But Catfish Alley wasn’t like that at all. It felt like Harlem and smelled like it, too. Good scents of enticing things, fried up and waiting. And it sounded like home. Regina heard Cab Calloway echoing himself, complaining about Minnie the Moocher on two different radios. The stations must have started the same record seconds apart.
Poor Min. Poor Min. Poor Minnie.
People stopped on the street to hum along.
Regina watched and she listened. Just being surrounded by other black folks again was a relief. Her shoulders loosened. Her step lightened. It was a lot of work to become “American,” like everybody else. You always had to be on your guard. Were you doing things right? Were you ever American enough? She wondered if others were like this—the Irish, the Italians, the new immigrants from Eastern Europe; if they felt this way, too. Happy to be back among people that were like them. Happy they’d landed someplace where they could relax, at least for a minute, and that bore a resemblance to home.
The window was there, level with her eyes. You couldn’t miss it.
THOMAS BANKS RASPBERRY
LAWYER
REAL ESTATE AND PROPERTY DEVELOPMENT
Under that came
The Revere Fair Dealer
Then
THE PENNYWISE BANK
Then finally, and most exuberantly of all
EVERYBODY WELCOME! COME RIGHT ON UP!
All of this painted black and outlined in gold, on a window so clean and polished that Regina saw everything she had on, down to the pattern on her tortoiseshell sunglasses, mirrored back perfectly to her in its gleam.
The building itself was new, mortar still sticking through the cheerful red brick like ice cream peeking out of an Eskimo Pie. It was a surprise to her, the first new building she’d seen since she’d got to Revere. And owned by a colored man—who might very well possess a great deal more. Two washtubs of red carnations sat before the yet-to-be-painted front door. A breeze touched them, and they waved at her, bright and cheerful and as well tended as anything in Mary Pickett’s fine garden. All this encouraged Regina. Tom Raspberry hadn’t seemed very welcoming when they’d met yesterday, but perhaps she’d been mistaken about him. Back here, on his own turf, so to speak, and among his own kind, he might turn out to be entirely different. When Regina opened the door, it was onto a stairwell filtered in sunlight.
Pine stairs led directly up into a large, open hallway, where the parquet floor was bare, no furniture on it. Four doors lined the right wall. One had Tom Raspberry’s name, this time on pebbled glass; others announced The Revere Fair Dealer and the Pennywise Bank. They were all closed. She thought of choosing one and knocking on it. But across from them was a row of long windows. Regina hesitated, her hand already bunched. Maybe her conversation with Tom Raspberry could wait for a moment. She walked to the windows.
They faced east, and gave Regina a clear view down to the river. She realized now that Catfish Alley must be on a rise, though she hadn’t felt the land mounting as she’d walked here. From this far up, the second story, she was able to see the lazy snake of the Tombigbee’s brown waters, could see a trestle bridge spanning it and trees that marched almost to its banks. She splayed her fingers against the windowpane, leaned closer. She wondered if this was the place where they’d found Joe Howard, the very bridge against which his destroyed body had snagged long enough so somebody had finally seen it and been able to drag him up.
A tire hung from a rope that was tied to that trestle, and now there were children—no, maybe not children. Teenagers. All of them white. They were clustered around that place where Joe Howard had lain. Boys and girls both, and they were taking turns on that tire, swinging out, out, out over the muddy water, which must be cold now, this time of year. Holding on to their noses. Jumping into that river. Their mouths wide open. Laughing? Screaming? From this distance, Regina couldn’t tell. But they were having fun. She could see that, all right. And the thought stunned her that this thing that had so completely marked her—this death of Joe Howard—had not seemed at all to touch them.
• • •
TOM RASPBERRY LEANED expansively back in his chair. “And it’s known as Catfish Alley,” he said, “by everybody in Revere and Jefferson-Lee County and on into Noxubee and Oktibbeha and Clay counties, and even all the way down into Rankin and Scott and Hinds counties, as one of the most syncopated parts of the state.”
