The Secret of Magic

by Johnson, Deborah

  “Which one said that—Jackie Earle Blodgett or Rand Connelly? They both could have, you know. All the boy children came with me, one time or another. Even the ones I didn’t particularly take to, like Rand Connelly. Even the ones came from hardscrabble stock, like Jackie Earle and his wife-stealing brother. We knew each other and I had to take them all, me being nothing more than a nigger man and all.”

  Regina had never heard him use this word before. The force of it slapped her.

  “Don’t call yourself that,” she lashed out without thinking. “Let them do it if they want to, but don’t you give them the satisfaction of knowing they can make you do it to. Besides . . .”

  “Besides what?” If Willie Willie were astonished by what she’d just said, he didn’t show it. “Why, Miss Regina, that’s the whole tragedy of it. Lynching’s a terrible thing, that much is for certain, but the judge explained to me once what tragedy really is, the literal, old-timey meaning of the word. It’s something that might look good outside but inside it’s evil. Can’t control it. Nothing you can do about it. And, sure enough, Mississippi’s a tragedy. The state of it is. These people who won’t do a thing about Joe Howard . . . why, I’ve known them all my life. They’ve known me. They knew him. A place like Revere—it’s not like Memphis or Jackson or New Orleans. Everybody’s in everybody else’s business here. White ones and black ones, we all played together. Dreamed our little dreams together, concocted our lives. Up until we were ten, that is. After that, we split up. Went our separate ways. White ones going on to school. Black ones mostly out to the fields. White ones sifting themselves into your good folk and your good-for-nothing folks. Sure as black from white, this happened, too. But that didn’t stop us from knowing each other, if you understand what I mean.”

  After that, they drove back to Revere in silence, Willie Willie’s truck lights tracing out the road ahead. Regina opened her purse and dropped the key into it. She felt it wedge its way in between her lipstick and compact, her handkerchief and change purse and wallet. She felt it brush against the smooth-sided picture of dead Lieutenant Joe Howard. She rolled her window all the way down. There was pine and the wood smoke on the air, autumn scents, and she wondered what springtime would smell like in a place like this. And she thought about the buck. She wondered if she might see it again before she left, if it might wander one last time out of the forest and into Mary Pickett’s garden. She hoped it would.

  It was only after they had driven far enough into town that the forest backed off and released them onto a road where light flickered through curtained windows. They were driving down Main Street again, past the big houses Willie Willie had told her about when she’d first come into town, but going by this time he kept his eyes straight ahead. “A nice place, but still . . . it’s best to be careful. Don’t let no wayward thing get hold to you.”

  “Who would want me,” said Regina, and she laughed.

  “Maybe nothing . . . But then again, maybe something.”

  She didn’t know what he meant by this, looked over at him, saw nothing on his face. They turned onto Third Avenue, and there was Calhoun Place. The way Mary Pickett’s house was set, close to the street, you could stop at the curb or follow the long brick driveway all the way in and be led right straight through to the rear of the house and the cottage. Since the cottage was near the back door, Regina had always thought the drive was set up this way so that deliveries could be made through the kitchen or that folks could ask questions of the help. But in the time she’d been here, she’d never seen a car pull all the way to the end. Normally, Willie Willie parked at the curb. Mary Pickett kept her Daimler in its own patch of gravel at the side of her house. Dinetta walked wherever she went.

  But tonight Willie Willie turned in, drove clear through. Regina peered over at Calhoun Place. There was a light on over the front door and another farther down on the veranda. She saw a silver tray and some glasses. Regina looked around for Jackson Blodgett’s blue Buick. Regina, you ever been in love? But the Daimler and the slowly moving Ford truck were the only vehicles there.

  Calhoun Place itself was brightly illuminated, more brilliant than Regina had ever seen it before. Light poured out like a stream of fresh lemonade from the glass front door and peeked out through cracks around the draperies on the main floor. Mary Pickett getting ready for her garden fete, thought Regina, remembering what Peach had told her. She wondered about that long portrait in the front hall and what Mary Pickett’s mother, Miss Eulalie, caught forever looking back, would think about what was happening with Willie Willie, what had happened to Joe Howard.

