his life. He wished he had a moment alone in a dark alley with this bucktoothed bastard. He’d wipe that sanctimonious smirk off his face in a heartbeat and leave the little shit choking on his own blood. The thought put a smile on his face.

“That means that y’all ain’t gonna be no real policemen. It means y’all have to call a
real
officer when you want someone arrested, but you can interview witnesses and report suspicious activity and such.” That meant they would not have guns or badges but would be placed into some of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the city. Robert felt his stomach roll.

“I thought y’all were hiring detectives?”

Robert saw the fire leap into the officer’s eyes. The redhead’s lip curled back and his eyebrows furrowed. He stepped forward and poked Robert in the chest with his nightstick. “Now look here, boy! Ain’t no way we’s hiring no nigger detectives.
I
ain’t even a detective yet! You want to help us catch this killer? You sign up and never mind all this nonsense about being a damn detective!”

It took all the willpower within him to resist putting his fist through the policeman’s dental work, but Robert knew what would happen to him were he to let his temper get the better of him. It was only five years ago that angry mobs were lynching colored folks right on this very street in broad daylight. Robert smiled, nodded, and began to turn away when an older White gentleman in shirt sleeves and suspenders with a gold shield pinned to his chest stepped forward with an outstretched hand.

“My name’s Detective Douglas. Martin Douglas. What’s your name, son?”

Robert looked at the detective’s hand like it was on fire. He tentatively reached for it as if afraid that it would burn him. Detective Douglas had large shocks of gray running through his slick black hair. It glistened with pomade. He smoked a hand-rolled cigarette and had hard eyes that focused intensely. He stared directly into Robert’s eyes without blinking until Robert finally accepted his outstretched hand.

“My ... uh ... my name’s Robert, sir. Robert Jackson.”

“You want to be a police detective, Robert?”

The look in his eyes was genuine. Not mocking or challenging like the young red-haired cop.

“Y-yes, sir.”

“Well, Officer Lacey is right. We ain’t hiring colored cops right now. But what we have now is the next best thing. You can be an employee of the police department. You can help catch that bastard that’s killin’ all them colored women and make a pretty good wage doin’ it. Where else you gonna make ten dollars a week doin’ an honest man’s work?”

“I own a barbershop. I do okay.”

“Cuttin’ nigger hair?” Officer Lacey asked, laughing and sneering simultaneously. “You couldn’t pay me enough! What do you cut it with? An axe?”

“Lacey. Why don’t you go out on patrol?” Detective Douglas said, turning to Officer Lacey. “You’re not needed here any more.” Detective Douglas’s voice remained calm and measured. It was difficult to tell if he was angry or not.

Officer Lacey paused for a moment, staring at the detective’s face, looking for some clue to his superior’s temperament. When he found none, he scampered off with his tail tucked and his ears flat. “Yes, detective.”

The detective was smiling again when he turned back to Robert. “Excuse the interruption. Like I was sayin’, there’s good money in upholdin’ the law. And you’d be a hero in your community if you helped us catch this maniac that’s been killin’ Negro women. So what do ya say?”

Robert thought about it a moment. He wanted no part of it, honestly. Ten dollars a week
was
good money, even though he made twice that cuttin’ heads for a nickel a pop at his shop. Then there was the matter of Henry. He hadn’t said that it was mandatory, but he’d strongly suggested that Robert join, which was almost the same thing. And catching this maniac and becoming a local hero wouldn’t exactly be bad for business.

“How many colored folks done signed up already?”

“We’ve had about thirty or forty come through here. Mostly vagrants, criminals, and old church folks. We had a few young ‘uns try to sign up too. We’ve only accepted six Negroes so far.”

Robert thought about that. “How many you need?”

“We need at least a dozen. One for each neighborhood.”

“Do we get motorcycles?”

Robert knew the Atlanta police had just acquired motorcycles and motorized wagons. He’d always wanted to try one.

But Detective Douglass chuckled good-naturedly and shook his head. “Uh, no, boy ... I mean ... uh ... Robert. We’ve only got a few of those. Most of our deputies are still on bicycles or on foot. You’d be on foot patrol if ya came on board.”

Robert liked the detective. He seemed like a genuinely good guy, and he even tried not to call Robert “boy,” which, though Robert was used to hearing it from Whites, still felt demeaning.

“Look ... Robert, you seem like a pretty nice fellow. You seem pretty smart too. You speak well, so you’ve obviously had an education. You been to one of them new Negro colleges?”

Robert shook his head. “No, sir. I had to drop out of school in the tenth grade to work.”

“Well, that’s a lot further than most of your kind get. What I’m gettin’ at is that if this thing is gonna work, we need smart Negroes like yourself out there. I know a lot of colored folks don’t trust the police and I can’t say I blame ‘em. It wasn’t but five years ago that we had those race riots down here. But there were a lot of us policemen trying to stop the killings. I know there were some of us that just stood around doin’ nothin’, but believe me, a lot of us were tryin’ to help, includin’ me. It’s hard to imagine that with guys like Officer Lacey on the force, and I can’t say there aren’t a lot of officers like him ‘round here. Lot of us don’t like the idea of being bullied by the press and the colored community into hiring Negro cops. But this here is a pretty good compromise, and you’ll have our full support if you come onboard. You’ve got my word on that.”

Detective Douglas stuck out his hand. This time, the gesture looked far less threatening but no less ominous. Robert accepted his hand and felt the weight of the entire Negro community descend on him like a yoke.

NINE

July 21, 1911, Atlanta, Georgia

Lately, he’s been remembering more. Especially about the night Ronald Jeremiah slaughtered his entire family.

He was eleven when Grandma Sable put a stop to Ronald Jeremiah’s abuse.

