Sources of Light

by Margaret McMullan

  "He was handsome and fun. He was always game to do stuff, you know? He liked to read but he wasn't at all like my mom. He was good in science." We smiled at each other then, Stone and I. Maybe because we both realized that when I described my dad, I was also describing Stone.

  We lay down together on top of fallen pine needles, staring at the sky. His jacket smelled of wood smoke. We stared at the moon until a blue ring appeared. "Try this," he said. "Let yourself relax, and focus on the space between the moon and the stars. Don't think about anything. Then let yourself float. If you can, you can ride up there with them."

  We went quiet and we stayed quiet together in a way that felt like we were talking.

  Then after a while, he said, "My dad says they're trying to destroy Christianity and democracy and change what Mississippi's all about."

  "Who's 'they'?" I wished he could just keep talking about the moon.

  "The Kennedys. Outsiders."

  "I don't understand why you'd hate President Kennedy," I said, making my voice go soft. "He's the one who's behind your space age. He's the one getting us to the moon."

  "Someday we'll move on to other planets; the moon is just a training ground." His voice sounded calm now, especially as he began to go on and tell me about the combustion process, fuel functions, oxidizers, compressed gas, and thrust. He rolled over and turned toward me then, holding my face between his hands.

  "I love knowing that I'm keeping you safe, Samantha Thomas." He drew me so close that I could almost taste the sweet marshmallow of his breath. "Don't you like knowing that too?"

  It was such a strange question, I couldn't take it seriously. "Nyet," I said with a put-on Russian accent. He squeezed my jaw with his hand.

  "Sometimes you're too smart for your own good." He brought my mouth up to his and we kissed and kissed, hard until we went gentle.

  I couldn't help but feel like my world was coming out of focus, and it wasn't a bad feeling at all. Everything was moving and changing—the clouds, the moon, the earth, our town, us, me.

  Anything could have happened there in those woods. Anything magical and anything evil too.

  ***

  My mother was on the phone with my grandmother when I got back home that night. Stone was careful not to keep me out late. He said he wanted to earn my mother's respect. When he told me this, I liked him even more.

  My mother held the phone almost at arm's length and I could hear my grandmother's voice.

  "I want you both here right now. I want you out of that town. I want you to sleep here under this roof. You are no longer safe there. You need to be with your own people." My grandmother claimed to know more than most about violence in Mississippi because her mother, father and aunt lived during the Civil War and had told her everything she knew. Even though my great-aunt's name was Little Bit, she was considered a strong woman, one of the toughest ladies, and she lived to be ninety-five years old. My grandmother's name was Thelma Addy. Most people knew her for her bridge playing, her good housekeeping, and her fruit preserves.

  I waited for them to get off the phone. I wanted to tell my mother about Stone. I wanted to ask her questions about these strange new feelings I had.

  My mother bit her lower lip. "I appreciate the offer—really, I do." She was still formal with my dad's mother. "But I'm afraid we can't come for Thanksgiving. I'm giving this party, and I just can't cancel. I'm up for promotion, you know."

  My mother had already invited students and faculty over for Thanksgiving in two days' time—all the people who didn't go home over the short holiday. The left-behinds, that's what Perry called them.

  "Maybe we can come for Sam's birthday," she said. I don't know why she didn't just say Christmas, because I had been cursed with a Christmas birthday.

  Willa Mae stayed with us the day before Thanksgiving and we made a champagne punch and boiled five pounds of Gulf Coast shrimp the following day because my mother hated turkey. All afternoon Perry, Willa Mae, and I used shot glasses to make circles out of slices of expensive Pepperidge Farm bread, the kind we used only for company and never for lunch sandwiches. He talked to me about taking pictures.

  "You can't be afraid of your subject," he said. "You're behind the camera and it's like your shield, your armor. Nothing can hurt you when you've got proof." He picked up one of the little white bread rounds and held it up like a shield. I did the same and we played at jousting.

