The Secret of Magic

by Johnson, Deborah

  But not one thing got to those charmed children—the two boys, the girl—as they ran past the big house, the three of them charging into the night. Streaking over the rough sidewalks, down past the two big houses and the shacks, bound for the river, where an old man waited for them to show them his tricks, to teach them his knowledge.

  “You hear that sound?

  “It’s the king bullfrog.

  “He thinks he’s alone, but he’s ripe for the spearing.

  “You see that star?

  “It’s the north point.”

  • • •

  THE VOICES, NEXT MORNING, seemed to come from right outside the cottage window, the murmur of them blended into the general early, coming-to-life sounds Regina was used to by now. Mockingbirds quarreling with starlings in some daily territorial dispute. Ducks, heading south, honked their way through the sky.

  Hunting Season! Guns shooting! Time to fly away!

  Regina thought if she stuck her head out the window she’d feel the flap of their wings. There was the low rumble of early-morning traffic starting up from over on Main Street. And there was the whispering.

  She opened her eyes, pulled on her robe, and went to the window. Fog hung like a curtain over Calhoun Place. Toward the east, bare tree limbs scratched at the sky, and for the first time Regina saw the mistletoe nestled high in them, settling into places where leaves had once been. But once the ducks had echoed off into the morning, Regina was left once again with a subtlety of voices. Her ears and her eyes followed them down from the treetops to the side of Mary Pickett’s fine house.

  Mary Pickett stood there, along with the sheriff and Jackson Blodgett. Even though his back was to her, Regina recognized him by the tilt of his head, by the way his hand rested on Mary Pickett’s shoulder. It was the first time Regina had seen him touch her. And someone had been called out. She could tell it.

  Instantly wide awake, Regina ran down the stairs and out into the driveway. The others turned toward her in what looked like a synchronized rhythm, Jackson Blodgett and the sheriff with tight, puckered expressions. It was too early for Dinetta, and she was nowhere in sight, but a woman carrying a coffee cup was wandering over from the big house across the street. Looking both ways. And Mary Pickett, fully dressed in a tweed skirt and sweater, a scarf tied around her pin curls, stood there as well, one hand on a hip, one arm spread wide, her face thoughtful, her eyes pinpointed on her house.

  Regina followed that stare, and she, too, saw what the others were seeing. What Jackson Blodgett and Rand Connelly were shaking their heads at, what the curious neighbor, shocked, was now moving away from, what Mary Pickett attempted to hide with the outstretch of her arm. Regina, moving closer, saw it, too.

  NIGGER LUVER GET THAT NIGGER LAWYER OUT FROM HERE

  Misspelled words. Bad grammar. Trashy folks, thought Regina. And that was reassuring, because only people like that used a word like nigger, or so she’d been taught. Still, the lawyer in her automatically questioned that misspelling. The correct cipher of “lover” was not difficult to come by. It was on cards and candy boxes, in flower-shop windows, prominent on the covers of True Confessions magazine. Love was a word most people knew well. She wondered why it had been so prominently got wrong here, especially when the much less used lawyer had been got so perfectly right.

  But no one else standing there seemed to notice this, much less think that it mattered. What seemed to count was that Mary Pickett’s house had been desecrated by words written so large that Regina did not need her eyeglasses to read them, so big she was sure that if Thurgood had been looking down from New York, he could have read them himself. Splotches of black paint dripped from the letters down the pristine white walls of the house, crystallized on them, shone as darkly as dried blood.

  Out of the corner of her eye, Regina watched Jackson edge even closer to Mary Pickett, and she saw Lilla Raymond see this as well. The two of them—Regina and Lilla Raymond—stared at each other for the briefest of minutes. And Regina wondered which would soon enliven Revere’s telephone party line more—the fact that Mary Pickett’s house had been vandalized or the fact that Jackson Blodgett had touched his once-upon-a-time wife, had comforted her in public, had held her close.

  Mary Pickett looked over, her eyes jewel bright and shiny.

  Now you know what it feels like. To be singled out. To be cut low. To have people think they can do anything they want to your things and even your life. What it feels like to be black in Mississippi—at least for a minute.

