Sources of Light (8 page)

"You don't need their acceptance," my mother said.

I thought about that. "Yes, I do." I said it the way women say it at their weddings. "I do."

"You really don't, sweetie. You shouldn't."

I looked at her. I hadn't even told my mother about Stone's kissing me or asking me to the dance. This was my first secret from her, and it didn't feel right.

"When did you know?" I said. "About Dad. When did you know he was 'the one'?"

"I had no idea I would marry your father," she said. "But there was no way I could live without him." She stopped, thinking about what she had said. "Now I suppose we both have to, huh?" There was a pause. "When you were a baby, I'd pick you up and you'd put your hand inside my hair and you'd keep it there."

"Mom," I said. "I just want to sleep."

She took out her hearing aid. She unhooked the string of pearls around her neck. I used to like playing with this necklace and would until she made me stop. She picked up the framed picture of my father from my nightstand and stared at it.

Mary Alice told us girls at school that sometimes her mother declared a "pajama day" and they both stayed in their pajamas all day and watched TV and played board games and anything else you could do in bed. They ate meals on trays and had lots of girl talk. Oh, how we all envied Mary Alice.

After my mother finally left my room, I listened to her mumbling to herself in her bedroom. I knew she was talking to my dad. For my mother, my dad was always there with us. For me he was gone most of the time, except when I chose to think of him. I wondered, had she married him just to leave home? And now was she looking to leave again, this time with Perry? I rolled over and faced the wall, half wishing she'd come back.

I
N THE FOLLOWING WEEKS
my mother kept getting anonymous letters in the mail, and she wouldn't let me read them. Then, after she listened to one nasty phone call, she told Willa Mae I was no longer allowed to answer the phone. One morning, when I came back from my daily picture-taking walk, I found a black cat lying dead on top of our newspaper outside our front door. My mother put a stop to my early-morning photo sessions, so I started taking pictures after school.

If this part of my life had been a short-answer test like the ones we took at school, some of the questions would have been these: What would my dad say to all this? What was the right thing to do and when would I know it? Would he want us to stay here in his home state, or go, just go? Would leaving mean running away? Or, would he want us to stay here, close to his family?

Perry came and put new bolt locks on our doors. At night, he came by to check on us. He looked tired and sweaty, his shirttails hanging out, but he always smiled and made my mother laugh. He brought photography books for me to look through too, pointing out pictures taken by "famous" people I'd never heard of: Alfred Eisenstaedt, Ansel Adams, Margaret Bourke-White, Robert Capa, Walker Evans, and Dorothea Lange.

Perry was the only white person I knew who lived in an all-black neighborhood. Every day after he finished teaching, he taught kids in his neighborhood about photography. He was helping their parents register to vote too.

Every few days I gave my film to Perry and we stood side by side in his darkroom, developing pictures. Sometimes he talked while he worked, telling me how important it was to stay alert for good photographs, how to really
look
and
see,
or how he thought these difficult times in Mississippi were probably his most productive period. Once he got all worked up, saying that being here was better than the riots he'd photographed. No way was he budging. No way was he leaving.

"I'm finally
part
of a place," he said that afternoon. "I'm not just taking pictures." I couldn't help but think how I didn't feel quite the same way yet about living in Jackson.

This was in the fall of 1962, when winter was coming up on all of us. Weeks went by and then the leaves on the trees and the leaves on the ground were all washed in gold and burgundy and that's all you saw. Then
finally
people seemed to forget about my mother guest lecturing at Tougaloo, because there was other news.

A black twenty-nine-year-old air force veteran named James Meredith had enrolled at the University of Mississippi, or "Ole Miss," in Oxford as a transfer student, and at the end of September, on a beautiful warm Sunday night, in front of a building called the Lyceum, middle-aged men who didn't want Meredith attending an all-white university egged on students to attack the National Guards President Kennedy had sent down. There they all were at our state's institution for higher learning, running around in tear gas smoke, billy-clubbing one another before their first day of classes. My mother and I watched it all on TV and we both knew that this marked the beginning or end of something, though we weren't sure of what.

