The Secret of Magic

by Johnson, Deborah

  “And why?” she prompted.

  Mary Pickett looked wary. “Why what?”

  “Why would the men get on the bus in the first place? Why would they just, out the blue, decide to stop the bus and . . . I don’t know . . . take him off? Aliceville, Alabama, was mentioned in those clippings you sent us. It was his last stop, and something must have happened there. Something that got Joe Howard killed—or was the excuse for him getting killed. There has to be a link, and it seems to me the district attorney would be the most likely place to start in order to find it. He seemed to have been active in putting the case together. The newspapers talked about him, not about the sheriff. Once I have some idea what was presented, I’ll know what we need to find out to get him to reopen proceedings. Unless, of course, you think I should speak directly to the circuit court judge.”

  “Judge’s out with his dogs,” Mary Pickett snapped out. “It’s bird season.”

  “When will he be back? Tonight?”

  Mary Pickett looked at Regina like she was crazy. “I said Judge Timms’s gone bird hunting. He takes his dogs out once a year because, in his words, ‘They just love it to death.’ If you’re lucky, he’ll be back here right about Thanksgiving. But I don’t imagine you plan on staying that long?”

  “No,” said Regina. “I think we can clear things up before then. Look, maybe the district attorney knows how to get in touch with him. He might get the judge to release the grand jury findings.”

  “You won’t find a thing in it.”

  “With all due respect, Miss Calhoun, I think I should be the one to make that decision. Isn’t that why you sent for someone from the Fund—so that Mr. Willie Willie would have a responsible lawyer?”

  Mary Pickett regarded her. “Maybe.”

  She reached for her toast. “That’s a nice skirt you got on.”

  Something in her tone sent a warning, but Regina said, “Thank you. My mother made it. She’s a dressmaker.”

  Now Mary Pickett was looking right at her. “Ida Jane Robichard. Isn’t that your mother? The anti-lynching crusader? I put the whole thing together myself last night. I recognized the patronymic right away when I saw it on the telegram y’all sent down. Robichard’s not that common a name, even down this close to Louisiana. I thought you might be related.”

  For a moment the only sounds were those of a bee buzzing, a bird chirping, the tires of one lone vehicle traveling slowly up a nearby road. That’s all, as Regina sat reeling at the idea that this Southern white woman would be talking in her drawled voice of Ida Jane; that Mary Pickett would even know of her at all. A surprise. Almost a violation. Regina hoped to God the shock didn’t show on her face.

  “Yes,” she said. “I am related.”

  “Your mother, I imagine. You look like her. Pretty.” And then, to Regina’s unasked question, “I’ve seen pictures of her. Willie Willie gets the Negro newspapers, and I read from them. Sometimes. Your mother’s all through them. She’s famous. A firebrand. A martyr.”

  “No” said Regina, a little too quickly. “She’s not that.”

  “Don’t make a martyr out of yourself.” How many times had Ida Jane drummed that into her. “Martyrs are dead folks. And dead folks can’t get the job done.”

  “My mother doesn’t think of herself that way. She doesn’t think of herself at all. It’s the injustice that matters.”

  “But your father was, wasn’t he? A martyr, I mean. I imagine it’s given you a great deal to live up to.” Mary Pickett sighed. “Well, one way or the other, we’ve all got to live up to something. It’s a shared burden, nothing particularly racial about it.”

  Regina sat still as stone, her mouth chiseled into one tight line so thin it hurt her cheeks to draw it in. Who did Mary Pickett think she was, talking so glibly about Ida Jane and Oscar Robichard? Smug even that she had known their names. Regina wondered how a woman, so white and so privileged, could possibly think she knew anything at all about what it meant to be them.

  Mary Pickett swiveled slowly toward her, and not just with her head this time but with the whole of her body, with her careful sweater, and her lace blouse that hid the wink of good matching pearls. She moved no closer, but Regina caught a brief trace of her perfume, and it was a surprise, more opulent than she would have thought, deeper. Sexier.

  And Regina knew it. Shalimar. By Guerlain.

  Mary Pickett said, “You are ambitious. A lady lawyer. Determined to get ahead.”

