Sources of Light (20 page)

Word got out that my mother and I were probably leaving, so at that moment in time no one bothered us. As we ended our year at school studying balanced proportions and Fibonacci numbers in Miss Jenkins's math class, we hunted for a pattern in the senseless and unpatterned acts occurring nightly in Jackson. With order came understanding and beauty in our mathematical formulas. Chaos and a lack of pattern were ugly ... or were they? That same spring, my mother was giving lectures about modern art, showing slides of crazy-looking drip paintings by a man named Jackson Pollock, whom some called Action Jackson.

***

For our final communications project, Miss Jenkins asked us each to report on an "outside event." It could be either local or national, but it had to take place outside our school walls. She said the administration wanted us to be "more aware." Miss Jenkins didn't seem to be too happy about that.

Mary Alice talked about attending the Mississippi State Fair the previous summer with her family. Miss Jenkins actually clapped at the end of Mary Alice's presentation. Others reported on church events and family reunions. Ears, whom I called Tempe now, talked about the stickball games he played when he and other members of the Choctaw nation got together. He brought in his game equipment and demonstrated, barefoot, for the class. Everybody, even Miss Jenkins, liked his report.

I borrowed an easel from Perry's things and I propped up pictures one after the other, pausing between each picture to give everyone an eyeful. I showed the pictures I took at the lunch counter at the drugstore, the ones Perry had helped me develop. I showed all of them, ending with the picture of the waitress staring at Willa Mae, the picture I called "Hate." Then I showed the pictures I took of the woman writer, Miss Welty. I showed her smiling and signing her books. I showed pictures of her hugging people, both black and white. I didn't say much during my presentation. I wasn't much interested in speechmaking anymore. Besides, you know what they say about pictures, right? They tell a thousand words. So why make it a thousand and one?

I knew Miss Jenkins wouldn't like my presentation even though I showed not one but two outside events. By then I didn't care about her or Mary Alice or my grades. I did care what Tempe thought, so I looked at just him while I stood in front of the class and ran through all the pictures. Soon we would all go our separate ways. Families would move across the state, some even out of state. Jackson and a good part of Mississippi had proven to be a difficult place to live. Tempe and his family would move to Philadelphia, Mississippi, where his mother had family and his father hoped to find work. Miss Jenkins would surprise both Tempe and me by sending in his cicada report to Mississippi State in Starkville, where he received a camp scholarship to study science over the summer.

"Pictures are a form of communication," I said at the very end of my presentation. "When we communicate we have a bill of rights that guarantees us freedom of speech and expression." I looked around at all the faces in my class. I waited for someone, anyone, to just nod. "Right?" I said. Tempe blinked. The others looked blank. Someone yawned.

***

My mother sent out job applications, and in May she got word about a well-paying job as an assistant professor at a university in Boston. She got refitted with a new hearing aid, one that let in all the sound so she didn't have to keep turning it up or down.

We didn't want to go. My mother and I didn't want to leave Mississippi or the South. We left because we had to.

Together we repainted the house and put it on the market, selling it within a month's time. That summer we planned to rent a place in Boston, then see some of the East Coast and tour Washington, D.C., for the first time, and with the extra money made from selling our house, my mother and I planned the trip she had always wanted. We were going to spend ten days in Greece, walking the steps up to places like the Acropolis and the Parthenon, finding out more about what had once been a nearly perfect civilization and democracy.

It was going to be a new start. Because we were moving so far away, my aunt said it would be too inconvenient for her to send my cousin Tine's old clothes, which meant that I would have to find my own clothes, a hunt I both dreaded and anticipated.

We began packing, and at the end of every day, our little house was filled with more brown boxes that held our dishes, linens, books. One afternoon I opened the kitchen pantry and stared at what we had left of my grandmother's fruits and vegetables in their glass jars—the garlic and dill bobbing like the snow in those wintry Christmas paperweights I admired in storefront windows. I understood then why Perry had taken a picture of the jars.

At night I looked out my window at the moon growing fuller over the roof of the house across the street.

It was hardest to say goodbye to Willa Mae. She told me I was responsible for knowing where she packed the vacuum cleaner bags and that I had to do a better job of helping out more around the house, because now it was just going to be my mother and me. No Willa Mae helping. No Grandmother coming during emergencies. I was scared of leaving, of moving away from what I knew to something I did not know at all. I remembered Willa Mae telling me her biggest fear: that she would do something she'd regret. She'd told me fear was just one more thing you could change into something else, something else like anger or even love.

I wrapped up the picture of Willa Mae laughing and gave it to her. When she opened it in front of me, she smiled.

"I
will
miss you," she said, sitting down with me on a box to eat our last meal together—peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. She told me sometimes bad things happened for a good reason. If my mother had gotten her promotion, we wouldn't be headed for Boston. Either way you looked at it, we wouldn't have had much of a second chance at starting over if we stayed.

"Oh, Willa Mae." I was so sad, I could barely hold my head up.

"You can call me Bill," she said. Only those close to Willa Mae were allowed to call her Bill. "So? How you do?"

"Not too good," I said.

I was going to miss tending my grandmother's kitchen garden with Tine every summer, cooking and canning our harvests. I didn't know what was ahead of us. All I knew was what and whom we were leaving behind. I knew these streets, the houses, which trees were the best trees to climb, which hills were the best to skate down. I knew this place. And I could not see my way into knowing any other place as well as I knew Mississippi.

Willa Mae put down her sandwich and moved closer. She drew me to her, keeping her arm around me. I couldn't remember when I was ever this close to Willa Mae. She smelled of tobacco and ginger both. "In Mississippi, people have a way of holding on to the past," she said. "The mud here is sticky. But sometimes you got to let go."

***

On our last day, the day we were ready to pull out, I checked under the hood of our car before we left. I'd gotten into the habit after I'd read about how bombs were planted there under the hoods of cars during the night.

My mother and I got in. She backed out the drive. We waved to our house. We did all the things a body does to say goodbye. But even as we drove away from our house I missed it, missed the camellias that grew as big as trees, the monkey grass, the pines, the summer heat. But at the same time, I felt such a relief.

My mother sat in the driver's seat, smiling. We would go up north and something else new would begin. She knew this and I knew this. Our knowledge was behind her smile.

I wanted to be mad at everyone in the South who had done so much wrong. I was ready to be mad at the whole state of Mississippi, but then out of nowhere I looked at the road, then up at the sky, and thought,
Thank you.
Without all the bad, I wouldn't recognize the good. I wouldn't know. I wouldn't know about feeling bad for people and maybe I wouldn't know so much about feeling good for people either. I knew more, and this felt like a new old coat from my grandmother. I needed it all to feel this way, and I wondered what it might be if a whole country felt the same.

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.

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.