Sources of Light (19 page)

Stone quit coming to school for a while. In all, he missed something like three weeks. Mary Alice kept coming, though. We heard that Mr. McLemore's business suffered from the publicity, and that Mrs. McLemore wouldn't leave the house. When Stone finally did come back, he came to my locker, and his right eye was black and blue and swollen. I didn't ask what happened, and I could tell Stone appreciated my not asking.

I had thought about this time, when we would finally talk again. For days, I'd dreamed I yelled at Stone, telling him that Perry Walker's blood was on his hands, then in the same dream we were kissing on a bed of pine needles in the Petrified Forest. I woke up feeling embarrassed and guilty.

But he didn't say anything, and his face didn't look angry. We were both so oddly calm in a way I never would have expected. We walked together out of the building. It was raining. The weather had turned balmy. We stood and looked out at the playground near the church and the sidewalks flooding with rainwater.

He told me there would be a trial, and most likely he was going to be used as a witness against his own father. He sounded tired. He looked at me with his handsome dark eyes. "You know, I wasn't sure until I saw the pictures." He stopped himself. "I just wanted you to know I didn't mean for things to happen the way they did." He looked at the ground. It was as if he went back to being a little boy then. "I do what I'm told, but not everything. I tried to stop them, Samantha, but there were so many of them. And it was just me. I didn't go. I wasn't there when they did what they did to Perry in those woods, but then, when I saw those pictures..." His eyes filled with tears. "I didn't know they'd taken him there to the Petrified Forest. I wouldn't have taken you there that day, if I'd known. Really, I wouldn't have. But when you found Perry's camera that day, that's when I started to wonder. That's when I started putting two and two together. I guess I was trying to fool myself."

"I'm sorry." It was all I could think of to say.

He shrugged, looked down, and shook his head. "He did wrong, but I had to do right. The police had to see those pictures. Facts don't lie. But he's still my dad." He sighed and put his hand to his eye. "He'll always be my dad."

I put my arm around Stone. He pulled me to him and hugged me close, and for a while, I didn't think either one of us would ever let go. Quietly and in his own way, Stone had done the right thing, after all. We both had, separately. I couldn't help but wonder what we might have accomplished together. In a camera, the aperture is an opening through which light passes. Without the aperture, without this opening, you would never get a picture or any of the masterful photographs I'd learned to appreciate. It had been risky, but Stone and I both opened up a part of our selves to each other. Surely he and I captured something—a moment, a feeling, a document of the heart, to keep, review, and hold close.

When we finally did let go, we looked out toward the street, and I started walking. I needed to get home.

"Watch the puddles," Stone said after me. I turned and nodded, then waved goodbye. The sun coming out lit up the top branches of the pine trees. I wished then that I had my camera. The picture I really wanted? That's the one I never took—a profile of Stone looking skyward, thinking on all those stars. You'd see his nose, his upper Elvis lip, and the silhouette of his eyelashes. That picture would show the Stone I knew and that time when we had only our lives and the heavens to consider, nothing else.

I'd fallen for a boy who liked to sit and watch the sky. He knew about Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Isaac Newton. Maybe what I had with Stone wasn't love. Maybe I just wanted to feel him with me and I wanted him and me both to whisper things like
true love
in each other's ears. Maybe I didn't even care what he whispered so long as he just whispered. He had been more than a friend, and it was the first time I knew what more-than-a-friend meant.

Later I would think about that time I spoke with Stone at the school, and I would reassure myself. When you're developing pictures, you catch things you hadn't noticed the first time around. Perry explained that to me once. What the mind rejects as ugly it later perceives as beautiful once the underlying patterns have been recognized. Stone wasn't a monster. He was just a boy, and maybe that was the saddest part.