  That’s what Regina wanted to say, but what she heard herself saying was, “I am so sorry.” So sorry. Over and over again. Surprising even herself that she was.

  Sorry first for this word painted openly on this wall and what this word meant to Willie Willie and to her and to all the other Negroes in Revere. Sorry for her father and for Joe Howard. Sorry for those separate, unequal drinking fountains and the Confederate flag over the courthouse. But sorry for Mary Pickett, too, who maybe hadn’t known how things really were but was quickly learning. Regina shook her head like Mary Pickett was now shaking hers. Both of them, maybe, sorry for the whole sorry state of the world.

  “I’ll take care of it,” Jackson said to Mary Pickett. “I’ll send Wynne over. He’ll be honored to put things right.”

  Mary Pickett nodded, but she glanced at Regina. And the thought passed wordlessly between them—or maybe Regina just imagined it did—that Wynne Blodgett had already done what he meant to do.

  • • •

  LATE THAT AFTERNOON, when Regina called the Fund, she got her archrival Skip Moseley on Thurgood’s phone.

  “What’s up?’ she asked. “Where’s Thurgood?”

  Because something had to be up for Skip to be taking Thurgood’s calls.

  “Man, oh, man,” said Skip, and he was whispering, almost buzzing. “Is this place in an uproar or what?”

  Regina waited. She knew from experience that dead silence on her part would be the best encouragement for whatever it was Skip was dying to tell.

  And it was.

  “Big changes,” he said.

  Skip was what he liked to call “a natty dresser.” And there, in Mississippi, sitting on a tall red-vinyl-and-aluminum stool in Mary Pickett’s kitchen, and talking into Mary Pickett’s heavy old-fashioned wall telephone, Regina saw Skip, in New York, as clearly as though he were right there. He was flicking at his red bow tie, pulling out a perfect silk handkerchief, wiping his brow smooth with it. Preparing to tell all.

  “A huge project coming up in Jackson, Mississippi. Public school integration. Federal court. Thurgood’s finally starting with those big cases he’s been after. You know, the effect-the-legislation ones.” Skip did a bad imitation of Thurgood’s soft Tidewater accent, then laughed—tee-hee-hee—at his own joke.

  “Oh, that’s interesting,” said Regina, with a great deal more enthusiasm than she actually felt. Her mind had wandered to Mary Pickett’s wall with that NIGGER LUVER still painted on it. It was well past noon, and she’d seen neither hide nor hair of Wynne Blodgett and his promised cleanup.

  “Which means,” Skip continued, “that the Fund’s finishing up with the kinds of things you’re working on down there. You know, those individual litigation cases. We’re moving on, in a whole different direction. Who knows, you might even be out of a job.”

  Tee-hee-hee. Again.

  “Is Thurgood there?” Regina asked again. She started hunting through the kitchen cabinet drawers that were near her, searching for a stray pack of Mary Pickett’s cigarettes.

  Skip ignored that question, asked his own: “Now, where are you, exactly? Down there in Alabama—or is it Georgia?”

  It was Mississippi—where Jackson, Mississippi, was—and Regina knew that Skip knew this. In fact, he probably had a map of the state hanging in his living room, straight pins pushed in at Revere, right at the spot where he thought
her heart beat.

  And when he had found out, he’d probably said enough—and just enough—to Thurgood so that a little I-told-you-so could be singled out if she happened to bungle things in the end. Something along the lines of how he understood why Thurgood had done this. Thurgood and Buster and Ida Jane and Dr. Sam were all such good friends. If he’d had the courage, that’s what Skip would surely have said. Or would say.

  And he might be right about her, about how she’d got here. That thought was starting to sink into Regina as she sparred with him, as she hunted through dishtowels and silverware for that stray cigarette. Because, really, what did she have to tell Thurgood? Nothing much. She peeked out the side window, and there were people driving by Calhoun Place now, a steady stream of them. She saw the cars slow up, the people stare out of them and point. She opened another drawer and started rummaging through.

