The Secret of Magic

by Johnson, Deborah

  He had wound himself up good and, lawyer that he was, it would take him a long time to wind down. And Regina had heard all this before, especially since the end of the war. “Effect the legislation” had become the Fund’s battle cry. She stopped listening to the main argument. In her mind, she was already mapping out the appeal.

  So busy was she with this that she barely heard the murmur of his: “Why is this so important to you?”

  But her answer came quickly. It lived in her heart and on the tip of her tongue. “Justice,” she said, “if not for this man, at least for his family. M. P. Calhoun seems to think we can get it. At least she’s willing to give us a chance. You can’t just kill a man and that’s that.”

  Short. Simple. He would either let her go or he wouldn’t. Around them, the room held its breath.

  Thurgood looked at her, nothing on his face. He reached for another Camel, his Ronson lighter, a fresh ashtray. He flared the cigarette to life.

  “There’s more to it than what you’re saying. I don’t know if you realize that yet yourself, but you soon will. Mississippi will enlighten you, and, believe me, she’s a great teacher. Maybe the greatest teacher of all.” He smiled then, and the brightness dazzled her and blazed the weariness and the years from his face. “Oh, for the unmitigated zeal of young lawyers! Now, tell me you ever actually been to the South? I know your mama’s from Louisiana—she ever take you there?”

  Regina shook her head, eager now. “Never. She said once that south Harlem was plenty south enough for her. She said she doesn’t have a thing against it, and she’s gone there herself. With her talks, I mean. The South didn’t kill Daddy. It was the North did that.”

  Thurgood said, “It’s different from what you think it’s going to be. It’s better and it’s worse. Still, it might be useful for you to get on there and get the feel of it.” He seemed to consider. “We’ve got something coming up in the public schools in Jackson. Maybe even early next year. You could be helping out with that, so it could be good for you to get a feel for Mississippi. Way things are going, these days we might all could use some of that.”

  She thought: He’s letting me go. But the elation and the triumph of it, what she should have been feeling—her own first real case!—was shadowed by that unexpected mention of her daddy.

  Thurgood was still speaking “Two weeks—three, tops—down there should tell what M. P. Calhoun knows or suspects, whether there’s anything to it. The answer’s probably here someplace.” He gestured toward the clippings. “Hiding out in plain sight.”

  “Might take a month,” said Regina, on a roll now herself, but she was pleased enough with the two or three weeks.

  “I said three weeks tops. No longer. You’ve got those courts-martial to get through. How’re they going, anyway?”

  “Nothing new. It all takes time. You know how slow the government can be.”

  Thurgood knew all about the slowness of government. “Especially when it wants to be. What about the bar exam? When will you hear?”

  “Not for another week or so.”

  He nodded. “Call me every day—or, at the very least, once a week. Collect. And don’t look at me like that. I’m not singling you out. I’d make the men do it, too—Skip and the rest of them. I need to keep up with things. By the way—want Skip to go down there with you? The South can be tricky.”

  Regina bristled. No, she didn’t need anybody—especially Skip, who’d want nothing more than to best her at this. She could handle things herself and she told Thurgood this.

  He nodded. “Well, it’s a damn shame what happened—to that soldier, to his daddy. To your daddy.” Regina stood still as a statue, like she had learned to do a long time ago whenever her father’s name came up. Most of the time, if she stayed quiet people would just stop talking about him, and she wanted them to stop talking about him because talking about him hurt. You had to do something about it; that’s what Ida Jane had always told her. You couldn’t just talk about it. Talking didn’t do one damn bit of good.

  But for the first time, Thurgood seemed determined to talk about Oscar Robichard. “When someone dies as young as your daddy, as this Joe Howard Wilson—horrible, brutal deaths—that’s all about them that tends to get remembered. The way they laughed and what made them angry, the way they moved and the way they talked. The humanness of them, all that’s forgotten. How they died becomes how they live on. Maybe, going down with a fresh eye, you can find something out. Maybe.”