T
ENSION WAS BUILDING AT MY MOTHER'S COLLEGE,
and the faculty took another vote to integrate the college, but administrators feared violence and a loss of white students and money. They formally closed all events to black people and continued to discourage any faculty from teaching, speaking, or even visiting Tougaloo. Even our own teacher, Miss Jenkins at Jackson High School, warned us ninth-graders to steer clear of what she called questionable gatherings in and around the college.

After wearing all the dark mourning clothes, and after weeks of a heartbreakingly beautiful spring, my mother said she was taking me to a reading at her college given by a famous author who she said was "alive and still living among us."

On the evening of the reading, the college was lit up like a monument, as though something historical were about to happen, when in fact it was just a tiny old lady named Eudora Welty coming out to read us a story.

She came and so did the people, from all around, even some students from other colleges and high schools. The day before, the dean reminded everyone of the college's policy, making the event "off-limits" to black people. But they lined up outside anyway.

When it was time for Miss Welty to begin, she waited onstage. We watched as she had a brief exchange with the dean. They were both smiling politely. The dean shook her head no. Miss Welty nodded yes. Then Miss Welty shook her head no and the dean nodded yes. Some of us laughed at the sight.

But then something happened. The doors opened and all the black people waiting outside, the ones the dean wasn't going to let in, came in. Some sat in the front, some in the back, others sat beside us. They sat wherever there was a seat. The auditorium was full up now, dotted with different-colored people. From onstage, we must have been a sight. The corners of Miss Welty's eyes crinkled like tissue paper as she smiled and welcomed us all. She wasn't pretty, but when she smiled and talked and looked at us that way, she was beautiful and we all fell in love with her.

She dedicated the reading to her photographer friend Perry Walker. She told us all she'd met him at the Jitney, and that later he'd contacted her about coming to the college to read. I saw tears well up in my mother's eyes.

She read a story called "Powerhouse" about a Fats Waller concert, which she had written some twenty years before. Listening to her read, we were all together, not listening to a story, but in a music hall called the World Café, listening to jazz and to those musicians talking. When she finished we were all quiet, as though we needed to catch our breath, the drums and saxophones and piano still playing in our minds.

Then she talked about the power of imagination to unite us readers with writers. She said a shared act of imagination could bridge the separateness people feel, even if only for a moment. She talked about our being there, as if us listening to her story meant something important. As if just sitting there together was doing something.

We stood and clapped for her, hundreds of us clapping. Even after she left the stage, we applauded for a long time. We all had that close-together, huddled feeling of being under the same umbrella in the rain. I wanted to sit back down in my seat and replay the story in my head. I just wanted to sit and think.

Afterward, we saw her at a reception in an adjoining room, talking with students who were waiting to shake hands and thank her for coming. My mother had thought to bring my camera, and she gave it to me then. I brought it to my right eye, and then brought it back down again. I hadn't snapped a picture since Perry was still alive. Miss Welty nodded for me to go on, take the picture. She was giving me the go-ahead, so I did. I took a picture of her smiling. I took another of her signing books, and another of her hugging a group, their different-colored arms all wrapped around one another.

My mother took my hand and led me toward the edge of the small crowd. She spoke with Miss Welty. My mother was used to that sort of thing. She could talk to anyone. I saw that now.

"This is my daughter. She takes pictures." My mother sounded proud. "Perry taught her."

Miss Welty looked at me and then offered her hand. It was warm and bony, like my grandmother's. She told me she took pictures once too. She said that was when she learned how to really look at things. Sometimes what you see is more than you want to know. She talked the way Perry used to talk when he talked about photography.

My mother took the camera.

"Let me take a picture of you two," she said.

Miss Welty and I stood side by side, this lady writer and me, her arm around me. I didn't say a word. My mother snapped the picture. I knew by the way she was holding the camera, the picture would be out of focus, but that was okay. I would have it to keep.

***

That night at home my mother turned my pillow so I could lay my head down on the cool side. We had the house back to ourselves now because my grandmother had left.

"Pookie-poo," she said.

"Moo." For some reason, we spoke in whispers then.

