The Secret of Magic

by Johnson, Deborah

  After a lifetime spent in New York, Regina recognized a diner when she saw one. Red vinyl–topped stools, a chipped white counter, a ringing brass cash register, huge and old-fashioned. Yet . . . she stayed close to the door, her hand never leaving the mesh of the screen, brushing against it to make sure, just in case, that she had a clear way out of here. But the familiarity of the diner smell reassured her. She looked around.

  Along the wall there were six small tables, two with people at them. She was looking hard at these people, trying to see if any of them were black—which they weren’t—and holding on to the door and looking around for a waitress, and deciding whether or not she should ease out again into the street, pretend she’d never come in here—Where was that Negro woman? The one they called Peach?—doing all this at once, when her eyes eased up the wall behind the tables. And she saw the pictures.

  Not pictures really. Photographs. Black-and-whites, like the little snapshot of Willie Willie and Joe Howard that she had in her skirt pocket right now. But these had been enlarged, and maybe a tad too much. They were grainy and strung one after the other along the wall by a pyramid of baling wire. And they were a curiosity, nothing to her.

  At least at first.

  Then she moved a little closer, edged closer, really. Still, they were nothing—men clustered around a wood platform. Men standing puffed up and tall like they’d done their duty with honor, some smoking, some smiling, all of them looking like they were proud of themselves. But what were they doing? Regina saw two dangling legs, a pillowcase thrown over a head.

  What they were doing was lynching folks up.

  Daddy. My daddy.

  She wanted to but couldn’t look away. It was as though the photographs pulled her to them, fascinated her, just like the one of Willie Willie and Joe Howard had done. Close up now, she saw the stars she’d missed before and she realized the men weren’t part of the Klan but sheriffs and deputy sheriffs. And what they were doing wasn’t called lynching, it was called hanging, because what they were doing was carrying out the law.

  “Hangings. Hangings. Hangings.” Regina whispered the word over and over again, as though the saying of it made all the difference. And for a moment it did, at least to her it did. It allowed her to take in air again and to breathe.

  “You! Get out of here!” A waitress in a red gingham dress barreled toward her, a pencil in her hand, a grease-splattered short-order cook right behind.

  “Get out! Get out! Get out!” Then, “Nigger!” An afterthought. Called out for good measure.

  Miss Tutwiler all over again. Except this time charging forward, quill at the ready, wild as a boar.

  But Regina didn’t mind. She wanted out.

  She ran through the door, back across the street—and there was the woman. The biscuit-colored woman with the bright clothes and the pies, the one Regina had followed into the Old Jail Café. Now she was sitting on the concrete step in front of the Duval office. She had a basket on her lap and was calmly regarding Regina’s progress through the narrow squint of what Regina now realized was her one good eye.

  Not exactly a friendly face, but a Negro one and familiar. Regina homed toward it like a bee to a hive.

  She stopped, too breathless to speak, but that didn’t matter. The woman was talking, and Regina recognized the voice, had heard it echoing up from Willie Willie’s living room last night.

  “Ain’t nothing but a little ol’ palmetto bug. How can it hurt you?”

  Now it was saying, “Honey, don’t you let those poor crackers get to you. Mess they cook over there—you wouldn’t want to eat it, anyway.” And, “You must be the lawyer Willie Willie kindly told me about. And that Miss Mary Pickett told me about, too, though maybe less kindly. My name’s Peach. Peach Mottley. I bake pies. Do laundry, too, but that’s a different story. I live way out there in Magnolia Forest. But then you must know all about me. Willie Willie said you read Miss Mary Pickett’s book.”

  “Miss Mary Pickett’s book?” Regina echoed. So she’d heard that knife man right. Regina sat down. “Peach Mottley . . . The one who killed her brother, Luther?”

  “Might have killed him. But I guess, after all this time, it’s the same.” Peach shook her head when she said this and lifted her lips into something that just might have been a smile.

  Regina couldn’t help herself. Lawyer or not, she reached out a tentative hand to make certain that this woman was real.

