The Secret of Magic (21 page)

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 first 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.”

How could she say,
Do you think Wynne Blodgett killed Joe Howard Wilson, because I’m starting to?
Blurt it right out like that? Instead, she decided to dodge the question.

“Everybody said you’d be the best one . . . I mean, in Catfish Alley . . . You’d—”

“It’s not that everybody told you about me.” An interruption, true, but with it he threw her a lifeline. “It’s more like you got something you want me to do. I’ve been at this a long time. I recognize a do-something-for-me look when I see one. You seem like you might be willing to add on a please to it—something that doesn’t always happen—but you still want something. Why don’t you tell me what it is?”

Regina looked at the long lineup of certificates and diplomas behind him.

She said, “I haven’t even been able to see the grand jury docket.”

“That’s normal,” said Tom Raspberry. “It’s sealed. Nobody can see it. Once they finished up, foreman handed it over to Judge Timms like he’s supposed to. That’s that.”

“But,” said Regina, “Jackson Blodgett said he’d make sure I got a copy. He says he’s doing it for the good of the town.”

“Really?” said Tom. He cocked a bushy eyebrow.

“But there’s not going to be anything in that grand jury report, at least I’m not counting on it. What I need is for Bed Duval to go to Judge Timms and get him to call out
another
grand jury, one with some clout to it this time. I—we—have to find something that will make him do that.”

“There’s nothing gonna make either of them do that,” Tom said matter-of-factly. “Judge Timms . . . he’s the meanest man in Mississippi, which automatically means he’s racist to boot. Believe me, it runs like that. Besides, he’s up North Carolina duck hunting, and will be there until two days before the election, and that’s not ’til November. Win or lose, Judge Timms’s not going to let anything interfere with him taking out Dixie and Sugar.”

Regina shook her head, confused.

“His dogs,” Tom clarified. “Bird dogs. The best in three counties. Judge Timms . . . he’s more attached to them than he is to his wife. Besides, only reason Little Bed got him to do anything in the first place was because everybody knows Willie Willie, and Joe Howard was a war hero. And that was
then
, back almost a year ago. They’ve done what they could for Joe Howard. They’re not about to do anything more.”

“Even if we find other witnesses? Other people who were on that bus, saw what happened?”

“And how do you plan to do that?”

“With
flyers
.” Regina nodded to the dummies on his wall. “You’ve got a press. If we printed up flyers, put them on all the trees in Revere, in the black parts of town, in the white ones, somebody would come up. I’m sure they would. This woman, Anna Dale Buchanan . . .”

“I know all about Mrs. Buchanan.”

“This is the thing about Mrs. Buchanan. The reason she got in touch with Miss Calhoun was because she’d read something in the
Times Commercial
. It was just a little something, two, three sentences at most, about the grand jury finding, but Mrs. Buchanan was able to put two and two together and come up with Joe Howard. I’m betting if more people heard about what had happened . . .”

Tom interrupted again. “You talk to Miss Mary Pickett about this?”

“Why should I do that?” snapped Regina. This time she didn’t even try to keep the irritation out of her voice. “What would she care? I mean, I imagine she’d be upset about them. She’s just a bundle of good civic pride. She’d probably think they were litter, messing up her pretty little town . . .”

“That’s true. She loves her some Revere, all right. But don’t you think you owe her that much?”

Regina blinked. “Why?” she said slowly.

“Because she brought you down. It seems to me this means she wants to see at least some little piece of justice done here.”

“That’s not what she said.”

“That might not be what she
said
, but it’s what she meant. She knew Joe Howard all his natural life just like Willie Willie’s known her for all hers. You don’t think she cared he got killed?”

“No, I do not.” Words out before Regina could stop them.