The Secret of Magic (30 page)

Somebody called out, “Hey, girl, fill up my drink.” Answered by titters. Not by everybody, at least it didn’t sound that way, but by a few. Regina’s hands tightened on her briefcase, her cheeks flamed, but she willed herself to keep moving. Two steps more and she didn’t have to force herself hard anymore. What was it Ida Jane always told her?
“Consider the source. Anybody talking like that—tells you all you need to know about the way they were raised.”
Besides, this was a story she could carry to the Fund, something she’d be able to throw into conversation when she got back to her small desk in the office.
“Accent so thick, you could have cut through it with a knife. I felt lucky she didn’t call me worse than
girl
.”
It might not be the
war
story some of the men could tell—no dogs, no guns, no threats of death in it—but at least she had a small tale of battle to tell. The anticipation of this made her feel better.

Relieved, she made it through the cottage door, but she’d barely closed it, hadn’t had time to put down her hat and her gloves, when the rapping started up. One sharp knock after the other. Regina bent down, peeked through the window, and there was a woman staring back, right at her, straight in the eye. It was the same woman who had called her girl, and she was clutching a recognizable piece of thin blue paper in her hand.

The flyer.

“Open up and come on out here.”

Regina rolled her eyes heavenward, took a deep breath, but really, what could she do? She pulled at the door.

“I’m Mrs. Blodgett,” said the woman. Regina blinked, kept her face carefully impassive. “Mrs.
Jackson
Blodgett.”

Regina nodded. Mrs. Blodgett. Mrs.
Jackson
Blodgett, quite round, had forced herself or been forced into a dress that was bright yellows and pinks, a flower print meant to stand out from the bouquet with which she had been surrounded on the Calhoun Place south lawn. Everything else about her seemed just as willing to stand out as well, from the piled-high pitch of her blond hair to the way her skin dipped deep into the crevices that surrounded her sharp, seen-it-all eyes.

“Mrs. Jackson Blodgett,” the woman repeated. In case Regina had not understood.

“Regina Robichard,” she said, and then, for a moment, became Mary Pickett Calhoun, a woman faced with dilemmas. Should she reach out a hand in greeting to this awful woman? Did courtesy demand that she invite her in?

Mae Louise Blodgett did not appear to have any problem handling good manners as they pertained to race. What might befuddle Regina or even puzzle Mary Pickett Calhoun did not concern her at all. Mae Louise stepped smartly back from the door. No, she would not come inside. She left Regina’s hand straggling outward. No, she should not shake hands.

“Don’t need to tell me who you are. The whole town knows about you, Missy.”

Regina remembered where she was—Mississippi—and held on to her temper. No need to make a scene. She came out of the cottage, all the time thinking that never in a million years would she have pictured this woman with Jackson Blodgett, his wife.
Uh-uh
, thought Regina, suddenly seeing Mary Pickett’s face again as it turned slowly to Jackson. The way it lit up, like a flower taking its life from the sun.

Maybe that’s why Mrs. Jackson Blodgett had introduced herself twice. Maybe there were other people in Revere who had trouble with the idea of the two of them—her with her husband—together. And yet they
should
have fit just right. They were about the same height and even resembled each other, with their careless way of dressing, their shared keen eyes and sharp features, and the silver that was starting to show in their hair. Looked alike—but maybe they weren’t alike. Regina remembered how Willie Willie had imitated this woman and made her laugh with the imitation. “My name is Mae Louise Wynne, and my father is a gentleman planter from over Carroll County, Alabama.” And she remembered Willie Willie’s snort of derision, too.

For a second, she almost felt sorry for this woman, who held tight to Jackson Blodgett’s name because, maybe, she might not feel she had a real place in his heart. But that sympathetic feeling was not destined to last.

“And I know who you are,” said Regina, stepping out, closing the door behind her. “Wynne Blodgett’s mother.”

Mae Louise had a carefully defined painted red mouth. She creased it up now. She also had fewer wrinkles than Mary Pickett had but wore a great deal more makeup in an effort to hide the ones she had. Base and powder, rouge and mascara; Regina saw each as a separate, careful delineation upon the geography of Mae Louise’s broad face.