  Peach chuckled.

  “I’m solid, all right. Just as solid as that courthouse standing over there. Old as it, too, I reckon.”

  Her smile deepened, and when it did, Regina noticed a deep scar on the woman’s face that welted down from her ear to her lips. Three of her front side teeth were missing as well. Regina wondered what had happened to her, and if it had been an accident. In the book Luther had been violent, had been scary. But Regina knew she couldn’t ask, just as she couldn’t ask Peach if she dyed her hair, either, though sitting this close to her, Regina clearly saw the white roots. An old woman, a scarred woman, but if Peach was self-conscious about any of this, it sure didn’t show. And Lord—did she smell good! Like herbs in a garden and spices in a cake. Like sunshine and lavender. Like Central Park after a good spring rain.

  Regina said, “She wrote a book about you and used your own name in it?”

  “Why wouldn’t she?” Peach looked incredulous. “It’s my story, isn’t it? Not much made up.”

  “But . . .” Regina wondered how she could put this. “It’s about murder.”

  “Ah, murder,” said Peach. “Isn’t that why you’re here?”

  “To find out who killed Lieutenant Wilson.”

  Peach shook her head sadly. “Honey, everybody in this town knows the answer to that. You’ll learn it, too. That is, if you stick around long enough and the answer don’t kill you.”

  The square hushed around them. They could have been the only ones in it. The knife man, the one who’d tried to trip Peach—he and his friends gone now. Disappeared.

  “Who killed him?” It was a whisper from Regina but . . . what did she mean? Who killed Joe Howard? Who killed Luther Mottley? And who was this woman, come out of a book and talking to her?

  “Will you tell me?”

  When Regina said this, Peach looked over, squinted slightly as though all she wanted to do was take in part of Regina and leave the rest of her out.

  “Maybe I could tell you, but I won’t, and for the same reason nobody else is going to tell you, either. And believe me, everybody knows who did this, but ain’t nobody gonna come right out and say it. They’re just gonna keep inventing little diversions, conjuring down folks like you from New York, hoping time will heal a scab over the sore spot. Hoping Willie Willie will forget—which he won’t. Or decide to leave well enough alone—which he might. He trusts Miss Mary Pickett, good or bad, always has. But all this magic thinking and wishing not gonna do one bit of good. Something like this, the races involved, the only way it goes is from bad to worse. Me, I passed by my worst a long time ago. I don’t want to go back to it. No, no, no. Can’t go back.”

  But there must have been something about Regina that arrested Peach, because the scar on her face suddenly gathered up to her eyes again as she smiled.

  “Tell you what I can do, though, for you, and that’s lay out a trail. You know, like Hansel and Gretel into the woods. Ask Miss Mary Pickett about that colored boy sat next to Joe Howard on the Bonnie Blue. His name’s Manasseh Lacey. He won’t count for nothing in the law, that child, but at least your knowing about him will show you found something out. To Miss Mary Pickett, that is. She’ll know you mean business. She’ll think you might just find out something else. Then once that’s established, ask her about Miss Anna Dale Buchanan. She’s a white lady. And you can believe ol’ Peach on this one. Mrs. Buchanan is the reason you’re here.

  7.

  The M
ottley sisters, Peach and Sister, baked their pies and their cakes early most mornings, in the out-back brick kitchen that their daddy had built. The cakes stayed the same—lane, coconut, and a very rich Lady Baltimore were their specialties—but they changed their pie making with the season: peach in the summer and fall, pear in the winter. Sweet potato was the only one they made all year long.

  Luther, their brother, carried the pies into town to his store, where he sold them. Actually, it was the sisters’ store, too. Their daddy had left it to all three of them. But that wasn’t something Luther liked brought up, and so the sisters didn’t bring it up. Luther could be mean if you crossed him. He could beat you up.

  “Didn’t I have my own life in New Orleans? Didn’t Daddy call me back to godforsaken Mississippi to take care of the godforsaken pair of you two?”

