Sources of Light (15 page)

During commercial breaks, Aunt Ida whispered her gossip, and the conclusions were all the same:
She doesn't know better,
which meant
She doesn't know her place,
which meant
She's gone beyond her raising.
Staying put as you were and with what you had was of primary importance. Even if we weren't listening, we cousins were meant to hear all of this.

W
E LEFT EARLY THE FOLLOWING MORNING,
the morning after Christmas Day and my birthday, while everyone slept. She didn't tell me because she didn't have to, but I knew my mother never liked saying goodbye.

On the back seat of our VW Bug sat a box full of peach, pear, and plum preserves with masking tape labels made out in my grandmother's neat script. Next to the box of jars sat a bundle of my cousin Tine's old clothes folded neatly inside a shopping bag from Maison Blanche in New Orleans. In previous years, Aunt Ida had my mother sort through these clothes with me on the guest bed, and I was supposed to get all worked up over each item she pulled from the bag. My mother must have said something, because this year Aunt Ida secretly put the bag there in the back seat.

As we passed through Franklin, I read the sign on the store advertising bait:
OUR WORMS CATCH FISH OR DIE TRYING.
A new love song was playing on the car radio.

"Find something better," my mother said. "I hate that song."

I switched the station to a song played with a guitar, asking where all the flowers went. We drove in silence, staring out from our separate places. We passed through the colored section of town, where some lived in cinder-block homes with dirt floors and stuck colored bottles on the branches of trees stripped of foliage. My dad once told me that the bottles sucked in evil spirits called "haints." The rising sun shone through all that colored glass, and the wind whistled past the mouths of the bottles. I rolled down my car window to listen. Other people lived in nailed-together shacks with board floors. Some lived in shacks without windows or doors. Willa Mae told me once that the roofs often leaked in shacks like those, and the floors—if there were floors—often rotted. But we were used to these sights and this knowledge, or we were supposed to be used to it—the whites go here, the blacks there. Look out at a field and you half expected to see black people bent over picking cotton. It was the way things were.

Leaving Franklin, I thought of what it must have been like for my father to leave Franklin, and also what it must have been like for my mother to leave her hometown after she married.

"Why did you marry Dad, Mom?"

My mother sniffed through her nose, looked at me, then smiled.

"I wanted something more and he was it. We both had big dreams."

"Yeah?"

She nodded. "Yeah."

"So? Do you still?"

She shrugged. "Dreams get complicated."

"That must have taken a lot of courage," I said. "To marry Dad. He was so different from you."

"It was hardly courageous. It was just the only thing to do. We were in love."

We passed the smoking ruins of what could have been a church, and slowed only for a longer glimpse. We were getting used to seeing things smolder. Then we heard a police siren pop and my mother looked in her rearview mirror and pulled over.

"Oh, no," I said, holding on to the door handle, as though at any moment we could run for it.

"Was I speeding?"

I shook my head. "You were going slow."

"Maybe that's the problem."

The police officer walked slowly to our car, bent down, looked at my mother, and said, "Don't I know you? Who did you used to be?"

"Martha. Martha Thomas." She smiled. "I still am."

"That's right, that's right. I saw your picture in the paper. I knew your husband, Ed. We went to high school together. We played football. He was a good man, an outstanding quarterback."

He leaned in further and I saw his face. He was a handsome man about my mother's age, with blue eyes and a nice smile. "Don't believe I've met your daughter."

My mother told him my name and he tipped his hat my way.

They got talking. He joked about how he and my dad used to make away with watermelons from a nearby field, then crack them open on the road. He jiggled the keys and change in his pocket as he spoke. When he laughed, he put his tongue between his teeth and made a hissing sound. It smelled smoky outside. "He was a good man."

Finally, my mother asked why he'd stopped her.

"There's been a report of some trouble. Outsiders, most likely. Always is. Outsiders come in to stir up trouble."

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.

W
HEN
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."