Sources of Light

by Margaret McMullan

  The youngest cousins ran scared back to the porch, where the grownups all sat on rockers, drinking and eating boiled peanuts. There they stayed on their mama's lap or else they took turns hand-churning the ice cream, adding the crushed peppermint sticks near the end.

  Aunt Ida stood and said she was putting a stop to all our violent play. Each and every one of us would just have to quit. My grandmother told us to come to the porch for shrimp.

  We all gathered around a white table set up with Gulf shrimp on ice, shrimp that we peeled and dipped in a cocktail sauce made with ketchup, lemon juice, and horseradish.

  Aunt Ida wanted someone to snap a picture of all the grownups, and my mother offered up my services, saying I'd become a "pretty darn good photographer." She told me to get my camera, and even though I had sworn off taking pictures since my state report, I did what I was told. I still hadn't gotten my grade in the mail, but I kept thinking of Miss Jenkins's face when she saw my photographs.

  They draped themselves over the porch rail, then turned to face me. Aunt Ida didn't know that the shade from a tree darkened half her face and the light only hit her reddened lips. Uncle Ted didn't know that his hairpiece was crooked. I centered the picture on my grandmother because it seemed the right thing to do.

  "Say gumbo," I said.

  I snapped the picture and they relaxed, happy now to be done with me, while Aunt Ida asked my mother where I got "gumbo." That's when I snapped another picture, the better picture.

  ***

  "Christmas is more better than birthdays because you get more presents," my cousin Tine said, sitting cross-legged under the Christmas tree in the living room. She wasn't drooling or slurring her words as much as the year before. "The colors are prettier than they are in October too. I like red and green. I don't like orange or brown."

  Already it was getting cold. My grandmother turned on the space heater and I could smell its woolly heat.

  Everybody tore into presents we had all carefully wrapped and placed under the tree. This I never understood. It all seemed like such a waste. They oohed and ahhed over a gift only to put it aside to open another and another and another. My mother sat with my grandmother on the horsehair loveseat, watching.

  "Why don't you and Samantha come here and live with us?" I heard my grandmother say quietly to my mother. "She can go to school here, and I'm sure we could find you a job at the junior college. It's getting so dangerous in Jackson. You need to be closer to family." After my father died, everyone in the family had urged my mother to live in Jackson because it was a city and there were more opportunities for modern, educated women like her. Now they were asking her to come back even closer.

  I tried to imagine what our life would be like in Franklin, living in the same town with my grandparents. We would finally have the garden I wanted as my own, with pole beans, okra, and corn. My grandmother would needlepoint, a thimble on her first finger, quizzing me on Pilgrim's Progress and The Rose and the Ring—favorites of hers when she was my age. I would visit townspeople like the old women on Church and Main streets, women who knew stories about my great-grandfather Frank Russell. They would invite me in and fix me a bowl of ice cream topped with a sugar wafer, and while I ate they would tell me about all the folks he taught when he was a schoolteacher there and the dangerous roads he traveled when he sold goods, and they would go on to talk about their own dead husbands and the Daughters of the American Revolution.

  My mother handed me a box wrapped with the Sunday funnies, so I knew it was from her. I smiled when I opened it. Inside the box was a pair of neatly folded lime green knee socks. The ribbed kind.

  Already I had presented her with the pinecone wreath I'd spray-painted at school, but I also gave her a framed photo I'd taken of Willa Mae in front of our house. She seemed to like this and showed everyone.

  I missed Perry then, and Willa Mae too, wishing they were both there, because when they were with us my mother and I were both always so much happier. I thought of Mary Alice then too, and of Stone and the McLemores and their Christmas morning in their tidy home. Their lives felt so far away from mine right now, and I suddenly saw the situation of my mother's life for what it was: My mother had left her own home in Virginia to marry, and then when her husband died, she felt she had to move to his family's home state. She was a stranger in a strange land.