  They were almost at the cottage itself when Willie Willie turned off the engine and let his truck die. He didn’t move. That’s what got Regina’s attention, his absolute stillness, a stillness that drew everything into itself. She swiveled around from looking at Mary Pickett’s, speculating about her coming party and her mother’s life, so that she could see what Willie Willie was seeing.

  The door to the cottage stood open. Behind it, dark rooms yawned, a black gaping hole—except for a light from the bedroom that splashed brightness onto the bricks.

  “You leave that bulb on? You leave that door open?”

  She thought back. “It was afternoon when we left. I don’t think so.”

  Willie Willie’s voice calm as the weather. “Now, what I want you to do, Miss Regina, is reach under your seat, pass me over that shotgun tucked in there. Gentle. It’s loaded.”

  “It could have flown open. The door, that is. Maybe the wind . . .”

  “Nope, no wind. Door’s been opened on purpose.”

  She didn’t know how he knew this, but she believed, right away, that he did. She handed over the gun, gingerly as she could. It was the first one she’d ever handled, and for a moment she was more scared of it than she was of that gaping front door. This feeling didn’t last long.

  “You think I need to call the sheriff? Mary Pickett’s got that phone right there inside the kitchen . . . I know where it is . . . I wouldn’t be trespassing. I mean, she told me I could just go on right in . . .” Regina realized she was jabbering, and she forced herself to shut up.

  Willie Willie said, “Wait here.”

  He left the headlights of the Ford burning and jumped onto the drive. His feet came down so lightly that Regina barely heard them land. She saw him pause at the door, pull something from it. And then watched as he slowly entered his house.

  The shirt! Oh, God, I hope nobody found it. I hope Willie Willie doesn’t find it now.

  Once inside, he turned a flashlight on. It must have been one he kept near the front door, but she’d never seen it. Regina watched its pinpoint reaching into the downstairs corners, disappearing for a moment as Willie Willie went into the kitchen, then becoming visible again as he traced a path up the stairs. She wondered why he didn’t turn on the electric lights, but he didn’t. Regina had to scoot down a little and wedge herself closer against the windshield in order to see his shadow against the curtain in the bedroom. She heard a door open and then close again. This, she decided, must be the small closet next to the bed. In a minute she saw a faint light seeping out of the bathroom window, a busy piece of brightness, industrious as a firefly. She decided that Willie Willie must be checking behind the shower curtain, looking in the ancient claw-foot bathtub. Making sure everything was safe for her.

  After that, one by one, the electric lights flashed to life, first in the bathroom, then in the bedroom, the living room and the kitchen. Willie Willie didn’t stop until the whole cottage was lit up, bright as Mary Pickett’s. Through the little window, Regina watched him walk back downstairs and out through the front door. She realized she’d been holding her breath but now it gushed out. She scrambled out from the truck before he got to her.

  “I guess I didn’t close it all the way after all.” She didn’t really know which one of them she was reassuring.

  �
�Nothing but this.” He held a sheet out to her. The paper blue and so porous she could see the lights and the outlines of the cottage right through it.

  She looked at him quizzically. “What’s it say?”

  But Willie Willie shook his head, looked sheepish. “Can’t quite make out the words myself. Ain’t got my glasses.” He reached the paper over to her, and she took it.

  There were just a few words on the flyer. She sped through them and then smiled over at Willie Willie as she read them again, this time out loud.

  INFORMATION WANTED IN THE DEATH OF LIEUTENANT JOE HOWARD WILSON

  Contact

  Thomas Banks Raspberry

  NAACP

  Revere, Mississippi

  Cash Reward

  When she looked up, Willie Willie was frowning. “You know anything about this, Miss Regina? These—what did you call them—flyers?”

  The look on his face made her own smile falter. “Well, actually, they were my idea. I thought if we put up something around town, we might generate some interest. Not everybody knew about that grand jury. Anna Dale Buchanan didn’t, not ’til she read about it in the paper. There might be other people like her. It’s not that the city went out of its way to let folks know what had happened. I asked Tom Raspberry to help because he’s got that printing press puts out his paper. At first he laughed, said he wasn’t going to do it. I don’t know what made him change his mind, but he must have printed these out and left me one to show what he’d done. Put too much pressure on the door and didn’t see that it opened.” Regina babbling almost, she was that relieved. That yawning door, so frightening when she’d first seen it, now meant nothing after all.

