So we weren't considered outsiders here. I wondered when exactly that had happened.
He knocked the hood of the car and told us to take care and stay safe. "Let me know when you come back in town next," he said to my mother.
She smiled, and when I caught her looking at him from the rearview mirror, I joked that maybe moving back to Franklin wasn't such a bad idea after all.
"Not a chance," she said, speeding up. I don't know how I knew, but I knew then that she had her mind on Perry Walker.
CHAPTER 11
WHEN I OPENED THE MAIL I saw that I'd made okay grades, and as my mother read over my report card, she nodded and wondered out loud why there was no serious art instruction in the Jackson public school system and really no European history at all. My mother considered Europe the mother of all history, adding that you really couldn't study American anything until you had studied Europe.
"It looks like you all are spending a lot of time just talking about the South," she said.
I shrugged and asked if we had any potato chips. She rolled her eyes, not because I asked, but because she knew that I knew we never ever had potato chips.
I watched my mother take in a deep breath and then let it out when she saw the C- for my communications grade. Miss Jenkins's comments about my state report also arrived with my grades. She pretty much said what she'd told me in front of the class: Nobody in my pictures was smiling. Nobody even looked happy. One might think that everybody who lived in Mississippi was sad, and was that really the way I wanted to represent our state in my report?
"She didn't get it, but that's not what you were going for," Perry said that night when he came over. He brought dinner this time, locking the door behind him, and he had pictures he'd just developed he wanted us to see. "You were going for art, not the grade."
"I wish I'd gotten an A." I felt like we were hunkering down in an air-raid shelter. It felt claustrophobic.
"You don't live in that world right now."
I didn't know what he was talking about. I was just getting angrier and angrier. I should have just done what all the others had done in my class—made dopey little collages and Elmer's-glued the cut-out pictures onto posterboard.
Perry showed us pictures he'd developed while we were gone, from a roll of film he had forgotten he had, long-distance shots unlike anything he was taking now. He showed us a picture he had taken of a subdivision much like ours from an airplane a friend of his flew—the subdivision looked like a giant octopus with its circle of streets like tentacles extending out.
"Sometimes you see the picture only later," he said, looking at the pictures spread out on the floor. It was as if he were looking at someone else's work, someone he didn't even know. "Way after you take the shot. Sometimes it's worth it to wait before you develop. Makes for a nice surprise."
"You're not still planning on going, are you?" my mother asked.
"Come with me," Perry said.
"I'll go," I said. They both looked at me. "You're talking about the day you're going to help black people register to vote, right? I want to go. I could help. Mom, you and me, we could both help. They need volunteers. Perry said so."
"It's not safe," my mother said.
Perry and I both just looked at my mother. We waited. She stood up and went into the kitchen, then called out and told me to go to bed.
***
We took Highway 55 and drove south to McComb. Perry and I both had our cameras hanging from our necks. On the way there, Perry told us about a black farmer named Herbert Lee who was shot in cold blood the year before because of his participation in voter registration. The murderer was E. H. Hurst, a member of the Mississippi state legislature. Nobody ever charged Hurst with the crime.
"But that was in Liberty, not McComb," my mother said to me. I knew she was trying to reassure herself.
"Right," Perry said, but he thought we should also know about what had happened in McComb just the year before. More than one hundred high school students were jailed for protesting. One man was beat nearly to death by a mob of angry white men while police just stood by and FBI agents took notes.
"But that was last year," Perry said, finally turning on the radio. "All in the past." My mother didn't say much else for the rest of the ride down. McComb today wasn't going to be that different and we all knew it.
When we turned off the highway and in to McComb, volunteers and protesters were all already there in two straight, orderly lines, and they were kneeling on the concrete sidewalk as though in prayer. There were men and women, black and white, and even some kids my age. The women had their heads covered with scarves tied at their chins, and the men wore suits and ties. They'd hung posterboard signs around their necks saying THE TEST MUST GO! BALLOT FOR FREEDOM! WE WANT TO VOTE! A police car cruised along the street around them, circling them at about two miles an hour.
Winter was here, and a brown carpet of fallen pine needles united us all.
We followed Perry to someone with a stack of papers, who told us what to do. We were going door to door, handing out voter registration forms. All we had to do was say "Have you registered to vote?" and hand out a registration form. If the person needed help filling it out, we would help him or her read the form and fill it out.
I took a stack of papers and while my mother went to one house, I went to the one next door. We finished one block and then another, and soon we started on another. I was enjoying myself. A black woman, someone's maid, answered the knock. She looked at me while I talked about voting and registering, but then when I handed her the paper, she looked past me and mumbled "Oh Lord, have mercy" and shut the door. I turned around to see what she had seen.
Mobs of white men were closing in on the line of protesters, and as they did this they just started beating them with what they had—billy clubs, ax handles, and sticks—just as they had the year before. It all started so fast. Some punched and kicked, slinging people around, knocking them in the head. But none of the protesters fought back. Some of them ran into the streets, only to get chased by a white man with a stick. They just took it. They took the beating. It was nearly impossible to watch.
