Free The Secret of Magic by Deborah Johnson Page B

herself, had thought. And Collie had made sure Jack knew first thing when Daddy Lemon gave them the idea of forming themselves into the Dancing Rabbit Magic Club.
    The deep wood and what lay within it was what Daddy Lemon wanted his children to know. The good-luck properties in a buckeye. The healing and the numbing that came from a piece of a toothache tree when your mouth was acting up. He showed them how to tell the difference between a natural hillock and a built-up Indian mound. Showed them fish scales, old as Jesus, that he’d found on a rock under the trestle bridge that spanned the river. He taught them to tell golden alexanders from butterweed and ox-eyed daisies—rough, wild flowers rarely spoken of at the Revere Garden Club, whose sacred meetings Collie, like her mother before her, was forced to attend. And the moons—harvest in autumn, beaver in winter, blue when two moons showed up in a month. Once, he called them outside, made them look straight up at that beaver moon—dead of night, if they’d known, their parents would have killed them—made them look straight up at the fat winter moon.
    Until that last summer. Those three children going deeper and deeper into the forest, sometimes with Daddy Lemon, sometimes without. Until one day Collie whispered, “I heard Miss Betty DeLean Mayhew talking about a murder. I heard her say something about a witch.”
    And with that, the magic ended and the mystery and the troubled times began.
    • • •
    REGINA READ ALL THIS, thinking with each sentence she’d put the book down. But a sentence became a paragraph, which flowed on into a page, two pages, a chapter, more. She was still deep within it when the train shuddered to a halt in Richmond, Virginia, where cars were added.
    They were old cars, and they were rickety. Regina, looking out, could tell this right away. A white man came up to her and handed her a new ticket. She was told, matter-of-factly, that she’d have to give up her seat, get off, move herself and her belongings to the rear. The man did not remove his hat when he spoke to her and he called her “girl,” but he did smile and he had a nice, bright, friendly smile, nothing malicious about it. Regina was not upset at first. In fact, she felt slightly ennobled. She had expected this. After all, the South and its Jim Crow laws had to start somewhere, and where better than Richmond, the seat of the old Confederacy?
    She did what she was supposed to do and climbed down from the train onto the platform where her things had been off-loaded. She’d brought a lot with her. A hatbox, a makeup case, a Pullman big as a trunk. All of this in matching Hartmann brown tweed that had been given to her by Dr. Sam’s sister and her husband as a law school graduation gift.
    All around her, the races fluttered like birds in separate migration, white folks toward the clean, new cars near the engine and colored folks to the dilapidation that brought up the rear. Everybody chatting away and nobody anxious or angry, at least not that Reggie could tell. She had thought she might have a problem down here with the language, with its cadence, with its various dialects, with—as Dr. Sam would say—its patois. Instead, she found she understood every word that was being said around her. It was just that none of them helped her one bit. So there she stood, like a dividing boulder, still fresh and perky in pearls, a hat, white gloves, and a ladylike suit but having not the faintest idea how she was supposed to transport herself and all she had with her from where she was to where she was supposed to be.
    She, cracker-jack at hailing a cab in the city, tried calling out, “Sir!,” tried a “Here, please!” and met no response from the busy porters, or were they red caps? It didn’t matter what you called them. They were all black. While around her white folks were calling out for boys (grown black men) to help them, and the boys (grown black men) were doing just that.
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