Sources of Light (10 page)

For three weeks in October we got out of school early not because of anything that was happening around us in Jackson but because of what was going on in other parts of the world. Everyone in our school had to carry Clorox bottles filled with water and canned goods in duffel bags to better prepare ourselves for a nuclear strike because of something that had to do with Cuba and the Kennedys and a man named Castro. No matter how many times my mother rinsed the Clorox bottles, she could never quite get rid of the taste of bleach.

The neighborhoods around Jackson began to look worse and worse. One afternoon, Willa Mae and I were both sitting in the back seat, flipping through magazines with pretty houses on the covers while my mother drove Willa Mae home. As we neared Willa Mae's neighborhood, we glanced out the car windows, looking all around us. The paved roads needed fixing and the dirt roads needed paving. Some of the houses we passed were burned out or falling down. We all grew very quiet. When my mother stopped the car, I didn't want Willa Mae to get out.

"Seems like nothing's getting safer or better," I said. "Seems like everything's getting worse."

"Maybe that's what's gotta happen," Willa Mae said. She picked up her pocketbook and opened the car door. "Maybe everything's gotta break loose and fall apart before we can put it back together again right."

I stared down at the magazine in my lap. On the cover was a pretty porch with gingham-covered cushions. Everything about the picture said to me,
Here is a good place and a good life.
But that's not what I saw outside our car window. That's not what I saw Willa Mae walking toward.

***

Perry was having a tough time selling his photographs. He said editors were no longer interested in the "race problem," which was too "local" and "minor." The crisis in Cuba had taken over most of the front-page news. With more time and fewer deadlines, Perry relaxed. He came over at least once a week now for dinner, as if he was my mother's new best friend, and he took us out for long car drives. Every now and then we would stop at a lake, or a church, or an old sharecropper's house and Perry and I would get out of the car and spend time taking pictures. During those drives, from the back seat I watched my mother slide over up front to ride closer to Perry. I quit feeling queasy seeing them close together during these drives. I took snapshots—close-ups of Perry's arm around my mother's back, the locks on the car doors, and incidental tears in the vinyl seats.

***

I was still young enough to
want
to dress up for Halloween but old enough not to talk about it. I was supposed to be too old for that sort of thing. So that year, on that Halloween, I just answered the door, and under the yellow porch light I gave out our usual handfuls of candy corn.

Right after a clutch of witches and one wolf left, their parents waving from the sidewalk, I shut the door and then heard a car screech. Doors opened and slammed shut. Something exploded. I looked outside. Our mailbox was on fire. My mother called the police, but by the time they got there, we had put the fire out. The police told my mother it was just another Halloween trick, nothing they could do.

When the police left, someone threw a rock through our front window. We taped the gaping hole with cardboard from an old cut-up box, and this time we didn't even bother calling the police. Instead, I asked my mother to call Perry Walker. "Tell him to come over."

"I'm on my way," he said.

My mother and I both felt safer when Perry came over.

***

In state history Miss Jenkins told us that before the war, Mississippi was the fifth richest state in the Union and the only reason "we" didn't have Memphis was because the original surveyors were drunk. She quoted one line a Mississippi writer named William Faulkner wrote, that Mississippi began in the lobby of a Memphis, Tennessee, hotel called the Peabody and ran south all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.

"Mississippi really starts in Memphis," she said. "Everybody knows that." She paused then and looked at us all for a long, hard moment. "Southerners built America. Southerners are true patriots. Race mixers want to destroy the South and America."

At lunch Ears had two baloney sandwiches, each made with lots of yellow mustard, one of which he gave to me, and I just about died and went to heaven. We ate my peanut butter sandwich as a dessert while we continued reading out loud from a Captain Fantastic comic. Ears was fast becoming a better reader.

***

My mother signed up to chaperone our fall dance, and when she told Perry, he asked if he could attend as her date so that he could take pictures. Perry was at our house having dinner again. He fixed our window. I knew that he came over so often because he felt responsible for our safety. Maybe my mother knew that too. Maybe she liked finally having a guardian, someone looking after us. We were sort of like a family.

