The Secret of Magic Read Free Page A

daddy.
    Once he had it off, the policeman would knock it into the dirt, sometimes with a billy club, sometimes with bare hands, and he’d be forced to bend down and pick it up from the street. He’d be let go then, with a curse and a “nigger,” and he’d be free to continue on. They never really
hurt
him. They didn’t even intend to
hurt
him. Joe Howard knew this, but as soon as his face was turned away from them, he’d start to cry. A man, a grown man, walking through the streets of a big city, crying like that, like a damn baby. Secret and shameful. But he couldn’t help it. He hated those big-baby tears, and he hated himself for letting those stupid-ass white men get to him and for crying those rivers of tears.
    Now, waiting for his daddy, Joe Howard cleared his throat, once, then twice. He was less than thirty miles from home and he had made it and his daddy had made it. They were both alive. They would see each other soon, and that was a blessed thing and a great one. In Italy, he was sure he’d never make it home.
    Sometimes, when he was out on patrol, especially in the last months before the war ended, Joe Howard had been scared to death his daddy might die before he got back. He knew soldiers who had lost their mothers, lost their fathers, lost their wives, lost their children, even, while they were gone fighting. You never thought of that, but it happened. In foxholes, behind trees, in the bodies of dead animals and dead men, in the cratered earth, would hide the terrifying thought that he would somehow get back to Revere and that his daddy would be gone, that he’d never see his daddy again.
    But Willie Willie was alive. Joe Howard heard him now, running up the back steps to the telephone, coming in from where he had been working—keeping up the garden, fixing things that broke down, telling his tall tales and his stories, driving Miss Mary Pickett, who couldn’t drive, all over town in the old Calhoun Daimler. His daddy took up the receiver, breathing hard and shouting into it, just like Miss Mary Pickett had done.
    “That you, son? You okay?”
    “I’m well, Daddy.” He put the telephone receiver between his ear and his shoulder and reached, again, for a Camel before he remembered, again, that he didn’t have one. “It’s taking longer than I thought. They got us caught over here in Aliceville.”
    “Aliceville?”
Willie Willie was plainly astonished. “Why, son, Aliceville’s not on the way home.”
    “Close, though. Thirty, thirty-five miles. Maybe less. At least that’s what they say.”
    His daddy said, “But it’s an
unknown
way. Don’t get yourself in any trouble. You know how folks are over in Alabama.”
    Joe Howard laughed. They both laughed. This was their joke, talking about how things were over in Alabama, as though they weren’t the same way in Mississippi, as though Alabama was a whole world away.
    “I should be there in an hour, maybe less.”
    “Just get here quick. Everybody’s excited. They got your picture up all over Revere—at least all over the colored parts of it. Miss Mary Pickett’s got hers laid out, too, up there in her office. She told me so herself. You know that snapshot she took of the two of us—you in your uniform and me right beside you? Well, she kept hold to it.”
    “She did?”
    Joe Howard didn’t know whether he was pleased to hear this or not. Mostly not, he decided, because he knew the picture. Him all fresh in his new uniform and his daddy in old overalls, and they were leaning right into each other, holding on to each other like each was the only thing living that the other had left, which was true enough. And they were grinning, both of them. Hard. Except
grinning
wasn’t really the right word.
Radiant
was better. Willie Willie and his son, Joe Howard Wilson, radiating love. Willie Willie looking prouder even than he had looked when Joe Howard had graduated from Morehouse College and the judge had sent him over to Atlanta—his first