For a moment, she and Regina stood on the smoothed cement in front of the cottage, both aware they were being covertly watched by the ladies still out on the lawn, all of them calm as the middle of a hurricane’s eye. The scent of Confederate roses and of autumn clematis and sweet olive combined around them, all mixed together, intoxicating and strong.

Mae Louise came right to her point. “This was found on top that stone nigger boy outside my house, the one with the electric lighted lantern. You’ve seen him?” A small knowing smirk.

“Yes,
Mr.
Willie Willie showed me the statue the first day I got here.”

“I thought he might have. It’s a county landmark. He’d be the one to show it off.” Another twitch of her lips. “Anyhow, this whatever you call it . . .” She waved the paper so close into Regina’s face that it almost, not quite, slapped her. Regina narrowed her eyes, folded her arms over her chest, gratified when Mae Louise took the slightest step back.

“This
flyer
,”
Wynne’s mother continued, “was glued right top that boy’s nappy head when I got up first thing this morning. You got any idea who put it there?”

“No, I do not.” And Regina honestly didn’t.

“Well, I do. We been having some trouble over at the house. Your man Willie Willie, he’s the one did this. At least, that’s what my boy says. My husband means to take measures.”

Mae Louise spoke quickly, one word flying over the other, fast and high. Regina caught her as she glanced covertly over her shoulder at the others, though by now all the ladies had seen her, had seen where she’d gone and were diligently and earnestly talking to one another or looking down at their tea in a polite attempt not to notice. But Mae Louise Blodgett didn’t seem to mind. She knew she had their attention and that what she said now would very shortly be all over town—just as she intended it should, a sly way to embarrass the woman her husband had married first and get some prick of jealous revenge. Regina wondered if this had been going on for years. If there had been moves and countermoves. Regina looked around for Mary Pickett but still didn’t see her anywhere.

Making sure her voice carried, Regina said, “Mrs. Blodgett, I have no idea what you mean. But I will say that if you continue to insinuate accusations against my client, we will take appropriate action. In the courts.”

Little good
that
would do, but at least she’d answered something back. She hadn’t let herself be rolled over.

The collective gasp from the lawn was quick and precise. Mae Louise Blodgett’s face flared a stunning vermilion. Behind her, the stirring of spoons against cups died down. Regina looked over and there was a woman eyeing them, her mouth still caught in a shocked, gaping “Oh.”

And then there, at last, was Mary Pickett at an out-of-the-way table where she must have been all the time, her eyes fixed not on them but on the rough asphalt sidewalk that ran along the front of her house. The place where Jackson had stood, looking up, on that long-ago day when she’d first seen him. The day he’d been facing north. And away from here.

“Jackson
assured
me,” his wife now said, “that he means to get us some protection. It’s all just a bunch of mess, since that nigger soldier got himself killed over in Alabama.”

Regina’s mouth popped indignantly open, but Mae Louise shot her own words out first.

“I know what people are saying about my Wynne, that he had something to do with this. Insinuating things without proof. People maybe jealous of what we got.”

“Somebody would accuse your son of murder because they were jealous?” Regina thought of Peach. She thought of Anna Dale Buchanan. “That doesn’t make much sense.”

“It sure does to a lot of folks living here. That’s why the whole thing got thrown out by the grand jury.”

“It got dismissed because of lack of evidence, not because he was innocent. And the right evidence might still be forthcoming.” Regina, almost quaking with anger, managed to keep her voice smooth as silk.

“Really?” said Mae Louise Blodgett, no slouch in the smooth-as-silk department herself. “I imagine it was niggers told you that.”

“Negroes,” corrected Regina. “And whites.”

“Niggers.” The word deliberately repeated. “No matter what all y’all call yourself, you better watch out. There’s folks around here knows how to call a spade a spade—and how to lay one out, if you catch my meaning.” She smiled, made sure that Regina knew what she was threatening before she went on. “Oh, we know all about Anna Dale Buchanan, what she says. But she didn’t see anything, and everybody knows she’s sure been strange since her boy got
his
self killed. Keeps to herself. Doesn’t know what’s going on, what went on. Doesn’t really care, not anymore.”

The wind picked up, breezing in from the river, scattering leaves off the maple at the entrance to the drive and across the street at Raymond Hall, tearing at the clematis and the last of the roses, whipping the scent of them into the air. It ruffled the blue sheet Mae Louise still clutched, daggerlike, in her hand.

