The Secret of Magic Read online

  She was still at this when Thurgood came in. When he cleared his throat, she jumped. For a moment, as Regina looked up, she saw only the man in the snapshot, the soldier. His face haloed Thurgood’s face. Regina slipped the snapshot into a pocket of her suit jacket instinctively, without knowing why.

  “Hey, Reggie, what you doing here on such a fine Saturday afternoon?”

  He was dressed casually in pleated twill trousers and a pocketed chambray shirt that was almost the same creamy color as the envelope. He carried a cardboard cup of coffee in one hand and a waxed-paper sack of Do-Rite Donuts in the other. The bag was chock-full, almost overflowing. Sweets were Thurgood’s weakness. “Want one?” He held the bag out to her.

  Reggie shook her head. She was as careful about her weight as she was about most things. “Afternoon?” she echoed, and glanced down at her watch. It was one o’clock. She’d gotten in before ten.

  Thurgood answered his own question. “I guess you came in to catch up on those.” He shook his head in comic commiseration and motioned with it to the case room.

  Regina got up, stretched discreetly. “Back so soon? We weren’t expecting you until sometime next week.”

  “I got in yesterday night. Late.”

  “How was it?”

  “Good. By which I mean the donations were good. What I had to tell the folks to get those donations—well, that was something else.”

  There were so many cases, not even counting hers, that for a moment Regina had to stop, had to remember just exactly which one had formed the basis of the LDF’s latest appeal. Then it came to her. A white family in rural Oklahoma had been murdered, their house burned down round about them. A colored man had been accused of the crime. He was simple, in the polite and colloquial implication of that word simple. This translated that the colored man “wasn’t all there.” He also happened to be crippled, with a badly misshapen and withered right arm and right leg. And he was known to be gentle, kind to ladies and to children. The white family—a husband and wife, their three little girls—had been tied up, tortured, individually slaughtered. The woman’s breasts had been sliced off. The little girls—well, nobody could bear to write down what had been done to them. But even the white woman’s grieving father could not believe the colored man had done this. How could he have? Even physically? The father repeated this over and over again. Other white people agreed with him, but not many. At least out loud. Theirs was a small community where everybody knew everybody else.

  None of this mattered. There was an election coming up, and the man people actually believed had done the murder was white. Whites could vote. Blacks could not. Everything came down to this in the end.

  Still, the blacks weren’t going down without a fight.

  The Fund was called on and took up the case. The accused man’s name was Tom Studdard. He was tried, found guilty, and sentenced to the electric chair. He had no idea what had happened to him or what was about to happen to him. Nor was Thurgood able to explain it, not with any satisfaction. He had a hard enough time trying to explain it to himself. All these hopeless cases, one right after the other, were starting to wear.

  “Have you heard anything?” she asked.

  “I didn’t need to hear anything. I was still there yesterday when they fried him,” Thurgood said, then added, “We had used up all our appeals.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I didn’t know.”

  For a second, tears threatened, but Regina shook her head. Willed them back. She’d never get on here if she got emotional, and she knew it. And getting on here was important to her.

  Thurgood lingered in the doorway, saying nothing. Regina decided he might be just too damn drained to move on, and she wanted him to move on. Just a little. She needed to get back to the letter, figure out what she wanted to do with it before she shared it with him.

  But she’d been brought up to be polite, to respect her elders, so she asked, “How’s Buster?” Buster was Thurgood’s wife.

  “Buster’s fine. Tired of me being gone so much. Tired of me being tired.” He let his voice trail, and the trailing was not quite a sigh. “How are your folks—your mama and your new daddy?” He chuckled at this. “Dr. Sam and Ida Jane. Who would have thought it?”

  Regina sure hadn’t. She glanced away, toward the window. “Great. They’re doing well. They’re happy.” But she sounded as guarded as Thurgood had sounded when he’d talked about his wife.

  Thurgood knew both Samuel and Ida Jane Robichard Robinson well. Regina’s stepfather was the Marshalls’ doctor. Ida Jane—well, she was Ida Jane. A heroine.

  “Fine people,” said Thurgood. He smiled, like everybody seemed to when they talked about Regina’s mama. “Glad they found each other at last. What your mama went through when they killed your natural daddy.” Then he stopped talking, looked over at Regina. “What’s that you got in your hand?”

  She did, indeed, have something in her hand. The envelope. She jumped, and the jump made her feel guilty. At least she thought it did. Like she was doing something she should, perhaps, not be doing when actually what she was doing was fine. It was what she wanted to do, or, rather, what she wanted him to do, that might annoy Thurgood. That might make him mad.

  She said, “This came for you.” She held the envelope out to him.

  He shook his head slightly, a weary man who had stopped to say hello and did not want to be faced with more problems. “Is it important?”

  “I think so.” Reggie considered. “I think it could be.”

  “Then bring it on back. Coffee’s getting cold. I need to catch up.” Thurgood, all business now.

  He set off briskly down the short hallway that led to his cluttered office, and she followed, leaving her hat and her purse and her gloves where they lay but clutching the envelope. She had quickly managed to stuff the clippings back in, but the whole thing, bulging at its sides, was no longer as pristine, as pure-looking, as when she’d first seen it that morning.

