Sources of Light

by Margaret McMullan

  "Seems like nothing's getting safer or better," I said. "Seems like everything's getting worse."

  "Maybe that's what's gotta happen," Willa Mae said. She picked up her pocketbook and opened the car door. "Maybe everything's gotta break loose and fall apart before we can put it back together again right."

  I stared down at the magazine in my lap. On the cover was a pretty porch with gingham-covered cushions. Everything about the picture said to me, Here is a good place and a good life. But that's not what I saw outside our car window. That's not what I saw Willa Mae walking toward.

  ***

  Perry was having a tough time selling his photographs. He said editors were no longer interested in the "race problem," which was too "local" and "minor." The crisis in Cuba had taken over most of the front-page news. With more time and fewer deadlines, Perry relaxed. He came over at least once a week now for dinner, as if he was my mother's new best friend, and he took us out for long car drives. Every now and then we would stop at a lake, or a church, or an old sharecropper's house and Perry and I would get out of the car and spend time taking pictures. During those drives, from the back seat I watched my mother slide over up front to ride closer to Perry. I quit feeling queasy seeing them close together during these drives. I took snapshots—close-ups of Perry's arm around my mother's back, the locks on the car doors, and incidental tears in the vinyl seats.

  ***

  I was still young enough to want to dress up for Halloween but old enough not to talk about it. I was supposed to be too old for that sort of thing. So that year, on that Halloween, I just answered the door, and under the yellow porch light I gave out our usual handfuls of candy corn.

  Right after a clutch of witches and one wolf left, their parents waving from the sidewalk, I shut the door and then heard a car screech. Doors opened and slammed shut. Something exploded. I looked outside. Our mailbox was on fire. My mother called the police, but by the time they got there, we had put the fire out. The police told my mother it was just another Halloween trick, nothing they could do.

  When the police left, someone threw a rock through our front window. We taped the gaping hole with cardboard from an old cut-up box, and this time we didn't even bother calling the police. Instead, I asked my mother to call Perry Walker. "Tell him to come over."

  "I'm on my way," he said.

  My mother and I both felt safer when Perry came over.

  ***

  In state history Miss Jenkins told us that before the war, Mississippi was the fifth richest state in the Union and the only reason "we" didn't have Memphis was because the original surveyors were drunk. She quoted one line a Mississippi writer named William Faulkner wrote, that Mississippi began in the lobby of a Memphis, Tennessee, hotel called the Peabody and ran south all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.

  "Mississippi really starts in Memphis," she said. "Everybody knows that." She paused then and looked at us all for a long, hard moment. "Southerners built America. Southerners are true patriots. Race mixers want to destroy the South and America."

  At lunch Ears had two baloney sandwiches, each made with lots of yellow mustard, one of which he gave to me, and I just about died and went to heaven. We ate my peanut butter sandwich as a dessert while we continued reading out loud from a Captain Fantastic comic. Ears was fast becoming a better reader.

  ***

  My mother signed up to chaperone our fall dance, and when she told Perry, he asked if he could attend as her date so that he could take pictures. Perry was at our house having dinner again. He fixed our window. I knew that he came over so often because he felt responsible for our safety. Maybe my mother knew that too. Maybe she liked finally having a guardian, someone looking after us. We were sort of like a family.

  That night my mother laughed. "So we won't really be together together. You'll be the official photographer."

  He smiled. "Right."

  "We'll even go in separate cars. I'll take Sam."

  "No!"

  They both looked at me.

  "I've got a ride. Stone's coming to pick me up. He just got his driver's permit."

  "Whoa," Perry said, smiling. "A date date."

  My mother stopped smiling. "You could have asked me."

  "Stone," Perry said. "That's really his name?"

  "Please, Mom?"

  "You'll be chaperoning," Perry said to my mother. "And I'll be taking pictures. We'll both be watching." Perry was taking my side, but I was on to him. I knew he just wanted to win me over for my mother. Still, I was willing to accept his defense.