“And as for that ungrateful rascal Tom Raspberry . . . He’s got his nerve starting up with that nigger group—yes, of course, I already know all about it—what with all old Mr. Forrest Duval did to help him get on and so, and my own Mr. Blodgett owning the mortgage on everything that old coon’s got . . . I do declare, I can’t even begin to cogitate what he’s thinking. But when my husband sees this . . .” Again, she waved the flyer, two inches from Regina’s nose this time. “Why, I guess we’ll find out.”

Mae Louise Blodgett’s voice droned on and on. Regina looked out beyond her and watched as the ladies, Mary Pickett’s supposed-to-be good friends in the Revere Garden Club, put down their napkins and gathered up their plant cuttings. They looked at their watches and made discreet noises about husbands and children and dinner. They walked down Mary Pickett’s cleanly swept driveway, blew kisses to one another, and disappeared from her life.

G
otcha!

Regina was at the end edge of sleep when there she was once again, suddenly, deep, deep within
The Secret of Magic
, hiding out in its pages, safe from the world. She was on the street in front of Mary Pickett’s house, the one the young Jackie Earle Blodgett had stood on, the one with the gnarled roots of magnolias that glared out through the broken asphalt of the sidewalk. The roots that looked like alligator eyes, poised ready to spot you.

Ready to call out,

Gotcha!

Right there—with their reptile teeth, sharp as stilettos, ready to bite you and eat you and disappear you right out of this world.

But not one thing got to those charmed children—the two boys, the girl—as they ran past the big house, the three of them charging into the night. Streaking over the rough sidewalks, down past the two big houses and the shacks, bound for the river, where an old man waited for them to show them his tricks, to teach them his knowledge.

“You hear that sound?

“It’s the king bullfrog.

“He thinks he’s alone, but he’s ripe for the spearing.

“You see that star?

“It’s the north point.”

• • •

THE VOICES, NEXT MORNING,
seemed to come from right outside the cottage window, the murmur of them blended into the general early, coming-to-life sounds Regina was used to by now. Mockingbirds quarreling with starlings in some daily territorial dispute. Ducks, heading south, honked their way through the sky.

Hunting Season! Guns shooting! Time to fly away!

Regina thought if she stuck her head out the window she’d feel the flap of their wings. There was the low rumble of early-morning traffic starting up from over on Main Street. And there was the whispering.

She opened her eyes, pulled on her robe, and went to the window. Fog hung like a curtain over Calhoun Place. Toward the east, bare tree limbs scratched at the sky, and for the first time Regina saw the mistletoe nestled high in them, settling into places where leaves had once been. But once the ducks had echoed off into the morning, Regina was left once again with a subtlety of voices. Her ears and her eyes followed them down from the treetops to the side of Mary Pickett’s fine house.

Mary Pickett stood there, along with the sheriff and Jackson Blodgett. Even though his back was to her, Regina recognized him by the tilt of his head, by the way his hand rested on Mary Pickett’s shoulder. It was the first time Regina had seen him touch her. And someone
had
been called out. She could tell it.

Instantly wide awake, Regina ran down the stairs and out into the driveway. The others turned toward her in what looked like a synchronized rhythm, Jackson Blodgett and the sheriff with tight, puckered expressions. It was too early for Dinetta, and she was nowhere in sight, but a woman carrying a coffee cup was wandering over from the big house across the street. Looking both ways. And Mary Pickett, fully dressed in a tweed skirt and sweater, a scarf tied around her pin curls, stood there as well, one hand on a hip, one arm spread wide, her face thoughtful, her eyes pinpointed on her house.

Regina followed that stare, and she, too, saw what the others were seeing. What Jackson Blodgett and Rand Connelly were shaking their heads at, what the curious neighbor, shocked, was now moving away from, what Mary Pickett attempted to hide with the outstretch of her arm. Regina, moving closer, saw it, too.