On nights the beatings got bad he would run through the fields in the middle of the night after all the other servants had fallen asleep, desperate to reach her little shack in the woods. Once there he would burst in, his emotions already racing high, and burst into tears. Grandma Sable was always awake when he came to the shack, and it didn’t matter what time during the night he happened to make his escape, she was always there to soothe his troubled spirit.

“I workin’ the spirits,” Grandma Sable would say as she stroked his head after he poured out the day’s anguish to her. He’d rest his head in her lap while she sat in the battered wicker chair in the corner, reveling in the sounds and smells of the night outside her flimsy shack. “I workin’ them. They always protected me, and once I can appease them, they protect you too.”

He didn’t know what loa Grandma Sable was working on bringing to this world to help them, but whatever it was, it never came, and Ronald Jeremiah continued with the constant beatings, his refusal to pay his servants, and even his mistreatment of the servants’ children.

On the last night Mr. Jeremiah beat him, he hobbles to Grandma Sable’s shack, bleeding down the back of his legs, the pain and humiliation of his most recent abuse coming through strong. He pours his heart out to Grandma Sable, sobbing into her lap. “Mr. Jeremiah, he beats us, all o’ us. He beats the kids too,” he tells Grandma Sable.

“He beat you tonight?”

“Yes’m.” He is ashamed of this. He is even more ashamed of what he hasn’t told her, what he’s too ashamed to admit.

The hand stops stroking his head. “What else he do?”

He can’t tell her ... but he finds himself unable to stop, and it rushes out of him like water bursting from a ruptured dam. “He takes me! He beats me down and has me like he has my momma and all the other women!” And then he couldn’t help it; he bursts out sobbing, the pain and degradation of his assault that afternoon burning even hotter in his memory. Worst of all was the pain he felt from his shame, and the fear that Grandma Sable would turn him away, as if he was now poisoned by Mr. Jeremiah’s seed much like she’d already done with his mother.

But she doesn’t do that. And as his sobs race their way out of his system, she begins stroking his head again, only the touch of her hand is different now. It is more sensitive, more calming, yet behind that gentle touch is something dark and sinister with a sense of purpose.

When Grandma Sable speaks, her voice, old and brittle, has an undercurrent of terrific strength and power behind it. The threat of violence rumbles beneath her words like a coming storm. “He take you today?”

He nods.

“You try to fight him off you?”

He nods, tears streaking down his face.

He feels her fingers trace their way down his bruised and battered face. One fingernail brushes over the scab that has already formed over his left eyebrow. Another lightly traces over his upper lip, noting the puffiness, the blood still beading from a wound that brings waves of pain.

“I’m gone give you something to drink,” Grandma Sable says. “And you gone drink it. Every last drop. You hear?”

He nods and wipes the last of his tears from his eyes.

“You gone sleep here. And when you wake up you’ll feel a lot better. All your pain will be gone. And you won’t need to be afraid of Mr. Jeremiah no more.”

“What are you gonna do?” he asks, but she hushes him.

She gently lifts his head from her lap and places it on a worn pillow near her wicker chair. Then she stands up and hobbles to the small kitchen. He hears her rummaging around in there with her jars and bottles - she has a lot of them, labeled in her shaky handwriting in a script he can’t understand. She pours water from the jug on the table and then drifts over to the fireplace where a small fire is burning. She is carrying a small tin cup, which she hangs over the fire for a moment. As the heat of the fire warms the liquid inside it, he hears her mutter words he does not understand. He knows it is the old language, the language of his people, but she also speaks another language, one that is alien-sounding and guttural. Hearing her speak the old language of their people makes him feel ashamed because he doesn’t know it but feels that he should.

He watches Grandma Sable unhook the tin cup from over the fire and bring it to him, and he drinks from it at her urging. It has a strong, bitter taste, and it burns his throat as it goes down. But she insists he drink it down to the last drop. She sits down in the wicker chair and places his head back in her lap again. She talks to him gently, her voice soothing, and her fingers go back to caressing his head, his neck, his shoulders. Soon he is lulled to a sense of calm, peace, and then he is out ...

... and he dreams ...

He dreams of Grandma Sable. How she stands in front of the fire with her jars of herbs, how she grabs a pinch in her gnarled fingers and throws them on the fire, her voice low and guttural, speaking to something he can’t see. A little later he sees her kneeling before the fire over the carcass of a black pig, the hog’s blood spilling over the floor as Grandma Sable recites the words to something she is calling Marinette. And then it feels like something awakens him as he hears a chicken cackle and squawk in pain and terror and he sees Grandma Sable clutch a black fowl in her hands. His stomach churns as she yanks the feathers out of it, plucking the fowl while it’s still alive. Despite the bird’s struggle, Grandma Sable’s clutch is strong. Her withered muscles bunch beneath her weathered, leathery skin and the heat of the fire, the aroma of sweat and blood and herbs and the scent of terror overpower him, sends him back into darkness …

When he wakes it is morning. The sun is shining through the flimsy curtains of her shack. The smell of strong coffee wafts through his nostrils and he jerks awake, heart pounding, knowing that if he isn’t found in his bed by one of the plantation overseers, another beating will be in store. He sees Grandma Sable at the kitchen, pouring a cup of the black coffee.

“What time is it?”

“Six thirty,” she says, and he wonders how she knows this when she has no clocks on the wall or even a pocket watch.

The events of last night are a fading memory as he scrambles to his feet and visually inspects himself, running his hands down his trousers and shirt. He feels okay. The pain in his ribcage from the bruises, his battered face, all gone. Even the burning pain in his rectum from Mr. Jeremiah’s violation is gone, and he feels whole and uncorrupted down there, as if it had never happened. Already he’s wondering if what happened yesterday was a dream. Or a nightmare.