Sources of Light

by Margaret McMullan

  I'd fallen for a boy who liked to sit and watch the sky. He knew about Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Isaac Newton. Maybe what I had with Stone wasn't love. Maybe I just wanted to feel him with me and I wanted him and me both to whisper things like true love in each other's ears. Maybe I didn't even care what he whispered so long as he just whispered. He had been more than a friend, and it was the first time I knew what more-than-a-friend meant.

  Later I would think about that time I spoke with Stone at the school, and I would reassure myself. When you're developing pictures, you catch things you hadn't noticed the first time around. Perry explained that to me once. What the mind rejects as ugly it later perceives as beautiful once the underlying patterns have been recognized. Stone wasn't a monster. He was just a boy, and maybe that was the saddest part.

  CHAPTER 18

  TENSION WAS BUILDING AT MY MOTHER'S COLLEGE, and the faculty took another vote to integrate the college, but administrators feared violence and a loss of white students and money. They formally closed all events to black people and continued to discourage any faculty from teaching, speaking, or even visiting Tougaloo. Even our own teacher, Miss Jenkins at Jackson High School, warned us ninth-graders to steer clear of what she called questionable gatherings in and around the college.

  After wearing all the dark mourning clothes, and after weeks of a heartbreakingly beautiful spring, my mother said she was taking me to a reading at her college given by a famous author who she said was "alive and still living among us."

  On the evening of the reading, the college was lit up like a monument, as though something historical were about to happen, when in fact it was just a tiny old lady named Eudora Welty coming out to read us a story.

  She came and so did the people, from all around, even some students from other colleges and high schools. The day before, the dean reminded everyone of the college's policy, making the event "off-limits" to black people. But they lined up outside anyway.

  When it was time for Miss Welty to begin, she waited onstage. We watched as she had a brief exchange with the dean. They were both smiling politely. The dean shook her head no. Miss Welty nodded yes. Then Miss Welty shook her head no and the dean nodded yes. Some of us laughed at the sight.

  But then something happened. The doors opened and all the black people waiting outside, the ones the dean wasn't going to let in, came in. Some sat in the front, some in the back, others sat beside us. They sat wherever there was a seat. The auditorium was full up now, dotted with different-colored people. From onstage, we must have been a sight. The corners of Miss Welty's eyes crinkled like tissue paper as she smiled and welcomed us all. She wasn't pretty, but when she smiled and talked and looked at us that way, she was beautiful and we all fell in love with her.

  She dedicated the reading to her photographer friend Perry Walker. She told us all she'd met him at the Jitney, and that later he'd contacted her about coming to the college to read. I saw tears well up in my mother's eyes.

  She read a story called "Powerhouse" about a Fats Waller concert, which she had written some twenty years before. Listening to her read, we were all together, not listening to a story, but in a music hall called the World Café, listening to jazz and to those musicians talking. When she finished we were all quiet, as though we needed to catch our breath, the drums and saxophones and piano still playing in our minds.

  Then she talked about the power of imagination to unite us readers with writers. She said a shared act of imagination could bridge the separateness people feel, even if only for a moment. She talked about our being there, as if us listening to her story meant something important. As if just sitting there together was doing something.

  We stood and clapped for her, hundreds of us clapping. Even after she left the stage, we applauded for a long time. We all had that close-together, huddled feeling of being under the same umbrella in the rain. I wanted to sit back down in my seat and replay the story in my head. I just wanted to sit and think.

  Afterward, we saw her at a reception in an adjoining room, talking with students who were waiting to shake hands and thank her for coming. My mother had thought to bring my camera, and she gave it to me then. I brought it to my right eye, and then brought it back down again. I hadn't snapped a picture since Perry was still alive. Miss Welty nodded for me to go on, take the picture. She was giving me the go-ahead, so I did. I took a picture of her smiling. I took another of her signing books, and another of her hugging a group, their different-colored arms all wrapped around one another.

