The Secret of Magic

by Johnson, Deborah

  Compromise was in his voice. But the man called Leroy was having none of it.

  “I said move aside here, nigger. Give these white men your place.”

  “And I said that I’m not moving, and neither is anybody else.”

  Each word clear and distinct, and with the feel of his friend L.C.’s blood fresh on him again, the warm, iron smell of it, the sticky drained life. Joe Howard felt those always-near tears well up in him, threatening his eyes, threatening him, just like they had so long ago on the streets of Atlanta and just like they always would. It was the tears that told him that the war—his part in it, the long horror of it—hadn’t changed one thing.

  By now all the white folks had turned around and they were looking, too. Joe Howard saw the one he thought he knew, Miss Anna Dale. It was her. A prim lady in a lace collar, in a polka-dot dress, in a green hat with lilacs blooming on it. With a polished gold star pinned to her ample bosom. He saw all of that now. She stared at him with dark, deep eyes. Joe Howard heard her whisper, “Oh, dear.”

  Be careful!

  Words, using his daddy’s voice, slipped into his mind.

  “Are you safe, son? Come on home safe!”

  But Joe Howard had no use for those words. He closed his eyes. They disappeared.

  He found his own words. “Aren’t these Germans? Aren’t these Nazis?”

  And even one of the Germans—light of hair, light of eye and skin, a stranger in this place—seemed anxious to help.

  “It’s okay. We can stand.” His words accented but still clear.

  “You’ll shut up if you know what’s good for you, you lousy Kraut,” shouted Leroy. The German shut up.

  And Joe Howard thought, clearly, distinctly: Why the hell am I doing this?

  Manasseh, who in his short life had only left Mississippi to journey over into Alabama, knew what was coming next. He didn’t need his mama to tell him. He shifted in his seat. Joe Howard had been nice to him. Manasseh wanted to get up. Joe Howard had to lay a heavy hand on his shoulder to keep him down. Things were just so much like always. The little colored boy getting up automatically, and the little white boys, ahead, just as automatically turning back to see what was going on but staying put.

  Manasseh moved again, and Joe Howard looked down at him and he said—because he’d promised the boy’s mama that he’d watch out for him—“Everything’s going to be all right. You’ll see. Things are going to be different now. We just fought a war. We fought it, too—and that means nobody anymore’s got the right to take our paid-for seats from us.”

  He turned slightly and let his battle-sharpened gaze sweep on over the other Negroes—some already on their feet—on past them to the whites at the front where the woman had clustered her children close beside her. And where the bus driver had decided just what needed doing next.

  He looked over at the mother of the twins, puffed up his chest, started back. Outside, the electric Dr Pepper sign still twinkled. Its brilliance flashed over the little depot and illuminated it with the purity of the Bethlehem star. But not all the lights on it worked, and Joe Howard heard the sizzle and crackle of currents trying to connect. He realized that he still was holding on to Manasseh, holding on to him too tightly. He might be hurting the boy. He relaxed his hand.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered. Manasseh from Revelations in the Bible nodded, but with that white bus driver lumbering back like thunder, he was too scared to look up at Joe Howard now.

  The guard named Leroy said, “You’ll do what I say, boy . . . ,” creating a dangerous situation.

  The driver drew close. His name, Johnny Ray Dean, was scripted in bright blue thread on his gray uniform. “What’s all this? I don’t want no confusion.” His words were drawn out in a thick Alabama hill-country drawl and there was a glint in his eye that said he was aware of and happy that he had the redheaded woman’s full attention once again. Happy that such a really pretty woman would see how good he was at solving nigger problems.

  “There is no confusion,” said Leroy. “This here boy’s just got to let folks do what they been told to do.”

  Joe Howard thought, If this cracker calls me nigger one more time, I’m going to kill him. Kill him outright.

  Joe Howard said, “And I have told this fucking white man I am not getting up out of my seat for some prisoner, for some goddamn German. For some goddamn fucking Nazi.”

  He’d cussed now. Around him, all the old women, both colored and white, gasped.

  Joe Howard said, “I’ve had . . . My friends . . . The war . . .”

  But what friends were left? They were all dead now. And these people—could they care about the war and what had happened to him there?

  Around Joe Howard, the whole bus grew silent as a grave and the driver looked at him for a long moment. Eyes narrowed, fists bunched. Then he smiled. He opened up his mouth and he said, “Hold on there, I don’t want no trouble. There’s another bus due in. It cleared out of Birmingham right after we left Tuscaloosa, a bare couple hours behind us. Why don’t I see if I can get you and these here prisoners on that one, Leroy? Avoid all this confusion.” He said this even though the white part of the bus was half empty. But, of course, they would not put these German prisoners up there. Not with the white women. Not with the white children.

  Johnny Ray Dean leaned in and whispered something to the guard, a few quick words that Joe Howard could not hear, and then added, “I’ll climb on down. Make the call myself.”

  “Yeah, Leroy,” said the young deputy. “Let him do that.”

  Leroy paused over this, considered, though Joe Howard could tell this was only a ruse and that his mind was already made up.

  Johnny Ray said, “There’s other ways to handle this; let this boy be for now. Just don’t give me no more ruckus. GIs all coming home and they want everything they can get their hands on. I get trouble on this bus—somebody might think to give my route to one of them.”

  Again, Leroy appeared to cogitate. “Well, sir, you sure there’s another bus coming?” Whatever the driver had whispered privately seemed to have calmed him down, made him stand tall again, at least for the moment. Still, there was face-saving to do.

  “Oh, I’m sure,” said the driver. “There be plenty of ways to skin a coon.”

  The white men—all of them: guards, prisoners, and the driver—trooped to the front of the bus, the Americans whispering, the Germans behind them. The German who had spoken up earlier turned back. He caught Joe Howard’s gaze and then quickly looked away. Joe Howard watched as all of them got off the bus. Johnny Ray climbed down with them. The blacks still had their seats, but Joe Howard felt like he always felt when he’d come out of a battle—that same strange alchemic mixture of relief and shame.

  “Daddy wouldn’t want me cussing,” he said out loud. His daddy wouldn’t want him talking back to white men with guns, either, but there was no helping that now.

  He made up his mind he was going to apologize to Manasseh; maybe even to some of the ladies, especially to that one who wore the gold star that told the world she had a son who’d been killed in the war. Maybe she might understand.

  “Miss Anna Dale,” he whispered her name. Sure of it now.

  Joe Howard sat back down again. He touched his face and his shirt and his arms and his hands, just as he’d done when he’d wakened from his nightmare, and found himself on this bus going home. He tried, but he could no longer see his face in the window. It had grown too dark for that.

  Johnny Ray Dean climbed back on, the courier shifting under his weight, and the whole thing was over. He started up the engine, pulled out onto the asphalt road, but if he had thought he could win his maiden’s admiration by swaggering back and taking control of things, he’d been much mistaken. He tried talking to her, and then after a silence tried again, but even Joe Howard could see she was no longer paying attention. She sat hugging he
r children. Except for the flame of a match and the burning coal of a cigarette being smoked farther up, the bus rolled on, silent and dark.

  It eased on down a road free of traffic, ambling along until it finally crossed the state line. Manasseh hadn’t said a word since he’d first seen the Germans. Now Joe Howard remembered something—another tale, another legend from his daddy—and he bent close so that he could whisper it into the child’s ear and comfort him with it.

  “You see that sign—see how it says JEFFERSON-LEE COUNTY WELCOMES YOU? All white on green and pretty? And see the one stuck up behind it, WELCOME TO MISSISSIPPI? These two painted boards, coming one right after the other, mean you enter the county before you enter the state. Twenty feet between them, and those twenty feet are magic—because nothing owns it. Not Alabama. Not Mississippi. It’s a special place. Free. That’s what my daddy always said to me. And anything can happen on this magic land. My daddy told me if you make a wish here . . . If you make a quick wish here, why, the mistletoe might find you . . .”

