Sources of Light

by Margaret McMullan

  Mr. McLemore cleared his throat. Mrs. McLemore disappeared into the kitchen to get something.

  "Ma'am?" Stone asked, filling my mother's water glass.

  My mother and Perry had gotten too used to mocking anything having to do with the Ku Klux Klan, it had become habit. Once she'd told me, "The whole thing is so barbaric and so absurd."

  "Mom?"

  "I'm fine," she whispered, then quietly hiccupped. "I'll behave. I promise." She began drinking water.

  I excused myself, thinking I was going to be sick. I couldn't watch Stone or Mary Alice watching my mother and me as if we were some free freak show at their dinner table. And I didn't want to stick around to see what wrong thing my mother would do or say next. Luckily, I knew where to find the air-raid shelter bathroom, so I knew where to hide in order to collect and prepare myself for the worst, which was my mother after three drinks. This was so much worse than a nuclear bomb explosion.

  In the downstairs powder room, I splashed cold water on my face. I took three deep breaths. When I opened the door, Stone was there.

  "There you are," he said. "I've been looking for you."

  "You have?"

  He smiled. "Sure I have." He stepped closer, closer than any boy had ever stepped. "Hey."

  "Hey," I said, swallowing.

  "Samantha." He called me by my full name like that and then stepped even closer. "I was wondering. Will you come to the dance with me?"

  This moment felt so new, I wished it would slow down. I wished I had time to step back and look at it from a distance, with a long, wide-angle lens. This handsome boy I admired and liked to look at appeared before me just like that, as though he had dropped down from outer space, and there we were, face-to-face in his air raid shelter, safe from the Russians and all the other grownups. He had asked me and I would say yes and we would be going to the dance. Me. Samantha Thomas would be going to a high school dance with Stone McLemore.

  "Sure," I said, trying to sound as casual as you please. But it came out sounding like a cough.

  He lifted my chin the way handsome men did to pretty women in the movies. He closed his eyes. I had never before seen a boy up close with his eyes closed. It felt private and personal, and I held my breath so I wouldn't mess up this perfect moment. We kissed, and I hoped I wouldn't burp up the onions from dinner. When I opened my eyes, he saw and stopped.

  "You're supposed to keep your eyes shut," he whispered.

  "I didn't know."

  He smiled. "You're like some kind of purebred. My dad's told me all about your family. I think my kin might even have known your kin way back."

  For some reason I remembered just then that I was wearing Tine's old red dress. Tine drooled when she was nervous. I hoped I wasn't drooling all over myself.

  I could hear Mrs. McLemore in the living room upstairs, saying that we weren't required to obey northern laws.

  When we went back up separately, I couldn't stop smiling. Not even the sound of Mary Alice's charm bracelet tinkling could wipe away my grin.

  My mother was saying that Mississippi had isolated itself from the rest of the nation.

  "It's not a separate nation-state," she said. She was no longer jumbling her words. She had her teacher voice on. I wasn't sure which was worse. "It's not like we're unaccountable to a higher authority. If that's the case, then we're living in a totalitarian state."

  "You sure do have some ideas," Mr. McLemore said, grinning.

  "I didn't understand a word you just said," Mrs. McLemore said, laughing, fanning herself with her napkin. "Mary Alice, clear those dishes, would you, dear? Jeffy, quit running around. You're wearing out my last nerve."

  "Your husband's family, they're fine people, good people, your husband's people." Mr. McLemore's voice went low and soft. "I just know they don't want you agitating and stirring up trouble here where you're trying to start a new life and all."

  My mother and Mr. McLemore stared at each other then and something happened between them. Something understood just between the two of them. My mother nodded. "Thank you for the advice." Then she turned to me. "Sam, we should be going." She wasn't serious rude. Just serious polite.

  As we were leaving, Mr. McLemore took my mother's elbow and drew her close. "Honey, this isn't your fight." He was almost close enough to kiss her. "Let's us leave the serious business of governing to our governor."

  My mother just smiled. "As long as the governor works for us."

