The Secret of Magic

by Johnson, Deborah

  But at least the courthouse was right where Mary Pickett had said it would be—a two-story red brick building with white-painted trim. Regina saw it loom up straight in front of her, plain as day in the morning light. And with a soldier standing guard right beside it. A granite soldier, clutching a stone rifle and with stone eyes that seemed to pick out Regina and follow her down the street. The War Memorial. Beneath his feet a plaque, its bright brass turned verdigris by humid air and time. She was too far away to read it. She didn’t know if she’d want to even if she could. There’d be no black name on it, of that she was certain. Not with that Confederate flag flapping overhead.

  This wasn’t a flag you came upon often in New York, and if you did usually it was buried deep someplace in a book. Or else, once in a while, you’d see it on the front page of some daily, grimly sinister in a black-and-white photograph, surrounded by men who thought it best to hide who they were behind pointed hats and long, plain sheets. But no matter where she saw it, the Confederate flag remained an object of caution. Certainly not something Thurgood or the other lawyers at the Fund would think to bring back as a sweet Southern memento. Yet here, in Revere, Mississippi, the Stars and the Bars reigned supreme.

  “And not just anywhere,” whispered Regina, “but over the damn courthouse.”

  Perhaps not the best of omens as it fluttered over a square that was filling up with white people, going into the courthouse or coming out again, folks who stopped to chat with one another on its broad steps. It waved over a black man, busily snapping his shining rag over the shoes of a portly white man, both of them deep in conversation, over what looked to Regina from this distance like a one-page racing form. The white man shook his head, stabbed the air with a forefinger. The black man, shook his head, mumbled, “Uhm. Uhm. Uhm.”

  But they looked helpful enough, at least the black one did, and Regina was heading in their direction, her perkiest smile at the ready, a polite, “Excuse me, sir, is the Duval law office near here?” rising to her lips. When she noticed the woman. Or rather, being Ida Jane Robichard’s daughter, when she noticed the woman’s jaunty felt hat. A cloche that looked for all the world like a chipper red sailboat; feathered, veiled, facing optimistically forward, and bobbing along on a carefully straightened, darkly perfect, wave of marceled hair.

  That’s a really nice hat, thought Regina, surprised a little by the fact that the woman who wore it was Negro.

  And she looked serene, too, looked sprightly, as she made her slow way down the main street. It didn’t seem to be easy going. One hand steered a white wicker baby buggy while the other clutched what looked to be a three-year-old boy.

  His mother—because surely she was the mother—had to wheel around the uneven sidewalk paving and dodge tree roots that poked up through the asphalt, just like they did on Mary Pickett’s street. And her little boy was a handful. Lively. He clamped his arms to his sides, told his mother, and anybody else within earshot, that he was too old now to hold hands. He and the woman looked just alike. Same big eyes. Same high cheekbones and coffee coloring. Not a white child. And Regina wondered what this woman’s husband must do for a living that she was able to dress smartly and walk about with her own children on the sidewalks of Revere, Mississippi, in the middle of a fine, bright day.

  The carriage lost its balance, nicked against the curb, shifted. Inside it, a baby started to cry. The woman looked like she might need some help. Regina started toward her. But then she stopped. Men were coming down the street, straight toward the woman, and they were closer than she was.

  White men, dressed in shirt sleeves and ties, their suit coats slung over their shoulders. They had hats on their heads and they were talking, busy with what they were saying, and they didn’t appear to notice the woman and her children on the sidewalk. Even though she was coming straight toward them. Even though the child still loudly protested that he was way too old to hold hands. And the baby crying . . . How could they miss all that?

  But they sure seemed to.

  The woman kept her eyes studiously down; kept them on the buggy, on her recalcitrant three-year-old son, on the pavement, on her shoes. But she must have seen the men, must have been paying attention to them all along. Because as Regina watched, she deftly maneuvered her baby carriage and herself and her boy, all together, off and into the street, leaving the white men to own the sidewalk. Only after they’d passed did she climb back up where she’d been and go on like before—except for one difference. Her little boy stopped protesting. He followed his mother’s example and lowered his eyes to the ground.