  Thurgood’s private office was on the north side of the Fund’s general offices, and so not as brightly lit by sun as hers had been, and it was cooler. Regina felt the difference right away.

  With his bag of doughnuts, Thurgood motioned for her to sit in one of the green leather client chairs in front of his desk, and then he took the other. He stared at her, sipping his coffee as she reached into the envelope and handed over the letter.

  He pulled a pair of glasses from his shirt pocket and began to read, his whole head moving from side to side, like a bloodhound’s, sniffing words across the page.

  While he read, Regina looked around. Thurgood’s office was almost exactly as it had been two years ago when she’d first come into it, wanting the job as his clerk so badly that her heart was thumping against the ribs in her chest and her knees knocked together—phenomena she’d encountered before only in books. A woman in a position like this was practically unheard of. She was terrified, too, because Thurgood Marshall knew her mother and knew about her father. But Thurgood never mentioned Oscar Robichard and what had happened to him in 1919 in Omaha, Nebraska, on a day as bright as this one was and as filled with promise. Regina took this as a quiet kindness from someone who, too, knew the meaning of loss.

  The office had been chaotic then and still was, with open law books laid out helter-skelter, and with briefs piling haphazardly up the walls. Regina, apprehensive and even frightened, had still loved the space, much like she idolized the man, already a legend. The messiness, the ghost lingerings of way too many smoked-to-the nub cigarettes, the muffled urgency in the noises that reached them through the closed door, the rhythm of a thousand cases, a hundred appeals, even the faint scent of Thurgood, his Glo Mo Glo hair oil, his Old Spice aftershave—all of this had pulled her, like magic, into the pulse and the heart of a bloodstream. Her pulse, her heart, her bloodstream. She recognized its beating right away.

  The first thing he�
��d said, even before he’d gone through her carefully typed-out résumé, was, “Regina Mary Robichard? That’s a bit long. Mind if I call you Reggie?”

  She hadn’t minded a bit. She loved the new name, wondered why nobody had ever thought to call her that before.

  He’d then launched into tale after tale about the Fund, telling her what they were working on, his careful choice of words making her understand even more fully how important that work was. Important man’s work, that’s what she was hearing, because that’s what people had been telling her all her life. Only Ida Jane had said, “Baby, you can make it.” And Reggie had made it—at least this far. Now, listening to Thurgood, Regina felt her knees stop shaking, her heart stop beating, and she was already thinking, There is just no way I’m going to get this, when Thurgood said, “When can you start?”

  “Today. This very minute.” She’d been way too excited to even think about trying to sound cool.

  This was her first lesson with Thurgood. You couldn’t always tell what he was thinking from what he was saying. She’d come to see this as a very lawyerly trait. Later, she’d also learn how much he respected women. His mother had been the first Negro woman to earn a degree at Columbia Teachers College. When he’d needed money for school she’d not hesitated to sell both her engagement and her wedding rings to get it.

  Now he looked up and at her over the white line of the letter and began to read it aloud:

  I would like you to come down to Revere, Mississippi, to investigate the death of Joe Howard Wilson, a veteran recently and honorably discharged with the rank of lieutenant from the United States Army. His family, and most especially his father, Willie Willie, has worked for my own family for years. Willie Willie has expressed to me his wish to have this unfortunate incident investigated by a Negro. I thought it best to choose a Negro from outside the state of Mississippi. I imagine you are far too busy in New York to find time to attend to this matter, but should you choose to concern yourself, I will agree to pay all the attendant expenses.

  Sincerely,

  Mary Pickett Calhoun

  (M. P. Calhoun)

  Thurgood said, “Doesn’t sound too enthusiastic. A little lukewarm. Not like she really expects us to do anything.”

  “Or wants us to,” agreed Reggie. “It’s strange. Why would she write in the first place? There’s no salutation. Did you notice?”

  Thurgood had noticed. “Since she seems to be asking for our assistance, she probably thought it best not to start right out with ‘boy.’” He stretched a little, and the old chair creaked beneath his weight.

  “It doesn’t sound to me like she’s really asking for anything. I don’t get the feeling of a ‘please.’”

  “A woman like that”—Thurgood waved the embossed letter paper—“living like she does in the backwaters of Mississippi . . . Believe me, she’s not used to associating the word Negro with the word Please.”

  Again, he bent close, “Hey, I think I know that name.”

  “You do.” Regina kept her voice even. “At least you know about him.”

  “Her,” corrected Thurgood automatically. He looked up, squinted. “Is that the writer, or somebody just named the same?”

  “It’s her, all right. I checked. Did you read the book?”

  Thurgood shook his head. “Too busy. But I know all about it. Everybody does. It’s damn famous, or at least it was. Made the front page of The New York Times.”

  Regina nodded. “It was called The Secret of Magic and it’s still in print. It came out about fifteen years ago. I read it then. As I remember, it created quite the sensation. She wrote about a colored man. His name was . . . Lemon. Daddy Lemon. And Lemon wasn’t an Uncle Tom. He wasn’t an Uncle Remus, either, but, like him, he had his legends and his tales. He knew about the people who tell them, too. He knew about the land, and his land was Mississippi. He had hold of its secrets and its magic.”

