Sources of Light (11 page)

"Evening, miss," the officer said. "You know how fast you were going?"

"I'm not sure."

"You were going forty in a fifty-mile-an-hour zone. You were going under the speed limit, which is just as serious as going over."

My mother and I looked at each other.

"I'm so sorry," my mother said. Her voice sounded shaky. Just that week we had heard that two black men had been arrested for no cause, then taken to the basement of the police station and beaten.

"We've just come from my daughter's high school dance."

The officer shined his flashlight in my face, then he moved the light all over us.

"You look like a nice lady," he said then to my mother. "How come you're wearing those clothes?"

I think we thought he was kidding. The question startled us so that we both said "Ha" without knowing or thinking about what we had just done. And it was the worst possible thing we could have done. We laughed. And then we laughed not once, but twice.

We both realized exactly what we had done when we saw the policeman's face. My mother gripped the steering wheel and froze. He reached in and took her car keys, then opened the door and took her by the arm. I held on to her other arm. We were both pulling, while she had hold of the steering wheel.

"Miss. You're under arrest."

"For what?"

"Tell your girl to let go."

"Let go, Sam," she said. "I'm all right. We're all right. This is a nice police officer. He's a gentleman. He's not here to do us harm." She was saying these things to convince herself or the policeman, not me. I saw that her hands were shaking.

"Mom?"

Already he had taken her out of the car. He was handcuffing my mother, while she leaned against the car.

"What about my daughter?"

He looked in, and it was like he was just remembering me again. He sighed. We waited. I thought I heard the sound of a few cicadas hanging on to summer, humming. My ears were full up with humming and ringing, leftover noise from the dance. I wasn't sure if I was still breathing.

Then, just as quickly as he had cuffed her, the officer uncuffed my mother.

"Consider this a warning," he said.

***

We drove home in silence. Even though the night air was warm, we couldn't stop shaking.

"Mom," I said after a while. "Aren't you going to report this?"

"Report it? Report it to whom? The police?"

That night the house seemed suddenly too big. It had too many windows and dark corners. My mother turned on every light, then turned them all off again. She locked and bolted all the doors and we sat together on the sofa, watching, waiting—for what, we weren't sure. Then, when we grew sleepy, I didn't hesitate to climb into her big bed and she didn't stop me.

S
TONE CALLED ME THE NEXT MORNING.
He said he was sorry our big evening had been cut short and he had wanted so badly to drive me home. We both knew what that meant. It meant we could have kissed again. He was wondering if my mother would allow him to take me out that night to look at the stars. I wasn't used to talking with a boy on the phone. I thought of Stone standing in the McLemore kitchen, or sitting in his room. The McLemores even had phones that didn't have a dial, but buttons with numbers you pushed. I put down the receiver and ran to my mother's room to ask.

She hesitated, but after I begged and begged, my mother said that I could go out with Stone, only for a little while. She had lectures to go over and papers to grade. She sat at her desk with open books all around her and a blank sheet of paper already in the typewriter, daring her. She was behind with everything and I could tell she just wanted me to leave her alone.

***

We went through some nearby woods, then hiked up to the top of an old Indian mound that had escaped being subdivided. There was a full moon and the sky was clear and bright. The night was still, and the stars were all over the place. Stone brought a telescope and we took turns looking through it.

He knew so much. He told me that Ptolemy of Alexandria developed the idea of the sun and planets moving around the earth in the second century. He told me someone in the thirteenth century figured out that a tube filled with gunpowder and lit at one end gave a push as the gasses rushed out, and boom, you've got a rocket. Stone knew about guns and bombs and where the Milky Way was. But then we turned our focus on the moon. I felt the way Galileo must have felt looking at the moon for the first time through
his
telescope, seeing the lunar surface clearly marked by craters. It wasn't perfect. The moon wasn't perfect and there wasn't a man
in
it, but Stone and I both knew that soon there might be a man
on
it.