  Already little Jeffy had turned on the TV. A previously recorded performance was on The Ed Sullivan Show, and even though the McLemores' TV was the biggest I'd seen, that box didn't seem like it could hold the sounds coming out of Louis Armstrong's trumpet.

  ***

  When we got back home from the McLemores', my mother pulled off her black shirt and skirt. It seemed she couldn't get out of those clothes fast enough. She pulled on one of my dad's old shirts to sleep in, and for a change she climbed into my bed with one of her big art books. She was so caught up in her books—huge picture books of art and art history, books two times the size of her head. She once told me she got hooked on art because every year her mother gave her a big art book for Christmas. My mother loved art and sometimes talked about old paintings like they were old friends. She told me that when she was my age, looking through her art books was an escape, and when she looked hard enough and long enough at the pictures, she was where she wanted to be. Now every night when she climbed into bed, sometimes even when it was still light outside, she'd haul these books in with her, opening them on a pillow so the corners wouldn't jab into her stomach, then with a pencil behind her ear and a notepad nearby, she would read these books, even the captions, and study the pictures until she had them memorized.

  She had seen the Acropolis only in pictures. She was reading about Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli. She had just finished rereading Euripides. She wanted to do a study on all the different versions of Aphrodite and what every culture from different times saw as beauty.

  When I climbed in beside her, she turned off the light. I couldn't stop thinking of Stone. He had kissed me. My first kiss and it was from Stone McLemore. Lying there next to my mother's warm, soft body made me feel weird.

  "Kitty-cat," she said, tracing the outline of my ear. She sounded a little drunk.

  "Quit it."

  "Pookie-poo." I could smell the wine on her breath and the Pond's cold cream on her face.

  "Why do you have to be so strange, Mom?"

  She was laughing and I was not.

  "Because that's the way God made me." She was making a joke, imitating someone now, but I didn't know whom. A McLemore?

  "Are you making fun of them?"

  "I wouldn't be at all surprised if each of them had white sheets and hoods in their closets. They are as bad as the people who painted our front door." She picked up some of my hair and twirled it around. I batted away her hand.

  "Stone is not a member of the KKK, Mom."

  "Honey," she sighed. "Don't go falling for a boy like Stone. He's not our kind."

  "Leave me alone, Mom." Our kind? What was that supposed to mean? I didn't care if Mary Alice or Stone was our kind, but I sure knew I wanted to be Stone's kind. I thought of the whole McLemore world that had just opened up to me. It was a family world where they took vacations together, ate casseroles, held hands and said grace. I had never been skiing, but for some reason the McLemores looked like people who skied or who would eventually ski.

  "You don't need their acceptance," my mother said.

  I thought about that. "Yes, I do." I said it the way women say it at their weddings. "I do."

  "You really don't, sweetie. You shouldn't."

  I looked at her. I hadn't even told my mother about Stone's kissing me or asking me to the dance. This was my first secret from her, and it didn't feel right.

  "When did you know?" I said. "About Dad. When did you know he was 'the one'?"

  "I had no idea I would marry your father," she said. "But there was no
way I could live without him." She stopped, thinking about what she had said. "Now I suppose we both have to, huh?" There was a pause. "When you were a baby, I'd pick you up and you'd put your hand inside my hair and you'd keep it there."

  "Mom," I said. "I just want to sleep."

  She took out her hearing aid. She unhooked the string of pearls around her neck. I used to like playing with this necklace and would until she made me stop. She picked up the framed picture of my father from my nightstand and stared at it.

  Mary Alice told us girls at school that sometimes her mother declared a "pajama day" and they both stayed in their pajamas all day and watched TV and played board games and anything else you could do in bed. They ate meals on trays and had lots of girl talk. Oh, how we all envied Mary Alice.

  After my mother finally left my room, I listened to her mumbling to herself in her bedroom. I knew she was talking to my dad. For my mother, my dad was always there with us. For me he was gone most of the time, except when I chose to think of him. I wondered, had she married him just to leave home? And now was she looking to leave again, this time with Perry? I rolled over and faced the wall, half wishing she'd come back.