  My mother took my hand and led me toward the edge of the small crowd. She spoke with Miss Welty. My mother was used to that sort of thing. She could talk to anyone. I saw that now.

  "This is my daughter. She takes pictures." My mother sounded proud. "Perry taught her."

  Miss Welty looked at me and then offered her hand. It was warm and bony, like my grandmother's. She told me she took pictures once too. She said that was when she learned how to really look at things. Sometimes what you see is more than you want to know. She talked the way Perry used to talk when he talked about photography.

  My mother took the camera.

  "Let me take a picture of you two," she said.

  Miss Welty and I stood side by side, this lady writer and me, her arm around me. I didn't say a word. My mother snapped the picture. I knew by the way she was holding the camera, the picture would be out of focus, but that was okay. I would have it to keep.

  ***

  That night at home my mother turned my pillow so I could lay my head down on the cool side. We had the house back to ourselves now because my grandmother had left.

  "Pookie-poo," she said.

  "Moo." For some reason, we spoke in whispers then.

  "I'm very proud of you, Samantha," she said. She hardly ever called me Samantha. "You've shown so much courage all through this year."

  "I didn't think about being courageous."

  "You don't have to think about being courageous to have courage," she said. "I doubt that you even have to feel courageous either. Your father wrote me something like that in a letter when he was overseas. You are so much like him."

  "You never said that before."

  "I'm not sure I thought it before."

  I thought about courage and how it must be more hidden than anything like love or hate, grief or mourning. Something inside tells you what's right and you know you have to do that right thing to go on living with yourself and with others.

  "It's not like I went to war or into a battle or anything. Not like he did."

  "No. It's been a lot like fighting in a war. Every day."

  When things come clear, when you see it all before you in black and white and you know what's right and what's wrong, what kind of person would stand aside and do nothing? That wouldn't be a person at all, or the human being that Perry said he was—and in fact had been. That would be nothing more than an insect, but at least insects serve a purpose. There comes a time. There just comes a time.

  "I miss Dad," I said. "I miss him so much."

  "I know," my mother said. "So do I."

  ***

  Shortly after that evening with Miss Welty, my mother heard from the dean. She didn't get her promotion. My mother didn't get tenure or promoted to associate professor. What that meant was that she had no future at the college. What that meant was that she had to find another job. What that meant was that she most likely had been blacklisted. What that meant was that we might have to move from Jackson and even maybe Mississippi.

  When you know you're not wanted, you leave, right? It's as simple as that. Why stay in a place where people hate you daily, or where at least you know no one wants you around? Why stay when it's too dangerous to live out your life? Just because it's home and you've settled? Perry had stayed and he died. Would the black people of Mississippi all begin to disappear the way most of the Choctaw had? Would we?

  CHAPTER 19

  IT WAS SPRING, not just here but even in the northern stat
es. Neither the Russians that the McLemores and others had anticipated and built their bomb shelter for nor people from outer space had come after all, but the Freedom Riders had, and word was they would be coming again the following year and the year after that and they would keep coming.

  My mother's hair had grown, and she brushed the ends to curl under, not out the way the other mothers wore their hair. It was different and I liked it on her. She wore bright-colored dresses with bold patterns she said looked like Mondrian paintings. "When I stand and walk forward, you get the full effect," she liked to say when people commented.

  A copy of Perry's book of photographs came in the mail, and together my mother and I looked through it, sometimes even preferring the thin sheet of tissue covering the more violent and disturbing photographs in the book—the images muted that way and fuzzy, covered with the tissue. There was an introduction written by an editor of Life, quoting what Perry had once said to him. "Life is what it is at any second. A snapshot. Nothing more."

  "Did he really believe that?" I asked my mother.

  She shrugged and smiled.

  He had shown me how a picture was balanced, how what needed to be seen was what should be focused. It felt strange sitting there looking through all these terrible, good pictures. They were beautiful pictures of horrible things. How could beauty come from such ugliness? It didn't seem right or good, but maybe close to some kind of truth.

