The Secret of Magic

by Johnson, Deborah

  But at least now she had the key. And that key could make at least one thing all right.

  She was near enough that she could hear the men speaking into the microphone on the steps in front of the courthouse, one after the other, going on and on. She saw the flicker of strobe lights playing on fear-filled, hate-filled faces. But she turned away from them, and she thought of the forest; thought of its rich, firm goodness everywhere. This was something Daddy Lemon had always insisted they remember. That the forest snuck up on you, reached out to grab you. The roots of it would continually break through. You’d clear seedlings of it from the side of your road; look up and there they’d be all over again. The forest had been here before, and it would be here again.

  If Daddy Lemon could just get back there, could hide in the richness of its loam-scented bosom—well, she knew he’d be safe. From here, you could even see the forest, as you could from any spot in Revere, the stretched-out fingers of it reaching clear into the town. Beckoning for Daddy Lemon. Calling him home.

  Collie skirted around the men—and the women—on Main Street and went immediately to the back of the jail. She found the door unlocked like she knew it would be. In Revere, the doors were always kept open for tradesmen and friends. People just came and went, dropping off laundry or flower cuttings or their very own special lane cake. And there was no one at this back door. They were all out in front, listening to the speakers, as she had known they would be. In a small town, where so little happened, what little entertainment there was must, of necessity, be shared by them all.

  But inside the jailhouse, there was only Daddy Lemon. His eyes were swollen, his face red and bruised. She reached out to him, touched his worn black cheek for the last time, and put her hand into the strong black hand where it had rested—where all of their hands had rested—so long ago. He’d been beaten, and badly, but nothing looked broken. He was still a whole man. She was grateful for that. He could make it to the forest, and once he was there—why, he’d know what to do.

  “And always it’ll be talking to you. The forest’s gonna tell you everything you need to know.”

  Tonight she needed to know. So she listened.

  What the forest said to her, what it had always said to her, was, Come deeper.

  “I’ll try to give you a minute.” That’s what the sheriff had told her this afternoon. “That’s all the time you got. It’s all I can do.”

  Just a minute.

  But Collie slowed that minute down, she used every second of it, because she had the key.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, and she meant it. And wasn’t that what we all wanted to hear? From the ones who were close to us. From the ones who had turned on us. From the ones who had hurt us.

  “I’m sorry.”

  They’d been so close—not just her and Daddy Lemon but the whole town, all of them together, black and white, rich and poor—in a way that was difficult to explain to someone outside but was real.

  They smiled at each other, Collie and Daddy Lemon, one last time.

  Then Collie said, “Live me a story.”

  And she gave him the key.

  21.

  The taxi left her off at 69 Fifth Avenue, a place she had never been before. A new land, the woman thought, but she didn’t say this out loud. She reached into her crocodile purse—a splurge, but worth it; who knew when she’d get back to New York and Best & Co. again?—and took out money for the taxi driver and gave it to him. On the sidewalk, she looked up at the building and through a canyon of other tall buildings to a luminous sky overhead. Bright as a bluebird’s breast, she thought, not a cloud in it. And then she walked in.

  The woman at the reception desk was exactly what you would expect: bright-eyed and chipper. Not old, not dour. And with a smile on her face, as she looked up from stabbing wires into a switchboard, which made her look like she might be bursting with hope.

  “May I help you?” she said—helpfully. She was very pretty, dark-skinned, dark-eyed and dark-haired, and she was dressed in a snowy white lace-collared blouse. A very nice blouse; the woman noticed such things.

  “I’d like to see Thurgood Marshall,” she said. “He’s expecting me.”

  “Your name, please?”

  “Mary Pickett Calhoun.”

  The receptionist looked down at a ledger beside her, then up again. She squinted a bit and nodded.

  “One moment, ma’am,” she said. “I’ll tell Mr. Marshall you’re here.”