That night my mother laughed. "So we won't really be
together
together. You'll be the official photographer."

He smiled. "Right."

"We'll even go in separate cars. I'll take Sam."

"No!"

They both looked at me.

"I've got a ride. Stone's coming to pick me up. He just got his driver's permit."

"Whoa," Perry said, smiling. "A
date
date."

My mother stopped smiling. "You could have asked me."

"Stone," Perry said. "That's really his name?"

"Please, Mom?"

"You'll be chaperoning," Perry said to my mother. "And I'll be taking pictures. We'll
both
be watching." Perry was taking my side, but I was on to him. I knew he just wanted to win me over for my mother. Still, I was willing to accept his defense.

My mother sighed. "He can pick you up, but I'll take you home. You're only fourteen, Sam. That's the best I can do." She had on her
I'm warning you
eyes. Perry winked at me.

"Mom, doesn't it hurt your face when you do that?" I said, making her laugh finally. Secretly I was thrilled, because I was actually going to the dance with Stone McLemore.

***

My mother wore her dumb black capri pants with loafers and a striped shirt while all the other mothers wore dresses cinched at the waist with belts to show off their figures. I wore a green skirt, and I parted my hair down the middle the way I'd seen Mary Alice do.

When he came to the door, the sound of my name in his voice took my breath away and made my legs shaky. I hated myself for feeling this way because it was so predictable and "girly." But still, I knew then what that expression "weak in the knees" meant. That was exactly how I felt. He was so handsome, I almost couldn't look at him face-to-face when he came over and pinned a flower to my sweater. Right then, right there, I knew this would be the most wonderful night of my life thus far.

I was grateful my mother didn't make a big deal out of questioning him or telling him what to do. We introduced him to Perry. They shook hands. We all left the house at the same time.

As Stone drove the three blocks to our school, I sat there in his car and admired the modern sweep of his dashboard.

"So tell me more about this Perry Walker," he said.

"I still can't figure out why you were there at the lunch counter downtown, making fun of that girl," I said. "How could you do that?"

"I wasn't making fun. I never said anything. I just watched. I didn't hurt anybody," he said. "I just happened to be there."

"So, you just stood there and watched?"

"That's what you were doing too."

We both went quiet. I hadn't thought of that.

"You're making too big a deal out of this, Samantha," he said. "Tonight's supposed to be fun, remember?"

"You're not one of them, are you? You're not like a member of the Klan or something, right?"

He sighed and shook his head.

"But why were you there?"

"It's against the law in Mississippi for blacks and whites to eat at the same counter—you know that," he said. "They broke the law, Samantha."

"Then maybe the law is wrong. Maybe that's what should be broken."

"How can you say that? If the law is wrong, then my parents are wrong and our teachers are wrong. How can you even say that?"

Then he pulled over by the side of the road. My heart was beating fast. "Look, Samantha." He wasn't angry. He spoke calmly, even softly then. "I'm just trying to figure all this out, just like everybody else, okay? You know what my mom's like. And my dad. You've met them. I have to live with them." I nodded. I could understand that. Stone was older than I was, but he was still only sixteen. We both of us sighed then. I didn't want to argue and I didn't think Stone did either. It was strange to want to be with someone you didn't agree with.

***

Our school was lit up, and inside, the decorations committee had strung balloons and streamers from the gym ceiling and through the basketball hoops. Stone and I watched other people dance until we agreed we were thirsty and went for the punch bowl.

Soon enough some new song came on, and then there they were, Perry and my mother dancing in the middle of the gymnasium floor, with everyone making a circle around them, watching them, and all I could think was
This is no good at all.

Stone and I stood in front of the punch table until he excused himself to talk with a group of his friends. I worried that I bored him. It seemed like Stone was someone who always needed people around him, orbiting him, his satellites other boys, mostly. I supposed I was mostly a loner, standing there like Pluto, sipping cherry-flavored punch. I looked for Ears but didn't see him.

