The Secret of Magic (3 page)

Manasseh was still behind the sign that read
COLORED ONLY
, still behind the makeshift separating curtain, still there in his seat, still clutching his lard can, still wearing the pinned-on paper sign that gave him a name and a place in this world. He looked relieved when he saw Joe Howard, and the biblical solemnity of his face broke up in a smile.

Joe Howard smiled back.

“You know, I been out to Macon,” he said, settling into his seat once again. “Lots of times. It’s a nice place. You gonna like it. My daddy used to take me over there, to the forest. The Magnolia Forest—ever heard about that? It can be dead of winter everyplace else still in Mississippi, there’s always gonna be at least some little speck of green. Grass peeking up through the snow in January. Full-bloomed bushes hiding out behind the skeletons of old oak and pecan trees. Christmas, and my daddy would take me out there, would point to the highest gray branch in the tree and say, ‘See that, son? That’s mistletoe. Breathe on it. Sigh on it. Let it kiss you.’ You know what, Manasseh? I’d do just that. Blow a soft breath straight up and the mistletoe would come down to kiss it. It would float against my cheek and kiss me. Right there in Macon—that’s what would happen.”

But Manasseh did not look convinced.

“And ladybugs. Everywhere you look, ladybugs. Did you know there’s magic in a ladybug? One touches you—why, son, it’s good luck.”

This, at last, was something Manasseh had heard before and remembered. He nodded. He smiled.

The bus started filling up again. Joe Howard saw the twin boys from before. He waved at them because it was safe to wave at white children, especially little boys. They looked at him shyly. One waved back. Their mother was still laughing with the driver but with a little less animation. Joe Howard wondered when the two of them would stop their flirting so the bus could get going again. He was looking down at his Longines, a little irritated, when he heard the driver say, “Hey, well now. It took you long enough to get them. How all y’all doing?”

From the front of the bus there came a faint rustle. A movement and a shifting that seemed purposed to draw everyone’s curious attention.

White men got on. There were a lot of them: five or six, from what Joe Howard could tell, but he couldn’t see much from the back of the bus. Most of them were still in the well, and the courier heaved slightly under their weight. Manasseh perked up, curious now, too. He stopped chewing on his dead gum.

The first man was in a uniform Joe Howard knew was not military, but the man seemed to know the driver, to be on good terms with him. The two of them chuckled together for a moment. The driver introduced him to the mother of the twins. She said something and the uniformed man pointed to the other men behind him. The woman nodded as the men finished their climb and started down the aisle.

It was then that Joe Howard realized that the first of them was some part of the law. If not exactly a policeman, then close. Joe Howard started paying attention. The men he’d led into the bus and were now passing right through the white section and coming on into
COLORED ONLY
were prisoners. There were red
PW
s on their belts. When one of them turned around to whisper something to the man behind him, something that caused both of them to smile, Joe Howard saw a big
P
and a big
W
stenciled large as life on the back of his cotton-fleck shirt. What looked to be a deputy brought up the rear.

Germans,
thought Joe Howard.
Prisoners of war.
Maybe about to go home, just like he was going home. Joe Howard settled back into his uncomfortable seat. He didn’t see how these men had a thing in the world to do with him.

Until they stopped. Until he heard the guard say, “You coloreds get on up. Give over these places to these here men.”

All around him Joe heard the slow shuffle of people gathering their things to move. A woman groaned to her feet behind him; across the way, an old black man reached for his pine cane. Even Manasseh, who had not budged even to go to the bathroom, started gathering his lard bucket together. Started shuffling. Started to obey.

Joe Howard could not believe it.
He could not believe it.

“You want us to get up and give our places—that we paid for—to some German prisoners?”

The guard’s face flared into a mottled map of angry affirmation. Could this be a black man talking back to
him
?

Yes, he damned well did want that. “What I want,” he said, talking slow now, and loud, “is for you niggers to get up and give these here places over to white men.”

When he said them, the words sounded as reasonable and as inevitable as the fact the sun would rise again in the east the next day. It was just simply the way things were, the way they had always been, the way they were always going to be.

L.C. calling out, “Come on, Joe Howard! Catch up! Catch up!”