  • • •

  IT WAS IN THAT PLACE of magic that the Bonnie Blue Line interstate courier bus shuddered to an unscheduled stop. From his place in the back of it, Joe Howard saw Johnny Ray Dean crane his head to look at him and then slowly, slowly crank the bus door, opening it onto this special make-a-wish place.

  Where Joe Howard heard voices. Where he saw men.

  Where he blew his breath into heaven and let mistletoe float down from the sky to kiss him one last time upon the cheek.

  2.

  Regina Mary Robichard noticed the envelope as soon as she entered her office. Fat and cream-colored, it lay there among the business letters, newspapers, and circulars on her small desk. It looked out of place, like an invitation. Not just any invitation, either, but an opening to something she might actually like to attend. Later, it was the photograph within that envelope that would capture her attention, and keep it. But for now the envelope itself was enough.

  She had come in on a Saturday with the idea of working for a few hours and then, since she was downtown, rewarding herself with a little shopping at Best & Co. or at Peck & Peck. There was a sale on hats at Gimbels, but she had a lot of hats and didn’t really need more. She’d read about another good deal, this one for better suits, at May D&F and a new movie, The Best Years of Our Lives, which was playing at the Rialto in Times Square. She thought about taking that in as well. If she was lucky, all of this might keep her out of her new stepfather’s house, and her mother—or, rather, her parents—would be asleep when she came in.

  It was a legend in the family how Regina, when she was little, under six, would go up to a man—any man—who had come to hear one of her famous mother’s famous speeches and say, “Would you like to marry my mommy? Would you like to be my daddy?” Often the men she asked did not know how to take this. They’d duck. They’d turn away. Of course they all knew what had happened to Oscar Robichard, not that long ago in Omaha, Nebraska. They wouldn’t have been there if they hadn’t, and they were all sympathetic. But nobody wanted to be Regina’s daddy. Nobody had wanted to marry her mother. Until now.

  “Monday,” Regina said aloud, “I’ve got to start looking for my own place.” I’ve got a job now, and my own life. It’s time.

  Behind her, she left the main door unlocked and opened a crack in case someone else came in, always a possibility on a Saturday here at the LDF, or the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, as it was more formally known. People worked late; they came in on weekends. There was always that much to do. Regina shared her space with three other lawyers, all of them men, one of them white. None of whom exactly relished having a woman in their midst. They never said this, not outright, but it was implied in their stories that stopped in mid-sentence, in laughter that abruptly died when she came into the room. She suspected that half the male lawyers thought she was here because her mother was Ida Jane Robichard, the other half because of the way that her father had died. They were all wrong. Regina knew she was here because she was born to be here, born to value the law and its order. With her history, who wouldn’t? But this didn’t stop her from sometimes feeling . . . well, strange.

  Especially because she sat directly across from Edgar Morrison Moseley III (“But my friends call me Skip”), hired as a staff lawyer three weeks before she’d been, fully as ambitious as she was herself, and the nemesis of what she liked to call her “legal life.” Skip had never been happy to have a woman in the office, a fact he made abundantly clear. Invariably, the women lawyers he talked about had something in common with Regina—“Hey, she looked exactly like you look. Graduated Columbia, too. I was astounded”—and they all ended up in either a sad or bad way.

  “War’s over. Women need to do their duty, go back home and make babies. A woman working takes a job away from a family man.” This was his continual refrain, called out whenever he thought Regina might be listening. Once he’d actually lectured her to her face while they were having sandwiches and coffee at the Forty-second Street Automat. “You need to get yourself married, settle down.” Ida Jane might have slugged him, but Regina didn’t. She just made her excuses and caught a cab home.

  “Why do you even date such a jerk?” Ida Jane had looked up from the piece she was writing, her brow still creased in concentration, splotches of fountain-pen ink dotting her hand.

  “It wasn’t a date, not really,” Regina answered. “We’d worked late, decided to go out, that was all. Besides, Skip’s got a right to his opinion. I just can’t let his opinion interfere with my life.”

  “Got to change some laws if you want to make sure that doesn’t happen.” Ida Jane rolled her eyes, shook her head. “But I guess that’s why you’re working over there at the Fund.”