Stone built a little fire and we roasted marshmallows. He was an Eagle Scout, so he knew about camping, being outside, and the maps of the moon marked with sections of seas called Ocean of Storms, Sea of Clouds, Sea of Serenity, and the Sea of Tranquility, where the first astronauts were headed. The fire illuminated his smile. Goose bumps ran over my scalp. We grew quiet.

"I'm sorry that your dad died," he said after a while. "My parents can drive me crazy, but. Well. That must be hard for you and your mom."

"I miss him." I thought about that. "I really do."

"What was he like?"

"He was handsome and fun. He was always game to do stuff, you know? He liked to read but he wasn't at all like my mom. He was good in science." We smiled at each other then, Stone and I. Maybe because we both realized that when I described my dad, I was also describing Stone.

We lay down together on top of fallen pine needles, staring at the sky. His jacket smelled of wood smoke. We stared at the moon until a blue ring appeared. "Try this," he said. "Let yourself relax, and focus on the space between the moon and the stars. Don't think about anything. Then let yourself float. If you can, you can ride up there with them."

We went quiet and we stayed quiet together in a way that felt like we were talking.

Then after a while, he said, "My dad says they're trying to destroy Christianity and democracy and change what Mississippi's all about."

"Who's 'they'?" I wished he could just keep talking about the moon.

"The Kennedys. Outsiders."

"I don't understand why you'd hate President Kennedy," I said, making my voice go soft. "He's the one who's behind your space age. He's the one getting us to the moon."

"Someday we'll move on to other planets; the moon is just a training ground." His voice sounded calm now, especially as he began to go on and tell me about the combustion process, fuel functions, oxidizers, compressed gas, and thrust. He rolled over and turned toward me then, holding my face between his hands.

"I love knowing that I'm keeping you safe, Samantha Thomas." He drew me so close that I could almost taste the sweet marshmallow of his breath. "Don't you like knowing that too?"

It was such a strange question, I couldn't take it seriously. "
Nyet,
" I said with a put-on Russian accent. He squeezed my jaw with his hand.

"Sometimes you're too smart for your own good." He brought my mouth up to his and we kissed and kissed, hard until we went gentle.

I couldn't help but feel like my world was coming out of focus, and it wasn't a bad feeling at all. Everything was moving and changing—the clouds, the moon, the earth, our town, us, me.

Anything could have happened there in those woods. Anything magical and anything evil too.

***

My mother was on the phone with my grandmother when I got back home that night. Stone was careful not to keep me out late. He said he wanted to earn my mother's respect. When he told me this, I liked him even more.

My mother held the phone almost at arm's length and I could hear my grandmother's voice.

"I want you both here right now. I want you out of that town. I want you to sleep here under this roof. You are no longer safe there. You need to be with your own people." My grandmother claimed to know more than most about violence in Mississippi because her mother, father and aunt lived during the Civil War and had told her everything she knew. Even though my great-aunt's name was Little Bit, she was considered a strong woman, one of the toughest ladies, and she lived to be ninety-five years old. My grandmother's name was Thelma Addy. Most people knew her for her bridge playing, her good housekeeping, and her fruit preserves.

I waited for them to get off the phone. I wanted to tell my mother about Stone. I wanted to ask her questions about these strange new feelings I had.

My mother bit her lower lip. "I appreciate the offer—really, I do." She was still formal with my dad's mother. "But I'm afraid we can't come for Thanksgiving. I'm giving this party, and I just can't cancel. I'm up for promotion, you know."

My mother had already invited students and faculty over for Thanksgiving in two days' time—all the people who didn't go home over the short holiday. The left-behinds, that's what Perry called them.

"Maybe we can come for Sam's birthday," she said. I don't know why she didn't just say Christmas, because I had been cursed with a Christmas birthday.