Out from behind Judge Duval’s shadow, Tom Raspberry appeared to become a great deal more syncopated himself. Out had gone the dark tie, the white pocket handkerchief, their places taken by a much livelier set of mixed blues and greens.
“You like?” he said, catching her stare and motioning to his neck with pride. “I got it in New Orleans, a small shop off Canal Street. Last autumn. You ever heard tell the two capitals of Mississippi?”
“Jackson,” answered Regina promptly. She’d done her homework.
“Two capitals.” Tom waited a slow beat, then answered his own question: “Memphis and New Orleans.”
He leaned back, exploded a cannonball of laughter aimed squarely at his own joke. Like Thurgood.
Regina took the opportunity to dart a quick look around. They were in his private office, but there had been no outer office, no secretary like Miss Tutwiler over at the Duvals’. Regina imagined that folks knocked on Tom Raspberry’s door and came right in. Just as she’d done.
As Tom chuckled on, his laughter easing off like the slow put-puts of a train chugging into the distance, Regina’s attention shifted to the wall behind him where what looked like the dummy for an upcoming edition of The Revere Fair Dealer hung from drying tacks and fluttered against a display of studio portraits.
Quite remarkable photographs, really, and quite precisely composed and just a little bit larger than you’d think a studio portrait should be, as though someone had decided they shouldn’t be missed. The first, the center of everything, was of a much younger Tom Raspberry, his arm holding tight to a determined-looking woman, much lighter-skinned than he was and with serious, wide-awake eyes. His wife. No doubt about that. And around them, like roots branching out from a main tree, were photographs of three boys, each staring out as purposefully as their mama and daddy. Each was in cap and gown, with various graduation certificates lined up beneath that progressed them through the Rosenwald Colored Children’s School and the Revere Colored High School and then into and out of Tougaloo College. Regina leaned closer. One—who looked just like Tom Raspberry, only younger—had recently found himself the proud recipient of a fresh JD degree from Howard Law.
She looked over. Tom had stopped laughing; he was watching her. “Mighty proud of my family,” he said. “Fine boys, and none of them married. Sure to have one your age, if you’re interested. And you should be, if you’re smart. One you’re looking at, that’s Thomas Banks Raspberry II. We call him Deuce. He’s my oldest. Studied up at Howard with Charles Hamilton Houston, just like your Thurgood did.” Tom lowered his voice. “Guess where he is now?”
Regina shook her head. She couldn’t imagine.
“Jackson!” Tom exclaimed. “He went down to sit for the bar.”
“I thought they didn’t let Negroes into the Mississippi bar.”
“They don’t,” Tom said matter-of-factly.
“Then why’s he down there?” She might be wrong, but Tom certainly didn’t seem like the type to encourage the wasting of time.
“I sent him on down there for the same reason I’m seeing you now—things are changing. Some deep foundations starting to shake. When the dust settles, I want to make sure it’s not covered me over.” Tom stretched out a little, leaned back again in his seat. “It’s the war did it. I graduated Howard Law, too, but there was no chance of me making my living doing lawyering full-time, not if I wanted to come home and live near my people in Mississippi. No way I could do it, not with a wife to support and children to educate. If I wanted to go on
in the law, I had to find me some way to accommodate myself, and the Duvals have been my accommodation. They’re bound and determined to get this judgeship for Little Bed now. Get themselves some real respectability. But you know how they started out?”
Regina didn’t.
