The Secret of Magic Read online

  “You never find out,” said Regina, thinking quickly back. “They get close, but the children—they’re in the forest all alone. At night. Next thing you know, the sheriff turns up and maybe a parent or two.”

  “How’d they find them, the children? How’d the parents know where to look?”

  It was hard to remember all of it now, but at least some of it was coming back to her.

  “Daddy Lemon,” said Regina. “I think he knew where they were and alerted somebody.”

  “See, what did I tell you?” exclaimed Thurgood, triumphant. “Your mama was right. Sidling up to white folks like that . . . That man was nothing but an Uncle Tom hiding himself out behind a Daddy Lemon face.”

  It wasn’t like that. But Regina thought the better part of valor at this moment might be to let the matter slide.

  “Interesting,” said Thurgood.

  But there were a lot of interesting things in this life, and probably a good many of them were waiting for him on this desk right now. He’d already stuck his reading glasses on his forehead. Now he reached a hand up to pull them all the way off.

  “The thing is,” Regina said quickly, “you know about Joe Howard Wilson, too.”

  She took up the envelope, pulled out the newspaper clippings, and asked, “May I?” When Thurgood nodded, she walked over to his desk, cleared a small space, and laid out the slurry of articles that had accompanied M. P. Calhoun’s cryptic communication.

  She had numbered everything, except the note itself, with the same deep blue ink with which she had written on her letter paper. But foolscap was not vellum. Ink bled into the cheap paper like blood flowed into veins. It sieved into snatches snipped from the Afro-American out of Thurgood’s hometown of Baltimore; The Negro Voice from Tulsa, Oklahoma; Pittsburgh’s Courier; three differently dated issues of Jackson, Mississippi’s Black Leader; and four of the Revere, Mississippi, Fair Dealer. This last was printed on the thinnest paper of all. Altogether, there were nine separate stories. Regina had counted. She laid them out in chronological order. Their emboldened headlines reminded her of the beginning outlines of a novel, a tale.

  “Negro papers. We’ll print on anything,” said Thurgood. He glanced over at the vellum envelope. “Not like M. P. Calhoun.”

  He’d put his glasses back on his nose and come up beside her. He took the top clipping, held it high. Even though the light was dim, they could see the whole of his office through it—chairs, books, unfinished legal briefs. And not just vague outlines but colors, too, everything captured by the black-and-white tragedy of what had happened to Lieutenant Joe Howard Wilson on his way home from war.

  The clipping he held was from The Chicago Defender. It was dated January 15, 1946, almost ten months earlier, and was bylined by one Charles John Steptoe. Everybody at the Fund knew who Charles John Steptoe was, and a fortunate few actually knew him, although Regina didn’t. He was a journalist famed for flamboyant folksiness and for what he himself immodestly called “a certain grandiloquent way with a word.” His specialty was the nascent area of Negro civil rights.

  Thurgood said, “Lots of folks from Mississippi in Chicago now. Black people been going up there since before the Great Flood of ’27; by now it’s taken on almost the magnetic appeal of a Promised Land. The Defender sells a lot of papers when it prints a Mississippi story. Folks want to keep up with what’s happening in their hometown. Let’s read what Mr. Steptoe has to say for himself.”

  OUTRAGE

  * * *

  Revere, Mississippi, January 1946

  The illustrious product of a one-room Rosenwald Colored Children’s School in Revere, Mississippi, Joe Howard Wilson went on to the Revere Colored High School (two rooms this time), and from there to a private Negro institute in North Carolina. He graduated Morehouse College in Atlanta with Honors at the age of 19. It was Judge Charles Pickett Calhoun, his father’s employer, who reportedly paid for this stellar education. I call it “stellar” because I am a proud Morehouse Man myself.

  Lt. Wilson participated in ROTC in college and, fulfilling his patriotic duty, signed up early in the war for the Army. It goes without saying that he served in a segregated unit, as all units for our colored soldiers were segregated and still are. Trained in Alabama, he was sent to Italy, where he distinguished himself and rapidly rose to the rank of 1st lieutenant.