  This wasn’t exactly what had happened, why exactly he’d come back home. But after two months of his being there, the sisters knew enough about Luther not to cross him, to get on with life and just do what he said.

  So they baked the sweet potato only once a month even though they could have sold out every day, if they’d wanted to. But the once-a-month way was how things were done back then, or else how Luther had wanted them done. The way things were done or the way Luther wanted them done—to the sisters it became the same thing.

  There was something about Luther that didn’t want folks to have what they wanted. He’d always been sly like that, even before his daddy called him home to take up the store and his sisters. Luther called this his “exclusive way of doing things.” Peach and Sister called it something else.

  Were these the exact words? Regina didn’t know for sure, but she’d just read them, or something very much like them, in The Secret of Magic, and so she knew they were close enough. The idea was, anyway.

  And the idea was that . . . good heavens! There was a real Peach Mottley! She existed. She hadn’t just been made up in a book. And if she was real, what else was real? Were Collie and Jack and Booker real? Was Daddy Lemon real? Could he be—Willie Willie? This thought struck Regina as a tingle up her arm. But it also made sense.

  If there were a monster in the story, it had sure been Luther Mottley. But Luther Mottley had ended up dead, or “disappeared,” as M. P. Calhoun had so delicately put it, while making sure her meaning was abundantly clear. How he’d got “disappeared” nobody knew. At least in the book they didn’t. And by The End, the children who’d gone looking for him, or what remained of him, never found out the answer because by then they had other things on their minds. Just as there were other things on Regina’s mind now, as she hurried quickly along the rut-filled sidewalks that led back to Calhoun Place.

  “His name’s Manasseh Lacey,” she said, breathless by the time she got to Mary Pickett. “He was sitting next to Joe Howard on the bus. You know, that last night.”

  “A colored boy?”

  Regina colored herself. “Yes. A Negro.” As if that made any difference, though she was coming to realize that it might.

  “How old?”

  “Maybe ten.”

  “And who told you about him?”

  “Peach.” Then deliberately, “Miss Peach Mottley. Like in your book.”

  Mary Pickett had been standing on her back veranda, busily arranging champagne-colored roses in twin blue-and-white vases. She cocked her head to one side, pursed her lips, made a slight adjustment. Only then did she look up.

  “I knew you’d read it,” said M. P. Calhoun, considering Regina in the same practiced way she had just considered her flowers. “You had that Magic look about you. I can always tell someone’s read my book first time I meet them. Dinetta! Come on out here!”

  Please. Dinetta, please. You say please to the people who work for you. Regina so wanted to correct Mary Pickett’s bad manners, but she held herself back. Because, please or no please, the screen door flew open and there was Dinetta coming on out.

  Up close, she looked even younger than Regina had suspected, thirteen years old at the most. Way too young to be wearing a too-big gray uniform and too-small run-down Oxfords—the little toe cut out of them; she must have wide feet—and no socks. Working when she should still be in school, thought Regina. She made up her mind once again, to have a little discussion about this with Mary Pickett soon as she could. Just not right this minute.

  Mary Pickett said, “Dinetta, take these on in the house. Put them in the morning parlor.”

  Dinetta nodded, said not a word as she, careful not to look in Regina’s direction, slipped back into the house once again.

  Mary Pickett turned back to Regina. A fly buzzed close. She waved it away. “Talking to a colored child, that’s not gonna help you.”

  “What will help me, Miss Calhoun?”

  “Nothing,” said Mary Pickett.

  “Then why am I here?”

  “I already told you that,” replied Mary Pickett, like she could have been talking to a child. A servant. A slave. “To conciliate Willie Willie. I want him to realize I’m doing everything I can to help him out, and I am. But my willingness to help’s not going to change any outcome. Joe Howard, bless his heart, is dead, but Bed Duval’s not, and he’s got a tricky election coming up. Everybody hates Judge Timms, at least behind his back they do. Folks all say he’s corrupt and a slacker, but when it comes down to it, they vote for him just the same. All his years in office—Judge Timms’s built up a lot of connections. He can make life miserable for you if he wants to. Bed’s already stuck his neck out, calling up that grand jury in the first place. His daddy’s not going to let him do more.”

