Sources of Light (17 page)

***

Perry stopped breathing on a beautiful sunny Sunday afternoon when the whole world seemed to be coming out of a deep sleep. My mother swore he squeezed her hand, and I believed her.

We were both there. Already it was warm outside, but the light was fading as the sun went down into the wet streets, and we could smell the warm rolls and the green beans getting served for dinner up and down the hospital corridor. It was as though the sun itself were taking Perry away, and when he was gone the room went dark and the hospital's air conditioner sighed. I had been wrong not to trust Perry with my mother at the beginning, just because he was an outsider and different from any other man I had known. We all were different, and that made us all the same.

"He didn't have anybody but us," my mother said as we looked out the window and watched the sun going down from Perry's hospital room. "No family." Her eyes were red from crying. I couldn't help it. I started crying too.

"We need to go to his place," my mother said. "Make sure everything's turned off, see if there's anyone to contact." I could tell she was trying to get organized and make sense of what had happened. She'd done this when my dad died too. I could tell she was thinking,
Maybe I can still fix this.

"This is my fault," I said, crying harder. "I told. I did it. I told Stone about the people going to register." I was crying so hard then, snot ran out of my nose. I was crying so hard, I scared myself. But it was my mess. I'd made the mess.
Loose lips sink ships.
They do. They do. It was my fault. All of this was my fault.

"This is not your fault, do you understand me?" my mother said. She was fierce, holding my head, looking me in the eye.

When she said it like that I felt better and worse all at once. Better because she was so sure and she was forgiving me, worse because her forgiveness made me feel worse and even uglier with guilt.

"I lost my earrings too, Mom. I'm no good. I'm no good at all."

"Oh, honey. Don't worry about the earrings, okay? This wasn't your fault."

Everywhere around me sounds became stainless-steel sharp, their edges scraping against my eyes and ears. All I wanted to do was sleep in a dark, noiseless room. I didn't want to hear any more voices. I needed a place to hide, but there was no such place. Everywhere I turned that night and in the days to come, a voice was too loud, a car door slamming too noisily.

What would my dad have said? Would he have wanted us to stay and fight this out, fight other people's battles? Or go, just go? Leave and be safe? Wouldn't he want us to be safe?

"They don't have the right murderer," I whispered.

"I know," my mother said. "I know."

I already had one death in my life. My dad's. And now there was Perry. And that afternoon, the afternoon Perry died, I knew that my mother and I cried for them both. We slept together that night, holding each other, wordless. We stayed still like that with our eyes shut. In my dreams, I saw us together like that, with something like chords of sound linking us, running back and forth between our heads, carrying words only we could understand.

M
Y MOTHER HAD JUST DRIVEN
W
ILLA
M
AE HOME
when my grandmother arrived. She drove all the way in just to be with us. I heard my mother tell her she was worried about me.

My grandmother tied on an apron, took out our black skillet, and first cooked some bacon, then scrambled some eggs in the leftover grease. She put one of Willa Mae's good biscuits on my plate, and I moved it so that it could soak up some of the bacon grease on the bottom the way I liked. Then we sat down at the table together and ate. She told me she would stay the week to look after us.

In my room, she rocked me in her arms as we sat on my bed.

"You're grieving, sweetie. And you're scared. That's all it is," she said. "We're living in scary times." I watched her looking at all of Perry's photographs I'd taped to my walls.

There was so much you could see in those pictures—the baker in the baker's shop smiling at the woman in another shop and the way they looked at each other, you knew, you just knew how much they liked each other. Who knew if it would last, but for that second it was everything.

He had taken pictures of coal miners, of young men hauling bricks on their shoulders, of boys mining, and of a boy going off to school with his knapsack in Germany, his town and streets in ruins. I thought it looked a little like Jackson.

There was the picture of my mother and me side by side the night I dressed up to look like her for Mary Alice's party, my mother's arm reaching out over me.