  CHAPTER 5

  IN THE FOLLOWING WEEKS my mother kept getting anonymous letters in the mail, and she wouldn't let me read them. Then, after she listened to one nasty phone call, she told Willa Mae I was no longer allowed to answer the phone. One morning, when I came back from my daily picture-taking walk, I found a black cat lying dead on top of our newspaper outside our front door. My mother put a stop to my early-morning photo sessions, so I started taking pictures after school.

  If this part of my life had been a short-answer test like the ones we took at school, some of the questions would have been these: What would my dad say to all this? What was the right thing to do and when would I know it? Would he want us to stay here in his home state, or go, just go? Would leaving mean running away? Or, would he want us to stay here, close to his family?

  Perry came and put new bolt locks on our doors. At night, he came by to check on us. He looked tired and sweaty, his shirttails hanging out, but he always smiled and made my mother laugh. He brought photography books for me to look through too, pointing out pictures taken by "famous" people I'd never heard of: Alfred Eisenstaedt, Ansel Adams, Margaret Bourke-White, Robert Capa, Walker Evans, and Dorothea Lange.

  Perry was the only white person I knew who lived in an all-black neighborhood. Every day after he finished teaching, he taught kids in his neighborhood about photography. He was helping their parents register to vote too.

  Every few days I gave my film to Perry and we stood side by side in his darkroom, developing pictures. Sometimes he talked while he worked, telling me how important it was to stay alert for good photographs, how to really look and see, or how he thought these difficult times in Mississippi were probably his most productive period. Once he got all worked up, saying that being here was better than the riots he'd photographed. No way was he budging. No way was he leaving.

  "I'm finally part of a place," he said that afternoon. "I'm not just taking pictures." I couldn't help but think how I didn't feel quite the same way yet about living in Jackson.

  This was in the fall of 1962, when winter was coming up on all of us. Weeks went by and then the leaves on the trees and the leaves on the ground were all washed in gold and burgundy and that's all you saw. Then finally people seemed to forget about my mother guest lecturing at Tougaloo, because there was other news.

  A black twenty-nine-year-old air force veteran named James Meredith had enrolled at the University of Mississippi, or "Ole Miss," in Oxford as a transfer student, and at the end of September, on a beautiful warm Sunday night, in front of a building called the Lyceum, middle-aged men who didn't want Meredith attending an all-white university egged on students to attack the National Guards President Kennedy had sent down. There they all were at our state's institution for higher learning, running around in tear gas smoke, billy-clubbing one another before their first day of classes. My mother and I watched it all on TV and we both knew that this marked the beginning or end of something, though we weren't sure of what.

  In a televised address to the state of Mississippi, President Kennedy said to us, "If this country should ever reach the point where any man or any group of men, by force or threat of force, could long defy the commands of our court and Constitution, then no law would stand free from doubt, no judge would be sure of his right, and no citizen would be safe from his neighbor."

  Governor Ross Barnett addressed the state too, saying, "We must either submit to the unlawful dictates of the federal government or stand up like men and tell them 'NEVER!'"

  It took three or four U.S. marshals just to get James Meredith to his first class the following day, a class that happened to be Colonial American History.

  None of the business with James Meredith especially interested other kids at my school because it was all happening up in Oxford, which might as well have been Mars—plus all the girls in my class were now wearing bras, all, that is, except me. Mary Alice had started something and every girl at Jackson High School wanted to be like Mary Alice McLemore.

  Even though she had already agreed to get me one, my mother said she could not understand what my rush was. Besides, she said, she was teaching all day every day that week, and she had a "slew" of faculty meetings every afternoon and she couldn't get home until after the stores all closed. So she asked Willa Mae to please walk me into town and take me to get fitted.

  ***

  Willa Mae knew where to go, but I didn't. I had never been downtown with Willa Mae before. At home Willa Mae was the boss of me. At home she didn't have to call me Miss Samantha either. She drank iced tea or water not from a mayonnaise jar like other maids but from one of our own drinking glasses, and she shared our bathroom.

