The Secret of Magic (4 page)

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IT WAS IN THAT PLACE
of magic that the Bonnie Blue Line interstate courier bus shuddered to an unscheduled stop. From his place in the back of it, Joe Howard saw Johnny Ray Dean crane his head to look at him and then slowly, slowly crank the bus door, opening it onto this special make-a-wish place.

Where Joe Howard heard voices. Where he saw men.

Where he blew his breath into heaven and let mistletoe float down from the sky to kiss him one last time upon the cheek.

R
egina Mary Robichard noticed the envelope as soon as she entered her office. Fat and cream-colored, it lay there among the business letters, newspapers, and circulars on her small desk. It looked out of place, like an invitation. Not just any invitation, either, but an opening to something she might actually like to attend. Later, it was the photograph within that envelope that would capture her attention, and keep it. But for now the envelope itself was enough.

She had come in on a Saturday with the idea of working for a few hours and then, since she was downtown, rewarding herself with a little shopping at Best & Co. or at Peck & Peck. There was a sale on hats at Gimbels, but she had a lot of hats and didn’t really need more. She’d read about another good deal, this one for better suits, at May D&F and a new movie,
The Best Years of Our Lives
, which was playing at the Rialto in Times Square. She thought about taking that in as well. If she was lucky, all of this might keep her out of her new stepfather’s house, and her mother—or, rather, her
parents
—would be asleep when she came in.

It was a legend in the family how Regina, when she was little, under six, would go up to a man—any man—who had come to hear one of her famous mother’s famous speeches and say, “Would you like to marry my mommy? Would you like to be my daddy?” Often the men she asked did not know how to take this. They’d duck. They’d turn away. Of course they all knew what had happened to Oscar Robichard, not that long ago in Omaha, Nebraska. They wouldn’t have been there if they hadn’t, and they were all sympathetic. But nobody wanted to be Regina’s daddy. Nobody had wanted to marry her mother. Until now.

“Monday,” Regina said aloud, “I’ve got to start looking for my own place.”
I’ve got a job now, and my own life. It’s time.

Behind her, she left the main door unlocked and opened a crack in case someone else came in, always a possibility on a Saturday here at the LDF, or the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, as it was more formally known. People worked late; they came in on weekends. There was always that much to do. Regina shared her space with three other lawyers, all of them men, one of them white. None of whom exactly relished having a woman in their midst. They never said this, not outright, but it was implied in their stories that stopped in mid-sentence, in laughter that abruptly died when she came into the room. She suspected that half the male lawyers thought she was here because her mother was Ida Jane Robichard, the other half because of the way that her father had died. They were all wrong. Regina knew she was here because she was
born
to be here, born to value the law and its order. With her history, who wouldn’t? But this didn’t stop her from sometimes feeling . . . well, strange.

Especially because she sat directly across from Edgar Morrison Moseley III (“But my friends call me Skip”), hired as a staff lawyer three weeks before she’d been, fully as ambitious as she was herself, and the nemesis of what she liked to call her “legal life.” Skip had never been happy to have a woman in the office, a fact he made abundantly clear. Invariably, the women lawyers he talked about had something in common with Regina—“Hey, she looked
exactly
like you look. Graduated Columbia, too. I was
astounded
”—and they all ended up in either a sad or bad way.

“War’s over. Women need to do their duty, go back home and make babies. A woman working takes a job away from a family man.” This was his continual refrain, called out whenever he thought Regina might be listening. Once he’d actually lectured her to her face while they were having sandwiches and coffee at the Forty-second Street Automat. “You need to get yourself married, settle down.” Ida Jane might have slugged him, but Regina didn’t. She just made her excuses and caught a cab home.

“Why do you even
date
such a jerk?” Ida Jane had looked up from the piece she was writing, her brow still creased in concentration, splotches of fountain-pen ink dotting her hand.

“It wasn’t a date, not really,” Regina answered. “We’d worked late, decided to go out, that was all. Besides, Skip’s got a right to his opinion. I just can’t let his opinion interfere with my life.”

“Got to change some laws if you want to make sure
that
doesn’t happen.” Ida Jane rolled her eyes, shook her head. “But I guess that’s why you’re working over there at the Fund.”