  ***

  I grew my bangs out and parted my hair down the middle, more the way my mother's college coeds wore their hair and not the way Mary Alice wore hers. For the first time, I actually fit into my bra. I wore knee socks now instead of bobby socks, but my mother still wouldn't allow me to wear hose, let alone the green fishnet stockings or go-go boots Mary Alice and her friends wore.

  Mary Alice had written to Glenn Campbell and John Wayne, and neither had written back. She took up the baton because she said twirlers always won the beauty pageants. Even though Mary Alice told everyone that her brother Stone had been "disowned," she also said he had dumped me, and because I was so "marked," surely nobody would ever go out with me ever again. "If I don't marry," Mary Alice said loudly one day in the cafeteria, "I might as well be dead." Mr. McLemore was out on bail and facing a prison sentence. He stayed in his house mostly. Rumors circulated about Stone. Someone said he thought he saw Stone hitching a ride toward Alabama. Someone else thought she saw him at the grocery store. He became like a ghost.

  Word got out that my mother and I were probably leaving, so at that moment in time no one bothered us. As we ended our year at school studying balanced proportions and Fibonacci numbers in Miss Jenkins's math class, we hunted for a pattern in the senseless and unpatterned acts occurring nightly in Jackson. With order came understanding and beauty in our mathematical formulas. Chaos and a lack of pattern were ugly ... or were they? That same spring, my mother was giving lectures about modern art, showing slides of crazy-looking drip paintings by a man named Jackson Pollock, whom some called Action Jackson.

  ***

  For our final communications project, Miss Jenkins asked us each to report on an "outside event." It could be either local or national, but it had to take place outside our school walls. She said the administration wanted us to be "more aware." Miss Jenkins didn't seem to be too happy about that.

  Mary Alice talked about attending the Mississippi State Fair the previous summer with her family. Miss Jenkins actually clapped at the end of Mary Alice's presentation. Others reported on church events and family reunions. Ears, whom I called Tempe now, talked about the stickball games he played when he and other members of the Choctaw nation got together. He brought in his game equipment and demonstrated, barefoot, for the class. Everybody, even Miss Jenkins, liked his report.

  I borrowed an easel from Perry's things and I propped up pictures one after the other, pausing between each picture to give everyone an eyeful. I showed the pictures I took at the lunch counter at the drugstore, the ones Perry had helped me develop. I showed all of them, ending with the picture of the waitress staring at Willa Mae, the picture I called "Hate." Then I showed the pictures I took of the woman writer, Miss Welty. I showed her smiling and signing her books. I showed pictures of her hugging people, both black and white. I didn't say much during my presentation. I wasn't much interested in speechmaking anymore. Besides, you know what they say about pictures, right? They tell a thousand words. So why make it a thousand and one?

  I knew Miss Jenkins wouldn't like my presentation even though I showed not one but two outside events. By then I didn't care about her or Mary Alice or my grades. I did care what Tempe thought, so I looked at just him while I stood in front of the class and ran through all the pictures. Soon we would all go our separate ways. Families would move across the state, some even out of state. Jackson and a good part of Mississippi had proven to be a difficult place to live. Tempe and his family would move to Philadelphia, Mississippi, where his mother had family and his father hoped to find work. Miss Jenkins would surprise both Tempe and me by sending in his cicada report to Mississippi State in Starkville, where he received a camp scholarship to study science over the summer.

  "Pictures are a form of communication," I said at the very end of my presentation. "When we communicate we have a bill of rights that guarantees us freedom of speech and expression." I looked around at all the faces in my class. I waited for someone, anyone, to just nod. "Right?" I said. Tempe blinked. The others looked blank. Someone yawned.

  ***

  My mother sent out job applications, and in May she got word about a well-paying job as an assistant professor at a university in Boston. She got refitted with a new hearing aid, one that let in all the sound so she didn't have to keep turning it up or down.