  My cousin Tine gave me another present marked with my name. I carefully opened the tiny square box. "Good things come in small packages," Aunt Ida said. I knew the gift was from my grandmother, but I was supposed to pretend it was from Santa Claus—for my younger cousins' sake or their parents', I didn't know which.

  Inside the box was another box, a blue velvet box lined with satin the color of oyster shells, and there in the folds of the satin sat two perfect pearl earrings, the kind you could screw on.

  "These belonged to my mother, your great-grandmother Irene," my grandmother said, moving next to me. "She and her family lost most everything in the war, but she managed to save a few things. Your mother and I think you're old enough now to have them." She didn't have to say it, but I knew my grandmother felt as though maybe I'd had the same kind of loss as Irene had.

  Aunt Ida looked at the earrings over my shoulder and said, "Humph. My Tine has pierced ears, so she wouldn't want to wear those anyway."

  ***

  My grandmother could cook. There was turkey and two kinds of cornbread stuffing—one with oysters, the other with pecans. There were sweet potatoes, lady peas, biscuits with fig preserves, fresh collard greens and fresh mustard greens from the garden. My mother put out choirboy and choirgirl angel candles. A wick came out of the tops of their head. They'd had these candles for as long as we could remember, none of us ever thinking to light the heads because, really, how could we?

  No matter how old we were, cousins still sat at the kids' table, though we older ones served the grownups.

  My grandfather said grace. Uncle Ted carved the turkey. Aunt Ida made toasts. Then everyone got to the eating.

  "There's a new group in town called the Citizens' Council," Uncle Ted said, busy with his food. "Two dollars for membership. I know because they asked me to join. There's a businessman named McLemore in Jackson who's the ringleader."

  I looked at my mother, waiting for her to say something. Everyone knew this new Citizens' Council group was up to no good.

  "That's not true—I know that's not true," I said. "I know the McLemores. They're good people." I thought of Mary Alice, then said, "Most of them are."

  "Listen, like I told you before over the phone, I happen to know your name is on their list," Uncle Ted told my mother, ignoring me. "And your house is being watched. You're hanging around the wrong sort. I hope your new friend isn't putting you in harm's way."

  "Is he talking about Perry?" I asked.

  "Hush, Sam," my mother said.

  "Just stay with your own kind," Uncle Ted said to my mother. "I'm just trying to look out for you."

  "How do you happen to know all this, Ted?" My grandmother stopped eating.

  My grandfather looked at Ted. "You didn't join, son, did you?" He sounded surprised.

  Uncle Ted cut into the turkey on his plate and smiled. "I'm not the enemy here."

  "No?" my grandmother asked. "And exactly who is?"

  "Look," he said, putting down his knife and fork. "This race problem, this isn't our battle."

  "Whose is it then?" my grandmother asked.

  "They're the country club KKK without the sheets," my grandfather went on. "You shouldn't have anything to do with them."

  "They're nothing more than bad men in business suits." My grandmother touched her pearls. She looked to be calming herself down. "Herod is in Christmas," she said quietly. "Evil is there along with the good. My father used to remind me of that. 'Evil, resisting forces rising to destroy truth and love,' he'd say. That's the spirit of bigotry that is blind to everyone and everything. He knew a lot about evil, your grandfather Frank." She shook her head. "The
Citizens' Council." She spat the words out. "That's not what this family is about."

  Uncle Ted got up from the table and left the room. The screen door slapped. The ceiling fans hummed. We all waited for his voice or more noise.

  "Would you just look at those pretty birds outside," Aunt Ida said, taking a sip of sweet tea. "Pretty, pretty," she said, tapping her glass with her watermelon-colored nails.

  My mother stood up to clear the table and motioned for me to do the same. She and I were usually the ones stuck doing the dishes. I chalked this up to the way my aunts and uncles felt about us. No one ever said so, but it seemed as though they thought my mother had been a mistake in my father's life. She was not from here, not even from the state. And now they were stuck with both her and me.