  “Voodoo?” Thurgood raised an eyebrow, rolled a comic’s eye. Regina wanted to laugh, but she didn’t. Her laughter might quake. It might show just how nervous she was, and how eager. That wouldn’t be good.

  Instead, she said, “That’s what people think first when they put together Negroes and magic, something dark. Magic was different in M. P. Calhoun’s book. Lemon was a good man, but he knew all about dancing rabbits. He knew about toothache trees. And he knew about two old ladies who lived in a big white house stuck out in the middle of the forest. Colored ladies.” She thought for a moment. “The Mottley sisters. Peach and Sister. They had a brother, too. Or they did have. Once upon a time.”

  She was talking too quickly. She forced herself to slow down. “The brother’s actual name was Luther, but in The Secret of Magic he was known as Luther the Disappeared. I can’t remember why now. Maybe I’ll look it up. Folks said his sister murdered him, then hid his body out in someplace called the Magnolia Forest. And there were these three children, and they knew Daddy Lemon and they wanted to find out about this murder. Two boys, one girl. Two white, one black. I guess that was part of the scandal, the mixing up of these children. It’s not how we think of the South. It’s certainly not how the South thinks of itself. But I guess the unsolved murder played its part as well. In the book’s popularity, I mean.”

  “You guess?” Thurgood wrinkled his forehead, pulled his glasses back up to it. “A children’s book with killing in it?”

  “His—” She stopped and corrected herself. “Her novel was about children, and I read it first when I was a child. But it wasn’t really for us. I wouldn’t say that.”

  “You sure know a lot about it.”

  Regina had the grace to blush. “Some I remembered. I called over to the public library, and they told me the rest.”

  How could she explain The Secret of Magic to Thurgood, all it had meant to her and the spell it had cast? How she had lain, night after night, in her young girl’s bed, curled up under blankets and quilts. Her hand clutching tight to a heavy aluminum flashlight. Her eyes racing words across the page. Her heart rat-tat-tatting against her ribs. Her mind desperate to find out what happened next.

  Three children. A dead man. A wide-open forest.

  Now Regina wondered if she still had it. She wondered if it had been packed up, like everything else, like her mother had been, like she had been, and carted to their new home, Dr. Sam’s brownstone, smack in the middle of Harlem’s lovely Edgecombe Avenue.

  “It was a very involving novel,” she said to Thurgood.

  She realized how pompous she sounded when he threw back his head and laughed. And this time she laughed with him, tentatively at first, and then until tears started. The laughter was a relief.

  “Did Ida Jane get involved with it?” Thurgood wanted to know. “The book, I mean.”

  Regina shook her head. “Early on, M. P. Calhoun calls Lemon, her hero, a ‘black Nimrod.’ Mama didn’t care that Nimrod was in the Bible, even though I told her it was. She said it was a demeaning and antiquated way of describing a colored man and she had no intention of continuing on with any book in which that word was used. You know how she is.”

  Again, the laughter. “Sounds like Ida Jane. But you did read it.”

  “I read everything back then, even cereal boxes, and Mama always kept huge piles of books for her and for me. Library books, mostly—that’s all we could afford—but when I heard about this one, I wanted it right away. It took me a month to save up, but I got it. I read it straight through first, then immediately took it up again and reread a little each day. I did that for a long time.”

  “It certainly caused a ruckus. Murder and Mayhem. Threatened Miscegenation.” Thurgood’s eyes twinkled. “A wonder M. P. Calhoun didn’t see herself in trouble, living in Mississippi and writing stuff like that. Such a sensation . . . I wonder why it never got out she was a woman before?”

  “Maybe timing,” speculated Regina. “As I recall, Ma
gic came out in the spring of 1929—I was maybe eight—no, nine. Six months later the stock market fell, then came the Depression. After that was the war. All of this could have moved her out of the limelight, if that’s what she wanted. Still, who knows? I imagine that book made a lot of money for her. Everybody in my school was reading it back then, and mine was a Catholic school, so most of the kids in it were white. As I remember, it was banned in six of the old cotton states, including her own, and banning always seems to help sales. People get curious. I imagine M. P. Calhoun wouldn’t have actually needed to produce another. And it seems like she didn’t.”

  Thurgood cocked his head.

  Regina said, “I called Walter Winchell’s office over at the Daily Mirror. Somebody was there on a Saturday. With a gossip column like his, turns out Saturday’s their biggest day. This somebody called out to somebody else and came back saying that after that first book, M. P. Calhoun never wrote another word. Or at least another one that’s been published. She seems to have just disappeared into thin air. Of course they said ‘he,’ as in ‘he disappeared.’ I didn’t correct them.”

  “Why not?”

  “Lots of people read that Magic book. There might still be a curiosity about him—about her. A curiosity that, maybe, she wouldn’t welcome. I thought it best not to put Winchell’s office on the scent—at least not yet.”

  Curiosity got the better of Thurgood for a moment. “Well, who did it? That book murder, I mean.”