Sources of Light (2 page)

In Jackson, my mother and I lived on a quiet, shady street in a new subdivision that was still getting built. My grandfather told us that back in the 1940s, archaeologists had excavated what was part of a trench where the Chickasaw fought the Choctaw during the colonial Indian wars. But that didn't stop anybody from building houses there in 1962. Streets, houses, and yards now covered the area where Chickasaw and Choctaw once died. Sometimes I wondered if murder was in the soil.

Longleaf pines grew straight and tall like a giant's legs, dwarfing all the new houses. Most of the houses were like ours, ranch homes with open carports and big backyards. Tall pine trees hid the really ugly houses, and everywhere there were lines of monkey grass dividing lawns and properties. A line of monkey grass led you right up to our front door. We'd planted two sasanqua bushes, my father's favorite, at the cor ner of the house under my bedroom window. An old magnolia tree stood front and center in the backyard.

So far, I did not get along with the other girls my age on our street, the ones who played with Barbies and still mooned over Rhett Butler in
Gone With the Wind.
They all had bigger families, with mothers who stayed home and living fathers who sold lumber or cars.

My mother wasn't like their mothers and I wasn't like them. The inside of our house didn't even look like the insides of theirs.

As soon as we moved in, my mother painted our kitchen floor black and used the pages of cooking magazines to wallpaper the kitchen walls, painting over them with something glossy to seal them. But the paper puckered and the seal didn't quite work. Throughout the house was a black and brown carpet with a modern design that looked something like a bamboo forest, and all the walls were white, like the ones you see in museums.

When I got home from my first day of school, I took a sleeve of saltines out of the box on the counter and an open bottle of Coca-Cola from the refrigerator.

I sat with Willa Mae while she ironed. My mother didn't have snacks like Moon Pies or Little Debbies in the house. My mother told people she didn't "believe" in snacks, and I supposed it was the same belief system that prevented me from getting pierced ears. I knew we couldn't afford either.

"Why you like that old soda?"

"The flavor is enhanced and it doesn't hurt as much when you burp."

Willa Mae shook her head. "You a strange thing."

When Willa Mae ironed she kept an old Coca-Cola bottle filled with water near her. Every now and then, she put her thumb over the bottle and drizzled the water on the clothes to make for smoother ironing. My mother was the only mother I knew who wouldn't let her maid take our dirty clothes home with her. My mother thought that when Willa Mae left our house, she left her work behind, just like any other job.

Willa Mae owned her own house, and I heard her husband, who was a full-blooded Cherokee, left for a month, and then when he came back drunk she shot him, not dead, but wounded. And even though Willa Mae shot him, he still wanted to come back to her. They had a son I once met sitting in front of their swept yard, drawing pictures in the dust with a stick.

People who were really close to Willa Mae called her Bill. I wasn't close to Willa Mae, not the way other girls I knew said they were close to their maids, not the way I'd read about in all those old-timey novels about the South, not the way I thought I should be close. Early on when we moved into this house, my grandmother declared that if my mother was going to teach every day, someone had to be home when I came home from school, so she arranged for Willa Mae to come to our house every afternoon around three to clean, iron, and sometimes cook for an hour or until my mother came home. I figured that because Willa Mae knew someone else was paying her, she had decided not to allow herself to get too close to us. I guess she figured, who knew how long this arrangement would last?

I pressed my chin to my chest to check for any new developments. "Do you think I should be wearing a bra?"

Willa Mae glanced over my way briefly. She was as black as a person could be, and the white of her teeth glowed when she snickered. "That's not something you need."

My mother would be home soon. After teaching all day, she came home tired and took a thirty-minute nap. Sometimes she stayed there in her room, and I could hear her walking the floor. I knew she was thinking of my father then. I don't know how I knew, but I knew.

We heard two car doors slam shut in the carport. My mother came in through the back door, her arms loaded with papers and books. She was with a man.

He wore black jeans and pointy black boots and he was carrying a big canvas satchel and two bags of groceries. He had at least three cameras around his neck.

"Set the table, sweetie," my mother called in a singsong voice. Her eyes crinkled shut when she laughed. "We've got company for dinner."

My mother introduced this man to me and to Willa Mae, who didn't look up but only nodded and continued ironing one of my mother's white shirts. His name was Perry Walker and he called me "kiddo" right off the bat. My mother suggested we all get started on dinner.

"I don't cook," I said, looking this Perry up and down. He laughed.

"She cooks all the time," my mother said, unpacking the groceries.

She set a pan of water on to boil and asked me to get the skillet.

"Do you teach with my mother?" My mother was already chopping an onion. I could hear Willa Mae in the next room, unplugging the iron, wrapping the cord around it. When Willa Mae had finished ironing, the shirts and everything else in the house smelled starchy and white. My mother and this Perry were messing up this good clean smell with their cooking. That night was supposed to be grilled cheese night for my mother and me, and it was supposed to be just us two.

"Perry just joined the faculty," my mother told me. "He moved from New York City in, what, July? Can you imagine how crazy this place must be to Perry, Sam? What do you think of this heat, Perry?"

"Are we talking weather or politics?"

"Oh, come on," my mother said. "It's not that bad."