  "Sit down, dears," my grandmother told us both, smoothing out the wrinkles in her dress with her hands. "We're not quite finished here. Children? When you're ready, there's coconut cake and pecan pie in the kitchen."

  My cousins all went running into the kitchen. I stayed seated.

  Aunt Ida changed the subject, asking about some woman from Franklin. "She's still smug over winning Miss Magnolia twenty years ago," she said. "I bet she's home right now, polishing that silver bowl."

  "It was a tray," my grandmother said. "She won a tray."

  "I always thought she got a crown," my mother said, smiling at my grandmother. I knew then that they liked each other, despite circumstances, despite what others might have thought. My mother often said she respected my grandmother, saying that she was "broad-minded," as though brains were to be measured like shoulders. But looking at them then, I thought, they just liked each other.

  "Bowl, tray, crown, whatever she got. I pity her. I really do. She's troubled is what she is. Troubled." Aunt Ida chewed and chewed and chewed.

  ***

  "You remind me so much of a woman I knew named Addy, Samantha. You two are cut from the same cloth." It was after the big feast, and the grownups were either napping or talking outside on the porch while my cousins went exploring in the woods. My grandmother and I were in the back guest room. She was going through her coat closet because she wanted to give my mother one of her coats. She thought my mother needed a coat. My grandmother had three closets for her clothes, one solely for her coats. Tine and I liked to scare ourselves opening this closet, because in it hung the red-brown fox, with its head still on and a tail that my grandmother let trail down her back. My grandmother said coats were the real reflection of a woman's wardrobe, and a woman could never have too many coats. My mother didn't even have a coat. She said people who lived in Mississippi didn't need coats.

  Aunt Ida and Uncle Ted were in the adjoining bedroom, fighting. I was used to them arguing over his drinking or money or both. But on this day someone had switched on the radio. Martha and the Vandellas were singing, so I couldn't hear what they were arguing about.

  "What happened to her?" I asked my grandmother. "What happened to Addy?"

  "She could talk to the Choctaw and she learned from them. She became a nurse and a midwife," she said. "She helped birth a good portion of this county. I was her first delivery." She sighed and laughed. "Then later, when Addy grew older, she fell in love and married a man who was full-blooded Choctaw. They moved north to Neshoba County, where they set up a medical practice together. They had a son. She died of old age about three years ago."

  I looked at my grandmother. Once upon a time she had been my age—a little girl running around getting dirty and into trouble. I had to wonder how anybody so old, polite, and mannerly managed to get along and survive in as hard a world as this. When exactly did the growing up part of growing up kick in?

  "What are you two up to?" My mother came in with a cup of coffee.

  "Shopping," my grandmother said. "Samantha and I think it's high time you went shopping for some new clothes."

  "Honestly, I'm too busy to think about clothes."

  "She's got Greece and Aphrodite on the brain," I joked, lying back on the bed and staring up at the white glossy paint peeling off the ceiling.

  My grandmother laughed. "Aphrodite. For goodness' sake. What am I supposed to tell my friends in Culture Club?" My grandmother was joking and being serious at the same time. She could do that, though I was never sure how.

  My cousin Tine and I used to eat the leftover butter mints from the little bowls my grandmother set out for Culture Club meetings. These ladies would get together and discuss books, plays, and paintings, or make perfectly cut flower arrangements, carefully clipping away the tendrils and stray vines.

  "Now, here's a good running-around coat," she said, giving my mother a dark blue coat. "You could be Zeus in that coat." I put my head in my mother's lap. She traced the edges of my ear while I listened, and she and my grandmother went on talking.

  ***

  That evening the middling cousins played Parcheesi, the older boys crept to the back of the house to look through back issues of National Geographic, and the rest of us cousins kicked off our shoes and socks and watched TV. In the shows everything happened very fast. The mistakes, the arguments, and then finally the hugging and the quick need to say "I love you."

