Sources of Light (12 page)

"You obviously haven't seen Perry's photographs," my mother said. My mother wore a new sleeveless shift made out of material that said
Fragile: Handle with Care
all over it. Perry had gotten her this dress from some new shop. On her arm she wore a silver cuff that looked as though it could take bullets. Her black hair was still short, but it looked tangled and somehow undone. She pushed her foot back and forth in her shoe as she stood and talked.

Everyone was talking at once about art. They used words such as
banal, Dadaist aesthetic value,
and
intrinsic.
I watched my mother's face. She pretended to be okay with modern art, but I knew she really loved Rubens and Rembrandt, Renoir and Degas. She loved the landscapes by Poussin, the still lifes of Caravaggio, and all those cloudy paintings by Monet. All she wanted to do was see a van Gogh or any other European painting up close, then go to Thessaly and Greece and see the theaters of Pergamum and of Epidaurus, where, she told me, poppies grew nearby.

School was different in college. These teachers and students
argued.
They were still asking questions. They talked about ethics and consequences. They knew details along with facts. They knew about big things like wars but they also knew about little things like how Mussolini's army poured acid on the desert sands when barefooted Ethiopian soldiers chased them down in Abyssinia.

Later, after all the eating, I found Perry outside, humming some song, swinging on the rope swing the previous owner had left behind hanging from a black walnut tree in our backyard. His cigarette was burned down nearly to his fingertips while he sat there, his camera slung over and around his neck, resting on his back.

"If you're so good at what you do, why are you here?" I asked.

"That's some attitude. Good things can come to the most unlikely places, you know. I'm a good guy, Sam." He looked at me. "Seriously." He stomped out his cigarette and looked up at the sky. "Once upon a time I took a picture of a soldier shooting Korean prisoners in the back. Their hands were tied, their legs bound. They'd photographed executions before; usually they were out-of-focus shots because the photographer flinched. This was a good, clear image. My editor at
Life
took one look at the picture and he said, 'American soldiers don't shoot people in the back.' So that was that."

"You quit?"

He shook his head. "I was fired."

I went quiet. I'd never known anyone who had actually gotten fired. It felt a little like talking to someone who'd been in prison. "My mom could get fired too, you know."

He nodded. "You know, at
Life
we used to outline our assignments. I couldn't outline all that's happening here, though. You can't make this up," he said. "Who knows? Maybe this was the way it was supposed to be. Maybe I was meant to come back from the war to take pictures of the one going on down here."

This time I didn't say,
What war?
This time I knew what he was talking about.

"I don't know. There are some things about the South I guess I just don't get," he went on. "A maid gets fifteen cents an hour cooking, laundering, ironing, mopping, sweeping, changing the sheets, and everybody expects her to be grateful."

I thought about that. I thought about Willa Mae and all the men outside the drugstore, billy-clubbing those women. "I know Willa Mae gets more than fifteen cents an hour."

Perry smiled. "Come on," he said, getting out of the swing and taking my hand. "We can't change the world tonight. Let's go back inside and tell these pointy-headed intellectuals and pretentious students a thing or two."

Inside, while I went around with a garbage sack and cleared paper plates, students started to recite their poetry without any complete sentences. One said things like "All that's left is." And "Untranslatable." Another made different vowel sounds, clicking out a tune with his tongue, a kind of song without words, both beautiful and annoying. I didn't want to like it, but I couldn't help but listen.

Perry was talking to a man in the corner of the room. "We need someone to take pictures," he said to Perry. "If we don't get the pictures, they'll act like it never happened." Perry was nodding, repeating the time and day. "It's the only time they have off to register to vote."

Perry nodded, and said, "Okay, okay. I'll be there."

Someone was reciting a poem about tangerines and misery, ending with the line "chew, swallow, made into flesh and the imagination of our lives to come, amen." Everyone clapped. Some snapped their fingers.