  The receptionist got up, started walking, but turned back before she reached the frosted-glass door that led off from the main room into who knew where. She smiled shyly at Mary Pickett, and the smile took years off her face. Mary Pickett realized she really was quite young. Twenty, at most. A girl with the whole of her life still before her, with the aspirations of it and the disappointments and the mistakes and the changes, all the things you never anticipated—but a life, nonetheless. Something that could shine forth, be full.

  “Hey, Miss Calhoun,” said the girl-woman. “I read The Secret of Magic, you know. When I was little, ninth grade, I think, and I loved Daddy Lemon.”

  “I loved him, too,” said Mary Pickett, quietly, and then she added, “Thank you.”

  “Thank you,” said the receptionist before she disappeared, “for writing it. That book meant a lot to me.”

  She had a New York accent, syllables all there, sharp vowels. It sounded nothing at all like a voice that had come out of the South. But the “ma’am” was there, and the “hey.” Mary Pickett thought this young woman might possibly have what they called in Revere “antecedents”—a mama from Louisiana, a daddy from Carolina or Georgia, grandparents who had started out in Alabama, then crossed over into Mississippi in order to catch the Illinois Central and start that long, long voyage up to Detroit. Mary Pickett sighed. Good or bad, throughout the nation, it was the South pumped the heartbeat of so much.

  She took a moment to look around the office. Dullish green-painted walls with a few ancient-looking palm tree prints nailed up on them. Orange plastic seats with chrome legs. Back issues of magazines—mainly, the NAACP’s Crisis—scattered on wood-veneer tables. It could have been an office anywhere. Mary Pickett didn’t know exactly what she had been expecting, but she decided that this seemed . . . well, right.

  She heard the quick tap of high heels, the forceful clomp of a man’s sturdy shoe. She turned back to the door, and there was Thurgood Marshall. Immediately he took over the room, the very presence of a man. Lately, his picture seemed to be everyplace. Mary Pickett saw it quite often in the newspapers she read. But his was the kind of face, she decided, you would remember from the very first sight.

  “Mr. Thurgood Marshall,” said the receptionist with a flourish. She was proud of him. Proud of what they were doing. Mary Pickett could tell, and she was reminded of something she had once read that had always stayed with her, something somebody had written well before the last war. “If you find a job you really love, you’ll never work again.”

  Thurgood Marshall looked like a man who had found his life’s work. Mary Pickett had, too—or refound it. This gave them something in common. This made her happy for him.

  “Mr. Marshall,” said Miss Mary Pickett Calhoun. It was a private joke, this salutation, from what seemed like a long time ago now, but still they both smiled. Then she took off her glove. She reached out her hand. The shake that he gave it felt good.

  “Come right this way,” said Thurgood Marshall as he held the frosted-glass door open.

  On the other side of it—ringing telephones, the clicking of multiple typewriters, the smell of stale coffee and too many cigarettes. She felt herself pulled into a vast forward movement and, without thinking, started putting together images in her mind for a book.

  Thurgood Marshall introduced her left and right—to lawyers and secretaries, to the office boy bringing in a bound stack of newspa
pers, to a visiting member of the NAACP Board of Directors, to W. E. B. Du Bois. He didn’t seem to discriminate in the hierarchy of his office. Mary Pickett surprised herself by being gratified by this. She thought that it boded well. There were more white lawyers than she thought there would be, and this boded well, too. Mary Pickett shook hands with everybody. She answered quick questions about The Secret of Magic. And she smiled.

  “Regina’s back here in my personal office. She’s waiting,” said Thurgood. “Place is too small now, and we’re so full up in it, they had to stick her with me.”

  His personal office was exactly like Mary Pickett had expected it to be. Regina had described it more than once. Papers that marched in columns up the wall, half-full cardboard drink cups, a window open to the last of a late-summer breeze. It looked very much like her own office, back home in Revere looked when she had been deep, deep in the writing of her book. A finished book, In Magnolia Forest. It was in her arms now, one of the things she had brought with her, and for a second she clutched it close to her heart. Finished, that’s true, all the way to The End. But now Mary Pickett knew there would be another. And then maybe even another. She had only to look around her to know there was no holding life back.