  Regina could not believe it. She could not believe it—except, of course, she could. It’s why she was here, wasn’t it? Bad behavior taken for granted, ending in murder and who knew what else. What she didn’t understand, though, was the scintilla of her anger—a sharp, bright shard of it—that splintered off from the rage she felt toward those men and trailed that Negro mother.

  She thought of Ida Jane, all the hard work, all the fiery speeches.

  “You don’t stand up for yourself first, ain’t nobody in this world going to stand up for you.”

  • • •

  BED DUVAL’S OFFICE, too, turned out to be exactly where Mary Pickett had said it would be, catty-corner and across from the courthouse. It was in a one-story brick building hugged up between the Moffett’s Dry Goods Store (COFFINS $5, MADE WHILE U WAIT) and another squat structure with a simple LAWYERS CHEAP (LAND ISSUES), green paint on a white sandwich-board sign. The Duval office was different from both these. More impressive. You couldn’t miss it if you tried. Twin windows glared out onto the sidewalk. One read NATHAN BEDFORD FORREST DUVAL V, ATTORNEY-AT-LAW in gold-edged black letters, the other said NATHAN BEDFORD FORREST DUVAL V, ATTORNEY-AT-LAW AND DISTRICT ATTORNEY. The two windows were separated by a worn red door.

  Regina opened it. Stepped inside, where everything was dusty and dim. It took a few seconds of real concentration before her eyes were able to focus. When they did, she found herself in a cramped, unadorned room, staring at a good-sized wooden partner’s desk stuck like a sentry post right in its middle. Behind which sat a precise little white woman, her back pulled up to attention, ramrod straight.

  “What you want?” Said in a husky voice that seemed redolent of some deep, strong substance, either good liquor or bad cigarettes.

  Regina took a deep breath, plastered a smile on her face, strode over, her hand held out.

  “I am Regina Mary Robichard,” she said. “And I would like to speak with the district attorney for a moment. I’m sorry I don’t have an appointment.”

  “About what?” said the woman. Maybe more curious than actively hostile, but with nothing about her that indicated May I help you? either. Regina drew her hand back.

  The woman had on a blue linen suit with a piece of white lace pinned, corsage-like, to its shoulder, hair gray as gunmetal, lipstick bright as fire. Sixty years old if she was a day. A gold sign perched on her desk proclaimed her as Miss Tutwiler. Which was a relief to Regina. Not a full day in town yet and already she’d noticed a subtle social distinction between somebody you called Miss Mary Pickett or someone you addressed as Miss Calhoun. Miss Tutwiler, spelled out, left no room for equivocation. This was further emphasized by a crisp THE RECEPTIONIST written beneath.

  A model of secretarial perfection but . . . It was early. And Miss Tutwiler, maybe, a trifle inattentive. She’d passed over a pin curl. Smack in the middle of her forehead, the steel bobby pin in it winked out from surrounding corkscrew curls like a third eye. Regina wondered if she should point this out, if that would be the polite thing to do. But Miss Tutwiler’s scowling face did not seem to welcome a warning.

  So Regina repeated, “Mr. Duval. I’d like to see him, if you don’t mind.”

  “Well, I certainly do mind, and I’m sure he would, too,” said Miss Tutwiler. “If he were in, but he isn’t. Nobody here now but me.”

 
Just then the telephone jingled. Without taking her eyes off Regina, Miss Tutwiler reached down and picked it right up. “Well, good morning to you, too, Mr. Blodgett,” she sang out bright as a bird into the Bakelite receiver. “He sure is. I’ll get him right on.” She punched a button on her desk. Regina heard the echo of a buzzer behind a closed door.

  “What you want?” This from a man’s voice, a deep rumble that sounded decidedly like Miss Tutwiler’s did—same accent, same brine.

  “Mr. Jackson Blodgett on the horn for you, Forrest.” Then she turned back to Regina, her small eyes narrow, a decided smirk on her tight little lips. “What, you still here?”