  We made mounds of bread rounds, and Willa Mae wouldn't let us throw out the crusts. She put them in bags to freeze for the day she would make some of her good bread pudding. Then we spread the bread rounds with butter and carefully laid cucumber slices on top or dabbed them with black and red caviar from a jar.

  After a while Willa Mae and I told the story again about what had happened that day at the drugstore. It made us both shake to talk about it, but we still wanted to tell the story again.

  "And all because they didn't want those students sitting at the lunch counter," I said.

  "Aha!" Perry said. "An agitator in the making!"

  "There are a lot of rules in this world—good ones and not-so-good ones," my mother said. "You still gotta follow them all or work with the system to change them. That's what living in our country is all about."

  I rolled my eyes. "Mom. Sometimes you can sound like such a teacher-mom."

  Willa Mae laughed and shook her head and told me I was walking on thin ice.

  ***

  My mother decided to make the party a celebration of the college's new art acquisition: an all-red canvas painting the school had just purchased from an artist who also blew up balloons and sold them, calling them artworks of his breath.

  My mother didn't like this artist's work, but she said hosting a party would hopefully let her win back points with members of the tenure and promotion committee. She said people were still whispering about her "mistake" at Tougaloo.

  The leaves hadn't all fallen and you still didn't need a coat. Next door our neighbors gathered and took pictures of one another dressed up, because they were celebrating Thanksgiving like every other normal family in Jackson. They stood in their new clothes in front of their house. I wanted to shout out to them to focus, to stand in the light, or not stand out at all because they looked too staged and tense. None of them knew what to do with their hands.

  The students who came from my mother's college looked shaggy. The girls wore short skirts and black stockings or narrow slacks, no lipstick, lots of powder, and heavy eye makeup. Perry told me they were dressing like actresses they'd seen in New Wave films. Perry had his Pentax camera around his neck, focused, he said, from two feet to infinity.

  One boy held his packet of Old Golds while he blew cigarette smoke, talking to a girl he was trying to impress. He was saying, "Need is an autoinduced mechanism implanted by the corporate culture that unfortunately permeates our innermost thoughts." I stepped away from them and laughed when Perry rolled his eyes.

  Our house grew crowded with students and professors all eating and talking at once about "cultural space" and "interiority." Did they make these words up? Cultural space—what was that supposed to mean?

  I heard one student ask one of the professors if he thought white people were better than black people. The professor looked at the student and said, "Son, we stopped talking about that when Darwin settled the matter. We're all people. We're just going to have to live with that."

  Perry had taken out his camera and was snapping pictures of everyone talking.

  "Couldn't you work some magic and make me look prettier?" my mother said. She kept moving her face to the right because she didn't like pictures showing her right side. "Take some pounds off here?" she said, laughing, putting her hands on her hips. "Use a soft-focus filter or something?" She smiled as she said this.

  He told my mother to look out the window and she did, and I could see what he saw. I could see her face lit up. I could see her beauty.

  I was glad then that he didn't say anything dinky like, "Oh
, you are so beautiful, you need no enhancing." He didn't say anything at all. He never took his right eye away from his camera. He kept clicking and clicking, moving around the room. My mother looked so happy.

  Watching Perry work, I saw that he became serious and focused so that the rest of us might as well have all fallen away. He was there, but he was not there. He sweated. He moved differently and as easily as a cat. My mother had told me Perry hated teaching, but that he was among the best.

  "Photography's not art," I heard someone telling Perry. "Art shouldn't have anything to do with mechanical equipment or technology. It should be an artist and a pen, a paintbrush, or some clay."

  "You obviously haven't seen Perry's photographs," my mother said. My mother wore a new sleeveless shift made out of material that said Fragile: Handle with Care all over it. Perry had gotten her this dress from some new shop. On her arm she wore a silver cuff that looked as though it could take bullets. Her black hair was still short, but it looked tangled and somehow undone. She pushed her foot back and forth in her shoe as she stood and talked.

