Darktown by Thomas Mullen

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.
    â€œFirst time in a courtroom?” Smith asked.
    â€œYou 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.
    â€œSorry 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.
    â€œYou 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.”

    â€œSo 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.
    â€œYou’re a smart man,” Smith said. “Figure it out.”
    â€œC’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.”
    â€œYou 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