The Secret of Magic.

• Author: Rogers, C.D.
• Position: Book review

The Secret of Magic

By Deborah Johnson

As predicting the 2015 Harper Lee Prize--the fiction "that best illuminates the role of lawyers in society and their power to effect change"--too close to call, simply consider Johnson's The Secret of Magic worth a read.

The characters remain with us like Atticus and Scout Finch, Sherlock Holmes, and Mitch McDeere. Regina Robichard, a young lawyer who works for Thurgood Marshall at the NAACP, is assigned to go to Revere, Mississippi, to answer the plea of Mary Pickett Calhoun, author of the well-known novel The Secret of Magic and who eventually becomes symbolic of both the good and the bad of the Old South. "Her man," Willy Willy, suggests both the Uncle Tom and William Faulkner's character Tobe (To Be) in "A Rose for Emily."

It is Joe Howard, killed while returning home to Revere, who controls the plot's sequence. He returns home a lieutenant with his "Service Cross for leading Negro troops to a decisive victory ... in Italy." But, Howard is killed 35 miles from Revere. There, the driver and guards of German POWs (returning home also) demand he either move to the back or yield his bus seat to the German prisoners. Howard refuses, and the white guards, driver, and "local boys on the bus" kill him.

The evolving issue concerns the complex meaning of justice. How is justice achieved in the reality of layers of interests, irrationalities, and people who are both good and bad? How do we peel the layers of this societal reality and get to that common core of humanity? Revere can be any community in the United States, but here Revere, Jefferson-Lee County, holds...