  Everyone was talking at once about art. They used words such as banal, Dadaist aesthetic value, and intrinsic. I watched my mother's face. She pretended to be okay with modern art, but I knew she really loved Rubens and Rembrandt, Renoir and Degas. She loved the landscapes by Poussin, the still lifes of Caravaggio, and all those cloudy paintings by Monet. All she wanted to do was see a van Gogh or any other European painting up close, then go to Thessaly and Greece and see the theaters of Pergamum and of Epidaurus, where, she told me, poppies grew nearby.

  School was different in college. These teachers and students argued. They were still asking questions. They talked about ethics and consequences. They knew details along with facts. They knew about big things like wars but they also knew about little things like how Mussolini's army poured acid on the desert sands when barefooted Ethiopian soldiers chased them down in Abyssinia.

  Later, after all the eating, I found Perry outside, humming some song, swinging on the rope swing the previous owner had left behind hanging from a black walnut tree in our backyard. His cigarette was burned down nearly to his fingertips while he sat there, his camera slung over and around his neck, resting on his back.

  "If you're so good at what you do, why are you here?" I asked.

  "That's some attitude. Good things can come to the most unlikely places, you know. I'm a good guy, Sam." He looked at me. "Seriously." He stomped out his cigarette and looked up at the sky. "Once upon a time I took a picture of a soldier shooting Korean prisoners in the back. Their hands were tied, their legs bound. They'd photographed executions before; usually they were out-of-focus shots because the photographer flinched. This was a good, clear image. My editor at Life took one look at the picture and he said, 'American soldiers don't shoot people in the back.' So that was that."

  "You quit?"

  He shook his head. "I was fired."

  I went quiet. I'd never known anyone who had actually gotten fired. It felt a little like talking to someone who'd been in prison. "My mom could get fired too, you know."

  He nodded. "You know, at Life we used to outline our assignments. I couldn't outline all that's happening here, though. You can't make this up," he said. "Who knows? Maybe this was the way it was supposed to be. Maybe I was meant to come back from the war to take pictures of the one going on down here."

  This time I didn't say, What war? This time I knew what he was talking about.

  "I don't know. There are some things about the South I guess I just don't get," he went on. "A maid gets fifteen cents an hour cooking, laundering, ironing, mopping, sweeping, changing the sheets, and everybody expects her to be grateful."

  I thought about that. I thought about Willa Mae and all the men outside the drugstore, billy-clubbing those women. "I know Willa Mae gets more than fifteen cents an hour."

  Perry smiled. "Come on," he said, getting out of the swing and taking my hand. "We can't change the world tonight. Let's go back inside and tell these pointy-headed intellectuals and pretentious students a thing or two."

  Inside, while I went around with a garbage sack and cleared paper plates, students started to recite their poetry without any complete sentences. One said things like "All that's left is." And "Untranslatable." Another made different vowel sounds, clicking out a tune with his tongue, a kind of song without words, both beautiful and annoying. I didn't want to like it, but I couldn't help but listen.

  Perry was talking to a man in the corner of the room. "We need someone to take pictures," he said to Perry. "If we don't get the pictures, they'll act like it never happened." Perry was nodding, repeating the time and day. "It's the only time they have off to register to vote."

  Perry nodded, and said, "Okay, okay. I'll be there."

  Someone was reciting a poem about tangerines and misery, ending with the line "chew, swallow, made into flesh and the imagination of our lives to come, amen." Everyone clapped. Some snapped their fingers.

  I fell asleep in my mother's room next to the pile of everybody's coats spread out on her bed. I woke up to the sound of Perry's voice, "Why are you here?"

  He wasn't talking to me. He was in the next room somewhere with my mother. All the coats were gone. Everyone had left, so I could hear Perry clearly. He said, "You weren't even born here. Your husband was."

  "This is the closest thing to home and family I have," my mother said.

  "You know, when I came here, I gave this place a few months. One year max," Perry said. "But now? Now is different. I wanna stay and I wanna stay here with you and Sam. This is my place. You're my home."

