The Secret of Magic

by Johnson, Deborah

  But first there was something else that needed doing, and she found what she needed for it under Willie Willie’s stained porcelain sink as well—a wicker basket, a blue vinyl–covered thermos. She’d washed them both, filled the thermos with water, put it into the basket beside the pillow Thurgood had warned her she’d need. Then she’d put in the book.

  Now, hustled summarily out of the office, and sitting once again on the Duvals’ front steps, she pulled out The Secret of Magic, a novel still very much banned in Mississippi, or so Anna Dale Buchanan had said. Regina had forgotten her handkerchief here the day before, and it had disappeared, so she pulled out another, settled herself, looked around, started to read:

  They were at the very edge of the forest now, but they’d found the right path. Collie was sure of this, and she told them so. It was later than they thought it would be, though. The daytime peepers had stopped their chatter, and the hooty owls were whooing deep down in the woods. This licking close to the river, anything could happen. Good or bad, you never knew which.

  “Come on, Booker. Hurry up! You scairt?”

  Jack calling out. Collie laughing.

  Regina was used to seeing the dusty pink cover of the book in New York—the two blond white children running toward a distant forest, but with Booker turned back, his face captured by the moment. Booker with his dark skin, his devilish expression, his wide-open eyes. A face that hinted at something, never quite gave it away. Yesterday at Anna Dale’s, Regina had thought for the first time how this cover might play in Mississippi, the scandal of it. Above all, there was the arch of the prominent title and the author’s name, M. P. Calhoun, printed big as you please. In front of the Duval office, people walking past slowed when they read this. Both the square and the street hushed.

  “Get on in here!” Miss Tutwiler banged open the door. She stuck her head out, shook it with such force that those folks looking would know she was only doing her duty—and that she’d soon have a tale to share with anybody who might care to listen. Uppity New York Nigra. There she sat, bold as you please! “The district attorney said he’d see you. Five minutes. No more.” Miss Tutwiler no longer called him Bed, at least not to Regina Robichard.

  Regina sprang to her feet, smoothed down the skirt of her suit. She reached to put the book away into her basket, but Miss Tutwiler was quick as greased lightning. “Better hand that over. Reading a banned something is illegal in the state of Mississippi. Mr. Duval could get himself in a heap of trouble letting you bring that in here.”

  Regina gave her the book. Then, immensely satisfied, she followed Miss Tutwiler in through the Duval front door.

  The front door—because there was obviously a back one, and it was the back one people must use when they came here. Regina realized this right away. Nobody had passed around her, but the reception area was full. Two white-shirted men on straight-back chairs, staring at Regina through the smoke of their cigarettes, a young woman in a polka-dot dress looking up from a tattered copy of Look magazine. Miss Tutwiler sailed through the midst of them, the book’s front cover held tight against her prim, buttoned-up bosom. But no one paid the least bit of attention to Miss Tutwiler, not with Regina striding through there.

  Miss Tutwiler opened a stout oak door. “She’s here.”

  Regina skirted around her and walked in.

  She didn’t know what she’d expected but whatever it was, it had not included this many people—a young white man, an even younger white woman with a notebook in her hand, an older black man. All of them reverently grouped around the central motif of an aw-shucks country lawyer in his ah-shucks country office, a spittoon on conspicuous display right beside the mahogany desk in case anybody failed to get the Hey, now I’m just one of y’all message. Linen suit, dun-colored and a little too light for the season, flourished bow tie, round red face, a vandyke beard so scrupulous neat that Van Dyck himself might have trimmed it—and sharp little eyes that followed Regina’s every movement like twin razor blades.

  Was this Bed Duval? From what Mary Pickett said, Regina had expected someone younger. She held out her hand to him anyway. “Thank you for seeing me, Mr. District Attorney. My name is Regina Robichard. I am an attorney with . . .”

  “Everybody knows who you are, Missy.” The words rumbled out from the man at the desk, cascading against Regina with the force of glass marbles.

  He didn’t take her hand, didn’t look at it, even, and after a moment Regina pulled it back. She cleared her throat.