I saw Perry at the edge of the chaos, snapping picture after picture. I heard my mother calling my name, but I couldn't see her. I had my camera around my neck, so I lifted it and started taking pictures of police cars circling the beaters and the beaten. The police didn't even get out of their squad cars.
I lost sight of Perry then. I couldn't find my mother and I couldn't hear her calling for me anymore either. I was scared. I was angry. Willa Mae had told me to turn those feelings into something else. I lifted my camera and closed my left eye. It was as if the camera became a part of my eyes, a part of me, and my head and hands just followed, doing what they were told to do. Me? I disappeared, and so did my fear.
That's when I saw Stone, standing there in the green space that was a small park, away from the circle of craziness. I looked at what he was looking at—there was his father with a billy club, beating a man I had just seen kneeling with all the others.
Pickup trucks and paddy wagons came and the police finally got out of their cars, only to begin loading the bloodied protesters. Most were limping. Some looked to have broken ribs or legs. They were under arrest now for disturbing the peace.
As I crossed the street, Stone turned his head and saw me.
"Samantha, get back," he shouted, waving his hands for me to go away.
But then, all at once, I was part of the crowd of protesters. I couldn't see where I was going. I was shorter than everyone else. I could only smell the crush of all those bloody, sweating bodies. All around me stood men, black and white, knots swelling on their heads and blood running. White men were shoving these men into the paddy wagons and pickup trucks, pushing them as if they were cattle. Children were getting crammed in too, even women carrying crying babies. I thought then of what Ears had said one day outside at school. This was like something out of the Bible. But surely because this
was so unjust, any minute someone would come and right this wrong. Any minute now.
If I'd had an enlarger like the one Perry had in his darkroom, I'd have taken this high-speed moment and printed it bigger, making the contrasts in black and white even more vivid. Now more than ever it was so clear to me what was right and what was wrong.
At the doors of one paddy wagon I saw Mr. McLemore shoving people in. I called his name. He looked at me but then looked right through me. I could see that I too would be shoved in, and I simply prepared myself for just that. I understood what that expression brace yourself meant then. I was ready for anything, because I saw then that the someones to come and right this wrong were in fact us, this line of people getting shoved into paddy wagons.
If all those white men were this scared and angry over black people registering to vote, then voting must be a powerful, powerful weapon.
***
"Samantha!" Stone was there, right by me.
"Step aside, son," Mr. McLemore said, tapping Stone's chest with his club. "That girl's one of them."
Stone shook his head. "No. No she's not."
"Son," Mr. McLemore said. He tapped his club on Stone's arm. "Don't you dare cross me."
Stone just took my hand and snatched me out, leading me away. I kept looking back, expecting someone to come after us, but nobody did. I was both relieved and angry that Stone had pulled me away. I was still wearing the cross necklace he had given me, but I didn't want to think of Stone in that way right then.
Perry and my mother came running toward Stone and me.
"Thank God you're all right," my mother said, hugging me, moving me away from Stone. We heard sirens then. Somebody had set a house on fire across the street. What else could happen? Perry reloaded his camera and made to go toward the house, but my mother held his arm.
"No. We're going. Now," she said.
Perry nodded, said "Right," then put his arm around me and around Stone too.
"No," my mother said. "Not with him. Not with that boy."
"But Mom. Stone got me out..."
"That's okay, Mr. Walker. I've got a ride back."
Perry looked at Stone and let his arm drop. We three just started walking back to the car, none of us saying anything. What was there left to say?
***
As I fell asleep that night and many other nights that week after Christmas, I prayed I wouldn't have to write an essay called "What I Did over the Holidays." I kept hearing Miss Jenkins's fake-peppy voice singing, "Go, Mississippi, you're on the right track. Go, Mississippi, and this is a fact, Go, Mississippi, you'll never look back." Never look back? Didn't everyone in this state talk about The War every other day? And then there was that last part of the song when you spell it, and we all knew that we would spend the rest of our lives singing the spelling: M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-I!
CHAPTER 12
AT SCHOOL, MARY ALICE TOLD EVERYBODY that her father had given her little brother, Jeffy, a BB gun for Christmas and her mother bought her a brand-new portable TV so she could watch programs all day from her bed. It was an altogether new television season and a new year. 1963.
Talk of the New Year only made my mother irritated with everything and everybody, especially me. Why couldn't I pick up my room? she wanted to know. I was spoiled because I didn't like any of Tine's old hand-me-downs, clothes that to me looked like costumes my Aunt Ida put together.
I knew the real reason my mother was testy. Perry hadn't called since he'd dropped us off at home after our trip to McComb, and I think she was realizing what I already knew: She liked him. She liked him a lot.
But she was also angry with him. It really had been dangerous in McComb. Out-of-state newspapers and TV news crews were coming into town now and reporting on what had happened there. What had happened in McComb was happening in other small towns all over the state—both the voters registering and the rioting. On the news, we watched little white boys turning a hose on an old black woman while grown white people just stood by and watched.