  We didn't want to go. My mother and I didn't want to leave Mississippi or the South. We left because we had to.

  Together we repainted the house and put it on the market, selling it within a month's time. That summer we planned to rent a place in Boston, then see some of the East Coast and tour Washington, D.C., for the first time, and with the extra money made from selling our house, my mother and I planned the trip she had always wanted. We were going to spend ten days in Greece, walking the steps up to places like the Acropolis and the Parthenon, finding out more about what had once been a nearly perfect civilization and democracy.

  It was going to be a new start. Because we were moving so far away, my aunt said it would be too inconvenient for her to send my cousin Tine's old clothes, which meant that I would have to find my own clothes, a hunt I both dreaded and anticipated.

  We began packing, and at the end of every day, our little house was filled with more brown boxes that held our dishes, linens, books. One afternoon I opened the kitchen pantry and stared at what we had left of my grandmother's fruits and vegetables in their glass jars—the garlic and dill bobbing like the snow in those wintry Christmas paperweights I admired in storefront windows. I understood then why Perry had taken a picture of the jars.

  At night I looked out my window at the moon growing fuller over the roof of the house across the street.

  It was hardest to say goodbye to Willa Mae. She told me I was responsible for knowing where she packed the vacuum cleaner bags and that I had to do a better job of helping out more around the house, because now it was just going to be my mother and me. No Willa Mae helping. No Grandmother coming during emergencies. I was scared of leaving, of moving away from what I knew to something I did not know at all. I remembered Willa Mae telling me her biggest fear: that she would do something she'd regret. She'd told me fear was just one more thing you could change into something else, something else like anger or even love.

  I wrapped up the picture of Willa Mae laughing and gave it to her. When she opened it in front of me, she smiled.

  "I will miss you," she said, sitting down with me on a box to eat our last meal together—peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. She told me sometimes bad things happened for a good reason. If my moth
er had gotten her promotion, we wouldn't be headed for Boston. Either way you looked at it, we wouldn't have had much of a second chance at starting over if we stayed.

  "Oh, Willa Mae." I was so sad, I could barely hold my head up.

  "You can call me Bill," she said. Only those close to Willa Mae were allowed to call her Bill. "So? How you do?"

  "Not too good," I said.

  I was going to miss tending my grandmother's kitchen garden with Tine every summer, cooking and canning our harvests. I didn't know what was ahead of us. All I knew was what and whom we were leaving behind. I knew these streets, the houses, which trees were the best trees to climb, which hills were the best to skate down. I knew this place. And I could not see my way into knowing any other place as well as I knew Mississippi.

  Willa Mae put down her sandwich and moved closer. She drew me to her, keeping her arm around me. I couldn't remember when I was ever this close to Willa Mae. She smelled of tobacco and ginger both. "In Mississippi, people have a way of holding on to the past," she said. "The mud here is sticky. But sometimes you got to let go."

  ***

  On our last day, the day we were ready to pull out, I checked under the hood of our car before we left. I'd gotten into the habit after I'd read about how bombs were planted there under the hoods of cars during the night.

  My mother and I got in. She backed out the drive. We waved to our house. We did all the things a body does to say goodbye. But even as we drove away from our house I missed it, missed the camellias that grew as big as trees, the monkey grass, the pines, the summer heat. But at the same time, I felt such a relief.

  My mother sat in the driver's seat, smiling. We would go up north and something else new would begin. She knew this and I knew this. Our knowledge was behind her smile.

  I wanted to be mad at everyone in the South who had done so much wrong. I was ready to be mad at the whole state of Mississippi, but then out of nowhere I looked at the road, then up at the sky, and thought, Thank you. Without all the bad, I wouldn't recognize the good. I wouldn't know. I wouldn't know about feeling bad for people and maybe I wouldn't know so much about feeling good for people either. I knew more, and this felt like a new old coat from my grandmother. I needed it all to feel this way, and I wondered what it might be if a whole country felt the same.