  He had made a decision, and he seemed, if not happy, then at least relieved by it. “Buster’s right. I’m away too much. Plus, as it turns out, this M. P. Calhoun is a white woman, and there’s always the chance, once she gets over the fact that you’re a woman, too, she might actually say more to you than she would have to me.”

  Regina wanted to believe this.

  “Know how you’re going to get there?”

  “I thought,” she said, talking right off the top of her head, “I might take the bus. That one Joe Howard Wilson took, that Bonnie Blue Line. Catch the train from Penn Station down to Birmingham and then go west from there, just like he did.”

  “Better take a pillow with you, then.”

  “A pillow?”

  “Oh, you’ll understand once you try finding some comfort in the COLORED ONLY section on a long-distance bus in the South.” He glanced at his desk and waved her away in dismissal. “Go on home, now. Rest up. You’re gonna need it. And say hello to Sam and Ida Jane for me. Give them my best.”

  The Secret of Magic. Daddy Lemon. The Mottley sisters and the mystery of their disappeared brother. Three children running into a forest. Now M. P. Calhoun herself/himself and Joe Howard Wilson—all beckoning to her. It was as though they were all right there. Whispering among themselves. Urging her on.

  Sunlight shafted through the office door they had left cracked, into that dark, quiet office, and the dust dancing on it seemed to Regina, with her lawyer’s eye and a mind that was not normally given over to fancy, like a sliver of road. Maybe it wasn’t yellow brick, but it was leading her somewhere.

  She thanked Thurgood once again, nodded good-bye.

  She walked out of his office.

  She walked into M. P. Calhoun’s book.

  3.

  Three children running into a forest, that’s how The Secret of Magic began. And the children’s names were Collie, and Jack, and Booker. Regina had to think hard to remember the first two, but Booker’s popped right to mind. It was almost as though he had been hiding out there all along, tucked away in some hidden fold of memory. In all the books she’d read when she was little, and she’d read many—the Nancy Drews, the Hardy Boys, the Bobbsey Twins, Five Little Peppers; the list went on and on—Booker was the first person she’d come across, with his smart little black self, who reminded her of people she actually knew, of her mother, and of herself.

  She’d went straight back home after the meeting with Thurgood, thinking so deeply about what she was going to do, about the snapshot in her pocket, about M. P. Calhoun and The Secret of Magic, that she almost missed her subway stop, barely made it off in time.

  She walked up Edgecombe Avenue, through the sedate row of apartment buildings and brownstones that marched along each side of the pavement, their crisp awnings and still-bright October geraniums announcing to the world what a nice place this was to live. Across the street at number 409 the sun caught a flicker at one of the second-floor windows. Regina looked up. She caught sight of a woman standing in front of the Venetian blind and carefully removing a forgotten blue star that hung at the glass. They’d been everywhere in Harlem during the war; you couldn’t walk anywhere without seeing at least one. A blue star meant you had a child in active service; a gold one meant they weren’t coming home. But the stars had almost vanished now. Regina couldn’t recall the last time, before now, that she’d noticed one. War fought. War won. War over. The woman
disappeared from the window. Behind her the Venetian blind snapped back into place.

  Regina turned and looked up past the sign that read DR. SAMUEL JAMES ROBINSON, GENERAL MEDICINE at the ground floor of the brownstone, then on up the stairs that led into his—their—home.

  When she opened the door, she heard them laughing. She recognized Dr. Sam’s deep boom right away. Then she heard her mother’s voice and it was clear and pure, like what Regina imagined a mountain stream might sound like as it rushed against the last of winter’s ice. She stopped, listened. Ida Jane sounded happy, and Regina had never really pictured her mother as happy. She’d thought—still thought—of her as strong and fierce, like a hero in an action comic. And not Lois Lane, either, the sidekick, but Superman herself. Regina stood there, in the darkness of the shadows, as the laughter washed over her again, and she marveled.