In a televised address to the state of Mississippi, President Kennedy said to us, "If this country should ever reach the point where any man or any group of men, by force or threat of force, could long defy the commands of our court and Constitution, then no law would stand free from doubt, no judge would be sure of his right, and no citizen would be safe from his neighbor."

Governor Ross Barnett addressed the state too, saying, "We must either submit to the unlawful dictates of the federal government or stand up like men and tell them 'NEVER!'"

It took three or four U.S. marshals just to get James Meredith to his first class the following day, a class that happened to be Colonial American History.

None of the business with James Meredith especially interested other kids at my school because it was all happening up in Oxford, which might as well have been Mars—plus all the girls in my class were now wearing bras, all, that is, except me. Mary Alice had started something and every girl at Jackson High School wanted to be like Mary Alice McLemore.

Even though she had already agreed to get me one, my mother said she could not understand what my rush was. Besides, she said, she was teaching all day every day that week, and she had a "slew" of faculty meetings every afternoon and she couldn't get home until after the stores all closed. So she asked Willa Mae to please walk me into town and take me to get fitted.

***

Willa Mae knew where to go, but I didn't. I had never been downtown with Willa Mae before. At home Willa Mae was the boss of me. At home she didn't have to call me Miss Samantha either. She drank iced tea or water not from a mayonnaise jar like other maids but from one of our own drinking glasses, and she shared our bathroom.

Downtown was different. Because she was black, Willa Mae wasn't allowed to go into the white stores without me. Because she was black, she couldn't try on hats or use the restrooms. Because she was black, she couldn't say
Yeah
or
Yes, Bob.
She had to say
Yes, ma'am
or
Yes, sir,
or
Yes, Mr. Smith.
Because she was black, she might have to step off the sidewalk to make way for a white person and use separate waiting areas and drinking fountains marked
COLORED
.

These were the rules. Right or wrong, this was just the way things were. Even though I had been taught that everybody was a human being and that everybody had the same rights because we lived in America and equality was what America was all about, I still had to follow rules.

Already I was in the habit of taking Perry's Pentax with me most everywhere I went. It was fast becoming my camera. I had adjusted the strap and it fit around me just so. I took pictures of all the stores that sold candy, talcum powder, Moon Pies, and bubblegum. Then finally, we got to the window with the mannequins wearing girdles.

Willa Mae came into the store with me and sat in a chair beside the door, waiting, as a big-bosomed saleswoman helped me find the right size and fit.

First I tried on a white bra over my shirt. The saleswoman frowned and said that it would be impossible to judge the fit that way. Willa Mae sucked her tooth and said something like, "If there's nothing to judge, you can't judge."

The saleswoman looked at Willa Mae, smiled, then led me into the changing room, insisting on staying as I took off my shirt. She said so much depended on
how
I put a bra on.

She said you were certainly
not
supposed to snap it on, then twist it around and pull it up the way I saw my mother do every single day. The saleswoman showed me how you were supposed to bend and carefully put yourself into the thing, assuming you had something to put in.

I did what she told me to do and when I stood up straight, she said, "See?" The fit was no different and it was still uncomfortable, but I kept it on anyway, and I paid her the money. I had to have a bra. I just had to.

It was hot. And Willa Mae and I still had the walk back home.

"Come on," I said. Wearing the bra made my back feel straighter, and I held my head higher. "I still have enough money to get us some sodas. The drugstore is just up the street."

I liked going into the drugstore, where the bottles and boxes stood in neat rows, organized by varying heights, the prices clearly marked so you wouldn't even have to touch a thing, just look.

When we got inside and at the counter, I turned to Willa Mae. "What would you like?"

"A Mr. Coca-Cola, please," she said to me. Willa Mae didn't even feel she could say,
A Coca-Cola, please.
She thought she had to put a Mr. or a Mrs. in front of everything. That wasn't like her at all. It was like she was acting while we were downtown, and she knew I knew.

