The Secret of Magic by Johnson Deborah

Author:Johnson, Deborah [Johnson, Deborah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-01-21T00:00:00+00:00

• • •

IN REVERE, Regina found Tom Raspberry’s office the same way she would have found it in New York. She went up to the first colored person she saw on Main Street and asked him where it was. He was an old black man on a rusted bicycle peddling fresh eggs layered from a wicker basket that had been lashed by a rope onto the front handlebars.

“Tom Raspberry’s office? Please.”

The man’s reply was slow and specific. He got off his bicycle, took off his hat. His smile was wide and toothless, almost beatific. “You the lady lawyer come down from New York to help out Willie Willie?”

“Yes, my name is Regina Robichard.” She held out her hand, and he took it. His own hand was hard and work-callused, but it surprised Regina, after days spent introducing herself to wary white folks in Revere, Mississippi, how good it felt to be touching human flesh again.

“And my name’s Ben T.”

Ben T. said he’d be glad to help her. Ride her over there on the back of his bike if she wanted him to. Regina thanked him but said no, she didn’t want to put him to any trouble.

“No trouble at all,” he said. But in the end he nodded, pointed out the way, and then walked her down two blocks, going out of his way to make sure that she understood it.

“Once you get there, you’ll know where you are,” Ben T. told her. “He’s right there on the corner. Tom Raspberry’s building himself up a new place.”

She thought about this, three blocks down, when she turned the corner onto what a bright sign told her was Catfish Alley. And Catfish Alley was definitely a jumping place.

One thing Regina suddenly realized she’d missed in Revere were signs of progress. The war was over; the rest of the nation an active hive of rebuilding, of the old going down and the new strutting up. But not in Revere, not from what Regina had seen. Here the houses appeared to be all old Victorians and staid antebellums. Anna Dale Buchanan’s bungalow had been surrounded by other bungalows, not one of which looked less than fifty years old. Even the shacks she’d seen out of the corner of her eye on that first night, riding into town with Willie Willie, had been unpainted and crumbling, almost falling-down ancient.

But Catfish Alley wasn’t like that at all. It felt like Harlem and smelled like it, too. Good scents of enticing things, fried up and waiting. And it sounded like home. Regina heard Cab Calloway echoing himself, complaining about Minnie the Moocher on two different radios. The stations must have started the same record seconds apart.

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