Joe Howard close behind him now. Running straight into the night forest.

“I’m not getting up,” he said, as he actually jumped to his feet and stood there, blocking the way with his uniform. “And nobody else back here is getting up, either. Not for some Nazis.”

The other deputy came up from behind fast. He stared at Joe Howard, at his uniform, at his bars and his medals.

“Well, look-a-hear, Leroy,” he began, “Maybe . . .”

Compromise was in his voice. But the man called Leroy was having none of it.

“I said move aside here, nigger. Give these white men your place.”

“And I said that I’m not moving,
and neither is anybody else.”

Each word clear and distinct, and with the feel of his friend L.C.’s blood fresh on him again, the warm, iron smell of it, the sticky drained life. Joe Howard felt those always-near tears well up in him, threatening his eyes, threatening him, just like they had so long ago on the streets of Atlanta and just like they always would. It was the tears that told him that the war—his part in it, the long horror of it—hadn’t changed one thing.

By now all the white folks had turned around and they were looking, too. Joe Howard saw the one he thought he knew, Miss Anna Dale. It
was
her. A prim lady in a lace collar, in a polka-dot dress, in a green hat with lilacs blooming on it. With a polished gold star pinned to her ample bosom. He saw all of that now. She stared at him with dark, deep eyes. Joe Howard heard her whisper, “Oh, dear.”

Be careful!

Words, using his daddy’s voice, slipped into his mind.

“Are you safe, son? Come on home safe!”

But Joe Howard had no use for those words. He closed his eyes. They disappeared.

He found his own words. “Aren’t these Germans? Aren’t these
Nazis
?”

And even one of the Germans—light of hair, light of eye and skin, a stranger in this place—seemed anxious to help.

“It’s okay. We can stand.” His words accented but still clear.

“You’ll shut up if you know what’s good for you, you lousy Kraut,” shouted Leroy. The German shut up.

And Joe Howard thought, clearly, distinctly:
Why the hell am I doing this?

Manasseh, who in his short life had only left Mississippi to journey over into Alabama, knew what was coming next. He didn’t need his mama to tell him. He shifted in his seat. Joe Howard had been nice to him. Manasseh
wanted
to get up. Joe Howard had to lay a heavy hand on his shoulder to keep him down. Things were just so much like always. The little colored boy getting up automatically, and the little white boys, ahead, just as automatically turning back to see what was going on but staying put.

Manasseh moved again, and Joe Howard looked down at him and he said—because he’d promised the boy’s mama that he’d watch out for him—“Everything’s going to be all right. You’ll see. Things are going to be different now. We just fought a war.
We
fought it, too—and that means nobody anymore’s got the right to take our paid-for seats from us.”

He turned slightly and let his battle-sharpened gaze sweep on over the other Negroes—some already on their feet—on past them to the whites at the front where the woman had clustered her children close beside her. And where the bus driver had decided just what needed doing next.

He looked over at the mother of the twins, puffed up his chest, started back. Outside, the electric Dr Pepper sign still twinkled. Its brilliance flashed over the little depot and illuminated it with the purity of the Bethlehem star. But not all the lights on it worked, and Joe Howard heard the sizzle and crackle of currents trying to connect. He realized that he still was holding on to Manasseh, holding on to him too tightly. He might be hurting the boy. He relaxed his hand.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. Manasseh from Revelations in the Bible nodded, but with that white bus driver lumbering back like thunder, he was too scared to look up at Joe Howard now.

The guard named Leroy said, “You’ll do what I say, boy . . . ,” creating a dangerous situation.

The driver drew close. His name, Johnny Ray Dean, was scripted in bright blue thread on his gray uniform. “What’s all this? I don’t want no confusion.” His words were drawn out in a thick Alabama hill-country drawl and there was a glint in his eye that said he was aware of and happy that he had the redheaded woman’s full attention once again. Happy that such a really pretty woman would see how good he was at solving nigger problems.

“There
is
no confusion,” said Leroy. “This here boy’s just got to let folks do what they been told to do.”

Joe Howard thought,
If this cracker calls me nigger one more time, I’m going to kill him. Kill him outright.