  My mother sighed. "He can pick you up, but I'll take you home. You're only fourteen, Sam. That's the best I can do." She had on her I'm warning you eyes. Perry winked at me.

  "Mom, doesn't it hurt your face when you do that?" I said, making her laugh finally. Secretly I was thrilled, because I was actually going to the dance with Stone McLemore.

  ***

  My mother wore her dumb black capri pants with loafers and a striped shirt while all the other mothers wore dresses cinched at the waist with belts to show off their figures. I wore a green skirt, and I parted my hair down the middle the way I'd seen Mary Alice do.

  When he came to the door, the sound of my name in his voice took my breath away and made my legs shaky. I hated myself for feeling this way because it was so predictable and "girly." But still, I knew then what that expression "weak in the knees" meant. That was exactly how I felt. He was so handsome, I almost couldn't look at him face-to-face when he came over and pinned a flower to my sweater. Right then, right there, I knew this would be the most wonderful night of my life thus far.

  I was grateful my mother didn't make a big deal out of questioning him or telling him what to do. We introduced him to Perry. They shook hands. We all left the house at the same time.

  As Stone drove the three blocks to our school, I sat there in his car and admired the modern sweep of his dashboard.

  "So tell me more about this Perry Walker," he said.

  "I still can't figure out why you were there at the lunch counter downtown, making fun of that girl," I said. "How could you do that?"

  "I wasn't making fun. I never said anything. I just watched. I didn't hurt anybody," he said. "I just happened to be there."

  "So, you just stood there and watched?"

  "That's what you were doing too."

  We both went quiet. I hadn't thought of that.

  "You're making too big a deal out of this, Samantha," he said. "Tonight's supposed to be fun, remember?"

  "You're not one of them, are you? You're not like a member of the Klan or something, right?"

  He sighed and shook his head.

  "But why were you there?"

  "It's against the law in Mississippi for blacks and whites to eat at the same counter—you know that," he said. "They broke the law, Samantha."

  "Then maybe the law is wrong. Maybe that's what should be broken."

  "How can you say that? If the law is wrong, then my parents are wrong and our teachers are wrong. How can you even say that?"

  Then he pulled over by the side of the road. My heart was beating fast. "Look, Samantha." He wasn't angry. He spoke calmly, even softly then. "I'm just trying to figure all this out, just like everybody else, okay? You know what my mom's like. And my dad. You've met them. I have to live with them." I nodded. I could understand that. Stone was older than I was, but he was still only sixteen. We both of us sighed then. I didn't want to argue and I didn't think Stone did either. It was strange to want to be with someone you didn't agree with.

  ***

  Our school was lit up, and inside, the decorations committee had strung balloons and streamers from the gym ceiling and through the basketball hoops. Stone and I watched other people dance until we agreed we were thirsty and went for the punch bowl.

  Soon enough some new song came on, and then there they were, Perry and my mother dancing in the middle of the gymnasium floor, with everyone making a circle around them, watching them, and
all I could think was This is no good at all.

  Stone and I stood in front of the punch table until he excused himself to talk with a group of his friends. I worried that I bored him. It seemed like Stone was someone who always needed people around him, orbiting him, his satellites other boys, mostly. I supposed I was mostly a loner, standing there like Pluto, sipping cherry-flavored punch. I looked for Ears but didn't see him.

  Then I heard: "How come you don't dance like your mom?"

  I heard: "Your mom is like a teenager. You're nothing like your mom."

  I heard: "Is your mom a beatnik? My mom says she dresses like one."

  I even overheard our principal, Mr. Calhoun, tell Miss Jenkins that my mother looked like a young Lesley Caron, the way she looked in that movie Daddy Long Legs.

  When was this going to get fun? When was this going to become my night and not my mother's?

  I sat down in a chair. When Elvis came on, my feet started tapping and I didn't think the chair would hold me, but that passed and another song started. I was beginning to think Stone had ditched me.