  During commercial breaks, Aunt Ida whispered her gossip, and the conclusions were all the same: She doesn't know better, which meant She doesn't know her place, which meant She's gone beyond her raising. Staying put as you were and with what you had was of primary importance. Even if we weren't listening, we cousins were meant to hear all of this.

  CHAPTER 10

  WE LEFT EARLY THE FOLLOWING MORNING, the morning after Christmas Day and my birthday, while everyone slept. She didn't tell me because she didn't have to, but I knew my mother never liked saying goodbye.

  On the back seat of our VW Bug sat a box full of peach, pear, and plum preserves with masking tape labels made out in my grandmother's neat script. Next to the box of jars sat a bundle of my cousin Tine's old clothes folded neatly inside a shopping bag from Maison Blanche in New Orleans. In previous years, Aunt Ida had my mother sort through these clothes with me on the guest bed, and I was supposed to get all worked up over each item she pulled from the bag. My mother must have said something, because this year Aunt Ida secretly put the bag there in the back seat.

  As we passed through Franklin, I read the sign on the store advertising bait: OUR WORMS CATCH FISH OR DIE TRYING. A new love song was playing on the car radio.

  "Find something better," my mother said. "I hate that song."

  I switched the station to a song played with a guitar, asking where all the flowers went. We drove in silence, staring out from our separate places. We passed through the colored section of town, where some lived in cinder-block homes with dirt floors and stuck colored bottles on the branches of trees stripped of foliage. My dad once told me that the bottles sucked in evil spirits called "haints." The rising sun shone through all that colored glass, and the wind whistled past the mouths of the bottles. I rolled down my car window to listen. Other people lived in nailed-together shacks with board floors. Some lived in shacks without windows or doors. Willa Mae told me once that the roofs often leaked in shacks like those, and the floors—if there were floors—often rotted. But we were used to these sights and this knowledge, or we were supposed to be used to it—the whites go here, the blacks there. Look out at a field and you half expected to see black people bent over picking cotton. It was the way things were.

  Leaving Franklin, I thought of what it must have been like for my father to leave Franklin, and also what it must have been like for my mother to leave her hometown after she married.

  "Why did you marry Dad, Mom?"

  My mother sniffed through her nose, looked at me, then smiled.

  "I wanted something more and he was it. We both had big dreams."

  "Yeah?"

  She nodded. "Yeah."

  "So? Do you still?"

  She shrugged. "Dreams get complicated."

  "That must have taken a lot of courage," I said. "To marry
Dad. He was so different from you."

  "It was hardly courageous. It was just the only thing to do. We were in love."

  We passed the smoking ruins of what could have been a church, and slowed only for a longer glimpse. We were getting used to seeing things smolder. Then we heard a police siren pop and my mother looked in her rearview mirror and pulled over.

  "Oh, no," I said, holding on to the door handle, as though at any moment we could run for it.

  "Was I speeding?"

  I shook my head. "You were going slow."

  "Maybe that's the problem."

  The police officer walked slowly to our car, bent down, looked at my mother, and said, "Don't I know you? Who did you used to be?"

  "Martha. Martha Thomas." She smiled. "I still am."

  "That's right, that's right. I saw your picture in the paper. I knew your husband, Ed. We went to high school together. We played football. He was a good man, an outstanding quarterback."

  He leaned in further and I saw his face. He was a handsome man about my mother's age, with blue eyes and a nice smile. "Don't believe I've met your daughter."

  My mother told him my name and he tipped his hat my way.

  They got talking. He joked about how he and my dad used to make away with watermelons from a nearby field, then crack them open on the road. He jiggled the keys and change in his pocket as he spoke. When he laughed, he put his tongue between his teeth and made a hissing sound. It smelled smoky outside. "He was a good man."

  Finally, my mother asked why he'd stopped her.

  "There's been a report of some trouble. Outsiders, most likely. Always is. Outsiders come in to stir up trouble."