“Same way as every other lawyer start out in Revere, at least the ones that don’t own land.” He let this settle in so she knew he wasn’t talking about Judge Calhoun. Clearly, he wanted her to know that Judge Calhoun was an entirely different matter. “Some poor farmer finds himself in a pinch. Usually, this involves a dispute with some other farmer—or, worse, the bank—and the lawyer goes on out, offers to help him. This is a small place, lots of gossip, so most of the time the lawyer knows what’s what before he gets there, has already come up with a neat plan of action—involving the courts. But the farmer’s all worried. How can I pay you? The lawyer aw-shucks it, insists he don’t want no money. He says that right off the bat, first thing. If the farmer wins out, well, they can discuss a fee later. If the farmer doesn’t win out—just on one of the very rare occasions when this happens . . . well, there are other ways to settle up. The lawyer tells the farmer, “You still don’t have to worry about a fee. Why, that little piece of bottom forty you got out yonder? I’ll be happy to take that off your hands, call it a payment. This here’s a little paper you can put your name or your X to. Most all the farmers around here are land-poor, anyway. They own the earth, they just don’t have money to pull up a crop on it. So the idea sounds all good to the farmer. Besides, everybody thinks they got a good chance of winning their lawsuit when they first get started out. Reality sets in later. Now”—Tom Raspberry leaned further back, still very much enjoying himself, but Regina held her breath; the chair looked like it might be on the verge of tipping over under his weight—“getting your hand on land’s not something particular to color. You can’t tell it from his waiting room but Forrest Duval—and his daddy, Forrest III, and his granddaddy, Forrest Junior, before that—none of them had one bit of care about skin color, at least when it comes to taking hold to some land. They’d represent anybody, even if they wouldn’t let them sit down in the white folks’ waiting room. But black folks feel better dealing with black folks. That’s where I come in—or came in.”
Regina said, “I get the picture.”
“Do you, now? I wonder.” He paused. “I saw Bed Duval run up to you after you got out of ol’ Duval’s office. Bed’s a good man. He knows how things are down here. Old Forrest Duval’s his daddy. He knows how things are, too, and much better. But a little lady like you, from the North . . . well, there are many things you might need to learn.”
“And what things might these be, Mr. Raspberry?” She leaned forward a bit, very, very careful to keep the irritation out of her voice and off her face. For all she knew he might be trying to make her mad.
“There’s a hierarchy,” Tom said affably. “You ever heard the word oligarchy before?”
Yes, of course, she had heard the word oligarchy. Now she knew he was trying to rile her. This little lawyerette come down from New York. Let me just show her what’s what. He could have been Forrest Duval or Jackson Blodgett. Sounded just like them.
Tom said, “What it means is some few rule and the rest don’t count. You gotta tell them they do. You might even have to pretend that they do, but the world knows they don’t. Down here it goes rich over poor. White over black, but if you’re an enterprising man, there’s always the chance for a little overlapping. And in Revere, on the rich black heap, I’m at the tip-top. That’s because the Duvals and I have an understanding.”
Regina glanced over at the wall again. There was no certification from the Mississippi bar on it. She remembered what Mary Pickett had said about Willie Willie and her father, the distance that separated them. And she knew that even though Tom Raspberry and Forrest Duval might be good business partners, they didn’t meet eye to eye.
“Okay,” said Regina, looking around. “Things seem to work well for you. Maybe they work less well for someone like Mr. Willie Willie.”
“Things work well enough for Willie Willie,” said Raspberry shortly. “Now, the Duvals been lawyering for generations—mainly penny-ante stuff, like I said. But Bed went to war. He came back and married Mary Alice Mackey. Her whole family’s been in Revere since Jesus walked the earth, which means not quite as long as the Calhouns and the Mayhews, but almost. The Mackey connection’s a prime one down here. Now the Duvals can’t just be rich, like the Blodgetts, they got to be dignified. That’s why Bed’s daddy’s determined to get that judgeship for him.”
Regina didn’t get the connection. She must have looked dubious, because Tom said, “All this is relevant. But I imagine it’s not why you’re here.” The leather of his chair popped like a firecracker as he settled back into it. “Well, what can I do for you, Miss Regina?”
“I was wondering,” she said, “why Mr. Duval recommended I see you about Mr. Willie Willie’s case.”
Silently she counted slowly to three, an interrogation trick that Thurgood had taught her, before she continued:
“You know, Miss Calhoun sent us a lot of newspaper clippings about Joe Howard’s murder. One of them was from The Revere Fair Dealer. Yours.” She nodded to the next edition’s dummies, tacked up and drying on Tom’s wall. “I think the headline went something like ‘Can This Go On? Even in Mississippi?’ Or words to that effect. I don’t imagine a sentiment like that was very welcome here in Revere—at least in certain quarters of it.”