  “Determined to help Mr. Willie Willie,” corrected Regina. “As I presume you are yourself.”

  “Yes,” said Mary Pickett, as the lines of her face gravitated upward. It was a small smile, but it worked a wonder on her face, lightened it up. “Helping my Willie Willie—that’s what I know to do best.”

  “Your Willie Willie?”

  “Yes, mine.”

  Regina opened her mouth, then quickly shut it again. She wanted to ask just what Mary Pickett meant by that word “mine”? Did she think of Willie Willie as a possession, like her big house or her big foreign car that sat beside it? Something that made up what could be considered the gracious Calhoun life? Or was there more to it than that? Regina thought there might be.

  A breeze caught at the late roses and fire geraniums, brushed against carefully trimmed hedges and through low-hanging branches along the tree-lined lane that Regina had hurried through that morning on her way to Mary Pickett’s great house. The movement drew Regina’s attention down its short distance, straight to Mr. Willie Willie’s cottage, where she had slept last night.

  “He doesn’t trust people,” Mary Pickett was saying. “He might act like he does, but he doesn’t. I’m talking about Willie Willie. I’m talking about white people. That’s the only thing about him that doesn’t have anything to do with Joe Howard. Willie Willie hasn’t trusted white people in years. Doesn’t like us, either. Doesn’t even pretend to anymore. It all started with Daddy.”

  Regina turned back from the cottage. “Your father?”

  “My daddy was the circuit judge for this county. He was that before I was born and will be that long after I’ve died, even though he’s been dead himself now for many a good year. His picture’s over in the courthouse, and the brass plaque under it still announces that’s what he is. Present tense. No dates. You will find that the past is still very much alive down here.”

  You will find . . . Future tense. This did not have the ring of being sent away in it. She tried not to smile as Mary Pickett continued.

  “Daddy’s the one actually taught Joe Howard to read and to write. He did this when Joe Howard was little, a teeny-weensy boy. Daddy’s the first one told Willie Willie that he had himself a special son, that Joe Howard was going to grow up to be something. At least once he got out of the South.”

  She paused. Considered. “Of course, now I think about it, Willie Willie probably already knew this. He’s quick as all get out, so he’s the one made sure Daddy knew just how smart Joe Howard was. I wouldn’t put it past him. In sly ways, that’s how he’d do it. He always could read Daddy like a book. He had to, in order to make a way. And he, too, was always ambitious, not for himself but for Joe Howard. Sounds good, doesn’t it? Wanting your son to go on, to be better than you were? I imagine, though, it could be a weight. Especially if you were like Joe Howard. Gentle, like he was. Loving his daddy like he did. Now, my own daddy was . . .”

  Regina thought she’d say “a dreamer.”

  “. . . a drinker.” Mary Pickett clipped the word out. “A bitter man. Just like Willie Willie’s got bitter . . .” She let her voice trail off.

  “You think Mr. Willie Willie’s got no reason to be bitter?”

  Mary Pickett fielded a brief, significant glance toward the cottage. “You think he’s got reason?”

  “Miss Calhoun, the world thinks Mr. Willie’s got reason—even without what happened to his son.”


  Something flashed behind Mary Pickett’s eyes and then died there. Its movement made Regina think to the way the pigeons on the ledge outside her bedroom window in Harlem fluttered early in the morning, almost in slow motion, when first they began to stir.

  Mary Pickett said, “Well, maybe.”

  Well, maybe. Indeed!

  Regina wanted to reach both hands right across that carefully laid table and shake this woman until she woke her right up.

  “You know,” said Mary Pickett, “when I was a child, I worshipped Willie Willie. He didn’t have to do that much—just spend some time with me. My mama was always sick. My daddy was busy. Willie Willie taught me things, taught all of us things. With him, there was always something new to learn. Something secret and magic. It made me feel special to think that Willie Willie belonged to me. I can remember being five years old and telling everybody who would listen that he was my natural daddy. Feeble as she was, you can sure bet my mama put a quick end to talk like that.” Mary Pickett narrowed her already thin lips. “Did he tell you how he changed Joe Howard’s name to Wilson?”

  “He told me he did it.”

  “But did he tell you how?”

