Sources of Light (9 page)

Willa Mae stood against the wall close to the door. I could tell by her eyes that she had gone somewhere deep within herself, as if willing herself to disappear. We were the same like that.

One of the black women seated at the counter was a tall, pretty college-aged woman who carried a purse and two books. She could have been one of my mother's students, except that she was black. She stared down at the space on the counter in front of her, saying nothing.

"You've got to learn to see," Perry Walker had said to me, loading my camera with film. "The camera is gonna record whatever it's aimed at. It's up to you to pick what you want to record."

I brought my camera to my right eye, then closed my left, and from then on, the me that was me was gone and I was just seeing, watching everything through that lens. Mostly, I kept my focus on this girl, so pretty and so calm, staring down at a full glass of water somebody else had left behind.

Old and young white men closed in on that small group at the counter, and their focus was the same as mine. They called the girl names. She said nothing. The people at the counter with her said nothing. The white men standing behind her poured ketchup and then sugar over her head. She did nothing. The people at the counter with her did nothing. Young men gathered to jeer and gape, their cigarettes dangling from their lips. One punched her arm. She fixed her eyes on the lunch counter or on the glass of water—I couldn't tell which. She did nothing. If I had been her, sitting there, while all those nasty white boys poured a mess over my head, saying all those mean things, would I have been able to keep my cool like that? I thought of what gave her courage. She wanted to sit at the counter, but I also knew there was more. She wanted what I had and what I didn't even think twice about. She wanted to live her life, just like me and everybody else.

Those white men and boys were attacking her and she'd done nothing, but just by
being
there, by sitting there where she was not supposed to be sitting, she was doing something. They were screaming and getting so angry, their faces turned red. They made so much noise and their voices were so loud, you had to go quiet. I kept my eye behind the camera and snapped picture after picture. Then I quit taking pictures of what was happening. I took pictures of the crowd of angry white men yelling at the people at the lunch counter sitting there doing nothing. There were others in the crowd watching what was happening. They could have been looking at a circus performance or a child's running race. They were smiling and cheering. They shared cigarettes. They were having a good time.

The policemen stood by and watched.

There we all were in a town some called "A Fine Family Place," a town Miss Jenkins said William Tecumseh Sherman had burned to the ground ninety-nine years ago. Maybe we should have just left it that way.

I was still taking the pictures, my right eye glued to my camera, when I saw him, Stone. His face was one of the angry faces I snapped. He saw me and squeezed through the crowd, asking me what I was doing there.

"There's nothing here for you but
trouble,
" he said in a voice not at all like his. "Now go. Go."

"Why are
you
here? What are you doing?" I was shouting over the crowd now. My voice barely carried. There was a lot of pushing and shoving. I felt a hand on my arm. It was Willa Mae pulling me toward the door. When I turned back around, Stone was gone.

Outside, men were swinging baseball bats and billy clubs at black women carrying handbags and wearing white kid gloves. These women were all dressed up to go shopping, and these men came out of the drugstore and charged at them because ... because I don't know why. Because they were angry white men? That was all there was to it, all I could think of, and it was nothing but
wrong.

Willa Mae and I were both of the crowd and separated from the crowd. We were outside, our backs up against the building. I stepped forward and started taking pictures again. On what, on whom, and where to focus: it was like my camera knew what to do and I was just following its lead. People were yelling, their voices shouting, "They're not going to eat with us and they're not going to vote with us!"

"Your mother will kill us both if we don't get out of here." Willa Mae's voice rose above all the noise.

I rewound the film in my camera the way Perry taught me, unloaded the exposed film and put it in my pocket, then loaded a new roll. The drugstore waitress from behind the counter ran out shouting to a policeman that I had taken pictures and that I was "one of them outside agitators." The policeman headed toward me. When he caught up with me, he yelled for me to hand over my film.