  A grown man, and his daddy won’t let him? But Regina Mary Robichard, Esquire, let this pass.

  Instead, she said, “But Peach told me Manasseh was sitting right by Joe Howard when those men took him off the bus. She won’t tell me how she knows this, at least not yet, but I’m sure that child saw something that could identify them, something that will help us.” Regina considered. “Or perhaps I should say, something that will help me.”

  “That’s even worse,” said Mary Pickett. “And could be worse for him—that child—most of all. His people won’t let him talk to you. I already told Peach that.”

  “Then you knew about him.” Regina’s voice pitched so low she barely heard it herself.

  “Of course I knew about him. This is my town, isn’t it?” said Mary Pickett.

  Mine again, thought Regina. Does this woman think she owns every single thing in sight?

  But Mary Pickett was still going on. “Most nights after she’s finished delivering, Peach’ll stop off before she heads back out to the forest. She was here, right there in the kitchen, when you arrived last night.”

  “She told me that. She said she was the one who came over to the cottage.”

  “Indeed, she was,” said Mary Pickett. “Telling you what to do about that palmetto bug . . . That would be Peach, all right.”

  “Okay. I can understand about Manasseh Lacey and how talking to him would be dangerous for him,” said Regina. She exaggerated her shoulders, up and down, into a shrug. “But what about Anna Dale Buchanan?”

  You had to give it to Mary Pickett, she was a master at holding on to her feelings. She wasn’t about to give anything away. A little tightening of the lips, a little loss of color, that was all.

  “I imagine it was Peach told you about her, too.”

  “Only because she assumed you already had. From what Miss Peach said, Anna Dale Buchanan is the reason I’m here.”

  Without a word, Mary Pickett turned back to her flowers. Only after a moment of concentrated arranging did she deign to look up again. “She lives across Main Street, over on Southside. She came to me about a month ago, after Jackson put that snippet in the paper about the grand jury. It was just a little thing and I don’t know why he did it, but it got her attention. You see, she was on that bus with Jo
e Howard.” Mary Pickett paused. “And she’s white.”

  “That’s what Miss Peach told me. I’d like to speak with Miss—or is it Mrs.?—Buchanan.”

  “Mrs. She’s a widow. Had an only son, but he got himself killed off in the war.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Regina, but she was eager. “How can I reach her Is there something . . . I don’t know . . . a telephone book?”

  “A telephone book in Revere? For what?”

  “So I can get her address. I need to talk to her.”

  “You don’t need her address. I’ll take you over there myself.”

  “Take me?”

  “It’s only right.”

  Now, this was a surprise, but Regina recovered. “When can we go? Later on today?”

  “I’m busy today.”

  “Tomorrow, then? In the morning?”

  Mary Pickett had started sweeping gardening detritus from the veranda table into a paper grocery shopping bag at her feet. Now she stood up, tall as Regina, and for a minute they looked at each other eye to eye. “Tomorrow. I’ll come for you when I’m ready. Wait for me in the cottage. I’ll get there early as I can.” Then, with the slightest lowering of her eyelids, “Mornings I always work.”

  Work? At what? A new book? M. P. Calhoun writing again after all these years? And she, Regina Mary Robichard, the first to know it, at least the first in New York. For a moment this eclipsed everything else in her mind and she thought briefly of calling Walter Winchell’s office and sharing the news. Surely they’d be interested, and it might come in handy someday to have Walter Winchell owe you a favor. But then Regina realized Mary Pickett hadn’t actually said she was working on a new book. She’d just said she was working. Rich as she was, painting her toenails red could have evolved itself into a full-time occupation. Besides, it had been a long time now—really, who cared? Regina sure didn’t. Anyway, that’s what she told herself the next morning as she got up.