Sources of Light (6 page)

I didn't make eye contact with anyone. I looked down at my shoes or I picked off the rest of the pink polish from my nails, while my mother showed slides of paintings of virgins, Old Testament patriarchs, bloodied St. Sebastians, and Jesuses getting beaten by the mobs. I looked up to see a few students listening. One was asleep. Her lecture was on religious icons and martyrs from the past, but it felt as if she were suggesting that this past had everything to do with our lives right then.

The students who listened sometimes nodded their heads in agreement. At the end, they clapped. Someone, not Perry, snapped a picture. I felt clearly then that the students who listened liked her and what she said, and it surprised me because it was only my mother.

***

Monday morning after the lecture at Tougaloo, my mother and I found the flowerpots at our front door knocked over, the dark, glossy leaves of our sasanqua bushes trampled, and the words
WE'RE WATCHING
painted in red on our front door. Garbage was all over our lawn and it wasn't even our garbage. We both started picking up the lawn when we saw that among the garbage was that morning's paper with my mother's picture there on the front page of the
Clarion-Ledger
under a headline that read "Local Professor Addresses All-Negro Crowd." There she was, my mom, standing in that auditorium at Tougaloo, her mouth open and her hands raised in the air as though she were speaking to a crowd of hundreds.

"Your picture's in the paper," I said. "That
should
be good."

"No," my mother said. "Not good."

Neither one of us said anything else. My mother just put her hand over her mouth. There was another, smaller photo. I looked closer. In the bigger photo my mother looked as though she were convincing a crowd of something even though she was just talking to a few people about art. I was in the smaller picture, the one with the few people there clustered together. I looked closer at my tiny figure, the only white person. I couldn't help but notice how tightly Tine's old shirt fit across my chest.

This was way after what had happened in Montgomery, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man, and even after the bombings, fire hoses, and police dogs in Birmingham, where Bull Connor unleashed the KKK on a group of Freedom Riders on Mother's Day.

I, for one, did not want to get involved in any of that. I just wanted to fit in to this place just as we had fit in to all the other towns we had lived in, go along like everyone else, do whatever it was we were supposed to do, let whatever was supposed to happen happen. I intended to live my life staying out of the way.

But white teachers weren't supposed to teach black students. White people weren't supposed to be among so many black people. Now all of a sudden my mother and I had jumped onto the pages of the local newspaper known by some as the
Klan-Ledger.
We were officially involved.

I ran back inside and got Perry's Pentax, adjusting the strap to fit better around me. If they had a picture of us at Tougaloo, I would take pictures of this. I took pictures of the garbage in our yard and the words splattered on our front door. Willa Mae came and the two of us finished cleaning up the yard while my mother set to work scrubbing down the front door.

Inside, when we finally ate breakfast, the phone rang. When I answered, I heard breathing, then a man's voice say, "Watch your back."

"Do I know you?" I asked, but the caller hung up.

Before I could tell my mother, the phone rang again. I picked it up on the second ring, ready to yell, but it was my grandmother. "Please remind your mother that women here should appear in print only three times in their lives: when they're born, when they get married, and when they die."

"I'll tell her."

"I imagine she's getting ready for school, so I won't bother her." I looked at my mother, who was still staring at the paper. She hadn't even turned the page. "When are you coming to visit?"

"I don't know," I said. "Soon."

"Good. I'll make all your favorites. How are you all doing on peaches?"

I opened the kitchen cupboard and saw the jars of my grandmother's pear and peach preserves, the cloves hanging, suspended in the sugary juices, just behind my grandmother's careful script. It was like having her there with us, stored away.

"Two jars left."

"I'll put away more." She stayed on the line. "I'm worried. Should I be worried?"

"I don't
think
so."

As soon as we hung up, I heard someone at the front door. I thought of the man's voice on the phone, the one who said "Watch your back." Before I could say,
Don't open the door!,
my mother opened the door and ran straight into Perry's arms. I looked at them together. When had this started? Since when did they hug like that? My mother buried her face in his neck and Perry whispered something into her ear. Even though I liked Perry, I felt queasy.