For a scary moment I didn't know what to do. My heart was thumping. Could the policeman hear it? I thought of taking off, running as fast and as far as I could. I wiped the sweat from my palms on my shirt. I didn't hold my breath but tried to breathe, then lifted my camera to my right eye and snapped a picture of his angry face.

"Yessir," I said. I rewound the film, opened my camera, unloaded, and then gave him the roll with the one shot of himself, the full roll still safe in my pocket. The policeman walked away, stuffing the roll of film in his pocket.

Willa Mae stepped away from the drugstore and joined me. We hurried from the policeman. All around us men in pickup trucks drove past, their guns visible. People didn't show their guns, especially in town. You only saw guns when men went out hunting deer, rabbits, or squirrels.

Willa Mae touched me on the arm and said, "This way."

She led me to a shortcut back toward our subdivision. Finally, when we were clear of the town and the crowd, we slowed to a walk and then caught our breath. I rearranged my camera strap around my neck and tugged at my new bra. Willa Mae kept looking behind us.

I was still scared, but then my fear turned to anger. Why did these white people who had houses and cars, jobs and families, hate black people who were trying to make something of their lives or who looked to have nothing? I understood jealousy just fine, but this? Did it make them feel more important to hate? Something else must be at stake—something I couldn't see before me there in that store on that street in this town. They were scared of something bigger.

Being black or white wasn't supposed to make any difference. That's what I had been taught by my mother and my father both. This was so easy to say. Now I was realizing that it was a lie. And the rules, the rules I was supposed to follow, went against what we believed.

"Don't be scared," Willa Mae said.

I looked at her. "Aren't you scared?"

Willa Mae looked at me and said, "Shoot. Only thing I'm afraid of is that I'm going to do something I'll regret." We kept walking. In my mind I could still hear the sounds of people yelling "They're not going to eat with us and they're not going to vote with us!"

"Being scared is just one more thing to turn into what you want it to be," Willa Mae said. "The thing with fear is, it's like anger. You've got to change it into something else. Make it your weapon. Some can just turn it into smarts. The best of 'em can turn fear and anger into love." She looked out toward our neighborhood. "I'm not there yet."

"Have you ever voted?" I asked. She and I both knew there weren't many black people registered to vote in Mississippi.

I had never seen Willa Mae laugh out loud, but she laughed then and I saw that she was missing her side teeth. Willa Mae didn't usually look people in the eye, but she looked at me then.

"I tried to vote once," she said. "Clerk asked me how many bubbles it took to make a bar of soap. I thought it was one of those trick questions, and I said bubbles don't make soap, soap makes bubbles. He said I was wrong and I couldn't vote."

"What do soap bubbles have to do with voting?" I asked. "Did you ask?"

"Ask? I don't ask nothin'." She sounded mad. "I am colored. I am a colored woman. That's what I am."

I stopped myself from saying
I know how you feel
because what did I know? What could I know what it would be like to be black? To be the only girl in this white-personed world who was black? Would I ever really know what it was to step off a sidewalk to allow another person to pass because of her skin color?

I felt like I didn't know a darned thing. Seven years before, a Negro boy my age from Chicago had been tortured, tied to a cotton gin machinery fan, shot, and found later at the bottom of the Tallahatchie River. Even though nobody I knew in Mississippi spoke his name, news of Emmett Till gradually traveled to me and to Tine, but we never really could get anything more out of our parents. They held back as they did on most things that were happening. Now I supposed I knew why. To think on such dark happenings was almost more than a body could stand.

It started to rain, and Willa Mae and I made a run for the house. I was shivering, and even though I know she didn't believe me, I told Willa Mae it wasn't because I was scared.

"I
KNOW YOU'RE BUSY AND
I
KNOW WE JUST DID THIS
, but would you help me develop my film?" I asked. Perry Walker and I were standing in the hall outside my mother's office at the college while she sat grading papers.

He didn't hesitate. "Let's go."

We worked side by side in his darkroom. All along his shelves were cameras of every shape and size. I picked up a particularly small one, one I hadn't noticed before. Perry nodded and smiled.