  Patti Page was singing "Tennessee Waltz" when I finally heard Stone call my name, not my mother's.

  I had never danced with a boy. I wondered if my face looked funny this way, looking up, and if my hair spread out over my shoulders the way it was supposed to. I wanted Stone to look the other way for a minute so I could reorganize myself.

  He put one hand around my waist and he took my other hand and held it up steady in the air, and then we began to move. We didn't step on each other once. My chin just about reached his shoulder so that I could glance around to see if anyone saw us. But I didn't even care who saw, or what they were saying about my mother or Perry anymore. I was dancing and I was dancing with Stone McLemore. Even his ears were clean and fine-looking, and every now and then my lips brushed against his left lobe.

  Was this love? Was this what my mother felt when she'd first danced with my dad?

  Stone's shoulders felt man-like, and I wondered when that happened, when a boy's shoulders became man shoulders. Maybe when they began to read the paper in the morning and watched the TV news, maybe that's when shoulders changed. In movies I had seen girls talking while they danced, so I thought I should too. I told Stone what I'd heard my mother and Perry discussing. I told him about spies and stuff I didn't know anything about going on in Leningrad and Moscow. I thought what I said sounded secretive and romantic, especially whispered.

  "You sure know a lot about Commies," he said, smiling, pulling me toward him. "Where'd you find all this out?"

  "I watch. I listen," I said, looking into his eyes, then looking away, feeling like a spy. I couldn't hold my gaze for long because I thought my knees would give out. "Just like you do."

  "Yeah, but who are you listening to?"

  I nodded toward my mother dancing with Perry.

  He pulled me closer.

  Just then, it really did feel as though my whole body was made for him to hold.

  My mother and Perry danced to "Fever" until someone turned it off because the lyrics and the way Peggy Lee said them were supposedly improper, which was good, because now maybe my mother and Perry would quit dancing.

  We had all agreed to leave from the school. Stone offered Perry a ride back home, and we all laughed or tried to laugh at the strange arrangement. I was to leave with my mother even though Stone offered again to drive me home.

  "That was the agreement, remember?" she said in the parking lot. "Sam, I'll be over here by the car."

  Stone faced me and put both his hands on my shoulders. "I had a great time, Samantha."

  "Me too," I said.

  We started to lean in to kiss.

  "Sam!" my mother called.

  ***

  My mother and I drove back home in her old beige VW Bug, our faces filling with light from time to time as a car passed from the opposite direction. My mother's car was littered with lecture notes, books, empty coffee cups, and stray pencils and pens, and it still smelled of the suntan lotion I spilled on the floor last summer.

  "I haven't danced since, well, since your father was alive," she said.

  "He's not your boyfriend," I said. "Perry can't be your boyfriend."

  I waited, but she didn't say anything. And that's when I knew. He was her boyfriend, and I wanted to throw up.

  She turned on the car radio. She liked the new song playing, and she turned it up. "Louie Louie," she sang. "Aww. We gotta go now."

  We heard the sirens first. Then came the flashing lights.

  "Stay calm," my mother said, looking in the rearview mirror, slowing down, and then pulling over to the side of the road. "I'll handle this." She turned off the radio. My mother hadn't done anything wrong driving that I could tell. She was a good driver. My grandmother was the bad driver in the family, but she never got stopped because everybody in the state seemed to know her.

  "Evening, miss," the officer said. "You know how fast you were going?"

  "I'm not sure."

  "You were going forty in a fifty-mile-an-hour zone. You were going under the speed limit, which is just as serious as going over."

  My mother and I looked at each other.

  "I'm so sorry," my mother said. Her voice sounded shaky. Just that week we had heard that two black men had been arrested for no cause, then taken to the basement of the police station and beaten.

  "We've just come from my daughter's high school dance."

  The officer shined his flashlight in my face, then he moved the light all over us.

  "You look like a nice lady," he said then to my mother. "How come you're wearing those clothes?"