"This is all your fault," I said. "She wouldn't've even gone to Tougaloo if you hadn't told her. You took pictures. Now I bet my mom is going to lose her job."

"I didn't take that picture," Perry said quietly into my mother's hair.

"What are you talking about?" I said, pushing them apart.

"I never gave any film to that newspaper, Sam," he said. "Besides, I never took a shot like that." He said he took close-ups of students, but there were no wide-angle photographs of crowds. He sounded calm and sure, and even though I believed him, I didn't want to.

"So how did the newspaper get those pictures?"

"I think there was a guy from the school," Perry said. "But he never said who he was with."

"We believe you, Perry," my mother said.

"They threw trash all over our yard," I said.

"I know, I know," he said. "I'm here to help."

"You don't have to, Perry, really," my mother said. "I don't want to make you late for work."

"This is bad," I said. "Miss Jenkins won't like this one bit." I realized then that I was thinking of both my school and my mother's. Who in their right mind would ever ask me to the dance now? Perry had brought nothing but trouble into both our lives. I waited, looking from Perry to my mother, the three of us just standing there, breathing.

The phone rang again and I left my mother with Perry to answer it. "What is it now?" I screamed into the receiver.

"Hi, sweetie. This is Mary Alice's mom. Is your mom there?"

"Oh, I'm so sorry, Mrs. McLemore," I said. "Let me get her."

When I ran to the front door again, my mother and Perry separated, as though they had been caught doing something.

"Mom, you have a phone call." My mother went to her room to pick up the other phone.

I listened to them talk from the kitchen phone while I watched Perry outside sweeping the walk. "I know this is a difficult time," Mrs. McLemore said, as though someone in our family had just died. "But maybe we can help." Mrs. McLemore wanted to know if we could come over for dinner in a week or so. I gently replaced the receiver and ran into my mother's room, nodding over and over, doing a silent clap as soon as she accepted the invitation.

***

When I sat down for lunch in the cafeteria at school, everyone stood up and left. Everyone had seen my mother in the paper.
Why did we have to eat with anyone anyway?
I tried to convince myself. Who'd made that rule? I didn't have anything to say to Mary Alice or her friends anyway. I looked around and saw Ears sitting alone, staring off and out the window. I sat across from him. He stared while I opened up my parchment paper.

"Don't you have a lunch?"

He said no. He said his father lost his job. "He joined a union. People don't like unions here. They think they're Communist. My dad's from Mississippi. He's no Russian."

"My dad's from here, too." I gave Ears half my peanut butter and banana sandwich. Then we took our minds off being hungry, reading out loud to each other from a comic book about superheroes.

After lunch we had a free period, so Ears and I stayed on the blacktop. There were still cicada shells everywhere, in the grass, and up and down tree trunks. A few were in the midst of coming out of their shells in slow motion, and it looked obscene, like you were seeing them doing something private.

"It's a K-2 sky," I said.

"What's that mean?"

"You use a K-2 yellow filter on your camera to darken the sky and bring out the clouds," I said. "Makes a better photograph. That's what my mom's friend Perry says."

Ears just nodded. "It looks cemetery out here to me."

"You mean sad?"

"That's what I said," Ears whispered to me. "Reminds me of something out of the Bible." Ears was a lot like my cousin Tine. He made me miss her.

"Which part?" I asked.

He shrugged. "That part when God gets mad?"

After that weekend the light changed altogether. Shadows crossed everything: the lawns, the houses, and the trees. In the afternoon, as I walked home from school, I marveled at how the sun lit up the tops of trees while all the undergrowth hovered in a green-black range. At home, Willa Mae and I threw open all the windows to let the cool inside.

***

A week after my mother's picture appeared in the paper, a week of eating lunch every day with Ears, a week of me just standing around outside or in the halls, watching everyone else go about their high school business, Mary Alice stood looking in the mirror of the girls' room, fixing her hair. She was putting her long blond hair into ponytails above her ears.

"You know my brother Stone?"