Again, the slow, count-to-three pause.
“I can’t imagine that put you in Mr. Duval’s fine, upstanding Negro book.”
Tom didn’t say a word for a moment, but he did lean closer. His mustache was so thick and luxurious that Regina could see the small fan on the side of his desk bristle air through it.
Then he said, “Robichard,” like the name was dawning on him for the first time. “Isn’t your mama the famous Ida Jane Robichard? And wasn’t your daddy, Oscar—the one that got himself lynched?”
She’d never heard it put quite like that before—“got himself lynched”—but Tom didn’t seem to be trying to irritate her anymore.
“Yes,” she answered. The one word came out quickly, more quickly than she was used to it coming out. She hardly ever answered this question so directly, in one syllable. Usually she dodged it, turned away, didn’t say anything at all. She’d learned to do this young, when she was five or six, because even then people were asking her about what had happened to her daddy. Everybody she knew back then seemed to know the story, but she had never told her story to a living soul.
“Yes,” she repeated.
“Thought so,” said Tom Raspberry. He, too, motioned toward the fluttering dummies of the Fair Dealer. “Like you say, I run a newspaper, and I been writing about Ida Jane Robichard in my newspaper for years. Saw her myself once over there in Greenville. God, what a firecracker! Still, you had to admire her; talk about coming down into the belly of the beast.”
“She doesn’t think of Mississippi that way. It’s part of a larger problem. That’s how she sees it. My father ‘got himself lynched,’ as you say, in Omaha.”
“During the great race riots,” said Tom. “Up north. Bright-skinned woman, your mama. I imagine that’s the thing got your daddy in trouble. Most whites would have taken her for one of them. Especially in a place like Nebraska, where they don’t have that many colored folks to begin with, didn’t have the variety of us that we have down here.”
“It didn’t have anything to do with my mother,” said Regina quietly.
“Oh, I know all about that other woman,” replied Tom. “The real white woman. How she said your daddy touched her on the street. How she said she’d never been so disgusted in her life. But I imagine people seeing your mama with your daddy—it might have upset them. Let’s just say it sure didn’t help.”
Regina’s fi
rst urge, a blind one, was to get up, turn to that new oak door, walk right out of it, down into the street. Keep going. Until she’d walked herself all the way back to New York. Who did this man think he was, saying those things like this about her mother, about the way her daddy’d been killed? Then she looked at him more closely and saw real curiosity in his eyes, on his face. She knew he wanted to know, Why had this happened? A young man with a pregnant wife, working two daily shifts of a horrible job at Swift’s Packing House so he could save up money for law school. Who’d been walking down a street one day. Who’d seen a lady about to fall. Who’d reached out a hand to keep her from tumbling. And two days later was dead.
She’d been drunk as a skunk, that’s what someone had written in an anonymous note to Regina’s mother, much later. But by then even Ida Jane had given up hope she’d live to see justice done for her husband.
“I never knew him. He was killed before I was born.”
Of course, if Tom had heard Ida Jane speak, he knew this. It was always one of the first things she said.
My baby never got to meet her own daddy. What he could have done for his people—if he’d been allowed to live—why, we’ll never know.
Tom suddenly looked old, and as baffled by all this as Regina was. But what could she tell him that would explain it? There was no explanation. She slipped her hand into her pocket, ran her finger around the edge of the photograph of Joe Howard with his own father. It had become almost a talisman, like, she thought, Joe Howard’s medal in Willie Willie’s truck must be. Regina had patted the snapshot so many times since she’d got it that the sides had worn down, become as smooth as the picture itself. She transferred it automatically now from pocket to pocket, not even thinking what she was doing but doing it just the same.
The whip of the fan was the only thing slicing the silence. A door closed softly out in the hallway, and Regina thought she heard voices. Tom never took his eyes off her. “That said, now tell me why you came over here? The real reason.”
The Secret of Magic Page 19