  “Could be,” said Willie Willie, busy breaking the shotgun, but then he stopped what he was doing and gave Regina his full and steady attention. “Could be Tom Raspberry’s just bought himself a whole mess of trouble, and that’s his right. Tom’s been in trouble before this, lots of it, and he’s always managed to wiggle himself free. He’s the type attracts fuss like flypaper attracts flies. I just don’t want you getting stuck up there beside him. Might not be so easy for you to get yourself off it as it has been for him.”

  • • •

  “YEP, PUT ’EM UP all over town,” said Tom Raspberry, already in his office at eight the next morning when Regina came in. He was sipping coffee, in a good mood. Five other people were crowded in there with him. Four men, a woman—they were sipping coffee, too. Regina recognized the mother from the courthouse square, the one who’d stepped off into the street so that white men could pass. The woman smiled at her. Regina smiled back.

  “What you see before you are the charter members of the Greater Revere, Mississippi, Branch of the National Association for the Advancement of us Colored People,” said Tom with great dignity, his voice slowly emphasizing each syllable in each word. “Miss Regina Robichard, I’d like you to meet Mr. Curtis Willmon. He took over Mottley’s Dry Goods. Mr. Leonard Wilson, owner of Wilson Funeral Homes. Mr. Methuselah Evans. He’s vice president over my own Pennywise Bank. Dr. and Mrs. Daniel Stillworth. Dr. Stillworth, a proud graduate of the Meharry Medical College, takes good care of the dental needs of our colored people in these three adjacent counties, and Mrs. Barbara Stillworth takes good care of him.”

  Chuckle. Chuckle.

  Regina and Barbara Stillworth telegraphed a look to each other. No use getting upset now, but someday that will have to change, too. And Regina thinking, All these people professionals, at least independent. Not working for whites, else how could they do this?

  Tom said, “Lawyer Robichard, since this is what you might call our inaugural meeting, mind sharing a few words about why the national office sent you here?”

  She hadn’t expected this, and, unlike her mother, Regina hated giving speeches, but she walked farther into the room, took a deep breath, looked into their raised eyes, and began: “Ten days ago, in New York, Thurgood Marshall received a letter that had been sent to him from Revere, Mississippi, by one M. P. Calhoun . . .”

  • • •

  AFTERWARD, WHEN THE OTHERS had made their promises, shaken hands, and gone, Regina brought Tom Raspberry around to the blue flyer.

  “Sure,” he said. “I’m your man. I had the boys, the ones who deliver my papers, put them out all over the neighborhoods. The black neighborhoods, that is. I put them around the white neighborhoods myself. Loved doing it. See any on your way over?”

  Regina shook her head. “Not a one. On Main Street, or on Third Avenue.”

  “That’s cause they been already pulled down.” He let out a that’s-what-we-got-to-deal-with sigh that was almost gleeful. “First thing this morning, soon as some white somebody one saw one, they’d be at tearing them down. Won’t be nothing left of all my hard work but fluttering fragments by now. Still . . . it’s a start. Shows we mean business. You betcha. But if there’s none of them left around, how’d you come up on this one?”

  “It was tacked up on my door last night. I thought you’d left it.”

  Tom shook his head, frowned. “Wasn’t me. I was gonna bring you by one later on.” Tom listened as Regina told him all about coming home with Willie Willie. About the open door, the flyer pinned on it.

  “You weren’t scared, were you, to be there by yourself? I mean . . . door left wide open and all.”

  “I wasn’t by myself,” said Regina. “Mr. Willie Willie stayed, insisted on it. He slept propped up in a chair all night. I asked him to please come up, take his own bed, and I’d sleep on the couch. He’s getting so old, you know?”

  “Old? Willie Willie?” Tom considered this. “Maybe. But he’s still strong as an ox. Just last week, I was passing by up there near the courthouse and I saw him lift Peach’s pie safe off the wagon and set it down into the street so she could get to it better. All by himself he did this, and that pie safe weighs like a burden.”