  He received the Distinguished Service Cross for heroism at the Battle of Castel Aghinolfi, where many of the men in his platoon were killed, including his best friend, L. C. Hoover with whom he had roomed at Morehouse. Lt. Wilson was honorably discharged from the Army just after V.E. Day. Still in his decorated uniform, he landed in New York and took a train straight from there to Richmond, another to Atlanta, and then yet another from Atlanta to Birmingham, Alabama. In Birmingham he boarded a Bonnie Blue Line inter-state bus ultimately bound for Aberdeen, Mississippi. He got off it once in Tuscaloosa and again in Aliceville, where he made a call home to his father on the public telephone because he had promised to do this. Lt. Wilson paid for the call himself. Aliceville is some thirty miles from Revere, Mississippi, just over the state line. After making that call, Joe Howard got back on that bus, rode off in it. And disappeared . . . for two weeks.

  Eventually his body was found floating facedown in the Tombigbee River. My sources tell me it was obvious this decorated war hero had been beaten and perhaps tortured before his body was dumped. Naturally, there was an outcry. But the coroner of Jefferson-Lee County said the body’d been in the water too long for him to make what he called “anything near a determination as to cause of death.” Said he couldn’t be certain. And the judge had all kinds of excuses why it took him so long to pull together a grand jury. If there was no cause of death, then how could a grand jury decide that an actual crime had been committed? And if a crime hadn’t been committed, then how could it indict anybody for committing that crime?

  And that, my friends, was the sad end of that.

  Other clippings told much the same tale.

  Negro Veteran Found Floating in the Tombigbee River!

  * * *

  Decorated Veteran Murdered! Foul Play!

  * * *

  1946 AND CAN THIS CRIME GO UNPUNISHED—EVEN IN MISSISSIPPI?

  * * *

  The Revere Fair Dealer demanded to know this—in twenty-four-point bold type.

  “I guess it can,” said Thurgood. He stared at her.

  Regina stared back. They were both thinking of her father, of Oscar Robichard, of what had happened to him, and she knew it. “There’s nothing about lynching in any of this. It seems like Joe Howard was beaten to death, then thrown in the river. That’s what I read.” This distinction was important to her. She thought of the picture in her pocket—the old colored man and the young colored man, leaning close in to each other, smiling. She lowered her hand into her jacket and ran her fingers along the snapshot’s jagged edge. Her face hardened. She didn’t want what had happened to her daddy to have happened to this young man. And what had happened to her mama and to her, the “survivors”—she didn’t want this to have happened to Joe Howard’s proudly beaming daddy. More than anything else, she didn’t want that.

  “Not hanged,” she repeated. “Beaten.”

  A breeze rattled the shade at the window. Regina loosened her grip on the snapshot. Eased her fingers away, aching and stiff.

  “Only two articles more,” she said, and her voice was steady, her tone a lawyer’s balanced one.

  The first of these had been clipped from something called The Revere Times Commercial. The news stock was good. No Negro, no Afro-American, no Colored, no Black in the title. It was not one of theirs. The Times Commercial seemed to be a general-interest newspaper owned, edited, and published by, they read, one Mister Jackson E. Blodgett. The Mister had not been left to conjecture. It had been fully spelled out and writ large just beneath the masthead.

  “Thi
nks well of himself,” said Thurgood, “but I never heard of him.”

  From the looks of it, this particular piece of news had found a home deep within the recorded comings and goings of Revere, Mississippi. The small one-inch-by-one-inch notice had been attached onto the newspaper’s title page with a single straight pin. It looked like something you actually might find hidden in the forgotten back end of a paper, dropped in among ads for twenty-five-cent housedresses at Kresge’s and church notices and a sale on children’s shoes at the local TG&Y. Mary Pickett Calhoun had used her blue ink to underline the date.

  The Jefferson-Lee County Grand Jury, called in this State of Mississippi ruled January 18, 1946, that the Negro whose body was found floating in the Tombigbee River last October met with the adventure of an accident and was drowned.