  Now Regina pulled off kid gloves and a veiled felt hat and put them on a wooden chair. She glanced from the small room in which she stood to a smaller room next to it, which was stacked floor to ceiling with alphabetized manila envelopes. This was her special place, the reason she’d come to work on such a sunny Saturday morning. “Reggie’s Realm,” the others called it, relieved that it was her responsibility and not theirs. These were her cases. Thousands of them, sent in by Negro servicemen who had been court-martialed or dishonorably discharged for doing what a white man had gotten away with doing or been slightly reprimanded for doing.

  “My name is Legion,” Thurgood Marshall had said when he’d handed them over while out of the corner of her eye Regina had seen Skip smirk. They were not considered a gift and had been assigned to her because she had been the last one hired, and could be the first one fired, if she wasn’t careful. If she didn’t keep her nose to the grindstone and work hard. But she had surprised herself by actually liking the cases—or “the causes,” as she began calling them, though only to herself. She looked forward to opening each new envelope, reading through its depositions and briefs, getting to know men who had laid out their grievances in their own measured, carefully written-out words.

  Still, the fat, cream-colored envelope beckoned her first.

  She walked across the linoleum floor to take it into her hands, to weigh and measure it. Vellum, she thought, a good one. Being able to distinguish standard bond from good vellum was something that she knew how to do.

  The writing on the envelope was in a spidery Palmer penmanship and addressed to Thurgood Marshall, Regina’s boss. The name Thurgood Marshall had no Mr. before it. There was no Esquire behind it. It had been sent to him care of something called the Negro Legal Office, 69 Fifth Avenue, New York 10, New York. The street address, at least, was correct. The fact that it had been mandated to Thurgood did not stop Regina from opening it. She had taken the New York State bar examination two weeks before and was waiting for the result. But before moving into a new position as staff attorney, she had clerked for Thurgood during her last year at Columbia Law, and she was used to opening anything that came to the office and was addressed to him. Even now, when he
was out of town, which was often, the secretaries routinely brought his letters to her, and she went through everything that was not marked private. This envelope was not marked private.

  The cleaning people had been in the night before, and the shades and windows had been opened to let in the fresh air. This far down Fifth Avenue there was little noise drifting up from the street on a Saturday morning, and from the other offices that surrounded theirs, even less. Not like Harlem, where she’d just come from and which, even at this early hour, was already alive to the full and syncopated rhythm of its day. For a moment, Regina just stood there, listening to the silence.

  She looked for but could not find her letter opener, and so she used her fingertip to open the flap. This proved to be quite easy. The glue had been licked down only on the tip, but Regina’s nail polish—Elizabeth Arden’s Montezuma Red, worn patriotically during the war and still not abandoned—left a slender crimson wheal along the heavy ivory paper. Regina did not notice this. The envelope’s contents, newspaper clippings, showered onto the tidy plane of her desk. She did not stop to study these. There was a snapshot as well, and she paused over it.

  The photograph was of an old Negro man, his face ashy and worn, and gone not wrinkly but ropey in the way that black skin aged. He was smiling and holding on for dear life to a man younger than he was but who looked just like him. His son. The old man had on a white shirt that was carefully ironed but obviously threadbare. Regina could tell this even in black and white. His son was decked out in a splendid U.S Army–issue uniform, clearly brand-new. Even though the two of them were looking into the camera, they were beaming at each other. She wondered, for a moment, where the mother was, then decided that, of course, the mother was the one who had taken the photograph. Who else could have captured such love? After a moment, Regina started reading.

  And as she read, she took notes on a small stenographer’s pad, a holdover habit from the many years she had spent at lectures in college and in law school, though she had decided that this particular practice was something she must give up. There were still so few women lawyers in the courts of New York that she was regularly taken for a stenographer, a secretary. Even that, she was told, was a huge step up in professional recognition for her, a pretty colored girl who dressed well. As Regina wrote, the sun moved to shadow her hand upon her words. She made two brief telephone calls from the shared phone on another lawyer’s desk. At one point she went into a side office, rifled through the membership files, looking something up, and then returned to read and to write once again.