  Regina shook her head as Mary Pickett nodded hers. “I imagine he didn’t. Too busy gossiping about me.” She sidled a quick glance over to Regina, who blushed. Mary Pickett continued, triumphant, “I knew it! Talking about when I got married. That would be Willie Willie. Wanting you to look someplace other than at him. It’s the secret of magic, known by the great Houdini himself. That’s what Willie Willie always told me. Distract folks. Get them to look where you want them to look.

  “Welllll”—Mary Pickett dragged the word out—“like I said, Daddy was the circuit judge here. He had his office at the courthouse, right where Judge Timms is now. Daddy had known Willie Willie since—I don’t know—forever. Willie Willie was born on our place out at Magnolia Forest. His own granddaddy had been a sl—” She stopped, darted a quick glance over at Regina. “He’d worked out there for my great granddaddy. Calhouns have been in Jefferson-Lee County a long time, and the Willies have been here just as long. They came, all of them, down from Pickett County, Carolina, together. Negro and white.”

  Mary Pickett looked down, then quickly up again. She said, “I think things began to change that summer when Joe Howard turned eight. Something happened . . . Willie Willie decided a boy like his boy—with potential, with the interest of my daddy, who was going to help him—a boy like that needed a proper patronymic. At least, that’s what Willie Willie called it. I was twelve years older than Joe Howard and had what you might call a fine education, but I didn’t know what that word patronymic meant myself. Had to look it up. Daddy knew, though, and I thought he’d bust open the way he got so tickled by Willie Willie saying that. But he made sure that Willie Willie got what he wanted. Took him over to the courthouse himself, walked him right in—a black man there to get some legal rights that didn’t have a thing to do with jail time. It was odd. Folks talked. And that was the whole point of it—folks talking. To this day, I still haven’t figured out what it was my daddy wanted more—to help Joe Howard or just stir things up. Because if Daddy stirred things up enough, he could keep people looking at where he wanted them to look—which was at race—and keep them from seeing what was actually going on . . .”

  Mary Pickett hesitated. Maybe it was dawning on her, Regina thought, that she might be saying too much. She half expected her to stop, but Mary Pickett went right on. She was obviously not a woman who listened to reason, even her own. “Which was that he was drinking and my mama was dead and Picketts and Calhouns were steadily losing their land hand over fist to the Mississippi Commerce and Agriculture Bank. All the old families . . . fading out fast.”

  Regina leaned closer, drawn into the rich, strong scent of Mary Pickett’s perfume and the smell of the roses from the silver loving cup on the breakfast table and this piece of the story of Willie Willie and Joe Howard, a story that she was eager to learn.

  Mary Pickett drew a wide arc with her hand, bright red nails flashing sunlight. “Everything going, going, gone—or at least most of it. How can I phrase it . . . Daddy willing people to think, ‘Well, will you look at that Charles Calhoun. What a hoot! What a card!’ Dressing Willie Willie up. Taking him over to the courthouse. Protecting him, in a manner of speaking, and doing just enough for him that folks here might be slightly scandalized . . .”

  “But not enough that they would feel threatened.”

  “No, Daddy couldn’t have that. He needed the judgeship, the little money it paid him, and it was elected. Willie Willie knew this. He was also smart enough to know he was being used by my daddy, but he would have done anything that would help Joe Howard to get out of this place, move on, get going, make something of himself.”

  At first, as she listened, Regina could not figure out why Mary Pickett was doing all this talking and confiding, until finally it struck her that maybe the whole thing was, for Mary Pickett, like being on a long-distance bus. Because on a long-distance bus you could pour out to the stranger next to you things you wouldn’t tell your own mother. Folks sitting next to you on something like that—they’re not real people. Just like I’m not a real person to her. The next time the bus stops, she thinks I’ll be gone. Regina rooted herself a little deeper into her Chippendale chair. She had not the least intention of going anywhere.

  Mary Pickett had a pack of Chesterfields on the table, and she lit one up now. It must finally have struck her what she was saying and to whom.

  “My daddy was a good man,” she said. Her words came out on a plume of smoke. “Just like all of us here in Revere are good people—at least up to a point.”