Now Regina pulled off kid gloves and a veiled felt hat and put them on a wooden chair. She glanced from the small room in which she stood to a smaller room next to it, which was stacked floor to ceiling with alphabetized manila envelopes. This was her special place, the reason she’d come to work on such a sunny Saturday morning. “Reggie’s Realm,” the others called it, relieved that it was her responsibility and not theirs. These were her cases. Thousands of them, sent in by Negro servicemen who had been court-martialed or dishonorably discharged for doing what a white man had gotten away with doing or been slightly reprimanded for doing.

“My name is Legion,” Thurgood Marshall had said when he’d handed them over while out of the corner of her eye Regina had seen Skip smirk. They were not considered a gift and had been assigned to her because she had been the last one hired, and could be the first one fired, if she wasn’t careful. If she didn’t keep her nose to the grindstone and work hard. But she had surprised herself by actually liking the cases—or “the causes,” as she began calling them, though only to herself. She looked forward to opening each new envelope, reading through its depositions and briefs, getting to know men who had laid out their grievances in their own measured, carefully written-out words.

Still, the fat, cream-colored envelope beckoned her first.

She walked across the linoleum floor to take it into her hands, to weigh and measure it. Vellum, she thought, a good one. Being able to distinguish standard bond from good vellum was something that she knew how to do.

The writing on the envelope was in a spidery Palmer penmanship and addressed to Thurgood Marshall, Regina’s boss. The name Thurgood Marshall had no
Mr.
before it. There was no
Esquire
behind it. It had been sent to him care of something called the Negro Legal Office, 69 Fifth Avenue, New York 10, New York. The street address, at least, was correct. The fact that it had been mandated to Thurgood did not stop Regina from opening it. She had taken the New York State bar examination two weeks before and was waiting for the result. But before moving into a new position as staff attorney, she had clerked for Thurgood during her last year at Columbia Law, and she was used to opening anything that came to the office and was addressed to him. Even now, when he was out of town, which was often, the secretaries routinely brought his letters to her, and she went through everything that was not marked private. This envelope was not marked private.

The cleaning people had been in the night before, and the shades and windows had been opened to let in the fresh air. This far down Fifth Avenue there was little noise drifting up from the street on a Saturday morning, and from the other offices that surrounded theirs, even less. Not like Harlem, where she’d just come from and which, even at this early hour, was already alive to the full and syncopated rhythm of its day. For a moment, Regina just stood there, listening to the silence.

She looked for but could not find her letter opener, and so she used her fingertip to open the flap. This proved to be quite easy. The glue had been licked down only on the tip, but Regina’s nail polish—Elizabeth Arden’s Montezuma Red, worn patriotically during the war and still not abandoned—left a slender crimson wheal along the heavy ivory paper. Regina did not notice this. The envelope’s contents, newspaper clippings, showered onto the tidy plane of her desk. She did not stop to study these. There was a snapshot as well, and she paused over it.

The photograph was of an old Negro man, his face ashy and worn, and gone not wrinkly but ropey in the way that black skin aged. He was smiling and holding on for dear life to a man younger than he was but who looked just like him. His son. The old man had on a white shirt that was carefully ironed but obviously threadbare. Regina could tell this even in black and white. His son was decked out in a splendid U.S Army–issue uniform, clearly brand-new. Even though the two of them were looking into the camera, they were
beaming
at each other. She wondered, for a moment, where the mother was, then decided that, of course, the mother was the one who had taken the photograph. Who else could have captured such love? After a moment, Regina started reading.

And as she read, she took notes on a small stenographer’s pad, a holdover habit from the many years she had spent at lectures in college and in law school, though she had decided that this particular practice was something she must give up. There were still so few women lawyers in the courts of New York that she was regularly taken for a stenographer, a secretary. Even that, she was told, was a huge step up in professional recognition for her, a pretty colored girl who dressed well. As Regina wrote, the sun moved to shadow her hand upon her words. She made two brief telephone calls from the shared phone on another lawyer’s desk. At one point she went into a side office, rifled through the membership files, looking something up, and then returned to read and to write once again.

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.