Sources of Light (16 page)

Stone just took my hand and snatched me out, leading me away. I kept looking back, expecting someone to come after us, but nobody did. I was both relieved and angry that Stone had pulled me away. I was still wearing the cross necklace he had given me, but I didn't want to think of Stone in that way right then.

Perry and my mother came running toward Stone and me.

"Thank God you're all right," my mother said, hugging me, moving me away from Stone. We heard sirens then. Somebody had set a house on fire across the street. What else could happen? Perry reloaded his camera and made to go toward the house, but my mother held his arm.

"No. We're going. Now," she said.

Perry nodded, said "Right," then put his arm around me and around Stone too.

"No," my mother said. "Not with him. Not with that boy."

"But Mom. Stone got me out..."

"That's okay, Mr. Walker. I've got a ride back."

Perry looked at Stone and let his arm drop. We three just started walking back to the car, none of us saying anything. What was there left to say?

***

As I fell asleep that night and many other nights that week after Christmas, I prayed I wouldn't have to write an essay called "What I Did over the Holidays." I kept hearing Miss Jenkins's fake-peppy voice singing, "
Go, Mississippi, you're on the right track. Go, Mississippi, and this is a fact, Go, Mississippi, you'll never look back.
" Never look back? Didn't everyone in this state talk about The War every other day? And then there was that last part of the song when you spell it, and we all knew that we would spend the rest of our lives singing the spelling:
M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-I!

A
T SCHOOL
, M
ARY
A
LICE TOLD EVERYBODY
that her father had given her little brother, Jeffy, a BB gun for Christmas and her mother bought her a brand-new portable TV so she could watch programs all day from her bed. It was an altogether new television season and a new year. 1963.

Talk of the New Year only made my mother irritated with everything and everybody, especially me. Why couldn't I pick up my room? she wanted to know. I was spoiled because I didn't like any of Tine's old hand-me-downs, clothes that to me looked like costumes my Aunt Ida put together.

I knew the real reason my mother was testy. Perry hadn't called since he'd dropped us off at home after our trip to McComb, and I think she was realizing what I already knew: She liked him. She liked him a lot.

But she was also angry with him. It really had been dangerous in McComb. Out-of-state newspapers and TV news crews were coming into town now and reporting on what had happened there. What had happened in McComb was happening in other small towns all over the state—both the voters registering and the rioting. On the news, we watched little white boys turning a hose on an old black woman while grown white people just stood by and watched.

When the phone finally did ring, though, it wasn't Perry. It was Stone. He wanted to know if he could take me to the Petrified Forest. I hadn't been there since my grandparents took me one summer when I was little. Stone
had
rescued me, in a way, that day in McComb less than a week ago. Surely there must be a good explanation for him being there that day. I needed to talk to him in person. I pleaded with my mother to let me go with him. Finally she agreed.

Before he came to pick me up late that Saturday afternoon, I dressed carefully. I wore my own sweater and skirt. I wore the gold cross necklace Stone had given me. I clipped on the earrings my grandmother had given me for Christmas.

The Petrified Forest wasn't very far from where we lived, and when we got there, we sat on the bench from prehistoric times called the Caveman's Bench.

"This must have been something when these stone logs were living trees. They must have been huge," I said, but Stone was looking up at the sky. Already the stars were out. Even though our teachers called these woods Mississippi's own Grand Canyon, most kids my age tended to take the Petrified Forest for granted. They walked these woods every spring on field trips.

"I love to come out here and look at the sky," Stone said. "This could be the best, most quietest place I know. See? See all the stars you can already see?"

I turned to him then. "I need to know something for sure, Stone. Are you a member of that Citizens' Council with your dad?"

He looked up at the sky. "I'm not my father."

"I know that. But are you a member?"

The air was crisp and smelled of burning leaves. Somewhere up in the trees, an owl called.

"That was a bad day in McComb, and my father..." Stone stopped himself. "My father wasn't himself." Stone switched the subject. He talked about the dark side of the moon and other unmapped territories.