"I'm very proud of you, Samantha," she said. She hardly ever called me Samantha. "You've shown so much courage all through this year."

"I didn't think about being courageous."

"You don't have to think about being courageous to have courage," she said. "I doubt that you even have to
feel
courageous either. Your father wrote me something like that in a letter when he was overseas. You are so much like him."

"You never said that before."

"I'm not sure I thought it before."

I thought about courage and how it must be more hidden than anything like love or hate, grief or mourning. Something inside tells you what's right and you know you have to do that right thing to go on living with yourself and with others.

"It's not like I went to war or into a battle or anything. Not like he did."

"No. It's been
a lot
like fighting in a war. Every day."

When things come clear, when you see it all before you in black and white and you know what's right and what's wrong, what kind of person would stand aside and do nothing? That wouldn't be a person at all, or the human being that Perry said he was—and in fact had been. That would be nothing more than an insect, but at least insects serve a purpose. There comes a time. There just comes a time.

"I miss Dad," I said. "I miss him so much."

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

***

Shortly after that evening with Miss Welty, my mother heard from the dean. She didn't get her promotion. My mother didn't get tenure or promoted to associate professor. What that meant was that she had no future at the college. What that meant was that she had to find another job. What that meant was that she most likely had been blacklisted. What that meant was that we might have to move from Jackson and even maybe Mississippi.

When you know you're not wanted, you leave, right? It's as simple as that. Why stay in a place where people hate you daily, or where at least you know no one wants you around? Why stay when it's too dangerous to live out your life? Just because it's home and you've settled? Perry had stayed and he died. Would the black people of Mississippi all begin to disappear the way most of the Choctaw had? Would we?

I
T WAS SPRING,
not just here but even in the northern states. Neither the Russians that the McLemores and others had anticipated and built their bomb shelter for nor people from outer space had come after all, but the Freedom Riders had, and word was they would be coming again the following year and the year after that and they would keep coming.

My mother's hair had grown, and she brushed the ends to curl
under,
not
out
the way the other mothers wore their hair. It was different and I liked it on her. She wore bright-colored dresses with bold patterns she said looked like Mondrian paintings. "When I stand and walk forward, you get the full effect," she liked to say when people commented.

A copy of Perry's book of photographs came in the mail, and together my mother and I looked through it, sometimes even preferring the thin sheet of tissue covering the more violent and disturbing photographs in the book—the images muted that way and fuzzy, covered with the tissue. There was an introduction written by an editor of
Life,
quoting what Perry had once said to him. "Life is what it is at any second. A snapshot. Nothing more."

"Did he really believe that?" I asked my mother.

She shrugged and smiled.

He had shown me how a picture was balanced, how what needed to be seen was what should be focused. It felt strange sitting there looking through all these terrible, good pictures. They were beautiful pictures of horrible things. How could beauty come from such ugliness? It didn't seem right or good, but maybe close to some kind of truth.

***

I grew my bangs out and parted my hair down the middle, more the way my mother's college coeds wore their hair and not the way Mary Alice wore hers. For the first time, I actually fit into my bra. I wore knee socks now instead of bobby socks, but my mother still wouldn't allow me to wear hose, let alone the green fishnet stockings or go-go boots Mary Alice and her friends wore.

Mary Alice had written to Glenn Campbell and John Wayne, and neither had written back. She took up the baton because she said twirlers always won the beauty pageants. Even though Mary Alice told everyone that her brother Stone had been "disowned," she also said he had dumped me, and because I was so "marked," surely nobody would ever go out with me ever again. "If I don't marry," Mary Alice said loudly one day in the cafeteria, "I might as well be dead." Mr. McLemore was out on bail and facing a prison sentence. He stayed in his house mostly. Rumors circulated about Stone. Someone said he thought he saw Stone hitching a ride toward Alabama. Someone else thought she saw him at the grocery store. He became like a ghost.