  I think we thought he was kidding. The question startled us so that we both said "Ha" without knowing or thinking about what we had just done. And it was the worst possible thing we could have done. We laughed. And then we laughed not once, but twice.

  We both realized exactly what we had done when we saw the policeman's face. My mother gripped the steering wheel and froze. He reached in and took her car keys, then opened the door and took her by the arm. I held on to her other arm. We were both pulling, while she had hold of the steering wheel.

  "Miss. You're under arrest."

  "For what?"

  "Tell your girl to let go."

  "Let go, Sam," she said. "I'm all right. We're all right. This is a nice police officer. He's a gentleman. He's not here to do us harm." She was saying these things to convince herself or the policeman, not me. I saw that her hands were shaking.

  "Mom?"

  Already he had taken her out of the car. He was handcuffing my mother, while she leaned against the car.

  "What about my daughter?"

  He looked in, and it was like he was just remembering me again. He sighed. We waited. I thought I heard the sound of a few cicadas hanging on to summer, humming. My ears were full up with humming and ringing, leftover noise from the dance. I wasn't sure if I was still breathing.

  Then, just as quickly as he had cuffed her, the officer uncuffed my mother.

  "Consider this a warning," he said.

  ***

  We drove home in silence. Even though the night air was warm, we couldn't stop shaking.

  "Mom," I said after a while. "Aren't you going to report this?"

  "Report it? Report it to whom? The police?"

  That night the house seemed suddenly too big. It had too many windows and dark corners. My mother turned on every light, then turned them all off again. She locked and bolted all the doors and we sat together on the sofa, watching, waiting—for what, we weren't sure. Then, when we grew sleepy, I didn't hesitate to climb into her big bed and she didn't stop me.

  CHAPTER 7

  STONE CALLED ME THE NEXT MORNING. He said he was sorry our big evening had been cut short and he had wanted so badly to drive me home. We both knew what that meant. It meant we could have kissed again. He was wondering if my mother would allow him to take me out that night to look at the stars. I wasn't used to tal
king with a boy on the phone. I thought of Stone standing in the McLemore kitchen, or sitting in his room. The McLemores even had phones that didn't have a dial, but buttons with numbers you pushed. I put down the receiver and ran to my mother's room to ask.

  She hesitated, but after I begged and begged, my mother said that I could go out with Stone, only for a little while. She had lectures to go over and papers to grade. She sat at her desk with open books all around her and a blank sheet of paper already in the typewriter, daring her. She was behind with everything and I could tell she just wanted me to leave her alone.

  ***

  We went through some nearby woods, then hiked up to the top of an old Indian mound that had escaped being subdivided. There was a full moon and the sky was clear and bright. The night was still, and the stars were all over the place. Stone brought a telescope and we took turns looking through it.

  He knew so much. He told me that Ptolemy of Alexandria developed the idea of the sun and planets moving around the earth in the second century. He told me someone in the thirteenth century figured out that a tube filled with gunpowder and lit at one end gave a push as the gasses rushed out, and boom, you've got a rocket. Stone knew about guns and bombs and where the Milky Way was. But then we turned our focus on the moon. I felt the way Galileo must have felt looking at the moon for the first time through his telescope, seeing the lunar surface clearly marked by craters. It wasn't perfect. The moon wasn't perfect and there wasn't a man in it, but Stone and I both knew that soon there might be a man on it.

  Stone built a little fire and we roasted marshmallows. He was an Eagle Scout, so he knew about camping, being outside, and the maps of the moon marked with sections of seas called Ocean of Storms, Sea of Clouds, Sea of Serenity, and the Sea of Tranquility, where the first astronauts were headed. The fire illuminated his smile. Goose bumps ran over my scalp. We grew quiet.

  "I'm sorry that your dad died," he said after a while. "My parents can drive me crazy, but. Well. That must be hard for you and your mom."

  "I miss him." I thought about that. "I really do."

  "What was he like?"