  "All I'm asking, Perry, is that you not go," my mother said. "Let someone else do it this time. It's getting too dangerous."

  "They're registering to vote, honey. The timing couldn't be better. They need someone with a camera. No one else'll go. If you want, you can go too. You could help register."

  "I can't get involved, you know that. My job's already in jeopardy. I have Samantha to think of."

  I crept up out of the bed and tiptoed to the doorway.

  Perry was leaning in to my mother as he listened to what she said. They talked so close. He only leaned closer, his hands on the table, his leg touching hers.

  "It's so risky," my mother said. "Why are you doing this?"

  "Because I'm a human being. Because we're all human beings."

  My mother closed her eyes and winced. Maybe her hearing aid was ringing and bothering her, but as I watched her turn down the volume, I wanted to tell her right then that she couldn't quiet all those outside voices forever.

  "Come with me," he said. "I'll take care of you and Samantha. I promise." They kissed lightly, both of them leaning in. It was more hug than kiss, more meaning than anything else. My mother smiled when they broke away. This man made her happy. Maybe she was thinking what I was thinking too. Why did the men in our lives head for danger, all for the sake of doing the right thing? They kissed nothing like the way Stone and I kissed, and I wished then more than anything that at some point in my life I would get kissed that way.

  CHAPTER 8

  FOR OUR STATE REPORT, everyone else in my class cut out pictures from magazines and newspapers, neatly marking them This is a picture of... and then saying what it was a picture of. Mary Alice had always received high marks in handwriting, and she signed her name in perfect Palmer script. The words I wrote came out looking spidery.

  Mary Alice hung up maps we recognized from her family's air-raid shelter. She had also dressed up her dolls to look like early settlers. Ken stood inside a hexagonal hatbox decorated to resemble an early log cabin. Two of her Barbies wore big hoop skirts with crinoline to look like southern belles. They lingered together in another hatbox made to look like Tara from Gone With the Wind.

  Mary Alice's hair was pulled back into a soft, shiny ponytail. She was arranging the Spanish moss on top of the hatboxes when I came into the classroom to set up my report.

  I didn't ha
ve any dressed-up dolls. I just had the pictures I had taken with Perry Walker's camera, pictures I had taken during my walks around our neighborhood, and pictures I had taken when Perry took us for those long car rides. I had a picture of Willa Mae holding a packet of snuff in her apron in front of a row of hollyhocks and Confederate jasmine. I had a picture of a bottle tree and a family of ducks crossing a street. I had pictures of Willa Mae picking up the garbage in our yard and my mother scrubbing off the words WE ARE WATCHING from our front door. I had a picture of the police officer standing outside the drugstore while an angry man billy-clubbed a black woman. I had an underexposed picture of football players, silhouetted, hunched down, ready to charge each other. I had a picture of an old white man fishing while beyond him a church finishes burning. I had a picture of the inside of an empty sharecropper's house with calendars of the past the only decoration in the room. I had a picture of the big magnolia in our front yard—a close-up of a blossom past its prime, in the first stages of turning brown. I had taped them all to some posterboard.

  There was a written report too, meant to go along with the presentation.

  All day I thought over the written report I handed in. I had proofread it, then retyped it using my mother's black Underwood, the G coming out smudgy and looking a lot like an O. My mother asked if I needed any help, but I didn't want my mother messing with it. This was all my work, all mine. I was going for articulate and well organized. Those were the main criteria my mother used when she graded papers. But I was also after compelling, which I knew would bump the paper somewhere into the A zone. I covered everything: the state's symbols, including a picture of its coat of arms and motto: The committee to design a coat of arms was appointed by legislative action February 7, 1894, and the design proposed by that committee was accepted and became the official coat of arms.

  When she finally got to my setup, Miss Jenkins looked and looked and then stared at the browning magnolia. All she said finally was that it was a shame I couldn't find a better flower—one fresher and more representative of the beautiful magnolia that was our state flower.