"Please what?" the woman behind the counter said.

"We'll have two Coca-Colas, please," I said.

"Please what?" The woman behind the counter wasn't looking at me. She was looking at Willa Mae.

Willa Mae stared at her shoes.

"I'm talking to you, girl."

It occurred to me only then that this woman wanted Willa Mae to call me Miss. She wanted Willa Mae to redo her sentence. She wanted Willa Mae to say,
A Mr. Coca-Cola, please, Miss Samantha.
If Willa Mae were to do that right then, well, that would have been impossible, not for her maybe, but for me. In our house, Willa Mae was boss. Here in town, it was hard enough to pretend otherwise, but to go that far, to have Willa Mae say to me,
please, Miss Samantha,
we both would have bust a gut laughing.

I looked at the woman behind the counter. I had on my new bra and it felt to me like a bulletproof vest pinching me to do something. "Of all the people in here, I'm the girl, and I asked for two Coca-Colas. Please."

The woman stared at me for a beat, then got two bottles out of the cooler. She opened them on the counter, all the while keeping an eye on Willa Mae, who never looked up. I got two straws.

"She needs to take hers outside," the woman said. For a brief instant, I saw Willa Mae glance up at her. It was an expression I recognized.

Once not long before, when we first moved into town, Willa Mae and I were walking back from the park when we stopped at a gas station at the corner for water. There was a drinking fountain there that was part of the soda machine. There were no signs, but it was understood, white people drank from the fountain, and because there was only the one water fountain, black people had to get a used soda bottle from the empties stacked there, fill the bottle with water, then drink from the used bottle. But after I drank from the fountain, Willa Mae drank right after me, just as I had done. We weren't thinking.

Another boy not much older than me saw Willa Mae do this and said, "You better get you a bottle next time, girl, or else there won't be a next time."

Willa Mae looked at that white boy and then quickly looked down at her feet. But I saw what was in her eyes and I felt the sting of her shame then, not for herself, not even for me, but for that little white boy. She knew what he would likely become.

Willa Mae had that same look in her eyes then, when she looked back up at the woman behind the counter.

I put my camera on my hip and tried snapping a picture of the woman without her noticing. She noticed and called for her supervisor.

I looked out the window. Outside, across the street, a group of black people were gathered. I did a double-take. They weren't just gathering to talk. This group of black people wore posterboards around their necks:
YOUR CONSIDERATION CAN HELP US END RACIAL SEGREGATION
, one posterboard said. Another read
JOIN US IN OUR FIGHT FOR FREEDOM
. They walked past the movie theater where
The Day Mars Invaded Earth
was showing.

I walked closer to the window to watch white men begin to gather in the street. They were yelling at the group of black people, but I couldn't hear what they were saying.

Willa Mae tapped my shoe with her shoe, and then motioned toward the door.

"One minute," I whispered. "Please?"

A group of four or five college students and what looked to be their professors, black and white, came into the drugstore and sat down at the end of the counter, all quiet and businesslike. They waited to order, but the woman behind the counter did not move from where she stood near me.

All of the other white people seated at the counter stopped talking and stood up. They put their money down, leaving full plates of burgers and fries, and then they left, mumbling and shaking their heads. Willa Mae and I both could feel something happening then, except I could tell that she wanted to leave and I wanted to stay.

The place began to fill up. The angry white men from outside came inside, yelling now at the black and white students and professors sitting together at the lunch counter. These angry white men used every word I was never allowed to use, and then some. Three policemen came in too. They stood by, listened, and watched. I knew what they knew. Black and white people were not allowed to sit together at any lunch counter in Jackson, Mississippi.

Just then I thought about the samurai warriors I read about in
National Geographic
and how they prepared themselves for battle by deciding that they were dead already so they had nothing to lose. Had my father done that? What was the right thing to do now? Was this feeling I had now what he'd meant when he said "You'll know"? I kept the camera at my hip and snapped more pictures. The yelling inside around the lunch counter was loud enough now so that no one heard my camera clicking.