  Laughter echoed out from behind the closed door. Two men there. Right behind it. Obviously “Forrest” was one; she wondered about the other. Could it be Bed Duval?

  Regina drew herself up, ready for battle. But then she remembered the Confederate flag. She could almost hear it snapping just outside the office window. This was not the place, nor the moment, to get righteous, not if she wanted to help Mr. Willie Willie.

  “If you don’t mind, I’ll wait.”

  “Outside,” Miss Tutwiler said matter-of-factly. “No place for your kind to lollygag around in here.”

  Regina glanced pointedly over at six empty straight-back chairs that were lined up like lemmings around the walls, old Saturday Evening Posts sprinkled on tables beside them.

  Miss Tutwiler saw where she was looking, shook her head. “You gonna wait outside or I’m gonna call the police. Those are your options. Choice is up to you.”

  Well, wasn’t this what Regina had expected? She headed toward the door but paused with her hand on the knob and turned around to face the righteous Miss Tutwiler.

  Should she or shouldn’t she?

  She decided she should.

  “Oh, by the way,” said Regina Mary Robichard, Esquire, all innocence. “I thought you might like to know, you missed a bobby pin. Unfortunately, it’s sticking right out in the front of your head. Normally I wouldn’t think to mention it, but—it just ruins your appearance.” She drawled the words out, slow and easy, and hoped she sounded Southern. Like this was said by a Negro who belonged here.

  Miss Tutwiler’s hand flew up. It had a life of its own, she couldn’t stop it. The surprised “Oh!” of her mouth almost exactly matching the metal errant “Oh” of the bobby-pinned curl on her head. Regina turned away quickly. She didn’t want Miss Tutwiler to see the twitch of her own wicked smile.

  But outside, in the sunlight, her triumph lasted all of thirty seconds. That was the amount of time it took her to realize she was, again, back on the street. She blinked into the bright sunlight and turned back to the door she was certain closed her off from Bed Duval. In there with his father . . . Well, the both of them would have to come out sooner or later. She’d just sit down and wait.

  Trouble was, she didn’t know where to sit, or even if she could sit. Sitting didn’t seem to be racially designated, unlike the drinking fountains in front of the courthouse, which she could easily see from the Duval office steps. WHITES ONLY read the sign over clean, snowy porcelain; COLORED over the rusting spigot right next to it. But the wrought-iron benches that lined the square—who got to sit on them and where? They didn’t have anything written on them, no signs. Maybe they didn’t need to. They were already filled with old white men deep in animated conversation, with hatted and gloved ladies batting at the still air with palm-leaf fans. There were no Negroes sitting anywhere.

  But, sitting or not, everybody—black and white—turned to look at her. Regina saw what she now thought of as the Tutwiler “O” distorting the features of many a face. Fans ceased fanning; men stopped their talking on the bench. The only person not staring at her was the shoeshine man. He was looking down, paying strict attention to every pair of scuffed boots that shuffled past. Regina felt almost as sorry for him as she did for herself. She’d become a spectacle, something she didn’t like and wasn’t used to being. Who, in New York, stood out on the street? But there was no help for it here, not that Regina could see. She was never going to get into a courtroom with this case unless she found out what had happened with it in a courtroom already. She opened up her purse, pulled out a clean white lace handkerchief—glad she’d brought a few of them with her; they might come in handy—laid it out on the step, and sat herself down. Behind her, the Duval law office remained silent, shut up tight as a tick. Nobody went into it. Nobody came out.

  Soon as she was settled, she wanted water, but she dreaded that spigot. She wanted a bathroom, but she dreaded that, too. Who knew where it might be? And even when she found it, what would it be like? She also started sincerely regretting the beige cashmere sweater. It had seemed such a good, heaven-sent way to tweak Mary Pickett’s pride this morning, but Regina was burning up in it now. Still, she couldn’t pull it off, and she knew it, not when she was sitting on concrete steps, waiting to see the district attorney. That wouldn’t look professional at all.