  Her voice lost some of its trilling languor. Regina wondered if a little bit of it had been put on for her benefit—“This is how all y’all think we all talk down here”—and if the great author wasn’t, perhaps, laughing at her some, underneath. But she couldn’t tell, not from what Mary Pickett was saying.

  “A good man. He had influence, and he used it. All these years and the Klan never marched in Revere, never got a foothold here. It marched in the north, though, all through it. It marched in Nebraska, where your daddy was killed.” She looked dead at Regina. “Daddy protected our people.”

  Just exactly who Mary Pickett meant by “our people,” Regina could not tell. Just like she hadn’t been able to tell what she’d meant by that “mine.” They were mysterious words, perhaps even offensive. Regina put her napkin down, pushed back in her fine-wood indoor chair from the rattan table and got up.

  “Miss Calhoun,” she said. “I believe it’s time I got going. Will Mr. Duval be at the courthouse? I need to get started with the investigation.”

  “Ah—Nancy Drew.”

  No, Collie Collington. In your book.

  That’s what Regina wanted to say. She had thought about telling Mary Pickett that she’d read The Secret of Magic, that she actually had her old, worn copy with her, that she had searched for it and found it and brought it down from New York and that it lay on the nightstand by her bed in the cottage. She decided against this, even though she had the feeling that it would be a pleasure, after all this time, for Mary Pickett to hear that her novel was still read, that it held its place in a life and that it was loved. Willie Willie had told Regina so himself.

  No, she couldn’t say all this. So she clamped her jaw shut and said nothing.

  Mary Pickett stubbed her cigarette into a crystal ashtray. Light danced on her face when she looked up. “Bed Duval won’t be at the courthouse. Not this time of day. Not in Revere. Serving justice isn’t a full-time occupation here. He’ll be in his office, though, the one he shares with his daddy. It’s at Sixth Street and Second Avenue. On the corner. Wait a minute. I’ll point it out.”

  She disappeared into her house, the screen door slamming behind her. When she came out she had on a felt-and-feathe
r hat and she was pulling on her gloves. She’d been gone only a minute, but that had been enough time for her to change her sweater. This new one was the dark color of a storm cloud. The buttons on it were muted as well, and Mary Pickett had obscured her eyes behind a pair of sunglasses framed in yellow tortoiseshell.

  “The thing you got to know about Revere,” she trilled out, as they set out along the side of the house, her voice a perfect imitation of Willie Willie imitating her, “is that the whole town is laid out on a grid—north to south avenues, east to west streets. All numbered, except for Main Street, which should be First Street, but isn’t. And, of course, what should be Second Avenue is actually College Street. If you remember all this and keep people placed where they belong, you won’t get lost and you’ll keep yourself out of trouble.”

  She walked along with calm deliberation as she said all this, brushing against a bush whose flowers were, perhaps, a little past their prime. Petals rained onto Mary Pickett’s shoulders and onto the smoothly clipped perfection of the lawn. The air around them was so still and so thick that Regina was able to catch their petal fragrance as they tumbled past her, hear them as they touched the grass.

  “What are they?” Regina thought she’d never seen a flower so fat and ripe, so beautiful.

  Mary Pickett smiled. “That, my dear,” she said, drawling out the words, slow, wicked, and delicious, “is the Confederate rose.”

  6.

  Regina started off, alone, toward the courthouse. The sidewalk she traveled along was rutted from one end to the other. And of course they’d all been this way in the book. Magnolia roots glaring up through the rugged pavement, looking for all the world like eyes on top of a scary ol’ alligator head. An alligator head that was just waiting there, quiet as Sunday, to trip you up, to bite you hard, and to call out “Gotcha!”

  But nobody or nothing was going to get Regina. She was determined. She’d watch her step, all right.

  “Turn right. You can’t miss the Duval place. It’s in front of the courthouse. Mind what I said about that grid.” That’s what Mary Pickett had told her as she passed her through the gate and then left her. Regina had to shake her head. She thought, All that—Mary Pickett’s changed sweater, her hat, her gloves, her dark glasses—put on for a two-minute appearance on a deserted mid-morning street. Everything so different from The Secret of Magic, and M. P. Calhoun, too, so unlike the kindly old man Regina had pictured.