  “I represent Mr. Willie Willie in the wrongful death of his son, Lieutenant Joe Howard Wilson. I am here at the behest of Miss Mary Pickett Calhoun.” She added this last for good measure.

  “We also know why you’re here.” This from the woman. Like Mary Pickett, she had a high, trilling voice; like Miss Tutwiler, she was dressed in dark blue with lace trim.

  Nobody had introduced themselves, but Regina flashed a bright smile. “Are you the stenographer? Would you mind taking notes?”

  A current sizzled through the room. Instantly, Regina realized she’d said something wrong. Mighty wrong. That is, if the woman’s stony face was any indication, and there was certainly nothing aw-shucksy about the sitting man now.

  “Girl,” he barked, his voice pitched so low Regina heard the tick of a clock through it. It sounded like a death knell. “This here lady is my daughter. And you better treat her with respect if you know what’s good for you. Mrs. Marjorie Duval Tisdale is a lawyer, come up from Jackson to help her brother get elected judge. Mrs. Tisdale is a graduate of the University of Mississippi School of the Law, as is her brother and her daddy and her daddy’s daddy before that. And she, Missy, is a proud member of the Mississippi bar.”

  “I am so sorry,” Regina said, and she meant it. She wanted to tell this woman how the same thing happened to her in New York all the time, that people were continually taking her for something she wasn’t, asking her to take notes, wondering aloud where her steno pad was, so she understood how this woman felt, the frustration. But nobody in this room seemed like they’d want to hear that. So she repeated, “I’m sorry.”

  The black man smirked, Not as sorry as you gonna be, and, for the first time, Regina looked closely over at him. He had on a dark suit and dark tie. Something deliberately chosen not to be noticed, like an undertaker’s clothes, she thought. She wondered who he was, but she’d learned a lesson. She’d wait to find out. What was it Thurgood said? “Assume makes an ass out of u and me.” Well, she had assumed about Marjorie Tisdale and made an ass of herself. She turned back to the man at the desk.

  “I’m here to see about looking through the grand jury report on Joe Howard Wilson’s death.” She added, “If I may.”

  “DA can’t do that,” said the black man, quick as you please.

  “That’s enough, Tom.” The older man scowled, waved a hand at him, and then turned back to Regina. “What did you say your name was again?”

  I thought you said you knew. But aloud she said, “Regina Robichard. I am . . .”

  “Let me introduce you here, Regina. Now my name is Forrest Duval. This is my son, Bed. He’s a Nathan Bedford Forrest Duval, too. The fifth, to be exact. Bed’s his nickname, and he’s district attorney. My daughter—I imagine you know who she is now. Not likely ever to forget it again. And that there colored man’s Tom Raspberry.” No explanation as to who Tom Raspberry was or what he was doing here. “And like Mrs. Tisdale said, we know just who you are. What you are, too—and what you aren’t, Regina. Like, for instance, the fact you haven’t passed over any bar yet. Bar, as in the New York State bar.”

  What did that have to do with anything?

  “I graduated from Co—from law school this spring.” She thought it best not to mention Columbia, try to stir it into a pot that seemed already filled to the brim with University of Mississippi pride. “But I have taken the bar exam.”

  Forrest Duval swiveled
his large head like a lighthouse from his daughter to his son. “That place, that Nigra place, she comes from in New York . . . Why, I imagine it’s lousy with lawyers. But all they found to send down here is a teeny-tiny, itsy-bitsy little lawyerette. That don’t sound to me like they’re serious about our Willie Willie. More like they want to use him for a publicity stunt. The more they can show how bad things are in Mississippi, the more money it brings in for them.”

  Tut. Tut. Tut.

  “Mr. Duval . . .” began an indignant Regina. But the arrow had hit home. The Fund did need money. It always had, and she imagined it always would. “I’ve got new information. A woman. A white woman. She saw what happened on that Bonnie Blue bus.”

  “What you think? We don’t know about her, too?” said Forrest.

  His son cut in. “Why don’t you tell us what exactly it is you want?”