"Why was your dad so mad? Why does he hate black people so much?"

"He gets that way. I don't know. He doesn't like what's happening. He doesn't like change. And he really doesn't like outsiders coming in and changing things."

"Outsiders like my mom and me?"

"Y'all are different."

"Like Perry, then. He's an outsider."

"Yes, he is."

"So what if he is?"

"My dad thinks he stirs up trouble."

"Do you?"

"I don't know what to think anymore."

If the cicadas lived longer, they would have been humming loud all around us, making a racket, because I thought I heard them, in my head. I thought about prehistoric crawdads and turtles crawling up from the stream. Then I thought of what all had happened or could happen here, acts of violence that never made the news. Only last year a black man had been lynched in these very woods. On the nearby highway, a black mother of three had been raped, and then shot in the head. And there we were.

Stone pointed out the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper. He talked about altitudes and zeniths.

"Stone. Everything's crazy right now. Can't you think of anything else but constellations?"

"Things'll settle down."

"Or maybe they'll get worse before they get better."

Stone shook his head. "No way they can get worse. Everybody will learn they don't want to live like this and then we'll go back to the way things were."

I thought about that. "What if nobody wants that? What if nobody wants things the way things were? Black people you and me both know can't vote, and they'll keep on making next to nothing, raising their families in little shacks. That's the way things are. You think that's right?"

He sighed and fell back onto the ground, which was covered with soft dry pine needles. "I don't know, Samantha. I don't know." He pulled me down with him and hugged me tight, something he had never done before. Stone had a sour smell. I did not know where it was coming from, just that his odor had changed.

I could feel his chest against me. He put his face close to mine. He kissed my lips. Then we both kissed, this time together. It was a slow, sweet kiss, not one of those messy, lippy wet kisses with tongues I'd seen in the backs of buses and movie houses. And I didn't know that my eyes would close automatically, but they did this time, and when I opened them only because I didn't want to miss seeing this, his eyes were open too, and we just stayed together like that, our lips kissed swollen.

Thumb-size beetles scurried around us among the leaves.

"Damn them." Stone got up off the ground. He kicked each leg to shake his pants down. Then he started stepping on the beetles, smashing them with his boots. I thought of my mother's word
primordial
then. Beetles were like cicadas—
both looked to be little armored dinosaurs. Up close, you could see all their jewel-like colors too.

"They're not bothering anything," I said.

"They're pests."

"No, they're not," I said. "Besides, they'll just keep coming."

"Not if we stop them."

He walked around stomping and stomping, all the while looking at me and smiling. I tried not to mind all that crunching, but my heart stopped.

Then Stone finally stopped and smoothed his hair up and back with a comb the way everyone's seen James Dean do. I touched my earlobes.

"My earrings!" I started feeling around in the pine needles. "They're gone. They belonged to my great-grandmother."

Stone and I knelt for some time, feeling among the leaves and pine needles and dead beetles, but it was so dark, it was hopeless.

"Don't worry, sweetie," he said. "I'll get you a new pair."

A new pair? The idea of replacing my only inherited heirloom knocked the words right out of me. I couldn't think of what to say, so I said nothing. My ears felt raw, like the feeling your toes have right after you cut your toenails.

I stayed on the ground, crawling and feeling around. Under a bush, my fingers curled around something that felt a lot like a camera.

"This is Perry's," I said, surprised. It was the small camera Perry had shown me in his darkroom at the university, the one he said he'd used to photograph the military hospital in D.C. I looked closely and saw that the lens was cracked and the body of the camera was dented too, but it was still loaded with film.

"Why would Perry's camera be here?" Stone said, helping me up. "And how come it's smashed?"

"I know he comes here a lot to take pictures," I said. "Maybe it fell out of his camera bag."