  “Mary Pickett,” said Regina, getting up from her desk, coming to the door.

  And Mary Pickett said, “Regina,” still rhyming it with vagina. She walked into Thurgood Marshall’s office, holding out her hand.

  In the months since they’d last seen each other—Mary Pickett dressed in black, standing beside the Daimler at the Bonnie Blue Line depot, waving her off—Regina had changed. Gotten older—Peach must have done that to her, the endless recrimination about what had happened, the death. What if I hadn’t said this? What if I had done that? Mary Pickett understood that kind of thinking. She’d done enough of it over the years about Willie Willie, about The Secret of Magic, their book. Some things you do when you’re young, not thinking; you never can change them. Can’t make them better. You got to just pick up and go on from there. She hoped Regina realized this. It was important, with all that needed doing, that she not waste the time, that she not waste precious years. Always there were people who needed what you could give them. Who depended on you. Mary Pickett looked over to Regina’s small desk, and there was that snapshot on it, the one she’d sent here so long ago in her letter, the one of a grinning, proud Willie Willie and Joe Howard in his new dress uniform. Framed now, holding on to each other forever.

  Damn, Mary Pickett thought. I can’t let myself cry.

  She shook her head. This was a happy time, and she didn’t want to ruin it with too much serious thinking.

  “Nice suit,” said Mary Pickett, about Regina’s stylish tweed. “Hattie Carnegie?”

  “Yes, Hattie Carnegie,” answered Regina, and the quickness of her smile said some things would never change. And really—did everything need to?

  Thurgood indicated the two client chairs, brought his own massive leather one from behind the desk to face them.

  “Coffee, anyone?” he asked. “A doughnut?”

  The women shook their heads. “No, thank you,” they said together.

  Mary Pickett sat down, started opening the smaller of her manila envelopes. “I brought the clippings with me. There weren’t many, and that’s a blessing. The hue and cry died down quickly. About Willie Willie, I mean.”

  “So he got away,” said Thurgood. He took clippings from Mary Pickett, put on his glasses. “I’m sorry I never met him, but from what Regina told me, he was an amazing fellow.”

  “Yes, amazing,” said Mary Pickett. “And loved.”

  As Thurgood started reading, Mary Pickett turned to Regina. “All the major newspapers wrote something about his getting away. The white newspapers. Except, of course, The Revere Times Commercial, but you wouldn’t expect that.”

  “You ever see him anymore?” asked Regina. “Jackson Blodgett? Does he still come over? Maybe once in a while?”

  Jackson.

  The name brought with it the usual roil of emotions. What might have been. What could have been. And then, inevitably, What had happened. For a second, tears, the Gotcha!, threatened to overwhelm Mary Pickett. But then she lowered her eyes and found what had pulled her through so much in the past, so many losses—the inevitable strong core of her Miss Calhoun self.

  “No,” she said quietly. “I don’t imagine I’ll see Mr. Blodgett ever again, not personally, at least. He’s suffered the loss of a son, and he’s grieving. His wife, Miss Mae Louise . . . Why, she’s stricken. They, the two of them alone, need to hold on tight to each other, get through this terrible time together. I’m sure you understand.”

  Regina nodded. She understood.

  Thurgood looked up. “So, from what I’m reading, Willie Willie just vanished into thin air?”

  Mary Pickett shook her head. “Not into thin air; he went into the forest.”

  She had numbered the clippings like she had done the first time, with blue ink in her perfect Palmer penmanship hand, and just like before, ink had bled into the foolscap. But the bleeding ink couldn’t hide, couldn’t camouflage what they were all screaming.

  BLACK MAN KILLS WHITE MAN, THEN DISAPPEARS

  * * *

  “Except he didn’t,” said Mary Pickett.