Perry's pictures showed so much of how people were together, how mothers were when they raised their children, how much they held us and cuddled us, how close we could be when we let closeness happen.

***

At school Mary Alice wore new saddle shoes, but for the first time I didn't care what Mary Alice wore.

After Perry's funeral, my mother spent most of her time up at the college.

The faculty at my mother's college voted to support the ministers in town who were concerned about being able to speak freely in churches and schools. The faculty resolved that there should be nothing now to deny people in Mississippi of their right to freedom of speech, because it was a fact that we still lived in a democracy.

My mother said that there was a lot of tension in her school and around town, and we both needed to be more careful than ever.

School kept on being school. Mary Alice was making friends with a new girl in the tenth grade who looked a lot like a new doll I'd seen advertised. They both wore the same kind of saddle shoes.

I stayed in my room and stared at the shadows made from my bedside lamp, the slats on the blinds, the sliver of light from an open door. Mourning Perry felt a lot like sleepwalking or like your eyes getting used to the dark. I didn't say much. I couldn't listen to music. I could imagine myself humming again, but I couldn't imagine forming words. I thought about forgetting altogether how to talk.
Voice
was so close to the word
void.

***

Where we lived in Mississippi, February was spring. In the morning sheets of ground fog cloaked the lawns and trees. Mary Alice took to parting her hair on the side and rolling her skirts up at the waist to make them shorter. In the hall, she bumped into me and accidentally-on-purpose spilled the contents of her purse, showing everybody that she carried around a bottle of perfume and a spare Kotex—just to let everyone know that she was woman enough to smell nice and have menstrual cramps too. This time, some of us girls didn't want to keep up with Mary Alice anymore.

At school we learned some about the Choctaw, the Algonquians, the Chickasaw, the Natchez, and the Pascagoula Indians.

"They never wrote their history," Miss Jenkins said. "So to most, it doesn't count."

That couldn't be true, I thought. And it was crazy if it was true. Their history helped make history. Once you did something important, was it as important to make noise about it? This time I knew better than to say what I thought.

"Keeping a record is important," Miss Jenkins said.

I thought about Perry's pictures of my mother, the ones of her walking back and forth in the living room while he stood outside taking the pictures. In them she looked like a ghost. Was everything a record? And if so, what were those pictures a record of?

I thought about that night at my mother's party when I heard Perry talking to her about why he had to go to McComb to help register voters. He said it was because he was a human being. And I thought about what that man said to Perry in the corner of the room. He said: "We need some body with a camera." What he was saying was:
We need a witness. We need someone to go out and show the world what's going on down here so it can stop, get fixed, get sorted out. We need eyeballs, brains, mouths, hands—we need to get the word out anyhow and anyway. We need pictures and stories.
Miss Jenkins was right. Keeping a record was important. Just as there were some in Mississippi who really wanted the rest of the world to stay out or forget we were here, there were others in the state shouting out,
Hey! Here we are, and terrible things are happening! Pay attention!

That afternoon after school, when I put on my coat, I felt the camera there in the pocket. Perry's camera, the one I found that day I went with Stone to the Petrified Forest. I rushed to my mother's school and ran up the steps to her office. She was with a student, and I paced the halls, waiting for her. When the student left, I tapped on her door.

"Mom," I said. "I need to use Perry's darkroom."

"Now?"

I put my hands in my coat pocket and felt for the camera again. I had a feeling.

I nodded. My mother didn't even ask. It was as if she knew. It was as if we didn't need words anymore. She looked around. She stood up and looked up and down the hall. "All right, but not the one here. That's for students only, and I don't need to get into any more trouble." She put on her coat, the one my grandmother had given her. "I'm finished grading. Let's go to Perry's. I still haven't sorted through his things."

