Free The Secret of Magic by Deborah Johnson

laughter washed over her again, and she marveled.
    Dr. Sam had done this?
It wasn’t that Regina didn’t know him. Actually, she had known him all her life. In fact, he’d brought her into her life when her mother fled east after her daddy was killed. And Dr. Sam had been there ever since. A round, dark-skinned, competent man, he had sent Ida Jane clients for her little dressmaking business. He’d encouraged her to apply downtown at Hattie Carnegie, where she’d gotten that good seamstress job. What a godsend that had turned out to be! It had supported the two of them, mother and daughter, so that Regina could prepare herself at Catholic school and Hunter College and Columbia Law, while Ida Jane worked days and spent her nights propelling her own mission—which was to enact the anti-lynching laws.
    “It’s not right that folks get away with what they do.” These were the first grown-up words Regina recalled her mother saying to her.
    When she was little, sometimes Regina wondered if Hattie Carnegie and the other ladies Ida Jane worked with downtown even knew anything at all about her mother’s other life, knew that she was famous in it. She wondered if they knew about the speeches her mother gave at nights and on the weekends, about the pamphlets she wrote and the endless letters. Sometimes Regina wondered if the people where she worked even realized that Ida Jane was Negro. She had high yellow skin and light hair. She had light eyes, too, that were liable to snap out at you for no reason, at least no reason that most people understood. Many white people mistook Ida Jane for white, a mistake that had probably caused the death of Regina’s father three months before she was born.
    Ida Jane and Dr. Sam hadn’t heard her come in. Regina stood and listened to them for a moment, mostly to the low, peaceful mingling of their voices, their sentences punctuated by a sigh, a silence, sometimes more of that laughter. Regina, who was slightly bemused by her mother’s happiness—so sudden, or at least it seemed that way to her—and maybe a little frightened by its implications, nonetheless smiled at the sound. And then she went looking for the book.
    She found it in Dr. Sam’s attic, among a pile of boxes all neatly stenciled with her name, REGINA MARY , and then the word PERSONAL . Ida Jane’s work. Regina herself had been too busy with her studies for the bar exam, with her duties at the Fund, to take care of the move. So Ida Jane had taken care of it, like she’d taken care of so many other things in her daughter’s life.
    Just the two of us. We’ve got to stick together.
    Regina had the feeling this would change soon, and if it hadn’t already, it should. Ida Jane had a life of her own now. Regina thought she’d go looking for a spot for herself, her own little apartment, once she returned from Mississippi. Voices echoed up to her, footsteps moving in tandem across the polished wood floor from the living room to the kitchen. Yes, find her own place. When she got back, that’s what she’d do.
    She weaved slightly on the novel motion of this thought and felt a little seasick, but the sensation was not altogether unpleasant.
    She riffled through and found
The Secret of Magic
in the third box she searched. It still wore its original dusty pink jacket, the one with the three children on it, carefully preserved. She picked it up, ran her fingers along the spine, over the letters and the words of its title, over M. P. Calhoun’s name. It had been years since she’d last seen it, but when she pulled the book out, it fell open in her hands and she read:
    The children had always heard that the Mottley sisters were witches, at least that the youngest, Peach, was. Collie Collington especially had heard this, because this was the sort of thing she listened for. You couldn’t say the word “witch” around her without her paying attention. She had a nose for anything out of the ordinary, anything other people might not