  Regina turned to him. He was in a white shirt, no jacket, with his tie loose at the neck and his shirt sleeves rolled up. He looked like those men she’d seen walk right past that woman struggling with her child and her baby buggy yesterday. He could have been one of them, Regina thought. White men looked pretty much the same to her. Not bad-looking, maybe about Joe Howard’s age, or the age Joe Howard would have been. She wondered if he’d been in the service. A nice enough face, pleasant, even, but with the same sharp gray eyes as his daddy—eyes that were beaded in on her now.

  “I’d like to see the grand jury records. I need to see what they say.”

  This time the quick look passed from the judge to his daughter. Their lips pursed together at the same time.

  “Something you should know, if you haven’t already been told,” said Forrest, “and that is, judgeships are elected here, and taking on a rascal like Ezekial Timms would be a tough business, even at the best of times. But my boy’s moving up. Got to. And he’s already stuck his neck out enough on this Joe Howard thing, asking for a grand jury in the first place. I warned him not to get involved. Something like that—you just asking for trouble. Told him it wouldn’t do one bit of good, and it didn’t.”

  All this said for Regina’s benefit in Forrest Duval’s best better-watch-it-little-lady voice.

  Marjorie Tisdale looked over at her brother, both eyebrows knit into one dark slash. She opened her mouth, then shut it again, lips pressed tight. Regina wondered what she had been about to say—this woman who was a lawyer like she herself was, who might understand things, since, without a doubt, she’d been discriminated against herself. What woman lawyer hadn’t been? But Regina never found out what Marjorie Tisdale was thinking, because Forrest Duval started pontificating again.

  “My son can’t help you. The grand jury already turned in its findings. Ain’t nothing going to get those folks to change their minds. Tom Raspberry, now . . .” Without turning around, Duval punched a finger toward the black man behind him. “He’s the one handles our colored problems, been handling them for years.” Duval smiled, and his face lit up with mischief. “You got anything else to say, take your tail over to Catfish Alley. See him.”

  Take your tail, indeed! Regina started seething. She was dying to tell Forrest Duval what he could do with his own tail, but how could she?

  Instead, she said, “Thank you for your time,” and turned to the door.

  When she opened it up, Miss Tutwiler almost tumbled right in. But the receptionist managed to recover her balance quickly enough to step Regina smartly through the reception room and out onto the sidewalk again. This time when the wooden door to the Duval law offices closed behind her, its click was decisive.

  Regina looked down. All her things were still on the step where she’d left them—basket, thermos, pink pillow, her briefcase, her purse. And The Secret of Magic was there, as well. It lay on top of everything, neatly arranged beneath a brown paper bag. Miss Tutwiler’s work. No doubt about that.

  Gathering it all together, Regina started wondering what she ought to do next. Maybe she should go see Tom Raspberry like Forrest Duval had told her. He was a black man, after all; he might help her. Certainly, she wasn’t getting very far with the whites. And he’d been there with the Duvals in their office. Which meant he might know what the Duvals knew.

  She crossed the street and was halfway down the block when she heard someone’s, “Hey, there!” But who would be calling her? She kept on going. Then she heard, “Regina! Hold up!” Regina/Vagina again. Would these Southerners ever learn how to pronounce her name right?

  But she turned back anyway, and there was Bed Duval, and a stocky white man striding along beside him. She waited. Wary. The memory of that woman stepping children into street traffic so white men could pass still fresh in her mind.

  “You’re a mighty fast walker,” Bed said, hurrying up. Words, Regina thought, used to buy himself a little time. But he didn’t seem to need time. He got right to the point.

  “I’m sorry about all that back there.”

  “Sorry?” She studied him for a second. Fair-haired like his sister, rumble-voiced like his daddy. Maybe trying to be his own man, she decided, but resembling them both.

  “Daddy just wanted to save you a whole lot of trouble.”

  Oh, God, she thought, another you-got-to-understand-the-way-things-are-down-here lecture from somebody like Mary Pickett who always acted as though she was from “here” in ways she wanted to be and “not from here” in ways that she didn’t. But Regina had already stopped. Now she might as well listen. He was still the district attorney, after all.

  “Nothing in that grand jury file’s gonna help you. The whole thing—the convening—was over in fifteen good minutes. Not a serious witness called except for the coroner. I know. I was there.”