  Dr. Sam had done this? It wasn’t that Regina didn’t know him. Actually, she had known him all her life. In fact, he’d brought her into her life when her mother fled east after her daddy was killed. And Dr. Sam had been there ever since. A round, dark-skinned, competent man, he had sent Ida Jane clients for her little dressmaking business. He’d encouraged her to apply downtown at Hattie Carnegie, where she’d gotten that good seamstress job. What a godsend that had turned out to be! It had supported the two of them, mother and daughter, so that Regina could prepare herself at Catholic school and Hunter College and Columbia Law, while Ida Jane worked days and spent her nights propelling her own mission—which was to enact the anti-lynching laws.

  “It’s not right that folks get away with what they do.” These were the first grown-up words Regina recalled her mother saying to her.

  When she was little, sometimes Regina wondered if Hattie Carnegie and the other ladies Ida Jane worked with downtown even knew anything at all about her mother’s other life, knew that she was famous in it. She wondered if they knew about the speeches her mother gave at nights and on the weekends, about the pamphlets she wrote and the endless letters. Sometimes Regina wondered if the people where she worked even realized that Ida Jane was Negro. She had high yellow skin and light hair. She had light eyes, too, that were liable to snap out at you for no reason, at least no reason that most people understood. Many white people mistook Ida Jane for white, a mistake that had probably caused the death of Regina’s father three months before she was born.

  Ida Jane and Dr. Sam hadn’t heard her come in. Regina stood and listened to them for a moment, mostly to the low, peaceful mingling of their voices, their sentences punctuated by a sigh, a silence, sometimes more of that laughter. Regina, who was slightly bemused by her mother’s happiness—so sudden, or at least it seemed that way to her—and maybe a little frightened by its implications, nonetheless smiled at the sound. And then she went looking for the book.

  She found it in Dr. Sam’s attic, among a pile of boxes all neatly stenciled with her name, REGINA MARY, and then the word PERSONAL. Ida Jane’s work. Regina herself had been too busy with her studies for the bar exam, with her duties at the Fund, to take care of the move. So Ida Jane had taken care of it, like she’d taken care of so many other things in her daughter’s life.

  Just the two of us. We’ve got to stick together.

  Regina had the feeling this would change soon, and if it hadn’t already, it should. Ida Jane had a life of her own now. Regina thought she’d go looking for a spot for herself, her own little apartment, once she returned from Mississippi. Voices echoed up to her, footsteps moving in tandem across the polished wood floor from the living room to the kitchen. Yes, find her own place. When she got back, that’s what she’d do.

  She weaved slightly on the novel motion of this thought and felt a little seasick, but the sensation was not altogether unpleasant.

  She riffled through and found The Secret of Magic in the third box she searched. It still wore its original dusty pink jacket, the one with the three children on it, carefully preserved. She picked it up, ran her fingers along the spine, over the letters and the words of its title, over M. P. Calhoun’s name. It had been years since she’d last seen it, but when she pulled the book out, it fell open in her hands and she read:

  The children had always heard that the Mottley sisters were witches, at least that the youngest, Peach, was. Collie Collington especially had heard this, because this was the sort of thing she listened for. You couldn’t say the word “witch” around her without her paying attention. She had a nose for anything out of the ordinary, anything other people might not want to get into or explore. Of course the children all knew about Peach and her pies and her unfortunate sister, Sister. But when Collie heard that Peach Mottley had killed her brother, Luther, with nothing more than words strung together and a bad look, she called the others—Jack and Booker—together. And the three of them set off into the woods.

  A murder, thought Regina. Just like now there is a murder. For the first time she wondered if there might be a thread between the two. But you couldn’t assume this. One of the things Thurgood always reminded them was: “Assume makes an ass out of u and me.”

  When Ida Jane called out that dinner was ready, Regina had to force herself to stop reading. She slipped the book into her purse just as she’d earlier slipped the snapshot into her pocket. Two talismans. Together, they made her feel ready to go.