"That little puppy's a gem," he said of his smallest camera. I brought it to my eye while he talked. "It's perfect for when you want to take pictures and go unnoticed. I used that to shoot a military hospital in D.C. Two full pages in
Life.
The nurses didn't even know I was taking pictures."

Before when we developed pictures together, I'd watched him while he did most of the work. This time, he watched me.

"My dad gave me my first camera when I was eleven," he told me. He pointed to a big old black camera on the shelf. I thought better than to touch it. "It was just after the war, when rations were over and people had more money and buying a camera was all the sudden possible." In this darkroom, Perry was more than likable. Maybe because he was teaching me something. Maybe because my mother wasn't a part of the picture.

"I can't even tell what this is a picture of," I said, watching one of the photographs develop in a pan of water. We both stood back for a minute, watching the pictures form in the trays full of chemicals. The wavy figures emerged under the water, and then we hung the pictures out to dry.

"Forget about wondering what the picture is
of.
Think about what it's
about
"

"They're just snapshots," I said.

"Snapshots are the best," he said. He talked to me about looking even before I took the shot. He told me about finding the light source by looking
around,
because it is not always right in front of you. "Find the shadows," he said. "Know where your light is coming from. Maybe the only difference between snapshots and photographs people call 'art' is intention."

"I don't know what that means, but when I was snapping those pictures, it felt a little like I was spying."

"Nothing wrong with a little snooping, as long as it serves a purpose," he said. "My buddy called it soul stealing."

"Gee." I looked closer at one picture in particular. It really was Stone McLemore at the drugstore, even though I was trying to convince myself that he hadn't really been there, that I had just imagined it.

Both of us looked at all the pictures hanging like wash on a line.

"All these?" He pointed to the pictures I'd taken at the lunch counter. "They tell a story." He talked about multiple or sequential images. He said that response to a particular image is always influenced by what we see before and after it.

"This one," he said, pointing to one that I could barely look at now. It was a picture of a boy dumping a load of sugar and ketchup over the head of that girl. "You got the shot right there," Perry said. "Man, girl. You really captured something here too," he said, pointing to another. "A person can shoot from her head and she can shoot from her heart. The best pictures are shot from both. That's what you got. Jeez." I liked it best when he didn't lecture. I liked it when he quit talking all arty-farty.

Then Perry and I looked closely at another picture, a close-up of the waitress. If somebody asked what hate looked like, I'd give him this picture. I had not known it then, but I had taken a picture of hate. Hate looked like that woman behind the lunch counter, her eyes, the lines around her mouth and nose so full of the intention to hate.

"Way to stay with the story," Perry said. There was admiration in his voice. Even I could hear that. "You got a good eye. I think I know an editor who would like this one." He pointed to the shot of the waitress. "Can I send it to him?"

"You'd do that?"

"Only with your permission."

I hesitated, for me, for my mother, for Willa Mae, for us all. I shook my head. "No," I said. Maybe I was making a mistake. Maybe giving permission to print the pictures was the right thing to do, but it was too dangerous. We didn't need any more scary phone calls or hate mail, and besides, once the pictures ran, what would Mary Alice think? And would Stone still like me? Even though I wasn't certain why Stone was at the drugstore that day, he
had
been concerned about me and my safety. Maybe he just happened to be there, getting a Coca-Cola, just as Willa Mae and I had done that day. I couldn't help myself. I still wanted Stone McLemore to like me.

"I understand," Perry said. "It's asking a lot. But that camera? My Pentax? It's yours now."

"Are you kidding?"

"No joke. You've earned it."

***

At school Miss Jenkins would not allow us students to discuss protesting or what had happened downtown at the drugstore, even though everyone was beginning to whisper about it. Instead, she gave us a brief lecture about how red birds and black birds don't mix. "God didn't want it that way," she said. At lunch, I overheard our principal talking to another teacher in the hall. "Lincoln educated himself by candlelight with borrowed books," he said. "Why do these little darkies want so much?"