  “So they called one after all.” Thurgood paused. “I wouldn’t have expected that, not in Mississippi. Why, I wonder? Now, that’s intriguing.”

  This time it was Regina’s turn to ask why.

  “Because the judge must have called the grand jury back into special session,” said Thurgood. “There’s no mention here of any other case and nothing about the mundane things they handle at their regular call-ups, two, three times a year—stuff like jail upkeep and forest fire prevention and what’s going on with the tax sessions. There’s no mention of any of that here.”

  Regina said, “Do you think this is about Lieutenant Wilson?”

  Her boss whistled through his teeth. “Who else? First thing you got to learn about down there is they don’t ever call a colored person by his rightful name in a white newspaper. Most they ever write is ‘auntie’ or ‘uncle’—and that’s just when some old auntie and uncle’s perfected living a perfect God-Fearing, and especially White-Folk-Fearing, life. This is surely Joe Howard Wilson they’re talking about. Why else would that Calhoun dame have included it? Dates match up, too. He disappeared off that bus in October 1945. The grand jury came back January 1946. That makes sense. What doesn’t make sense is why this is all being sent to us now, so long after the fact. If this M. P. Calhoun cared so much, why didn’t she get in touch back when we might actually have been able to do something?”

  Regina said, “There’s one more. It’s the last.”

  This, too, was from The Revere Times Commercial. It had been front-page news on October 8, 1946, just the week before. Both Regina and Thurgood bent close to read about a fire in some place called the Bottoms. The house—“destroyed beyond knowing”—had belonged to a Mr. Jackson Blodgett, whose official residence was listed as 600 Main Street in Revere, where he lived with his wife, Mae Louise Wynne Blodgett, and his twenty-three-year-old son, Wynne Vardaman Blodgett. The burned structure had been something called a “home place.” Neither Thurgood nor Regina had any idea what a home place was.

  But for whatever reason, its blazing seemed to have caused quite a stir. The fire department had been called out, and the police and the sheriff, even though the flames themselves had been quickly extinguished. Not a total loss, the Times Commercial reassured its readership. For his part, Mister Blodgett expressed nothing but praise for the efficient carrying out of duty on the part of all concerned. He and his wife would be eternally grateful, he added, in print. Indeed, a barbecue had been hastily organized for the firemen—all volunteer—the policemen, the sheriff, his deputies, their wives, and their children at what appeared to be yet another Blodgett residence, “Magnolia Forest, their magnificent plantation on the Black Prairie.”

  Regina looked up. “Magnolia Forest? That’s in The Secret of Magic.”

  “Hey, look at this,” Thurgood said. He pointed to a half-page ad, taped to Joe Howard’s small notice.

  VOTE

  NATHAN BEDORD FORREST “BED” DUVAL V

  DISTRICT COURT JUDGE

  PLACE 1

  A NAME KNOWN AND TRUSTED IN REVERE FOR YEARS

  “I wonder if it’s just a coincidence,” Thurgood said, “this being included.”

  “Why?”

  “Strange she’d send a political advert along when she could have just as easily omitted it. Especially since she doesn’t seem that interested in our actually coming at all.”

  Regina reached over to pick up the vellum envelope again and there was a ladybug on it, fat and speckled. Maybe it had crept out of the letter. She thought she’d actually seen it doing this—just barely, out of the corner of her eye. But could this be possible? The ladybug made her think again of M. P. Calhoun’s book, The Secret of Magic, with its hidden portal forest, with its cunning, dark animals, with those two old, old ladies who lived there alone, with the brother who had once lived with them, and with those three children who had set out to find him. Or what was left of him. Regina watched as the ladybug spread its wings, trying them out in the stillness of Thurgood’s office. She moved her hand away very slowly, and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, the ladybug had disappeared.

  “I want to go there.”

  Shocking words. Shocking even to Regina. This was not what she had planned to say to Thurgood as she read, as she telephoned, as she hid the snapshot deep, deep within her pocket. She had told herself that she wanted him to go—Thurgood, whose very presence in Mississippi would confer the integrity of the Fund itself on this just cause. Thurgood should go.