Stone started to reach for the camera to have a look, but I put it in the pocket of my jacket, hardly thinking about it. Stone just stood there, looking at me and then at my jacket pocket, back and forth. I smiled. "I'll just give it to him next time he comes over," I said.

Stone took me back home. He didn't say anything more about the earrings. I didn't know how I would face my mother or my grandmother, knowing I'd lost the pearl earrings. Stone didn't seem too upset. His mind was on something else. He turned on the car radio. Elvis was playing, "Don't Be Cruel." Stone drove on, and I sat there in the passenger seat knowing I'd left behind something my ancestors had saved just for me—I'd lost them, just like that, kissing a boy.

I tried to forget about the earrings. I kept singing the words to that Elvis song in my head as though convincing myself of something: "
The future looks bright ahead.
"

M
Y MOTHER GOT THE CALL THE FOLLOWING MORNING
. She hung up the phone, and then she went to the back door and looked out the screen. Her shoulders were shaking and I knew she was crying.

We both went to the hospital.

A machine behind his bed beeped and plastic tubes hung from a stainless-steel bar, one half filled with blood. An IV tube dripped some clear liquid into his arm, and the gauze wrapped around his forehead was stained with his browning blood. I wanted so badly for him to wake up and joke, look at my mother that way that made her happy, but Perry just lay there swollen shut, unable to move or speak.

Somebody had beat him and beat him and beat him. Somebody had kicked his ribs, his legs, and his head. I heard the nurse whisper to my mother that Perry had head trauma, brain swelling, facial lacerations, and cracked ribs. Both his legs were in casts, his kneecaps shattered. Both his eyes were swollen shut as though whoever attacked him never wanted him to see again. Whoever did this had left him on the sidewalk in front of the newspaper building, a warning to journalists, even though the local paper never even printed any of Perry's photographs.

There was a lot of internal bleeding. My mother choked on those words.

She sat back down in the chair next to his bed. She held on to the fingers poking out of the bandages on his left hand. She squeezed them.

I tried not thinking about Stone kissing me until my lips swelled just the night before. I tried not imagining his hands on me, or what he looked like, smiling, standing up, there in the woods. I told myself not to care, because now was not the time for such thoughts.

Perry was my mother's friend. He was her boyfriend. She loved him, even though it was so hard to love anybody else after loving my dad. I think I knew this before she did. He was also my friend. He had given me his camera. Even though my mother went through all the reasons Perry shouldn't have given me his old camera, he still did. He told us his camera was like him. Indestructible.

We stayed all day. We closed our eyes and prayed, which we had not done together in a long time. The nurse came in and out of the room. Everything felt awful and I wondered why the whole world didn't seem to notice how bad things really were. I thought of how I'd gotten used to awful, how after my dad died the planets kept on spinning and I got up and ate breakfast every morning and kept on going to school. Something happens and it's terrible and you think you can't live another day, but then your mother gets used to it and you get used to it and you both keep on living, and you're not sure if that getting-used-to-things is good or the way life should be.

***

We visited Perry at the hospital every day that week. One day the nurses said he was a little better. The next day they said he was worse.

Driving to and from the hospital, my mother and I couldn't help but notice that Jackson looked like a war zone. Most everyone, black and white, was complaining about what a mess Mississippi had become. It was as if they were spending so much time scheming over the "black problem" that they weren't thinking about how to fix potholes, schools, abandoned houses, and burned-out buildings. For days we came home tired, eating tomato soup and crackers or bowls of cereal for dinner.

We both heard and read about ongoing investigations into Perry's attack. There were leads and suspects. Then on Friday, we read in the paper that they had arrested a man, a black man.

"They're saying this man didn't want Perry taking his picture trying to register to vote because it would hurt his family," my mother said, sitting there next to Perry, reading from the paper, shaking her head. "They're saying he went to Perry's place, broke in, took him away, and beat him."

I shook my head. "That's crazy," I whispered. I had started to whisper everything. "I don't believe any of that." I felt now I knew what the word
unspeakable
really meant.