  Regina caught that qualifying word serious, wondered what it meant.

  “Maybe,” she said, “if I could speak to the circuit court judge . . . ? He’s the one holds the grand jury docket.”

  “You want to talk to Judge Timms?” Bed looked around to the uniformed man beside him, whom he’d not introduced. The sheriff? Regina couldn’t tell. Both men shook their heads. Both men chuckled. Bed Duval lowered his voice. “He’s the one I’m running against, and there’s no ornerier man in all Mississippi. You being new here, let me tell you a story. He’s been on the bench thirty years now, and I’m his first major challenge. I’m also fresh back from the war, and he’s not happy about that, either. He thinks I’ve brought in new ways. And he’s got his supporters, people he’s been doing favors for, for a very long time. One day, one of these men—a moonshining owner of one of those little honky-tonks out deep in the county—sidled up to him and said, ‘Judge, a bunch of us been watching over that young Duval. There’s talk he wants to do you out of your Your Honorship.’ Then just like that, ‘Want us to kill him?’ The person who told me this said Judge Timms shook his head. Said, ‘Charlie Bob, now, you know killing’s against the law.’ A significant pause. ‘But if you did happen to shoot him, mind—I mean, if it just happened, an accident maybe—why, you sure can count on getting a fair trial in my court.’”

  The only reason Regina laughed was because Bed was laughing and the man beside him was laughing, making it seem like being jolly was the thing to do. Finally, she said, “You make Revere sound lawless as the Wild West.”

  Bed quieted down. “In some ways, I imagine it is. Oh, don’t let the softness of our accents fool you. It’s an eye for an eye down here.”

  People were staring at them now, and Regina’s load was getting heavier by the minute. Neither man offered to give her a hand, take any of it from her, which didn’t surprise her. She decided to come to the point. “Why’d you do it, then? I mean, if you weren’t going to see it through. Why’d you get Judge Timms to call up a grand jury in the first place? It must not have been easy. Especially when it was pulled back into special session.”

  She saw the reaction to her question in his eyes, saw their pupils close in r
eflex against it. It took him a moment to answer. The other man, his thumbs through his belt loop, said not a word. Then from Bed, “Judge Calhoun and my daddy and Willie Willie all grew up shooting together. Joe Howard and I used to hunt out in Magnolia Forest. With his daddy. My own daddy came out with us, too.” He paused. “At first, I didn’t even recognize him when they drug him up out of that water. Joe Howard. When I saw what they’d done. The indecency of it . . .” Bed Duval’s voice trailed off.

  Why, he wants me to say it’s okay, thought Regina. He wants me to say, “Well, you’re a good person. You did what you could. What more was there to do? It’s not your fault.”

  But she had no intention of saying any of that.

  “You thought what happened to him might bear investigating . . . Just not right away.”

  Now Bed’s eyes snapped with the same better-watch-it-little-lady snap that his daddy had thrown her way.

  “Yesterday,” said Regina. “I met with Mrs. Buchanan. You know, the lady we talked about back at your office. She saw Joe Howard taken off that bus, she was on it, and she went right around to tell the sheriff all about it when the bus got into Revere. Now, the sheriff, he wasn’t that interested. She hadn’t seen faces, you see, Mrs. Buchanan. But she had seen a car. A blue Buick. Brand-new, she said. Don’t see many of them in Revere do you, Mr. Duval?”

  She saw him glance around, at the hitched mule wagons, the pickups, the few dusty Fords parked on the square. A quick look, but old Forrest Duval wouldn’t have chanced it. He’d never have taken his eyes off Regina. Watching her. Assessing. But this man was young, a young lawyer. Nothing to be scared of. That’s what she said to herself.

  What she said to Bed Duval was, “Maybe you might want to talk to Mrs. Buchanan. Some afternoon. I can tell you she makes a marvelous date cake. But, of course, you already know that. Since, like you said, you and your daddy and the sheriff and Mr. Willie Willie and Joe Howard . . . the whole darn town it seems like . . . spent so much time together hunting deer in the forest. So bucolic. Makes all northeast Mississippi sound just like one big happy racial family.”