Sources of Light
Page 16
Already heat mirages rose from the asphalt highway as we drove. Lines of pine trees stood as still and straight as soldiers on either side of the road.
I had my camera and the jar full of cicada shells I'd collected the summer before, the summer we'd moved to Mississippi. The summer before. That was the way I would always think of that time. The summer before I learned about love and hate all in the same year. The summer before it all happened.
When my mother and I left Mississippi, we were just a month away from what was later called Freedom Summer, when all the real anger broke out. In June of 1963, a man named Medgar Evers was shot dead in his garage, a man with a house in Jackson just like ours, a man with a wife and children, a man with a carport, monkey grass, and a nice lawn. All of it, like ours. Except that he was dead and we were not, because he was black and we were not, and he had stayed.
In the car leaving Jackson with my mother, I looked at the empty shells through the glass, shaking them a little. They came up from out of the ground making all that noise, seemingly out of nowhere, when in fact they'd been there all along, there among us all along. They came up, baring themselves to the world, screeching, singing, humming, whistling, then they disappeared, marking the trees with their own remains. I thought about the nonstop hum my mother and I both always thought we heard all that year, even after the cicadas had died away. Maybe it was the land itself warning us, pleading with us: Do something.
My mother learned how to control the volume level of outside voices and other everyday disturbances by artificial means. She simply turned off her hearing aid. But I still hear the voices of Tempe and Willa Mae and Stone and Mary Alice, Aunt Ida, my cousin Tine, Miss Jenkins, Perry, and my grandmother. When I care to listen, I hear their voices humming inside my head, and every seven years, when the cicadas come out, I hear them all clearly talking and shouting, all of them all over again. They click and buzz from the ground and from the trunks of the trees. Their shells are scattered everywhere. Their voices are a reminder. Don't forget, they are saying. Don't you dare forget.
Years later, after school and several odd summer jobs, I would take newspaper positions in Cincinnati, Tallahassee, Atlanta, and then finally in Chicago, where I stayed on, photographing the news of the day. I tell colleagues about the past as I knew it. I show them pictures I took back then, pictures that look similar to some of the news pictures I take now.
"Mom, you know what?" I said in the car.
"What."
"I love you and I like you. Both."
She kept her eyes on the road, and her hands on the wheel of her beige VW Bug with the rusty fenders, but I saw the right side of her face break into a smile. Sunlight lit her up. Perry Walker once told me to find the shadows first in order to recognize my light source. I lifted the camera to my eye and focused.
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AUTHOR'S NOTE
January 2010
Sources of Light is a mix of fact and fiction. I lived in Jackson, Mississippi, with my parents and sister from 1963 to 1969. We didn't experience and witness everything that Samantha does, but we did have neighbors who were threatened or beaten, and my mother had a close friend who was murdered. I never attended a Jackson High School, and Eudora Welty never dedicated a reading to the fictional Perry Walker, though she did give a memorable reading of "Powerhouse" to an integrated audience at Millsaps College, where my mother taught and participated with her in a panel discussion. My sister and I used to play in the woods behind Miss Welty's house in Jackson, and my sister claims she once saved me from drowning in a little creek there.
We all at one time brush up against history or historical figures that have an impact on our lives. My parents attended a Joan Baez concert in Jackson one year, and afterward a young man from out of state couldn't start his station wagon. My father offered to jump-start it. He and the young man spoke briefly and the two went on their way. The following year my father recognized both the station wagon and the young man in the newspapers. The young man my father recognized was Michael Schwerner, one of the four civil rights workers murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi. The FBI found the burned-out station wagon before they found the bodies.
For a long time I was ashamed to say I was from Mississippi. I even told some of the jokes most people know by now. Question: What's got four i's and can't see? Answer: Mississippi.
When people asked where I was from, sometimes I just said "the South," or "north of New Orleans." After all, how could this one state produce magnolias, pine forests, Eudora Welty, William Faulkner, Richard Wright, and the Citizens' Council? How was that possible? How could I love a state that did such horrors to its own? Now I'm beginning to understand. Writers thrive on conflict—hopefully in our work and not in our lives. Our job is to reflect and interpret trouble. After a time, we should become skilled at finding the shadows so that perhaps our readers may recognize the light.
James Meredith graduated from the University of Mississippi in August 1963 with the help of 500 U.S. marshals' nearly constant security. He was the first black person ever to do so. In late August that same year, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a speech called "I Have a Dream" to 200,000 people in Washington, D.C.
But for a long time hate poisoned everything, especially in the South.
In September of 1963 a bomb exploded during a Sunday school class at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four children. They identified one of the victims by her shoes. Then in November, just days before Thanksgiving, President Kennedy was assassinated. Five years later, Martin Luther King Jr. was shot dead in Memphis, and a month after that the president's brother Robert Kennedy was killed in Los Angeles.
The Vietnam War, which started in a country no one had heard of, lasted sixteen years, ending only a few years after another battle called Watergate. In 1974 India joined other nations to explode a nuclear device, and the world couldn't help but look with wonder at pictures of the surface of Mars, and later even of Jupiter.
Sometimes when I tell my son about growing up in Mississippi I sound like my older relatives when they used to talk about the Civil War years and the hard times that followed. My 1960s are like their 1860s, for in my lifetime, people in the United States went out and beat and killed other people and more often than not got away with it, got away with murder. Still, I think it's important to talk about such things in order to know. You can't pick and choose your history, and you can't turn away from it either.
Many people tried to talk me out of writing about the 1960s in Mississippi. "That's all in the past," several southern friends told me. "We've moved on, so you should too." But I think it's important to look back and reflect on the past, even if it's only to see how far we've come.
And now? Now the forty-fourth president of the United States is Barack Obama, a man of color, powerful proof that we really are capable of judging people by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin. This hardly seemed possible. That difficult, violent time in Mississippi wasn't so long ago. But America is a different America now. The South is a different South. I know because my husband, my son, and I spend a lot of time on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi with my parents in a town that has survived two of the world's biggest hurricanes. We are all survivors—the people of this country, the South, this town, my parents, my sister, and me—and we all keep coming back.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I'd like to thank professors Dale Edwards and Cris Hoshwender at the University of Evansville and Richard Brown at Mississippi State for their help with endomology and cicadas. I'd also like to thank Suzanne Marrs, Millsaps College, and the Eudora Welty Foundation, the John F. Kennedy Library, Gary and Cindy Bayer and the Writers' Gathering Jerusalem, Alan Huffman and Scott Saalman for their recollections, the Ya-Yas, the Bibliochicks and the Inkling Book groups for their discussions, and the Social Literary Circle for their food recipes from the 1960s. And always, my thanks go to my agent, Jennie Dunham, and to Margaret Raymo
, Karen Walsh, Nadya Guerrero-Pezzano, and the many other talented people at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
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