NIGGER LUVER GET THAT NIGGER LAWYER OUT FROM HERE

Misspelled words. Bad grammar. Trashy folks,
thought Regina. And that was reassuring, because only people like that used a word like
nigger
, or so she’d been taught. Still, the lawyer in her automatically questioned that misspelling. The correct cipher of “lover” was not difficult to come by. It was on cards and candy boxes, in flower-shop windows, prominent on the covers of
True Confessions
magazine.
Love
was a word most people knew well. She wondered why it had been so prominently got wrong here, especially when the much less used
lawyer
had been got so perfectly right.

But no one else standing there seemed to notice this, much less think that it mattered. What seemed to count was that Mary Pickett’s house had been desecrated by words written so large that Regina did not need her eyeglasses to read them, so big she was sure that if Thurgood had been looking down from New York, he could have read them himself. Splotches of black paint dripped from the letters down the pristine white walls of the house, crystallized on them, shone as darkly as dried blood.

Out of the corner of her eye, Regina watched Jackson edge even closer to Mary Pickett, and she saw Lilla Raymond see this as well. The two of them—Regina and Lilla Raymond—stared at each other for the briefest of minutes. And Regina wondered which would soon enliven Revere’s telephone party line more—the fact that Mary Pickett’s house had been vandalized or the fact that Jackson Blodgett had touched his once-upon-a-time wife, had comforted her in public, had held her close.

Mary Pickett looked over, her eyes jewel bright and shiny.

Now you know what it feels like. To be singled out. To be cut low. To have people think they can do anything they want to your things and even your life. What it feels like to be black in Mississippi—at least for a minute.

That’s what Regina wanted to say, but what she heard herself saying was, “I am so sorry.” So sorry. Over and over again. Surprising even herself that she was.

Sorry first for this word painted openly on this wall and what this word meant to Willie Willie and to her and to all the other Negroes in Revere. Sorry for her father and for Joe Howard. Sorry for those separate, unequal drinking fountains and the Confederate flag over the courthouse. But sorry for Mary Pickett, too, who maybe hadn’t known how things really were but was quickly learning. Regina shook her head like Mary Pickett was now shaking hers. Both of them, maybe, sorry for the whole sorry state of the world.

“I’ll take care of it,” Jackson said to Mary Pickett. “I’ll send Wynne over. He’ll be honored to put things right.”

Mary Pickett nodded, but she glanced at Regina. And the thought passed wordlessly between them—or maybe Regina just imagined it did—that Wynne Blodgett had already done what he meant to do.

• • •

LATE THAT AFTERNOON,
when Regina called the Fund, she got her archrival Skip Moseley on Thurgood’s phone.

“What’s up?’ she asked. “Where’s Thurgood?”

Because something had to be up for Skip to be taking Thurgood’s calls.

“Man, oh, man,” said Skip, and he was whispering, almost buzzing. “Is this place in an uproar or what?”

Regina waited. She knew from experience that dead silence on her part would be the best encouragement for whatever it was Skip was dying to tell.

And it was.

“Big changes,” he said.

Skip was what he liked to call “a natty dresser.” And there, in Mississippi, sitting on a tall red-vinyl-and-aluminum stool in Mary Pickett’s kitchen, and talking into Mary Pickett’s heavy old-fashioned wall telephone, Regina saw Skip, in New York, as clearly as though he were right there. He was flicking at his red bow tie, pulling out a perfect silk handkerchief, wiping his brow smooth with it. Preparing to tell all.

“A
huge
project coming up in Jackson, Mississippi. Public school integration. Federal court. Thurgood’s finally starting with those big cases he’s been after. You know, the effect-the-legislation ones.” Skip did a bad imitation of Thurgood’s soft Tidewater accent, then laughed—
tee-hee-hee
—at his own joke.

“Oh, that’s interesting,” said Regina, with a great deal more enthusiasm than she actually felt. Her mind had wandered to Mary Pickett’s wall with that
NIGGER LUVER
still painted on it. It was well past noon, and she’d seen neither hide nor hair of Wynne Blodgett and his promised cleanup.

“Which means,” Skip continued, “that the Fund’s finishing up with the kinds of things you’re working on down there. You know, those individual litigation cases.
We’re
moving on, in a whole different direction. Who knows, you might even be out of a job.”

Tee-hee-hee.
Again.

“Is Thurgood there?” Regina asked again. She started hunting through the kitchen cabinet drawers that were near her, searching for a stray pack of Mary Pickett’s cigarettes.

