The Secret of Magic: A Novel - Softcover

Johnson, Deborah

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0425272788 ISBN 13: 9780425272787

Verlag: Penguin LCC US, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

Winner of the Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction

"If you liked The Help, you'll love this one!"--EW.com

In a novel that "brings authentic history to light," a young female attorney from New York City attempts the impossible in 1946: attaining justice for a black man in the Deep South.

Regina Robichard works for Thurgood Marshall, who receives an unusual letter asking the NAACP to investigate the murder of a returning black war hero. It is signed by M. P. Calhoun, the most reclusive author in the country.

As a child, Regina was captivated by Calhoun's The Secret of Magic, a novel in which white and black children played together in a magical forest. The book was a sensation, featured on the cover of Time magazine, and banned more than any other book in the South. And then M.P. Calhoun disappeared.

With Thurgood's permission, Regina heads down to Mississippi to find Calhoun and investigate the case. But as she navigates the muddy waters of racism, relationships, and her own tragic past, she finds that nothing in the South is as it seems.

Named one of four titles on the shortlist for this year's Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, awarded by the Baton Rouge Area Foundation

READERS GUIDE INCLUDED

Augusta Trobaugh

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Deborah Johnson is the author of The Secret of Magic and The Air Between Us, which received the Mississippi Library Association Award for Fiction.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof.

Copyright © 2014 by Deborah Johnson
OCTOBER 1945

Gotcha!

Joe Howard Wilson jerked and his hands went straight to his face, and then to his body, for his gun. Groping. Feeling. Saying his prayers. Checking to make sure that he was awake and what had happened in that forest in Italy, all the killing, was over. Checking to make sure it wasn't happening now.

"You all right, mister? Need any help?"

Did he need help?

He opened his eyes then, but he didn't turn them to the voice, didn't answer it, because it was a child's voice. Light, like L.C.'s voice had been in the dream. And Joe Howard didn't want to go back to the dream. Instead, he put a hand on the hard thing right in front of him and realized it was nothing more menacing than a window and that this window was on a courier bus and that this courier bus was passing through Alabama on its way to Mississippi, and that it carried him home.

Outside, it was coming on night. Twilight. "The magic time," his daddy called it, "the make-a-wish moment between the dark and the light."

And the dusk, the gritty Southern grayness of it, its harsh gathering, stopped Joe Howard from seeing out beyond the solitude of his own ref lection, a soldier's ref lection: dark hair, a trimmed mustache, eyes he didn't bother looking into, and farther down from them, the ghostly shadow of a khaki uniform, of lieutenant's bars and a medal. There was no brain, no blood, no bone, no friend called L. C. Hoover sprayed all over this Joe Howard Wilson-at least not anymore.

Other than that, it was already too dark to see much of anything, but Joe Howard didn't mind. This land wasn't foreign to him. It wasn't war. It wasn't Italy. He knew the ways of it, the slow progression of Alabama as it gave way to Mississippi. At its own pace, red clay soil gave place to black, trees grew greener, hills flattened themselves into plain and prairie, into delta.

"Mister?"

At last, Joe Howard turned to the boy. They'd been sitting side by side since the two of them had gotten on the bus together in Birmingham. He had promised the boy's mother to see to it that her child got safely to Revere, Mississippi, all in one piece. The boy's mama, who had worked at the Mobile Dry Docks during the war, was on her way out to Oakland, California, to see what the world might hold for her there. She was sending her son back to her parents in Macon, Mississippi, for what she called "The Duration," until, she told him, she could get herself established.

No way was she ever going back to Mississippi to live. No way was she going to have her son grow up there. Onto the front of his clean overalls, she had pinned a piece of sack paper with his name on it. Manasseh. "Came straight out of the Bible. Revelations," the boy had told Joe Howard. Below that came Manasseh's granddaddy's name, Preacher Charles A. Lacey, and his granddaddy's address, Short Cut Road, Macon, Mississippi. All of this neatly spelled out in looping capital letters. Manasseh still held tight on to the lard can that had once contained his lunch-a cold baked yam, some corn bread, a Ball jar of sweet tea that he'd offered to share. He was working on the stick of Juicy Fruit gum Joe Howard had given him as the bus pulled out of Birmingham. The taste must have long since been played out of it, but still the boy chewed on.

Manasseh had politely motioned Joe Howard to the window seat. His eyes rounded as he stared at Joe Howard's uniform, at his bars, at his medals. He didn't need to see out, he'd said. Joe Howard didn't tell him that when he was a boy, when he was this boy's age, he'd made this trip many times himself.

"I'm well," Joe Howard said now, finally answering. He yawned, looked out the bus window again. He might know Alabama, but he didn't recognize a thing. "Where are we?"

"Coming into someplace called Aliceville."

"Aliceville?" Joe Howard thought he'd remember every little to

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin LCC US
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0425272788
• ISBN 13: 9780425272787
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 416
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: BERKLEY; https://www.penguin.com/?s=BERKLEY; ; Unit 2 Limavady Business Park; Limavady; County Londonderry; BT49 0HR; Vereinigtes Königreich
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar