But white teachers weren't supposed to teach black students. White people weren't supposed to be among so many black people. Now all of a sudden my mother and I had jumped onto the pages of the local newspaper known by some as the Klan-Ledger. We were officially involved.
I ran back inside and got Perry's Pentax, adjusting the strap to fit better around me. If they had a picture of us at Tougaloo, I would take pictures of this. I took pictures of the garbage in our yard and the words splattered on our front door. Willa Mae came and the two of us finished cleaning up the yard while my mother set to work scrubbing down the front door.
Inside, when we finally ate breakfast, the phone rang. When I answered, I heard breathing, then a man's voice say, "Watch your back."
"Do I know you?" I asked, but the caller hung up.
Before I could tell my mother, the phone rang again. I picked it up on the second ring, ready to yell, but it was my grandmother. "Please remind your mother that women here should appear in print only three times in their lives: when they're born, when they get married, and when they die."
"I'll tell her."
"I imagine she's getting ready for school, so I won't bother her." I looked at my mother, who was still staring at the paper. She hadn't even turned the page. "When are you coming to visit?"
"I don't know," I said. "Soon."
"Good. I'll make all your favorites. How are you all doing on peaches?"
I opened the kitchen cupboard and saw the jars of my grandmother's pear and peach preserves, the cloves hanging, suspended in the sugary juices, just behind my grandmother's careful script. It was like having her there with us, stored away.
"Two jars left."
"I'll put away more." She stayed on the line. "I'm worried. Should I be worried?"
"I don't think so."
As soon as we hung up, I heard someone at the front door. I thought of the man's voice on the phone, the one who said "Watch your back." Before I could say, Don't open the door!, my mother opened the door and ran straight into Perry's arms. I looked at them together. When had this started? Since when did they hug like that? My mother buried her face in his neck and Perry whispered something into her ear. Even though I liked Perry, I felt queasy.
"This is all your fault," I said. "She wouldn't've even gone to Tougaloo if you hadn't told her. You took pictures. Now I bet my mom is going to lose her job."
"I didn't take that picture," Perry said quietly into my mother's hair.
"What are you talking about?" I said, pushing them apart.
"I never gave any film to that newspaper, Sam," he said. "Besides, I never took a shot like that." He said he took close-ups of students, but there were no wide-angle photographs of crowds. He sounded calm and sure, and even though I believed him, I didn't want to.
"So how did the newspaper get those pictures?"
"I think there was a guy from the school," Perry said. "But he never said who he was with."
"We believe you, Perry," my mother said.
"They threw trash all over our yard," I said.
"I know, I know," he said. "I'm here to help."
"You don't have to, Perry, really," my mother said. "I don't want to make you late for work."
"This is bad," I said. "Miss Jenkins won't like this one bit." I realized then that I was thinking of both my school and my mother's. Who in their right mind would ever ask me to the dance now? Perry had brought nothing but trouble into both our lives. I waited, looking from Perry to my mother, the three of us just standing there, breathing.
The phone rang again and I left my mother with Perry to answer it. "What is it now?" I screamed into the receiver.
"Hi, sweetie. This is Mary Alice's mom. Is your mom there?"
"Oh, I'm so sorry, Mrs. McLemore," I said. "Let me get her."
When I ran to the front door again, my mother and Perry separated, as though they had been caught doing something.
"Mom, you have a phone call." My mother went to her room to pick up the other phone.
I listened to them talk from the kitchen phone while I watched Perry outside sweeping the walk. "I know this is a difficult time," Mrs. McLemore said, as though someone in our family had just died. "But maybe we can help." Mrs. McLemore wanted to know if we could come over for dinner in a week or so. I gently replaced the receiver and ran into my mother's room, nodding over and over, doing a silent clap as soon as she accepted the invitation.
***
When I sat down for lunch in the cafeteria at school, everyone stood up and left. Everyone had seen my mother in the paper. Why did we have to eat with anyone anyway? I tried to convince myself. Who'd made that rule? I didn't have anything to say to Mary Alice or her friends anyway. I looked around and saw Ears sitting alone, staring off and out the window. I sat across from him. He stared while I opened up my parchment paper.
"Don't you have a lunch?"
He said no. He said his father lost his job. "He joined a union. People don't like unions here. They think they're Communist. My dad's from Mississippi. He's no Russian."
"My dad's from here, too." I gave Ears half my peanut butter and banana sandwich. Then we took our minds off being hungry, reading out loud to each other from a comic book about superheroes.
After lunch we had a free period, so Ears and I stayed on the blacktop. There were still cicada shells everywhere, in the grass, and up and down tree trunks. A few were in the midst of coming out of their shells in slow motion, and it looked obscene, like you were seeing them doing something private.
"It's a K-2 sky," I said.
"What's that mean?"
"You use a K-2 yellow filter on your camera to darken the sky and bring out the clouds," I said. "Makes a better photograph. That's what my mom's friend Perry says."
Ears just nodded. "It looks cemetery out here to me."
"You mean sad?"
"That's what I said," Ears whispered to me. "Reminds me of something out of the Bible." Ears was a lot like my cousin Tine. He made me miss her.
"Which part?" I asked.
He shrugged. "That part when God gets mad?"
After that weekend the light changed altogether. Shadows crossed everything: the lawns, the houses, and the trees. In the afternoon, as I walked home from school, I marveled at how the sun lit up the tops of trees while all the undergrowth hovered in a green-black range. At home, Willa Mae and I threw open all the windows to let the cool inside.
***
A week after my mother's picture appeared in the paper, a week of eating lunch every day with Ears, a week of me just standing around outside or in the halls, watching everyone else go about their high school business, Mary Alice stood looking in the mirror of the girls' room, fixing her hair. She was putting her long blond hair into ponytails above her ears.
"You know my brother Stone?"
I nodded. I hoped I wasn't turning red.
"He said you were cute." She smiled, picked up her stack of books, propped them on her right hip, waved with two fingers, then twirled around and left, saying, "See you Friday at our house for dinner." Like a ballerina's, her head never moved when she walked. Mary Alice McLemore wasn't always the nicest, but she was the prettiest girl in both the ninth and tenth grade classes, and she was Stone's sister, almost entirely diminishing my competition. And he said I was cute! My luck had suddenly turned.
***
For the McLemores' I wore one of Tine's old red dresses. My mother wore a drippy black skirt with a knit black top. Together she hoped they looked like a black cocktail dress. She wore a string of pearls her mother had given her, and she clipped two sparkly earrings on the front of her top for decoration. To me, they looked like two earrings trying to look like something they weren't.
"That's the biggest flagpole I've ever seen," my mother said as we walked up to the McLemores' front door.
"That old thing?" Mrs. McLemore said, standing at the entrance. "Well, we're very patriotic when it comes to this state."
"Don't let her scar
e you away," Mr. McLemore joked. "Call me Jack." His face was red, and already he had a drink for my mother as we walked into their home. She laughed and accepted it, the ice clinking in the wet glass. "You fly yours?"
"I'm afraid not," my mother said. "Not since my husband died. Besides, we don't have a flagpole."
"I understand he died a war hero," Mr. McLemore said, quietly, in a way I appreciated.
My mother nodded.
I wanted to say something more about my dad, other than that he was dead.
"He was in charge of his own platoon," I said. "They were bringing in supplies to a village. But before, their helicopter crashed. He stayed with his soldiers until the end."
"He must have been very brave," Mrs. McLemore said. "And you must be so proud that he fought for our country."
My mother just stared off at some point beyond Mrs. McLemore.
***
Stone was there and so was Mary Alice. They were setting the table and pouring iced tea. They looked like they were in a television commercial. They introduced my mother to little Jeffy.
"Jeff Davies," he said. He wore plastic Slinky glasses with eyes that popped out.
"For Jefferson Davis? You're kidding, right?" my mother said, laughing. I looked at her and I tried to make my eyes say, Can't you just pretend to be like other people? Just this once? For me? I knew my mother was tired from her day of teaching, and already the two sips of her drink had gone to her head. Mrs. McLemore excused Jeffy so that he could go watch The Jetsons on TV.
"What a lovely shade," my mother said, walking into their living room.
The room had what Mrs. McLemore called lavender-colored walls, which I hoped my mother wouldn't comment on. My mother hated what people called the color lavender because she said it never looked like the real lavender. She felt the same about lilac. I thought the room was nothing but beautiful.
Mrs. McLemore said she saw the color in Natchez. She talked about Natchez—the silt, the rich alluvial soil of the delta and how it had once been the floor of the sea itself. She made me want to go there. She told my mother about their new living room ceiling covered with Armstrong Cushion to cover the cracks and stains, not knowing that my mother didn't give a hoot about such things. But I did. I wanted a house like the McLemores'.
Over their fireplace, leaning on the mantel were wooden plaques that read FAITH, HOPE, and LOVE.
Mrs. McLemore could keep a conversation going. She said that she used to love that Loretta Young. Every Sunday night she had looked forward to The Loretta Young Show on TV, just to watch Loretta float down that open staircase wearing a floor-length strapless gown with a full diaphanous skirt. Every Sunday night. Mrs. McLemore's pearls settled into the hollows of her collarbone while she sat for a minute, thinking about Loretta Young.
Magazines called America and Commonwealth were fanned out on the coffee table.
We all at once began to talk about how TV shows ended, how Dinah Shore blew kisses and said, "See the USA in your Chevrolet," and how Red Buttons used to soft-shoe it off the stage to his "Ho-Ho Song."
"You know what I miss?" my mother said. "I miss that Jimmy Durante show—when he ended with 'Good night, Mrs. Calabash.'"
"Isn't that Jewish?" Mrs. McLemore said.
"I hear you teach art up at the college," Stone said. Everyone went quiet. I had never before seen or heard anyone approximately my age change the subject as he had.
"Art history," my mother said.
"I don't know about all this modern art," Mrs. McLemore said. "I just know I like what I like."
"That's right, honey." Mr. McLemore poured everyone more drinks.
"Mom's hoping to take me to Europe soon," I said, trying to follow Stone's lead.
"Greece, actually," my mother said. "I used to love to travel. Anywhere. I miss it."
Mary Alice's mother said she didn't like Europe at all because she said it was too hilly. She shook her head and said it was a wonder how little old her got to travel as much as she did, but she said her husband did enough travel for the both of them. He often went on business trips to the coast and had even heard Patti Page and Peggy Lee sing.
"We saw your picture in the paper," Mary Alice said, smiling.
Mary Alice's mother shot her a look. "Don't be rude."
I loved Mrs. McLemore more than ever right then.
"What do you want to do when you get out of school, Mary Alice?" my mother asked. She always asked this of her students.
Mary Alice said she wanted to be a Delta Airlines stewardess and then a homemaker.
My mother nodded. Somehow, I knew what she was thinking. She hated them all and she thought she was better.
No one even bothered asking me what I wanted to be when I grew up. It didn't matter anyway. Wasn't I going to Randolph-Macon Women's College as my aunt had or Ole Miss as my father had and as all my cousins were surely to go? I didn't know what I wanted to be anyway. I just knew what I didn't want to be: a teacher like my mom. I didn't want to be anything like my mom. I wanted to be more like Mrs. McLemore.
"I know you think you were doing some kind of good out there at Tougaloo," Mrs. McLemore said in a newly serious way. "But you're just wasting your time."
"I just don't understand why they have to get all riled up," Mr. McLemore said. "They don't have such bad lives. Our Mattie's happy. Go and ask her yourself."
Mattie was their maid. Mary Alice said Mattie did everything—cooked, cleaned, and even made out the grocery lists. "If she had front teeth, she'd be real pretty," Mary Alice said. Mary Alice wore a charm bracelet that jingled each time she passed around the deviled ham and cheese on crackers.
"Oh, don't get me wrong," Mrs. McLemore went on, looking into her glass. "The coloreds serve a purpose here. Unlike the Chinese." She put one manicured fingernail in the drink and came out with a gnat, and then rolled it between her fingers.
"And now they want to integrate into our schools," Mr. McLemore said. "They're just going to ruin things for our children."
"I don't see how that can ruin things," my mother started.
"The quality of our schools will plummet if we agree to integration. Don't you want your daughter to have all the advantages that you didn't?" Mrs. McLemore asked my mother.
My mother smiled. I braced myself and only wished Mrs. McLemore knew to do the same. "What makes you think I didn't have all the advantages?" My mother paused to breathe and look steadily into Mrs. McLemore's eyes the way she did sometimes with me to make me listen. "And why would you think that having advantages makes a bit of difference in the formation of a human being?"
Mrs. McLemore looked up and down and all around my mother. Her eyes couldn't settle down.
"Did we mention we knew your husband's people, the Russells?" Mr. McLemore said, patting his wife's knee. He talked about my great-grandfather Frank Russell, who had once been a schoolteacher. Frank Russell and his father had helped settle parts of Smith County, and he sold goods he brought up from New Orleans in his wagon. I was surprised Mr. McLemore knew so much about my father's relatives.
"The Russells are all buried in a pretty little cemetery on the property where my husband grew up," my mother said. "Sam has spent a lot of time out there with her grandparents."
Mrs. McLemore smiled. "It's important to know your family tree."
"She's a regular little Mississippi girl," Mr. McLemore said, squeezing my shoulder. I don't know why, but I breathed a sigh of relief, as though I'd passed some test. I didn't think my mother had, though.
I watched Stone watching my mother, who smiled and said nothing more. Stone had Elvis lips, but his eyes weren't so boyish or sad.
***
At the dinner table I sat next to Stone and I tried to keep breathing to steady my heart. We all held hands to say grace. His palms were hard and cool. His big hands with long, slender fingers were just turning into man hands. I had never held a boy's hand in any religious or romantic way before. My knee brushed against his.
Mr. Mc
Lemore poured my mother another drink. We ate roast with pearl onions, scalloped potatoes, and tomato aspic with olives and celery. My mother and I never ate like this on a weeknight, and I had never seen anyone cut his meat the way Mr. McLemore did, holding his fork like a dagger and then sawing away with his knife. Stone did the same. I thought of how my father had cut his meat, all the power coming from the tips of his fingers.
We used colored paper napkins too. At home my mother and I each had our own cloth napkin that we only washed once a week. I thought now how disgusting that might be to some.
No one spoke while we ate. My mother insisted on conversations at the table. She asked the McLemores what they had done that summer. I tried not to notice my mother watching Stone waving his fork as he spoke. I just listened. He had been to the bridge over the East Pascagoula, even fished in the same spot where those two shipyard workers said space aliens abducted them. He told us about the Mississippi Gulf Coast, where they went for family vacations, the alligator and turtle races in Long Beach, the Deer Ranch, and his favorite, Beauvoir, Jefferson Davis's house in Biloxi.
If my dad were alive, I would tell him about Stone. In my mind, we all would have gotten along.
Stone and his father said something to each other that sounded like gibberish but was really just man talk, separating themselves for a moment from the rest of us.
I was glad not to be a boy in Mississippi. Boys couldn't just be smart. They had to be smart in school, then pretend to be hunters and farmers even if they weren't. They had to say "ain't" and use the wrong verbs every now and then, just to show others they hadn't gotten beyond their raising. If boys were smart they had to be two people all the time.
"What, are you two in a klavern or something?" my mother said. She sounded drunk and she kept smiling, giggling even. When they were together, my mother and Perry often made fun of the KKK and all that was happening. They said laughing about it helped them get through a day of listening to crazy people. "You aren't Kluckers, are you?"
Sources of Light Page 5