  “If Thurgood’s there, would you please just put him on the phone?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Skip said. “Sure thing.”

  He clattered the receiver onto Thurgood’s desk so loudly that Regina had to hold the phone away from her ear. She heard Skip start to whistle and the tap of his shoes against the linoleum floor, not going fast. There was a low murmur of voices and the sound of a woman’s laugh. After that, for a while, there were just the muffled, ordinary noises of the office—other telephones ringing, someone calling for a secretary to bring coffee, someone else saying, “Hey, did you see this?”

  It was some moments before Thurgood picked up. “Reggie, that you?”

  “It’s me, Thurgood.” She smiled, happy at the sound of his voice. “How are things?”

  “Good. Fine. The question is, What’s going on down there? Over a week now. We were starting to worry.” All coming out as one rolling sentence, a quick inhale on his cigarette the only punctuation.

  She took a breath, gave him a quick rundown. She ended with what had been painted that morning on the side of Calhoun Place.

  “Calhoun Place?”

  “M. P. Calhoun’s house,” she said.

  “Oh, is that what it’s called?”

  But she’d not been sent down to Revere to learn the name of Mary Pickett’s house. Thurgood let out a deep breath. Regina could almost see the cigarette smoke on it, curling up, masking his eyes and his face. “Any idea who wrote it?”

  “They blame everything on kids down here. Outside agitating kids, to be exact.” She thought of herself for a moment. “That is, when they aren’t blaming inside agitating Negroes.”

  Thurgood didn’t laugh. “What do you think?”

  Regina took a deep breath. “I think it was Wynne Blodgett.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “The son of the richest man in town, the one who owns half of it, plus the newspaper, the bank.”

  “Hmm . . . What makes you think it was him?”

  She told him everything she’d got so far, about Bed Duval and Judge Timms and what Anna Dale Buchanan had told her and Peach—told him everything, in fact, except about the secret, hidden shirt. On a party line, in a place as chatty as Revere, Mississippi, she dared not mention that, at least not yet.

  “And you say his daddy sent the boy away after Joe Howard was killed—over there somewhere in Alabama.”

  “They didn’t send him far, and they didn’t send him for long. He’s back. Been back, from what I’ve seen.”

  “What you’ve seen?”

  Regina took a quick, shallow breath. “I mean, it’s a small town. He’s around.”

  “You got anything on him? Found any real witnesses? People who actually saw his face? You’ll need that.”

  “Not yet. But, like I told you, there are some leads.”

  A pause. “Reggie, are you sure it’s safe for you down there?”

  She closed her eyes. Saw that writing. Saw those words. Then she saw Skip Moseley. Hovering.

  “Safe as in church.” She thought of what Mary Pickett had said to her and echoed it in a sweet Southern voice: “Why, everybody down here’s just so nice to me.”

  A chuckle from Thurgood. “I’m sure they’re nice, all right, but you be careful. Now are you sure . . .” But he stopped himself. They both knew he’d been about to suggest Skip yet again.

  That was the last thing she wanted. She started vehemently shaking her head. “No, I can do this. I just need a little more time.”

  Thurgood said, “Well, that’s all the time you got left—just a little. A week from now—sooner, even—you got to come home. No extensions. With that word out there on the wall, it’s getting dangerous. Maybe it’s already dangerous. Plus, those veterans’ cases are waiting. I need you to finish them off. We’re making some changes . . .”

  Thurgood went on to repeat to her what Skip Moseley had already said.

  Regina eased off the phone as quickly as she decently could. Straight from the kitchen, she went looking for Mary Pickett. She didn’t know why, but she went out the back door, around to the side, keeping her eyes averted from that scrawled black paint on the wall. She went through the back gardens; she went out to the sidewalk and looked down the street. The Daimler was there, parked as majestically as ever in the driveway. But there was no sign of Mary Pickett, no hint of her, no whiff of her perfume.