  She was thinking all this as the wagon pulled up, so close that Regina could hear the crackle of ice melting through the straw that lined its bed, so close she could smell the sharp odor of mule and dusty plank and water-saturated hay stubble. So close she could make out the heady, unmistakable aroma of fresh-from-the-oven peach pie.

  Just like what she’d smelled last night, at Mary Pickett’s. The wagon seemed familiar, too. And maybe even the mule—or was it a donkey? Who knew? Certainly not Regina, but she perked up. She looked over.

  A woman climbed down from the wagon seat—jumped down, really—her little black boots hitting the asphalt with a sharp, hollow click. The woman was short and round and looked like a biscuit. Both her skin and her hair that same color, so similar you had to stare hard at her forehead to see where one ended and the other began. She wore a long yellow dress that was stamped all over with tiny, faded pink flowers, with pin tucks and smocking pulling in the waist. It was a riot of a dress, something that seemed created for a late-afternoon tea dance. Ida Jane would have known for sure, but Regina didn’t need her mother’s sharp dressmaker’s eye to see that this costume had certainly not been made to wear on the dusty streets of Revere, Mississippi, at ten o’clock on a weekday morning. Nor, probably, had it been made for this biscuit woman, at least not originally. If you looked closely, and Regina did look closely, you could see that the dress was threadbare at its hem and at the ends of its long sleeves. That it was faded almost white at its armpits; that it was old and that the woman who wore it was old, too—which came as a shock to Regina. She certainly hadn’t seemed like an old woman when she’d jumped down from her seat, when she lapped the mule’s reins around the hitching post that—in 1946!—was still embedded in the street. No, when she did all this, the woman moved with a grace that was ageless as air.

  Not looking right or left, the woman walked to the back of her wagon, opened a safe, lifted out four pies, and balanced them down the length of one arm. They were peach pies, golden brown, with lattice crusts thick with the dark ooze of amber fruit juice. Now Regina was convinced this was what she’d smelled at Mary Pickett’s last night. She leaned forward, curious.

  The woman crossed the street, still balancing the pies, strolled down past the courthouse, speaking to no one, not nodding. But, like Regina, she’d been noticed.

  A man called out, “Hey, Peach? Come into town to get away from the haints out there in the forest? Your brother, maybe? Waiting to call out ‘boo’? Waiting to get his hands on you, to snatch you baldheaded if he can? Kill you like you killed him? Hey, don’t you hear me talking to you, Peach?”

  Peach?

  There was a Peach in The Secret of Magic. Regina narrowed her eyes, looked across the street again, closely this time. The man talking was the one she’d seen last night at the depot, the blond one, the one who’d been playing with the knife. And once again there were other men with him. Three of them. Young. Able-bodied. Ought-to-b
e-working guys. All white. But here they were, sprawled on a bench, taking the sun at the courthouse. As Regina watched, Knife Man—that’s how she thought of him—stuck out his leg, like he meant to trip the woman as she passed. The others guffawed, but the woman stepped deftly around him, curled her lip, went on about her business. While the men catcalled after her, she walked calmly through a door Regina hadn’t noticed before but that opened onto something called the Old Jail Café.

  Walked through the front door, and this was important. It encouraged Regina, who was still thirsty and was starting to get hungry as well. If that woman could walk through that front door, then so could she. Regina got up. She gathered her things and followed the woman to the Old Jail Café. Which was a busy place, people going in and out. Not maybe a lot of them this time of day, but enough. All of them white.

  But that woman had been colored, and she was inside. Regina had seen her go in. Surely this must mean that the Old Jail Café was a place where Negroes could enter, where Negroes could get themselves something to eat?

  Still, something made Regina hesitate. She went up to the window, tried peering around and through the whitewashed letters. But she could see nothing, not really. The sun had angled behind her. It bounced off the dust on the glass, made it opaque. Which meant she couldn’t see race. Were there black people inside? She glanced furtively around one last time to make sure she hadn’t made a mistake, that this was where that mysterious colored woman had disappeared. It had to be. Except for the door of the courthouse, there was no other. Regina took a deep breath and walked inside.