I fell asleep in my mother's room next to the pile of everybody's coats spread out on her bed. I woke up to the sound of Perry's voice, "Why are you here?"

He wasn't talking to me. He was in the next room somewhere with my mother. All the coats were gone. Everyone had left, so I could hear Perry clearly. He said, "You weren't even born here. Your husband was."

"This is the closest thing to home and family I have," my mother said.

"You know, when I came here, I gave this place a few months. One year max," Perry said. "But now? Now is different. I wanna stay and I wanna stay here with you and Sam. This is my place. You're my home."

"All I'm asking, Perry, is that you not go," my mother said. "Let someone else do it this time. It's getting too dangerous."

"They're registering to vote, honey. The timing couldn't be better. They need someone with a camera. No one else'll go. If you want, you can go too. You could help register."

"I can't get involved, you know that. My job's already in jeopardy. I have Samantha to think of."

I crept up out of the bed and tiptoed to the doorway.

Perry was leaning in to my mother as he listened to what she said. They talked so close. He only leaned closer, his hands on the table, his leg touching hers.

"It's so risky," my mother said. "
Why
are you doing this?"

"Because I'm a human being. Because we're all human beings."

My mother closed her eyes and winced. Maybe her hearing aid was ringing and bothering her, but as I watched her turn down the volume, I wanted to tell her right then that she couldn't quiet
all
those outside voices forever.

"Come with me," he said. "I'll take care of you and Samantha. I promise." They kissed lightly, both of them leaning in. It was more hug than kiss, more meaning than anything else. My mother smiled when they broke away. This man made her happy. Maybe she was thinking what I was thinking too. Why did the men in our lives head for danger, all for the sake of doing the right thing? They kissed nothing like the way Stone and I kissed, and I wished then more than anything that at some point in my life I would get kissed that way.

F
OR OUR STATE REPORT
, everyone else in my class cut out pictures from magazines and newspapers, neatly marking them
This is a picture of...
and then saying what it was a picture of. Mary Alice had always received high marks in handwriting, and she signed her name in perfect Palmer script. The words I wrote came out looking spidery.

Mary Alice hung up maps we recognized from her family's air-raid shelter. She had also dressed up her dolls to look like early settlers. Ken stood inside a hexagonal hatbox decorated to resemble an early log cabin. Two of her Barbies wore big hoop skirts with crinoline to look like southern belles. They lingered together in another hatbox made to look like Tara from
Gone With the Wind.

Mary Alice's hair was pulled back into a soft, shiny ponytail. She was arranging the Spanish moss on top of the hatboxes when I came into the classroom to set up my report.

I didn't have any dressed-up dolls. I just had the pictures I had taken with Perry Walker's camera, pictures I had taken during my walks around our neighborhood, and pictures I had taken when Perry took us for those long car rides. I had a picture of Willa Mae holding a packet of snuff in her apron in front of a row of hollyhocks and Confederate jasmine. I had a picture of a bottle tree and a family of ducks crossing a street. I had pictures of Willa Mae picking up the garbage in our yard and my mother scrubbing off the words
WE ARE WATCHING
from our front door. I had a picture of the police officer standing outside the drugstore while an angry man billy-clubbed a black woman. I had an underexposed picture of football players, silhouetted, hunched down, ready to charge each other. I had a picture of an old white man fishing while beyond him a church finishes burning. I had a picture of the inside of an empty sharecropper's house with calendars of the past the only decoration in the room. I had a picture of the big magnolia in our front yard—a close-up of a blossom past its prime, in the first stages of turning brown. I had taped them all to some posterboard.

There was a written report too, meant to go along with the presentation.

All day I thought over the written report I handed in. I had proofread it, then retyped it using my mother's black Underwood, the
G
coming out smudgy and looking a lot like an
O
. My mother asked if I needed any help, but I didn't want my mother messing with it. This was all my work, all mine. I was going for articulate and well organized. Those were the main criteria my mother used when she graded papers. But I was also after compelling, which I knew would bump the paper somewhere into the A zone. I covered everything: the state's symbols, including a picture of its coat of arms and motto:
The committee to design a coat of arms was appointed by legislative action February 7, 1894, and the design proposed by that committee was accepted and became the official coat of arms.