  • • •

  THAT AFTERNOON, Regina decided it was time to take on the courthouse. She walked in the front door, right under the flutter of the Confederate flag. She could have seen it, but she didn’t look up. The courthouse smelled of ammonia, lemon wax, and stale cigar smoke. There was a black man in a corner, passing a mop. He stopped when he saw Regina, stared at her for a moment, no expression on his face, then got right back to work. The directory said Judge Timms’s office was on the top floor, which proved to be one story up. There was no elevator, and the steps were crowded, but Regina kept her head down and made her way through.

  Judge Timms’s clerk, Mrs. Hightower, seemed to be the formidable prototype for the Acceptable Law Receptionist here in Revere. Hers was obviously the demeanor that Forrest Duval’s Miss Tutwiler strove hard to emulate. Tiny, fine-boned, blue-suited, high-heeled, icy-eyed—Regina took one look at Mrs. Hightower and recognized implacability right away.

  Mrs. Hightower said, “He’s not here, not been here, and will never be here, as far as you’re concerned.”

  And that was that.

  But for the first time since coming to Mississippi, Regina felt like she’d truly accomplished something. She hadn’t really expected to be allowed in to see Judge Timms, hadn’t even known exactly what she’d have said to him, anyway. A little colored child can identify someone named Sonny Taggart—who lives down a piece from him out in the county on something called Short Cut Road—and this man, by the way, was one of those waiting for Joe Howard when he got off that bus? What would Judge Timms say to that? How would it matter?

  No, what was important to Regina was that she’d gone into that courthouse. She’d gone up those stairs all by herself and she’d asked for what she wanted. Openly, in plain view of anybody standing there watching, she—Regina Mary Robichard—had defied that Confederate flag.

  Think you can best me?

  Maybe, Regina thought, exhilarated. Maybe, I can!

  The courthouse clock struck five as Regina turned the corner toward Mary Pickett’s once again. The curious, slow-moving traffic on the street had thinned, but the wall on Calhoun Place was still as damaged as it had been that morning. Regina’s steps slowed as she drew near to the gate, as she looked at that word.

  Nigger.

  The house itself looked empty and dark, closed in onto itself. Ashamed. She wondered why Wynne Blodgett hadn’t cleaned the wall yet, why Jackson hadn’t made him clean it up. And why hadn’t Mary Pickett done something herself?

  Quickly, running away from that word, already halfway to the cottage—it was then that Regina decided to go to the
river. She wanted, needed, to see the place where they’d dragged up Joe Howard’s battered body. Willie Willie had pointed out a vague path for her that first day from the window of his truck. Now she thought she might be able to piece together the way on her own.

  • • •

  BEYOND THE GATE at Calhoun Place, the land sloped sharply downward. The few shotgun houses clinging to it looked poised to immediately give up and tumble downhill on the next sharp shiver of wind. Regina saw outhouses. She saw smoke rising from out-back kitchens, and she thought again to how Mary Pickett had modernized the cottage for Willie Willie, thought again to how much she must love him. Just like she said.

  Across the street, down from Raymond Hall, a black woman unpinned sheet after startlingly white sheet from clotheslines that stretched from the side of her tarpaper shack to a huge oak tree out front. Regina counted ten of them. That’s all she could see, but there might have been more. The woman’s hands were misshapen and ashy against so much brilliant whiteness. She smiled brightly when she caught sight of Regina. She called out, “Hey, there!” She waved, and the brisk sweep of the motion called down a cascade of brightness from the ancient trees overhead. Red and gold leaves, dying already, lost their last hold and showered onto the sheets, onto that dark working female, onto the bare earth of her yard.

  Why, she’s beautiful, thought Regina, and so is that tree and all the trees behind it, leading into the forest and the clear sky over them and the birds and the smell—the rich loam of earth meeting with river. All of it beautiful. All of it new—at least to her.

  Regina waved back. Called out, “Hi, how are you?”

  She wondered who the woman was, what she was doing with all these sheets, who they belonged to, who she worked for. She thought that Willie Willie would know, and Dinetta and even Mary Pickett. They’d know just who she was, her name and her nickname, and who her husband was and how they’d ended up in this house and who their parents had been and who their children were, and their cousins. Black or white, all her neighbors would know her whole story because she lived by them, had probably always lived by them, and belonged.