Skip ignored that question, asked his own: “Now, where are you,
exactly
? Down there in Alabama—or is it Georgia?”

It was Mississippi—where
Jackson
, Mississippi, was—and Regina knew that Skip knew this. In fact, he probably had a map of the state hanging in his living room, straight pins pushed in at Revere, right at the spot where he thought her heart beat.

And when he had found out, he’d probably said enough—and just enough—to Thurgood so that a little I-told-you-so could be singled out if she happened to bungle things in the end. Something along the lines of how he understood why Thurgood had done this. Thurgood and Buster and Ida Jane and Dr. Sam were all such good friends. If he’d had the courage, that’s what Skip would surely have said. Or would say.

And he might be right about her, about how she’d got here. That thought was starting to sink into Regina as she sparred with him, as she hunted through dishtowels and silverware for that stray cigarette. Because, really, what did she have to tell Thurgood? Nothing much. She peeked out the side window, and there were people driving by Calhoun Place now, a steady stream of them. She saw the cars slow up, the people stare out of them and point. She opened another drawer and started rummaging through.

“If Thurgood’s there, would you please just put him on the phone?”

“Oh, yeah,” Skip said. “Sure thing.”

He clattered the receiver onto Thurgood’s desk so loudly that Regina had to hold the phone away from her ear. She heard Skip start to whistle and the tap of his shoes against the linoleum floor, not going fast. There was a low murmur of voices and the sound of a woman’s laugh. After that, for a while, there were just the muffled, ordinary noises of the office—other telephones ringing, someone calling for a secretary to bring coffee, someone else saying, “Hey, did you see this?”

It was some moments before Thurgood picked up. “Reggie, that you?”

“It’s me, Thurgood.” She smiled, happy at the sound of his voice. “How are things?”

“Good. Fine. The question is, What’s going on down there? Over a week now. We were starting to worry.” All coming out as one rolling sentence, a quick inhale on his cigarette the only punctuation.

She took a breath, gave him a quick rundown. She ended with what had been painted that morning on the side of Calhoun Place.

“Calhoun Place?”

“M. P. Calhoun’s house,” she said.

“Oh, is that what it’s called?”

But she’d not been sent down to Revere to learn the name of Mary Pickett’s house. Thurgood let out a deep breath. Regina could almost see the cigarette smoke on it, curling up, masking his eyes and his face. “Any idea who wrote it?”

“They blame everything on kids down here. Outside agitating kids, to be exact.” She thought of herself for a moment. “That is, when they aren’t blaming inside agitating Negroes.”

Thurgood didn’t laugh. “What do you think?”

Regina took a deep breath. “I think it was Wynne Blodgett.”

“Who’s he?”

“The son of the richest man in town, the one who owns half of it, plus the newspaper, the bank.”

“Hmm . . . What makes you think it was him?”

She told him everything she’d got so far, about Bed Duval and Judge Timms and what Anna Dale Buchanan had told her and Peach—told him everything, in fact, except about the secret, hidden shirt. On a party line, in a place as chatty as Revere, Mississippi, she dared not mention that, at least not yet.

“And you say his daddy sent the boy away after Joe Howard was killed—over there somewhere in Alabama.”

“They didn’t send him far, and they didn’t send him for long. He’s back.
Been
back, from what I’ve seen.”

“What you’ve
seen
?”

Regina took a quick, shallow breath. “I mean, it’s a small town. He’s around.”

“You got anything on him? Found any
real
witnesses? People who actually saw his face? You’ll need that.”

“Not yet. But, like I told you, there are some leads.”

A pause. “Reggie, are you sure it’s safe for you down there?”

She closed her eyes. Saw that writing. Saw those words. Then she saw Skip Moseley. Hovering.

“Safe as in church.” She thought of what Mary Pickett had said to her and echoed it in a sweet Southern voice: “Why, everybody down here’s just so
nice
to me.”

A chuckle from Thurgood. “I’m sure they’re nice, all right, but you be careful. Now are you
sure . . .”
But he stopped himself. They both knew he’d been about to suggest Skip yet again.

That was the last thing she wanted. She started vehemently shaking her head. “No, I can do this. I just need a little more time.”