The Secret of Magic (29 page)

“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?
”

“Mr. Duval won’t be happy. You bringing up things during an election year.”

“Neither will his son be, Little Bed,” said Tom, and then he shrugged. But his shoulders came down with the weight of the world on them. Regina wondered if he, too, was thinking about that Confederate flag waving in pride of place over the courthouse, because she sure was.

Think you can best me?

“Forrest Duval’s got Bed, but I got my son, too,” said Tom. “When Tom Junior gets home from Jackson, he’s got to know his daddy’s going to be right here, standing beside him. And that I’ll continue to be there for him, no matter what comes up.”

Regina looked around at Tom’s office, its dust so new it still smelled of cut trees, the long row of proud pictures and diplomas black-framed and hung so carefully on the main wall. A dynasty—that was what Tom was building, just like Jackson Blodgett was building his and the Duvals had built theirs and the Calhouns before them, all of them putting a greedy hand to whatever they could to get ahead. She liked the fact that Tom was just like they were, trusted him more for his self-interest than she trusted his change of heart. If he’d printed those flyers, tacked them up, then Regina knew a tide might be shifting. Tom Raspberry’s interests no longer melded perfectly at the edges of Forrest Duval’s interests, at least not anymore.

From the hallway, she heard footsteps, then a knock at the door.

Tom got up as it opened. He was smiling again, first at Regina and then at the man and the young boy that came through. Dressed just the same—white shirts, clean but faded blue pants, dark suspenders—they looked alike, too, the boy a miniature version of the thin, dark-skinned man. The child looked at Regina through eyes round as saucers.

“Reverend Lacey!” Tom was at the door himself now, pumping the older man’s hand. “Good to see you, sir. Thanks for coming in. Thanks for bringing the boy.” Then, to Regina, “Miss Robichard, I’d like to introduce you to Reverend Charles K. Lacey. He saw one of your flyers down there where he lives near Macon. Called me up, first thing this morning. Said his grandson Manasseh’s got something you might want to hear.”

• • •

MANASSEH LACEY!
She still could barely believe it. It had taken long moments of coaxing—the boy had been holding tight on to his grandfather’s hand the whole time—but eventually, slowly at first and then flooding, the words had come out. About the POWs, the Germans, the bus stopping, about a dark car waiting there, and about the men—men wearing hoods. And Regina was thinking,
Nothing new here, nothing I haven’t already heard from Anna Dale Buchanan,
when Manasseh said, “I knew one of them.”

“One of whom?” She leaned closer, took his small hand, thinking at first he might mean one of the Germans—but how could that be?

“One of the men by the big car.” A quick look at his grandfather. “One of the men waiting for Mr. Joe Howard.”

Wynne Blodgett? Was this who Manasseh was talking about? Did Manasseh know him? Could he identify him?
But she couldn’t say that. Her heart tapped away like thunder, but she couldn’t lead him. “Who was it?”

“Sonny Taggart” came the child’s prompt response, and he wasn’t looking at his grandfather anymore, he was looking at Regina. “Lives down from us out in the county. He and his mama, out on Short Cut Road. Aunt Eloise does cleanup for them. Sometimes.”

Manasseh paused, took a deep breath. “Juicy Fruit,” he whispered. “Lieutenant Wilson gave me a stick of it. He was nice to me.”

Regina had to look away when he said it, toward Tom Raspberry, who was looking away, too.

• • •

SONNY TAGGART MIGHT
not be Wynne Blodgett, but at least he was something. A lead.

Rushing home, Regina weighed exactly what to do next—call Thurgood right now with what she had and see what he said? Or take this new information over to Bed Duval and see what, if anything, he would do? Or should she try to see Judge Timms? Was he even back yet?

She had forgotten about Mary Pickett’s garden party, but when she rounded the corner onto Third Avenue she could hear the chatter and the music from it, violins enthusiastically struggling though an early movement of one of the Brandenburg Concertos. Regina paused at the gate, uncertain. Ahead of her stretched a string of linen-covered round tables threaded like fat white pearls through the green grass. Women in hats and flower-print silk dresses, their dimpled hands holding tightly on to glasses of what looked like iced tea—or possibly sherry or bourbon—all of which, Regina had learned, in Revere, was referred to as sweet tea. All white faces, all dimpled white hands—and of course they would be, milling leisurely about Mary Pickett Calhoun’s bright garden on a workday afternoon.

Except for Dinetta, of course, though Regina hardly recognized her. She’d been spruced up, her brightness subdued, as it were, into a starched gray uniform, a frilly white apron, and a matching lace cap. Company clothes! But not completely—when Regina looked down she saw Dinetta still wore her normal, everyday, run-down, toe-cut-out oxfords. Company clothes, maybe—but not company shoes.

Mary Pickett was nowhere to be seen in all the day’s brightness, but Regina imagined she was hiding out in a flower print somewhere herself. One thing for certain, she surely wasn’t there to give Regina direction as to how to get through this party to the cottage. She looked around, and for the first time really noticed the low, lush hedges that bordered Calhoun Place from one end to the other, effectively blocking entrance to the property except from the driveway. Regina decided there was no way around it; this was one party she’d have to crash, at least for a moment.

She started up the driveway, more aware than she’d been since she got here of where she was and of everything around her. Sloping green lawn, a big white house, white tablecloths, white faces. As Regina drew nearer, conversation faltered, then stopped altogether, as though she’d turned into a brown cork that, popping along, plugged cheerful words back up into people’s throats.