For her novel, “The Secret of Magic,” Johnson will receive the 2015 Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction. Monique Fields, manager of communications, said the award was created five years ago to commemorate the 50th anniversary of “To Kill a Mockingbird” and former University of Alabama law student and author, Harper Lee. The award, authorized by Lee and cosponsored by the University’s School of Law and the ABA Journal, is given annually to a work of fiction that best illuminates the role of lawyers in society and their power to effect change. Previous winners include John Grisham, Michael Connelly and Paul Goldstein.
Johnson, who beat out 16 entries including finalists Linda Fairstein and Robert Dugoni, is the first woman and black author to win this prize.
“My goodness. It’s pretty stunning,” Johnson said. “I didn’t even know this book was being considered for that prize until I became a finalist. ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ is just a seminal book for so many people. It is called the American novel. To win this is just wonderful.”
Johnson’s novel explores race relations in Mississippi during the 1940s after World War II by following Regina, a New-York-born lawyer working under activist Thurgood Marshall, who sends her to investigate the death of an African-American veteran, Joe Howard Wilson. Although the book is a work of fiction, Johnson said she draws from real life examples. The main character Regina is inspired by real-life lawyer and activist Constance Baker Motley, who graduated from Columbia Law School and worked under Marshall.
Johnson said Wilson was inspired by the real life case of Isaac Woodard, a WWII veteran who was taken off a bus in South Carolina and beaten so badly he went blind. As in the case of Woodard, Johnson said WWII had a large impact on race relations in the 1940s.
“I think when a whole generation of men and women go off, it broadens their world a little bit,” she said. “They come home, and they’re not perhaps willing to be as subservient as they might have been. [Woodward] certainly went off and was not willing to be as subservient in South Carolina as he once had been.”
While Johnson took inspiration from many real life sources, the biggest influence on her novel came in the form of her grandfather. She said her grandfather, a WWII veteran, was a fan of Marshall and his civil rights work.
“[My grandfather] was very patriotic. He fought in the second World War to liberate Europe from the Nazis and fascists when he effectively didn’t have the right to vote in his own state,” she said.
Allen Pusey, editor and publisher for the ABA Journal, said they were thrilled by this year’s selection which continues Lee’s literary legacy.
“‘The Secret of Magic’ is exactly the kind of book the Harper Lee Prize is intended to honor; and the quality of legal literature we hope to encourage,” Pusey said. “The language is rich, the storytelling is gripping and the subject fits squarely in today’s discussions about race, courage and the rule of law.”
Johnson said she wanted to create a realistic portrayal of the South during that time period. The character Regina has a notion of what the South is like based on news stories and terrible stories coming out of Mississippi, but what she finds is slightly different than what she imagined it to be. Johnson said there’s a line near the beginning of the book that describes Manhattan as a long white candle and Harlem as a black burning wick. During that time period, she said, races in the North didn’t mingle much.
“In the South, it is entirely different,” Johnson said. “They’re much more bunched together. It was very hard to find a white person who did not know a black person and vice versa. This is not the norm in the North. It’s different than what [Regina] thought because there’s already so much interaction going on, which makes it better but also worse.”
Much of her Regina’s fish-out-of-water experience was inspired by Johnson’s own move from Italy to Mississippi 10 years ago. When she first moved here, Johnson said she had ideas of what the South was like. She soon became good friends with four wonderful, older white women. Johnson realized these women had gone through the civil rights movement, which totally changed what they expected their lives to be like when they were little, and yet they made that change with great dignity and good humor. Johnson thought about how often white women are stereotyped in people’s collective thought, and created the character of M. P. Calhoun, a reclusive author, as a homage. Another inspiration for the character, ironically, was Lee herself.
“I’m going to be quite frank and thought it was obvious Harper Lee herself went through my mind because I had no idea this prize even existed,” she said. “The idea of a woman who writes a great book well ahead of its time that had a great impact and then never writes another book fascinated me. There were so many great women who were writing in that time. [Calhoun] is an amalgamation. She’s a made up person, but a lot of it was inspired.”
Mary McDonagh Murphy, an independent film and television writer and producer, was one of the judges on a panel, including author Wayne Flynt and NPR host Michele Norris, that chose Johnson’s novel for the prize.
“Unforgettable characters, suspense that builds straight to the last pages and straight plain prose, all the necessary ingredients to win a prize named for Harper Lee. Deborah Johnson does a lovely job,” she said in a release.
Johnson said she actively tried to avoid stereotyping any group or race because if she stereotyped one race or group, the other group automatically gets stereotyped too. She said she wanted to write a book that addressed people where one race wasn’t all saintly and one race wasn’t all bad.
Johnson said she came up with the title before the story and sees it as a metaphor for change.
“The title was something that came to me because I was always intrigued by the notion of magic,” she said. “The secret of magic is to keep you paying attention to something that’s not important, so the important things can be tricked with. In that sense, I say the secret of magic is a metaphor not just for the civil rights movement but for many things to come.”