  Regina nodded. “He wouldn’t switch with me. He said he was used to sitting up through the night. Out in the woods, when it was tracking. ‘Have to do it, if you want to get hold to your prey.’ I didn’t hear him leave until morning.”

  “Well, you wanted to get some attention,” Tom said, nodding to the flyer that had been on her door. He wasn’t smiling. “I guess you did. You be careful. The somebody who put this up on your door, he’s the one left it open . . . It was meant as a sign. He knew Willie Willie would see it or at least you would tell him, and Willie Willie would know what it meant. Someone’s watching, and they don’t approve.”

  “I’m always careful,” said Regina. She thought, but didn’t add, Are you forgetting I’m from New York? Are you forgetting my daddy’s Oscar Robichard? I know all about bad men. I know all about bad things happening.

  There was silence between them. The dust dancing gold on the sunlight that flooded through Tom’s window suddenly seemed to absorb all their attention.

  Tom said, “I suppose this whole thing gave Willie Willie quite the shock. What’d he say last night when he saw it?”

  “He said you were fixing to get yourself in a whole mess of trouble.” Regina used Willie Willie’s accent. She thought her imitation of him was pretty good. Not as good as his of Mary Pickett’s but still . . . coming along. Regina decided not to tell Tom how Willie Willie said he could be getting her into trouble as well.

  “He might be right about that, about my raising a ruckus.” Tom chuckled, a wry, clear sound. “Nothing else might come of it, but that surely will.”

  “Then why’d you do it?”

  “Because,” said Tom, as he threw a quick glance to the row of diplomas behind him, “it’s time.”

  Regina leaned closer. “Did something happen with your son down in Jackson?” What was his name? “With Tom Junior? Did something happen with him when he was taking the Mississippi bar?”

  She thought of Joe Howard. Beaten to death.

  “Nothing happened,”
said Tom. For the first time since Regina’d met him, Tom lost his breeziness. “Which is the same thing always happens. I knew I was sending him down there without a snowball’s chance in hell they’d let him in. Even with me working my tail off here, building up my businesses and being a fine, upstanding Negro and an asset to the whole community, being an errand boy for the Duvals, delivering all the few black folks that can vote so they vote the right way—even with all that, you think I thought my son had a chance to join the bar here in Mississippi? No, I didn’t.”

  Tom’s eyes snapped—lightning there, too, and Regina felt the power behind those eyes, felt it electrify her as he went on. “I sent him on down to Jackson to be turned away because that was the ritual. That’s the way we do. If you’re a Negro, being turned away from the bar is like being admitted to the bar if you’re a white lawyer. At least you tried. It’s what you do so that folks think . . . ‘Well, at least that boy tried his best.’ But my Tom Junior—he’s not having none of it. Not anymore.”

  Regina leaned closer. “What’s that mean?” But knowing what it meant. In the well-chosen words of Ida Mae Robichard, “Honey, that young man had had him enough.”

  “It means,” said Tom, “that when he was down Jackson he met himself a man named Medgar Evers. Evers is a made-in-Mississippi boy, like my Tom Junior is, from over there in Decatur. Now, Medgar, he fought in the war, and when he came back, he aimed to vote right here in this state for what he’d seen colored boys killed fighting for over there. Dying for. So he got him some folks, his brother Charles among them, and they marched on the courthouse last April. They wanted to register for the election coming up. Trouble was, other folks in Decatur, they didn’t see things the same way Medgar was now seeing them. He was turned back. Not by strangers but by white boys he’d grown up with, white boys he’d played with and hunted with all of his life. Except now he was the one they were hunting. They rode in their pickups and their jalopies around the colored section of Decatur all night long, determined in their minds that Medgar wasn’t going to register and be able to vote like they were able to vote. There they sat, leaning out their car windows with baseball bats in their hands and 12-gauge shotguns. Tom Junior said, in the end, Medgar gave up. He had to. This time. But he’s not turning back. Medgar’s going to apply to the University of Mississippi Law School. And one day, he says, he’s determined to vote, right there in Decatur, Mississippi, where he was born.” Tom paused, shook his head, no longer angry. “Well, Medgar, he fired up my boy and then my boy fired me up. I started thinking, Why do I just take it for granted that no colored person can be admitted to the bar?”