I nodded. I hoped I wasn't turning red.

"He said you were cute." She smiled, picked up her stack of books, propped them on her right hip, waved with two fingers, then twirled around and left, saying, "See you Friday at our house for dinner." Like a ballerina's, her head never moved when she walked. Mary Alice McLemore wasn't always the nicest, but she was the prettiest girl in both the ninth and tenth grade classes, and she was Stone's sister, almost entirely diminishing my competition. And he said I was cute! My luck had suddenly turned.

***

For the McLemores' I wore one of Tine's old red dresses. My mother wore a drippy black skirt with a knit black top. Together she hoped they looked like a black cocktail dress. She wore a string of pearls her mother had given her, and she clipped two sparkly earrings on the front of her top for decoration. To me, they looked like two earrings trying to look like something they weren't.

"That's the biggest flagpole I've ever seen," my mother said as we walked up to the McLemores' front door.

"That old thing?" Mrs. McLemore said, standing at the entrance. "Well, we're very patriotic when it comes to this state."

"Don't let her scare you away," Mr. McLemore joked. "Call me Jack." His face was red, and already he had a drink for my mother as we walked into their home. She laughed and accepted it, the ice clinking in the wet glass. "You fly yours?"

"I'm afraid not," my mother said. "Not since my husband died. Besides, we don't have a flagpole."

"I understand he died a war hero," Mr. McLemore said, quietly, in a way I appreciated.

My mother nodded.

I wanted to say something more about my dad, other than that he was dead.

"He was in charge of his own platoon," I said. "They were bringing in supplies to a village. But before, their helicopter crashed. He stayed with his soldiers until the end."

"He must have been very brave," Mrs. McLemore said. "And you must be so proud that he fought for our country."

My mother just stared off at some point beyond Mrs. McLemore.

***

Stone was there and so was Mary Alice. They were setting the table and pouring iced tea. They looked like they were in a television commercial. They introduced my mother to little Jeffy.

"Jeff Davies," he said. He wore plastic Slinky glasses with eyes that popped out.

"For Jefferson Davis? You're kidding, right?" my mother said, laughing. I looked at her and I tried to make my eyes say,
Can't you just pretend to be like other people? Just this once? For me?
I knew my mother was tired from her day of teaching, and already the two sips of her drink had gone to her head. Mrs. McLemore excused Jeffy so that he could go watch
The Jetsons
on TV.

"What a lovely shade," my mother said, walking into their living room.

The room had what Mrs. McLemore called lavender-colored walls, which I hoped my mother wouldn't comment on. My mother hated what people called the color lavender because she said it never looked like the real lavender. She felt the same about lilac. I thought the room was nothing but beautiful.

Mrs. McLemore said she saw the color in Natchez. She talked about Natchez—the silt, the rich alluvial soil of the delta and how it had once been the floor of the sea itself. She made me want to go there. She told my mother about their new living room ceiling covered with Armstrong Cushion to cover the cracks and stains, not knowing that my mother didn't give a hoot about such things. But I did. I wanted a house like the McLemores'.

Over their fireplace, leaning on the mantel were wooden plaques that read
FAITH, HOPE
, and
LOVE
.

Mrs. McLemore could keep a conversation going. She said that she used to love that Loretta Young. Every Sunday night she had looked forward to
The Loretta Young Show
on TV, just to watch Loretta float down that open staircase wearing a floor-length strapless gown with a full diaphanous skirt. Every Sunday night. Mrs. McLemore's pearls settled into the hollows of her collarbone while she sat for a minute, thinking about Loretta Young.

Magazines called
America
and
Commonwealth
were fanned out on the coffee table.

We all at once began to talk about how TV shows ended, how Dinah Shore blew kisses and said, "See the USA in your Chevrolet," and how Red Buttons used to soft-shoe it off the stage to his "Ho-Ho Song."

"You know what I miss?" my mother said. "I miss that Jimmy Durante show—when he ended with 'Good night, Mrs. Calabash.'"

"Isn't that Jewish?" Mrs. McLemore said.