When she finally got to my setup, Miss Jenkins looked and looked and then stared at the browning magnolia. All she said finally was that it was a shame I couldn't find a better flower—one fresher and more representative of the beautiful magnolia that was our state flower.

She glanced at the pictures a second time, her face looking like she was being forced to eat a bowl of lemons. She told me my captions were difficult to read and therefore "inadequate." She said I left out the state bird even though I told her I'd tried but the mockingbird wouldn't sit still long enough for me to photograph it.

Ears brought in his jar of cicadas. They had sidetracked him altogether, and his report turned into a report about cicadas. He found out all kinds of interesting facts, like that cicadas were the only insects to have developed such an effective and specialized means of producing sound. Some species produced a noise intensity that approached the pain threshold of the human ear. Other species have songs so high in pitch that the noise was beyond the range of our hearing. Ears even brought in the Bible, which he turned open to the Book of Revelation, that part about a swarm of locusts with scorpion tails and human faces that torments the unbelievers.

We watched Miss Jenkins's strange smile as she looked over Ears's work. "I see that you became quite interested in our plague this summer, Ears," she said. "The problem here is that the cicada has nothing to do with Mississippi. It's neither the state bug nor the state bird."

Some people laughed when she said this. I knew that she was going to give Ears an F or make him do it all over.

"I thought your report was real interesting," I whispered to Ears.

He shrugged.

When Mary Alice asked about our grades, Miss Jenkins told the class that our state report grades would come in the mail along with our final grades at Christmas.

***

At lunch Ears shared food his mother had packed for the two of us, and we feasted on saltines and a can of sardines and Vienna sausages each. For dessert we split the one Moon Pie. Then Mary Alice and her friends busted up our fun wanting to play a game that involved tying Ears to the magnolia tree so that they could circle around him like they were in some powwow, but Ears and I would have none of it.

The sun had come out and it wouldn't quit. Mary Alice had her right hand above her eyes. "What are you telling me?"

I looked at Mary Alice standing there with her little gang of look-alikes. I didn't want to be like them or think like them to fit in anymore. "Me? I'm telling you you're acting like you're still in third grade," I said, staring her down till someone else said something about letting us losers be by ourselves.

"What's your real name anyway?" I asked Ears after they had all gone away. "I'm sick of calling you Ears."

"Tempe," he said. "After my great-granddaddy."

***

On the last day of school before Christmas break, we spent the day spray-painting pinecones silver and gold for wreaths we made to take home to our parents as gifts, and at the end of the day we all sang the state song, which we had memorized.

"
Go, Mississippi, keep rolling along,
" we sang, saying "Mizippi" for Mississippi. "
Go, Mississippi, you cannot go wrong.
"

When school was out, Stone stood outside our classroom and walked me to my locker. I was so surprised that I couldn't think of anything to say. Ever since the dance, Stone had kept his distance from me while we were at school. People didn't even know we knew each other or liked each other. I don't even think Mary Alice knew. I wanted other people to see me talking to Stone. I wanted them to look at me and think,
My, my. Look at that Samantha Thomas. She's no loser. She might just be okay. She might even be a little bit interesting.
I couldn't help but notice that Stone and I were most
together
when we were alone. When we were with other people, we were apart. And we were most of the time with other people. I wondered if he was ashamed to be seen with me. Or was this the way things were with boys and girls? If that was so, I wanted us to be different. I wanted our separateness to change. I opened my locker to gather my books.

"I got you a Christmas present," he said. He gave me a small wrapped box. "Open it."

"But I didn't get you anything," I said.

"That's not the way it works," he said. "Open it."

Inside was a necklace with a gold cross pendant.