  Downtown was different. Because she was black, Willa Mae wasn't allowed to go into the white stores without me. Because she was black, she couldn't try on hats or use the restrooms. Because she was black, she couldn't say Yeah or Yes, Bob. She had to say Yes, ma'am or Yes, sir, or Yes, Mr. Smith. Because she was black, she might have to step off the sidewalk to make way for a white person and use separate waiting areas and drinking fountains marked COLORED.

  These were the rules. Right or wrong, this was just the way things were. Even though I had been taught that everybody was a human being and that everybody had the same rights because we lived in America and equality was what America was all about, I still had to follow rules.

  Already I was in the habit of taking Perry's Pentax with me most everywhere I went. It was fast becoming my camera. I had adjusted the strap and it fit around me just so. I took pictures of all the stores that sold candy, talcum powder, Moon Pies, and bubblegum. Then finally, we got to the window with the mannequins wearing girdles.

  Willa Mae came into the store with me and sat in a chair beside the door, waiting, as a big-bosomed saleswoman helped me find the right size and fit.

  First I tried on a white bra over my shirt. The saleswoman frowned and said that it would be impossible to judge the fit that way. Willa Mae sucked her tooth and said something like, "If there's nothing to judge, you can't judge."

  The saleswoman looked at Willa Mae, smiled, then led me into the changing room, insisting on staying as I took off my shirt. She said so much depended on how I put a bra on.

  She said you were certainly not supposed to snap it on, then twist it around and pull it up the way I saw my mother do every single day. The saleswoman showed me how you were supposed to bend and carefully put yourself into the thing, assuming you had something to put in.

  I did what she told me to do and when I stood up straight, she said, "See?" The fit was no different and it was still uncomfortable, but I kept it on anyway, and I paid her the money. I had to have a bra. I just had to.

  It was hot. And Willa Mae and I still had the walk back home.

  "Come on," I said. Wearing the bra made my back feel
straighter, and I held my head higher. "I still have enough money to get us some sodas. The drugstore is just up the street."

  I liked going into the drugstore, where the bottles and boxes stood in neat rows, organized by varying heights, the prices clearly marked so you wouldn't even have to touch a thing, just look.

  When we got inside and at the counter, I turned to Willa Mae. "What would you like?"

  "A Mr. Coca-Cola, please," she said to me. Willa Mae didn't even feel she could say, A Coca-Cola, please. She thought she had to put a Mr. or a Mrs. in front of everything. That wasn't like her at all. It was like she was acting while we were downtown, and she knew I knew.

  "Please what?" the woman behind the counter said.

  "We'll have two Coca-Colas, please," I said.

  "Please what?" The woman behind the counter wasn't looking at me. She was looking at Willa Mae.

  Willa Mae stared at her shoes.

  "I'm talking to you, girl."

  It occurred to me only then that this woman wanted Willa Mae to call me Miss. She wanted Willa Mae to redo her sentence. She wanted Willa Mae to say, A Mr. Coca-Cola, please, Miss Samantha. If Willa Mae were to do that right then, well, that would have been impossible, not for her maybe, but for me. In our house, Willa Mae was boss. Here in town, it was hard enough to pretend otherwise, but to go that far, to have Willa Mae say to me, please, Miss Samantha, we both would have bust a gut laughing.

  I looked at the woman behind the counter. I had on my new bra and it felt to me like a bulletproof vest pinching me to do something. "Of all the people in here, I'm the girl, and I asked for two Coca-Colas. Please."

  The woman stared at me for a beat, then got two bottles out of the cooler. She opened them on the counter, all the while keeping an eye on Willa Mae, who never looked up. I got two straws.

  "She needs to take hers outside," the woman said. For a brief instant, I saw Willa Mae glance up at her. It was an expression I recognized.

  Once not long before, when we first moved into town, Willa Mae and I were walking back from the park when we stopped at a gas station at the corner for water. There was a drinking fountain there that was part of the soda machine. There were no signs, but it was understood, white people drank from the fountain, and because there was only the one water fountain, black people had to get a used soda bottle from the empties stacked there, fill the bottle with water, then drink from the used bottle. But after I drank from the fountain, Willa Mae drank right after me, just as I had done. We weren't thinking.