  Yet . . .

  “Please let me go. I think I can . . .” But what was it exactly she thought she could do that Thurgood couldn’t do—and better?

  “Do they have a branch there?” He meant an NAACP branch.

  “Not that I know of. I looked. We’re not showing one on our lists.”

  “Makes sense,” said Thurgood. “NAACP’s not very welcome in Mississippi. White folks down there call us subversive. Say we’re a communist front. Any black folks want to join . . . they have to be totally independent of the whites. That means economically independent, and there aren’t too many of those around. Not yet. But I was thinking, if they had one, maybe this M. P. Calhoun belongs.”

  “A white woman?” Regina’s eyes opened wide. “Who wrote a book?”

  “Why not?” said Thurgood but he was grinning. “You were wrong about her being a woman in the first place. To keep that much of a secret from the rest of the world for years? M. P. Calhoun might turn out to be just full of surprises. Besides, we have a lot of white members, and not only here in New York. Just thought I’d ask. It might be an explanation.”

  He wanted her to say, “An explanation for what?” But she didn’t.

  Instead, she repeated, “I want to go.” Her voice stronger now. In case he hadn’t heard her. In case she hadn’t heard herself.

  But Thurgood had heard. “I figured that. All this attention for a letter and a bunch of clippings on a Saturday afternoon when you got the courts-martial room to handle.” He fished in his pocket for a cigarette. “Surely you must realize that. The Fund doesn’t have . . .”

  “She said she’d pay.”

  “. . . any interest in this matter, which, incidentally—as I’ve already pointed out, but I’ll do it again—is not even a case, because the Jefferson-Lee County Grand Jury did not see fit to make it one. When they did have a case, when they fished that poor fellow out of the river, then maybe we could have done something. Maybe. But nobody called on us back then. Not even the Negroes in Revere called on us.” He paused, raised his free hand, waved smoke away in dismissal. “And they could have. We get calls from Mississippi all the time. There’s some feisty folks down there. If they had wanted us, they would have found some way to get in touch.”

  “M. P. Calhoun got in touch.”

  “A white woman? A white woman who once wrote an old-timey, stereotypical novel? Please!”

  “You said you never even read the book,” said Regina.

  “I didn’t have to read it. It was famous. Plus, you’re the one said Nimrod. You’re the one said it had dancing bears.
”

  “Dancing rabbits. It’s a folk tale. And M. P. Calhoun certainly must think there’s something to this. She’s laid a case out for us.”

  “Somebody works for her for slave wages. She wants to keep him happy.”

  “That may well be. That might be her reason for wanting us to come.” Regina paused. “It doesn’t have to be our reason for going.”

  “And,” added Thurgood, on a tear now, “if it’s so important to her, why didn’t she write when we could have done something.”

  “Maybe she has,” said Regina. “Maybe she’d got some new evidence. Maybe something’s changed. We won’t know unless we go down there and find out.”

  Thurgood did not look convinced.

  So Regina repeated the magical words: “She said she’d pay expenses.”

  “It’s not about the money,” he shot back, “so you can quit going on about that. It’s the time. You know how I feel about these individual cases. So many, one right after the other. We’re drowning in them.”

  “This one’s different.”

  “Reggie, you’ve been here two years now. You know there’s not a one of them different, except in the fact that each is usually worse than the last. What they share in common is that they take us away from the law, from changing it. That’s the only thing ever going to make a difference.” There was a warning in his voice.

  Regina braced herself for the torrent she knew was about to break over her.

  “I have said many times now,” Thurgood thundered, “that in order to change—I mean really effect this country, we have got to move on to changing the law, not trying all the individual cases that break it. Things like Plessy v. Ferguson—separate but equal—that has got to go. It’s a farce. Separate is never equal. Once they can legally separate us out, they make us second-class. As they keep us separated, they can keep us second-class forever. What we’ve got to spend our time on now is getting the schools integrated, getting public facilities that we are helping to support with our taxes integrated . . .”