Joe Howard said, “And I have told this fucking white man I am not getting up out of my seat for some prisoner, for some goddamn German. For some goddamn fucking Nazi.”

He’d cussed now. Around him, all the old women, both colored and white, gasped.

Joe Howard said, “I’ve had . . . My friends . . . The war . . .”

But what friends were left? They were all dead now. And these people—could they care about the war and what had happened to him there?

Around Joe Howard, the whole bus grew silent as a grave and the driver looked at him for a long moment. Eyes narrowed, fists bunched. Then he smiled. He opened up his mouth and he said, “Hold on there, I don’t want no trouble. There’s another bus due in. It cleared out of Birmingham right after we left Tuscaloosa, a bare couple hours behind us. Why don’t I see if I can get you and these here prisoners on that one, Leroy? Avoid all this confusion.” He said this even though the white part of the bus was half empty. But, of course, they would not put these German prisoners up there. Not with the white women. Not with the white children.

Johnny Ray Dean leaned in and whispered something to the guard, a few quick words that Joe Howard could not hear, and then added, “I’ll climb on down. Make the call myself.”

“Yeah, Leroy,” said the young deputy. “Let him do that.”

Leroy paused over this, considered, though Joe Howard could tell this was only a ruse and that his mind was already made up.

Johnny Ray said, “There’s other ways to handle this; let this boy be for now. Just don’t give me no more ruckus. GIs all coming home and they want everything they can get their hands on. I get trouble on this bus—somebody might think to give my route to one of them.”

Again, Leroy appeared to cogitate. “Well, sir, you sure there’s another bus coming?” Whatever the driver had whispered privately seemed to have calmed him down, made him stand tall again, at least for the moment. Still, there was face-saving to do.

“Oh, I’m sure,” said the driver. “There be plenty of ways to skin a coon.”

The white men—all of them: guards, prisoners, and the driver—trooped to the front of the bus, the Americans whispering, the Germans behind them. The German who had spoken up earlier turned back. He caught Joe Howard’s gaze and then quickly looked away. Joe Howard watched as all of them got off the bus. Johnny Ray climbed down with them. The blacks still had their seats, but Joe Howard felt like he always felt when he’d come out of a battle—that same strange alchemic mixture of relief and shame.

“Daddy wouldn’t want me cussing,” he said out loud. His daddy wouldn’t want him talking back to white men with guns, either, but there was no helping that now.

He made up his mind he was going to apologize to Manasseh; maybe even to some of the ladies, especially to that one who wore the gold star that told the world she had a son who’d been killed in the war. Maybe she might understand.

“Miss Anna Dale,” he whispered her name. Sure of it now.

Joe Howard sat back down again. He touched his face and his shirt and his arms and his hands, just as he’d done when he’d wakened from his nightmare, and found himself on this bus going home. He tried, but he could no longer see his face in the window. It had grown too dark for that.

Johnny Ray Dean climbed back on, the courier shifting under his weight, and the whole thing was over. He started up the engine, pulled out onto the asphalt road, but if he had thought he could win his maiden’s admiration by swaggering back and taking control of things, he’d been much mistaken. He tried talking to her, and then after a silence tried again, but even Joe Howard could see she was no longer paying attention. She sat hugging her children. Except for the flame of a match and the burning coal of a cigarette being smoked farther up, the bus rolled on, silent and dark.

It eased on down a road free of traffic, ambling along until it finally crossed the state line. Manasseh hadn’t said a word since he’d first seen the Germans. Now Joe Howard remembered something—another tale, another legend from his daddy—and he bent close so that he could whisper it into the child’s ear and comfort him with it.

“You see that sign—see how it says
JEFFERSON-LEE COUNTY WELCOMES YOU
? All white on green and pretty? And see the one stuck up behind it,
WELCOME TO MISSISSIPPI
?
These two painted boards, coming one right after the other, mean you enter the county before you enter the state. Twenty feet between them, and those twenty feet are magic—because nothing owns it. Not Alabama. Not Mississippi. It’s a special place. Free. That’s what my daddy always said to me. And anything can happen on this magic land. My daddy told me if you make a wish here . . . If you make a quick wish here, why, the mistletoe might find you . . .”