  Thurgood looked up, frowned. “I thought you said—”

  “Oh, he got out of Revere, all right. Physically, that is. First into the forest, then over into Louisiana, probably Texas after that. But he had to leave Mississippi to do it. Leave his home, the places he cared for and the people he loved.”

  Thurgood was having none of it. “No offense, Miss Calhoun, but I can’t imagine there’s a Negro alive not anxious to leave Mississippi. Willie Willie, once out—he probably didn’t stop running ’til he reached the Pacific. Besides, from what Regina tells me, the folks you’re talking about—Peach and Joe Howard—the people he loved were all dead.”

  “Maybe,” said Mary Pickett, tears glistening her eyes, looking right at Regina. “Maybe they were the only ones he loved. But I like to think not.”

  They were all silent for a moment, Thurgood still reading and then passing the clippings one by one to Regina. She didn’t look at them now. Mary Pickett imagined she’d wait until later. She’d want to be by herself when she did.

  “Well, my goodness, I’d almost forgotten . . .”

  She flourished forth another manila envelope, this one marked TOM RASPBERRY. She passed it to Regina, who opened it up. A front-page banner headline from the Chicago Defender:

  LAWYER SON OF PROMINENT REVERE ATTORNEY TO SIT FOR MISSISSIPPI STATE BAR EXAM NEXT SESSION!

  * * *

  And there he was, smiling away—Tom with his arm wrapped around a younger, spitting image of himself.

  Mary Pickett said, “I thought you might have already seen this, but just in case . . .”

  “I had,” said Regina. “I read it.”

  “He won’t make it,” Thurgood said matter-of-factly. “Not in Mississippi. Not yet. They’re not ready.”

  There was a knock at his door. A woman—a secretary—stuck her head in.

  “Mr. Wilkins wants to see you,” she said. “He said it’s urgent. Something about Oklahoma.”

  “The Rattley case,” mumbled Thurgood. He nodded at Mary Pickett, took the file from the secretary, and followed her out.

  Mary Pickett and Regina sat in silence for a moment, listening to Thurgood’s footsteps as they blended into the overarching activity of the office. A breeze at the window still flapped at the shade. Regina waited for a moment, then asked, “You still at Calhoun Place? Jackson Blodgett didn’t take it from you, did he? Willie Willie said he held the note on it . . .”

  “I’m still there,” said Mary Pickett. “And he could have. I don’t know why he didn’t, but he didn’t.” They were silent again for a moment, their minds
swirling around the contradiction that was the South.

  Then, strangely, Mary Pickett whispered, “Do you miss it?”

  And, strangely, Regina answered back, “Sometimes. Yes, sometimes I do.”

  Talking about Revere. They both knew that.

  Mary Pickett smiled. “Bed Duval tells me Tom Raspberry keeps writing you to come down, join Tom Junior and him in their practice. Not a law practice, really, not what you’re used to. Maybe not yet, but Tom . . . if things change, he sure can adapt.” They both laughed at this. After a minute, Mary Pickett went on: “You know how it is in a small town—might as well air all your business on the party line. Bed tells me Tom says you’re just what Revere needs. Bed says you might be just what Tom needs. Now, that’s just his personal opinion, though he did say that—if you come down—Tom wants to call his new firm Raspberry and Robichard. I told Bed, that it sounds like dessert to me.”

  “Me, too,” said Regina.

  “But,” said Mary Pickett, looking at her keenly, “I do declare you look like you might just be in possession of a fine sweet tooth.”

  Mary Pickett looked down at her watch then. “Oh, my!” Started up. “Gracious, time for me to be going. I’ve got a train to catch out of Penn Station. But I brought this for you. I wanted you to have it.”

  She opened up the last of her manila envelopes, pulled out a thick binding of typeset pages.

  “In Magnolia Forest,” Regina read. “Is this your new book?”

  “The galleys of it,” said Mary Pickett. “Lippincott’s bringing it out early next year. They did Magic, too, way back when. I’m surprised they remembered me, but they did.”

  She knew she looked pleased as punch. She couldn’t help it. She said, “Look here.”