P
ERRY HAD LIVED IN THE POOR PART OF TOWN
, where he'd started an afterschool photography program for young people. He never locked his door. He would have said
Come in
to anyone who knocked. My mother had already gone there alone to find what she could of people to contact. There really had been nobody else in his family, nobody else but us, because now more than ever we felt like Perry's family. We passed the twigs that were his hydrangea bushes. I tried to picture how they would be in the summer, their face-size blue blooms drooping again with morning dew.

His jacket hung on a hook. His bed was unmade. There was a camera on the kitchen table with extra rolls of film and spare lenses.
Life
magazines laid open on the coffee table near a full ashtray, an open bottle of cream soda, and an advance copy of the photography book he was working on with a publisher in New York. The pillows on the sofa were smooshed and dented with the shape of his back and head. It felt as though he had just gone out for milk or bread and that he would be back any minute.

Except that he wouldn't.

We didn't say anything. It didn't feel right to talk.

The world felt so sad at that moment as we looked around Perry Walker's room. And outside, Jackson felt only small and tight and airless.

"Completely senseless," I heard my mother say as she began to clean up.

I fingered the camera still in my jacket pocket, then pulled it out. Here was one of Perry's cameras, and it was still loaded with film. While my mother began putting dishes in a box for Goodwill, I slipped into Perry's darkroom.

***

The pans were neatly lined up in the tiny darkroom and all along the walls on built-in shelves were instruments to enable a person to look more closely at the world: lighting devices for his cameras, rolls of what looked like Saran wrap, tarps, extra film, light bulbs, and more cameras.

All around me, Perry's unframed black-and-white pictures hung on the walls—pictures of people behind bars in prison, people in wheelchairs, homeless people asleep in strange city streets, dirty, naked children begging for food in front of grocery stores with foreign names, dying or dead soldiers left in the mud. A picture can do so much, he'd once told me. If it's a picture of someone singing, you can hear the music.

Hanging on one line were the last pictures Perry had developed—the pictures from that day in McComb with all the protesters on their knees, and then being pushed and shoved into the paddy wagons.

I don't know what I thought I would find in there or in the pictures I was about to develop, but I knew that I had to see and find out. Perry once told me that it was important to have motivation or purpose behind your work. That's what this feeling I had felt like: it felt purposeful.

I did and did not know what I was doing. When I saw how fuzzy these new images first were, I thought I'd made a mistake, but then I saw they were blurry for a reason. Perry had just snapped and snapped, not bothering or unable to hold the camera still. Just get the shot. That was always his number one recommendation.

The pictures showed the story. Fists and hands carrying clubs, sticks, and rocks coming toward me, the viewer, the camera lens. It must have been hard to keep taking the pictures. He must have kept the camera off to the side. It was still light out, so he hadn't needed a flash. There must have been so much shouting and noise, they hadn't heard the clicking. He'd made a decision. He decided to use his one hand not to fight but to take pictures.

Oh, but they hated him, and they wanted him suffering and dead from their own beating. They called themselves Christian and hid behind their own white churches. Hadn't they read the Bible? Didn't they know about Jesus? If they saw these pictures clearly in black and white for themselves, surely they'd see what they had done. It was a scene straight out of the Bible, like an art slide from one of my mother's lectures, the one she gave at Tougaloo about martyrs.

Then I looked closer at one of the pictures still developing. At first, all I could see were arms—all of them strong and white and male, but then I saw a face I recognized emerging in the pan of water. I saw the profile, the nose, the strong chin, and the hate in his eyes. I recognized that look. It was the same look his son Stone had when he was stomping out bugs. And there he was with that angry face, waving a billy club: there was Mr. McLemore.

Had he really done this? And what was Stone's involvement? Had he stood by and watched, then done nothing? Or had he tried to stand up to these men as he had stood up to his father and saved me in McComb?

But then, why would Stone have allowed me to take and keep Perry's camera? Maybe he wanted me to know. Maybe he wanted me to see for myself what he couldn't admit about his father and maybe about himself. Maybe letting me keep the camera was Stone's way of confessing.