Darktown

Here in Darktown, where even the shadows have shadows, you drink your coffee black and never get up before suppertime.  The streets are littered with unfiltered cigarette butts and dented plastic cups.  The gutters reek of stale beer and blood.  The bars never close and the horses go hungry in their shabby stalls while ragged women call from second story windows and down-and-out men lounge beneath the streetlights selling magic white powder.  Children can't read but they can shoot and handle a blade with deadly sleight of hand.  The river keeps its secrets, the smoky landscape looks like a weathered, faded postcard - mud stained with torn edges - the church bells never ring.  Here in Darktown, even the moonlight keeps away and you can get killed over a chicken bone or a fifty cent piece.  The sky is never anything but sick yellow and when the fog rolls in around midnight, even the stray cats run for cover.  There are no innocents in Darktown.  It's not on any map, not on the way to anywhere.  You don't get here by accident and you don't hardly leave except in a pine box. 

During the day here in Darktown, the wind blows hot and dry and gritty as a sandstorm.  It collects litter and debris - cast off candy wrappers and discarded newspapers mostly but empty aluminum beer cans as well, sometimes even a blood stained old shoe - and shuttles them roughly over the broken sidewalks and into the gutters at the low end of town.  The streets are swept as clean as they ever get here but no one notices.  It's an unnaturally quiet place during the day - desolate and deserted - no foot traffic or passersby, no horse carts. You might hear the occasional loose shutter slam against a dilapidated building or the creak of a swinging door forced open by the wind but there are no people sounds.  It's like an old, abandoned mining town, full of ghosts and rag-tag homeless dogs.  The stench of the river is always in the air, brackish and smelling vaguely of food gone bad.  The dogs sniff at it warily but then slink away, too thin and too tired to pursue it.

The river is not a pretty place.  It's banks are slimy and overgrown with weeds and dead trees.  The currents flow quickly and are thickened with trash - sometimes a body part or two rises from the black bottom and is swept downstream - if it's not snagged and impaled on a fallen branch for all to see.  A hand once washed up on the slippery shore, so it's said, but the river hurriedly reclaimed it.  The black water has never encouraged visitors or curiosity, it claims its victims silently and never brags, then flows to the rendering plant and offers them up.  They disappear in a cloud of vile smoke and hot ash falls like confetti.

A safe distance away, ordinary people live with ordinary troubles and try not to think too much about the nearness of Darktown.  They isolate themselves with their their workaday worlds, their Sunday cook outs, their sweet, equitable upbringing.  They comfort themselves with their sameness and shared ambitions.  They raise their children to be hard working, well behaved, civil tongued and it's a rare thing for a child to be threatened with Darktown - but it happens - and it puts the fear of God into these little ones.  It's a mean-spirited and desperate parent who resorts to this tactic and it's almost always immediately retracted but the children remember.  Words have power and they leave scars and for the one or two who will inevitably find their way to the terrible wasteland, not knowing why is a comfort.  They leave the ordinary world and crawl into the darkness with something like relief, seeking the sweet nothingness of Darktown and willingly getting lost in it.

And here in Darktown, they give up.  Sometimes they a leave a note, more often they just take too many pills or hang themselves from a tree on the bank of the filthy river.  Only the citizens of Darktown, the ones who actually live there, ever really understand the despair, the pain, or the power of depression. 

For me, as an adult who can still sometimes look out her second story bedroom window and see an imaginary place on the outskirts of ordinary, Darktown is imagery.  For those who live there, it's all too real.