  • • •

  EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, Regina Mary Robichard started out from Penn Station on the Burlington Southern Star. She had thought of a list of things she should do on the journey and had written them out in her neat, precise hand.

  Go through the letter from M.P.C. again.

  Reread the newspaper clippings.

  Write out questions for Mr. Willie Willie Wilson and for M.P.C.

  Grand jury???

  She’d underlined this last one twice and then starred it. She only had two weeks if she wanted to make this case, three weeks at the outside. Still, with all this to do and a new land before her, the train hadn’t left the station before she’d dug out her copy of M. P. Calhoun’s book.

  This time she started on page one.

  I just know for a sad fact, after the events of last summer, nothing more’s bound to happen to me in this life. Therefore I, Collie Collington, age 11, originally from Mississippi but exiled now to boarding school in Holy Virginia (the very heartbeat of the Confederacy) have decided it’s time to write my memoir. I have chosen, after this brief introduction, to do this in third person because, believe me, I don’t feel like myself anymore. But I swear to heaven—something my poor dear dead mama would kill me for doing—everything you’re going to read about really happened. It all happened. Some of it’s still going on. Yet what I’m putting together right here is a novel.

  It was novel, after all, that someone like her, brought up “ladylike and proper, taught to always keep my knees together and my mouth shut,” should even think about writing a book.

  After that brief introduction and true to her word, Collie Collington hid herself within a change of grammatical voice. She did this. She did that. But mostly she hated Virginia, pined night and day for Mississippi . . . its forests, its fields, its wide-open spaces, its new history, its ancient ways. A place named for a river so mammoth it was known as the Father of Waters.

  Bad as she missed Mississippi, Collie missed her friends more. A boy named Jack and a colored child called Booker. She and Jack the same age, Booker a little younger. Two whites, one black. Two boys, one girl. One rich, two poor. You wouldn’t think they had a thing in common, but they did, and it was, in Collie’s words, a “deepened sensibility” brought on by the fact that all three of their mothers were dead. It was Daddy Lemon who whispered that this made them special. Made them see, he assured them, things that maybe other people might miss.

  And the reason they couldn’t see them was because they didn’t know enough to realize when something wasn’t there. But “his children” did know the ache of missi
ng the missing. Yes, they sure did. “He’s the only one,” wrote Collie, “in my experience, able to make different seem better, or leastwise as good as.”

  That’s what Daddy Lemon always told them, at least he told this to Collie and Booker. It was Collie who went on to tell it to Jack because she told everything to Jack. Had a schoolgirl’s crush on him, at least that’s what Regina, a schoolgirl herself, had thought. And Collie had made sure Jack knew first thing when Daddy Lemon gave them the idea of forming themselves into the Dancing Rabbit Magic Club.

  The deep wood and what lay within it was what Daddy Lemon wanted his children to know. The good-luck properties in a buckeye. The healing and the numbing that came from a piece of a toothache tree when your mouth was acting up. He showed them how to tell the difference between a natural hillock and a built-up Indian mound. Showed them fish scales, old as Jesus, that he’d found on a rock under the trestle bridge that spanned the river. He taught them to tell golden alexanders from butterweed and ox-eyed daisies—rough, wild flowers rarely spoken of at the Revere Garden Club, whose sacred meetings Collie, like her mother before her, was forced to attend. And the moons—harvest in autumn, beaver in winter, blue when two moons showed up in a month. Once, he called them outside, made them look straight up at that beaver moon—dead of night, if they’d known, their parents would have killed them—made them look straight up at the fat winter moon.

  Until that last summer. Those three children going deeper and deeper into the forest, sometimes with Daddy Lemon, sometimes without. Until one day Collie whispered, “I heard Miss Betty DeLean Mayhew talking about a murder. I heard her say something about a witch.”

  And with that, the magic ended and the mystery and the troubled times began.