When the phone finally did ring, though, it wasn't Perry. It was Stone. He wanted to know if he could take me to the Petrified Forest. I hadn't been there since my grandparents took me one summer when I was little. Stone had rescued me, in a way, that day in McComb less than a week ago. Surely there must be a good explanation for him being there that day. I needed to talk to him in person. I pleaded with my mother to let me go with him. Finally she agreed.
Before he came to pick me up late that Saturday afternoon, I dressed carefully. I wore my own sweater and skirt. I wore the gold cross necklace Stone had given me. I clipped on the earrings my grandmother had given me for Christmas.
The Petrified Forest wasn't very far from where we lived, and when we got there, we sat on the bench from prehistoric times called the Caveman's Bench.
"This must have been something when these stone logs were living trees. They must have been huge," I said, but Stone was looking up at the sky. Already the stars were out. Even though our teachers called these woods Mississippi's own Grand Canyon, most kids my age tended to take the Petrified Forest for granted. They walked these woods every spring on field trips.
"I love to come out here and look at the sky," Stone said. "This could be the best, most quietest place I know. See? See all the stars you can already see?"
I turned to him then. "I need to know something for sure, Stone. Are you a member of that Citizens' Council with your dad?"
He looked up at the sky. "I'm not my father."
"I know that. But are you a member?"
The air was crisp and smelled of burning leaves. Somewhere up in the trees, an owl called.
"That was a bad day in McComb, and my father..." Stone stopped himself. "My father wasn't himself." Stone switched the subject. He talked about the dark side of the moon and other unmapped territories.
"Why was your dad so mad? Why does he hate black people so much?"
"He gets that way. I don't know. He doesn't like what's happening. He doesn't like change. And he really doesn't like outsiders coming in and changing things."
"Outsiders like my mom and me?"
"Y'all are different."
"Like Perry, then. He's an outsider."
"Yes, he is."
"So what if he is?"
"My dad thinks he stirs up trouble."
"Do you?"
"I don't know what to think anymore."
If the cicadas lived longer, they would have been humming loud all around us, making a racket, because I thought I heard them, in my head. I thought about prehistoric crawdads and turtles crawling up from the stream. Then I thought of what all had happened or could happen here, acts of violence that never made the news. Only last year a black man had been lynched in these very woods. On the nearby highway, a black mother of three had been raped, and then shot in the head. And there we were.
Stone pointed out the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper. He talked about altitudes and zeniths.
"Stone. Everything's crazy right now. Can't you think of anything else but constellations?"
"Things'll settle down."
"Or maybe they'll get worse before they get better."
Stone shook his head. "No way they can get worse. Everybody will learn they don't want to live like this and then we'll go back to the way things were."
I thought about that. "What if nobody wants that? What if nobody wants things the way things were? Black people you and me both know can't vote, and they'll keep on making next to nothing, raising their families in little shacks. That's the way things are. You think that's right?"
He sighed and fell back onto the ground, which was covered with soft dry pine needles. "I don't know, Samantha. I don't know." He pulled me down with him and hugged me tight, something he had never done before. Stone had a sour smell. I did not know where it was coming from, just that his odor had changed.
I could feel his chest against me. He put his face close to mine. He kissed my lips. Then we both kissed, this time togethe
r. It was a slow, sweet kiss, not one of those messy, lippy wet kisses with tongues I'd seen in the backs of buses and movie houses. And I didn't know that my eyes would close automatically, but they did this time, and when I opened them only because I didn't want to miss seeing this, his eyes were open too, and we just stayed together like that, our lips kissed swollen.
Thumb-size beetles scurried around us among the leaves.
"Damn them." Stone got up off the ground. He kicked each leg to shake his pants down. Then he started stepping on the beetles, smashing them with his boots. I thought of my mother's word primordial then. Beetles were like cicadas— both looked to be little armored dinosaurs. Up close, you could see all their jewel-like colors too.
"They're not bothering anything," I said.
"They're pests."
"No, they're not," I said. "Besides, they'll just keep coming."
"Not if we stop them."
He walked around stomping and stomping, all the while looking at me and smiling. I tried not to mind all that crunching, but my heart stopped.
Then Stone finally stopped and smoothed his hair up and back with a comb the way everyone's seen James Dean do. I touched my earlobes.
"My earrings!" I started feeling around in the pine needles. "They're gone. They belonged to my great-grandmother."
Stone and I knelt for some time, feeling among the leaves and pine needles and dead beetles, but it was so dark, it was hopeless.
"Don't worry, sweetie," he said. "I'll get you a new pair."
A new pair? The idea of replacing my only inherited heirloom knocked the words right out of me. I couldn't think of what to say, so I said nothing. My ears felt raw, like the feeling your toes have right after you cut your toenails.
I stayed on the ground, crawling and feeling around. Under a bush, my fingers curled around something that felt a lot like a camera.
"This is Perry's," I said, surprised. It was the small camera Perry had shown me in his darkroom at the university, the one he said he'd used to photograph the military hospital in D.C. I looked closely and saw that the lens was cracked and the body of the camera was dented too, but it was still loaded with film.
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