Then I heard: "How come you don't dance like your mom?"

I heard: "Your mom is like a teenager. You're nothing like your mom."

I heard: "Is your mom a beatnik? My mom says she dresses like one."

I even overheard our principal, Mr. Calhoun, tell Miss Jenkins that my mother looked like a young Lesley Caron, the way she looked in that movie
Daddy Long Legs.

When was this going to get fun? When was this going to become my night and not my mother's?

I sat down in a chair. When Elvis came on, my feet started tapping and I didn't think the chair would hold me, but that passed and another song started. I was beginning to think Stone had ditched me.

Patti Page was singing "Tennessee Waltz" when I finally heard Stone call
my
name, not my mother's.

I had never danced with a boy. I wondered if my face looked funny this way, looking up, and if my hair spread out over my shoulders the way it was supposed to. I wanted Stone to look the other way for a minute so I could reorganize myself.

He put one hand around my waist and he took my other hand and held it up steady in the air, and then we began to move. We didn't step on each other once. My chin just about reached his shoulder so that I could glance around to see if anyone saw us. But I didn't even care who saw, or what they were saying about my mother or Perry anymore.
I
was dancing and I was dancing with Stone McLemore. Even his ears were clean and fine-looking, and every now and then my lips brushed against his left lobe.

Was this love? Was this what my mother felt when she'd first danced with my dad?

Stone's shoulders felt man-like, and I wondered when that happened, when a boy's shoulders became man shoulders. Maybe when they began to read the paper in the morning and watched the TV news, maybe that's when shoulders changed. In movies I had seen girls talking while they danced, so I thought I should too. I told Stone what I'd heard my mother and Perry discussing. I told him about spies and stuff I didn't know anything about going on in Leningrad and Moscow. I thought what I said sounded secretive and romantic, especially whispered.

"You sure know a lot about Commies," he said, smiling, pulling me toward him. "Where'd you find all this out?"

"I watch. I listen," I said, looking into his eyes, then looking away, feeling like a spy. I couldn't hold my gaze for long because I thought my knees would give out. "Just like you do."

"Yeah, but who are you listening to?"

I nodded toward my mother dancing with Perry.

He pulled me closer.

Just then, it really did feel as though my whole body was made for him to hold.

My mother and Perry danced to "Fever" until someone turned it off because the lyrics and the way Peggy Lee said them were supposedly improper, which was good, because now maybe my mother and Perry would quit dancing.

We had all agreed to leave from the school. Stone offered Perry a ride back home, and we all laughed or tried to laugh at the strange arrangement. I was to leave with my mother even though Stone offered again to drive me home.

"That was the agreement, remember?" she said in the parking lot. "Sam, I'll be over here by the car."

Stone faced me and put both his hands on my shoulders. "I had a great time, Samantha."

"Me too," I said.

We started to lean in to kiss.

"Sam!" my mother called.

***

My mother and I drove back home in her old beige VW Bug, our faces filling with light from time to time as a car passed from the opposite direction. My mother's car was littered with lecture notes, books, empty coffee cups, and stray pencils and pens, and it still smelled of the suntan lotion I spilled on the floor last summer.

"I haven't danced since, well, since your father was alive," she said.

"He's not your boyfriend," I said. "Perry can't be your boyfriend."

I waited, but she didn't say anything. And that's when I knew. He
was
her boyfriend, and I wanted to throw up.

She turned on the car radio. She liked the new song playing, and she turned it up. "
Louie Louie,
" she sang. "
Aww. We gotta go now.
"

We heard the sirens first. Then came the flashing lights.

"Stay calm," my mother said, looking in the rearview mirror, slowing down, and then pulling over to the side of the road. "I'll handle this." She turned off the radio. My mother hadn't done anything wrong driving that I could tell. She was a good driver. My grandmother was the bad driver in the family, but she never got stopped because everybody in the state seemed to know her.