Willa Mae stayed with us the day before Thanksgiving and we made a champagne punch and boiled five pounds of Gulf Coast shrimp the following day because my mother hated turkey. All afternoon Perry, Willa Mae, and I used shot glasses to make circles out of slices of expensive Pepperidge Farm bread, the kind we used only for company and never for lunch sandwiches. He talked to me about taking pictures.

"You can't be afraid of your subject," he said. "You're behind the camera and it's like your shield, your armor. Nothing can hurt you when you've got proof." He picked up one of the little white bread rounds and held it up like a shield. I did the same and we played at jousting.

We made mounds of bread rounds, and Willa Mae wouldn't let us throw out the crusts. She put them in bags to freeze for the day she would make some of her good bread pudding. Then we spread the bread rounds with butter and carefully laid cucumber slices on top or dabbed them with black and red caviar from a jar.

After a while Willa Mae and I told the story again about what had happened that day at the drugstore. It made us both shake to talk about it, but we still wanted to tell the story again.

"And all because they didn't want those students sitting at the lunch counter," I said.

"Aha!" Perry said. "An agitator in the making!"

"There are a lot of rules in this world—good ones and not-so-good ones," my mother said. "You still gotta follow them all or work with the system to change them. That's what living in our country is all about."

I rolled my eyes. "Mom. Sometimes you can sound like such a teacher-mom."

Willa Mae laughed and shook her head and told me I was walking on thin ice.

***

My mother decided to make the party a celebration of the college's new art acquisition: an all-red canvas painting the school had just purchased from an artist who also blew up balloons and sold them, calling them artworks of his breath.

My mother didn't like this artist's work, but she said hosting a party would hopefully let her win back points with members of the tenure and promotion committee. She said people were still whispering about her "mistake" at Tougaloo.

The leaves hadn't all fallen and you still didn't need a coat. Next door our neighbors gathered and took pictures of one another dressed up, because they were celebrating Thanksgiving like every other normal family in Jackson. They stood in their new clothes in front of their house. I wanted to shout out to them to focus, to stand in the light, or not stand out at all because they looked too staged and tense. None of them knew what to do with their hands.

The students who came from my mother's college looked shaggy. The girls wore short skirts and black stockings or narrow slacks, no lipstick, lots of powder, and heavy eye makeup. Perry told me they were dressing like actresses they'd seen in New Wave films. Perry had his Pentax camera around his neck, focused, he said, from two feet to infinity.

One boy held his packet of Old Golds while he blew cigarette smoke, talking to a girl he was trying to impress. He was saying, "Need is an autoinduced mechanism implanted by the corporate culture that unfortunately permeates our innermost thoughts." I stepped away from them and laughed when Perry rolled his eyes.

Our house grew crowded with students and professors all eating and talking at once about "cultural space" and "interiority." Did they make these words up? Cultural space—what was that supposed to mean?

I heard one student ask one of the professors if he thought white people were better than black people. The professor looked at the student and said, "Son, we stopped talking about that when Darwin settled the matter. We're all people. We're just going to have to live with that."

Perry had taken out his camera and was snapping pictures of everyone talking.

"Couldn't you work some magic and make me look prettier?" my mother said. She kept moving her face to the right because she didn't like pictures showing her right side. "Take some pounds off here?" she said, laughing, putting her hands on her hips. "Use a soft-focus filter or something?" She smiled as she said this.

He told my mother to look out the window and she did, and I could see what he saw. I could see her face lit up. I could see her beauty.

I was glad then that he didn't say anything dinky like, "Oh, you are so beautiful, you need no enhancing." He didn't say anything at all. He never took his right eye away from his camera. He kept clicking and clicking, moving around the room. My mother looked so happy.

Watching Perry work, I saw that he became serious and focused so that the rest of us might as well have all fallen away. He was there, but he was not there. He sweated. He moved differently and as easily as a cat. My mother had told me Perry hated teaching, but that he was among the best.

"Photography's not art," I heard someone telling Perry. "Art shouldn't have anything to do with mechanical equipment or technology. It should be an artist and a pen, a paintbrush, or some clay."