"Depends on your definition of
bad
"

Perry told me he was a photographer and he was teaching a new class in photography.

"What kind of pictures do you take?"

"Everything. Wrecks, people, houses, you name it. But I draw the line at tree bark. I just don't want to see any more close-ups of tree bark." He laughed, carefully putting all the cameras hanging around his neck into his big satchel.

I stared at him. I couldn't help myself. What was this man doing in our kitchen, in our house?

"Perry's pictures have appeared in
Life
magazine, Sam," my mother said. "He's very talented."

Perry smiled and shrugged. "Anybody can take a good picture. I just happened to be around during catastrophic events. I guess that makes me an ambulance chaser."

"So what brings you here?" I asked.

He could have made a joke. He could have just said
teaching.
He could have made up something, but no. He went on as though I really cared because I was dumb enough to ask. He said he thought the South was this really amazing part of the country. He said that he sometimes went across town, across the tracks, into the houses of Negroes and took pictures of them and how they lived. He said that he believed that maybe, if people in the North and in the South saw them as people, eating cereal, doing laundry and folding clothes, sweeping their porches, just like everybody else does—if people knew their stories, maybe, just maybe, they'd quit lynching them.

"I'm ready, miss." Willa Mae stood at the kitchen's threshold holding her handbag, her hat already on. She wore shoes with the top tips cut out to give her toes room. We all grew quiet, knowing Willa Mae had heard that word
lynching.
Had this idiot Perry Walker forgotten she was only in the next room?

I just stood there and shook my head, hoping this Perry felt like the fool I thought he was. My mother taught me without ever having to tell me that you didn't discuss the race situation out loud. You just did the right thing, always.
We're all people,
she told me.
Black or white.
That's what her family believed and that's what my dad's family believed.

It never took my mother long to drive Willa Mae home because she lived only a few blocks away, but it was understood that Willa Mae would never walk home.

"I'll come with," I said, getting ready to leave. I could see Willa Mae smirk. She knew I'd much rather sit in the back seat with her. She could tell I didn't like this guy, Perry.

"No, you will not," my mother said. "You can help Perry with the rest of dinner."

When my mother left the house, she left behind a trail of sweet perfume.

"So. Are you one of those outside agitators?" My mother was gone now. I could say anything.

Perry laughed. "I'm just a photographer. The only thing I agitate is my camera and myself. Maybe some other teachers. And some students. Geez. I guess I'm an agitator." He opened a cabinet, saying he needed salt and pepper. Jars of peach, pear, fig, and plum preserves stood in a straight row before him like an army of Confederate soldiers, their masking tape labels made out in my grandmother's neat script. Perry stopped working on dinner and went to his big satchel, opened it, pulled out a camera, and this I couldn't believe. He started snapping pictures of my grandmother's preserves.

"My mother doesn't like photography. She prefers paintings." We had two paintings, one big enough to cover the wall behind the living room sofa. We called it the Spider because that was what it looked like most. Another painting hung in my mother's bedroom. It was a painting a student of hers had done of a medieval scene, but all the figures were out of proportion to the building they were in. I was never sure if that was on purpose.

Perry just smiled. He took some pictures of me sitting on the kitchen stool, even though I said I didn't like having my picture taken.

When my mother came back, I caught her fixing her hair and checking her reflection in the oven door.

***

Over spaghetti and garlic bread, my mother and this Perry Walker talked about their day and other faculty members. He did funny imitations of people, making my mother, and once even me, laugh. Then he started talking about things like contact sheets, cropping, and sepia toners.

"Why do you think you like taking pictures so much, Perry?" my mother asked. She turned up her hearing aid. She'd had polio as a child and lost most of her hearing in her right ear, but this was the first time in ages I'd seen her turn her aid up. Ever since the man from the military had come to our door to deliver the news about my father's death, she mostly turned her hearing aid down or off altogether. She put her elbow on the table, her face in her hand, and leaned in to listen. Crumbs stuck to her lipstick.

Perry shrugged. "Photography lets me get out of my own skin. I mostly bore myself."

Perry and I could both tell my mother was disappointed. She wanted an artsy answer. She wanted Perry to say something like
My pictures are a record of what the camera sees, not always what I see.
My mother was a sucker for art talk.

"Perry and I are going to give a series of art lectures at Tougaloo," my mother said. She knew I was getting bored. Tougaloo was an all-black college in Jackson. My mother's college was all white. Blacks weren't allowed to attend any college event. My mother told me only weeks before that the administrators at her college also discouraged faculty from teaching, visiting, or speaking at Tougaloo.

"Won't you get in trouble?" I asked.

My mother said she didn't care. They were wrong to impose such a ridiculous rule as keeping black people out of a public lecture at an institute for higher learning. Those were her words. She told me Perry was involved in the civil rights movement. "Last year I didn't know what to do about it." She looked at Perry then. "Now I do. If those students can't come to me, I'll go to them."

Perry smiled and raised his glass. They clinked glasses and drank to some silent toast. Had he put her up to this?

"You had your first day of school today too, right?" he said. "How was it? Have any big assignments to look forward to?"

I had to admit I liked that he said this and not
How was your day?
Or
Did you make any nice new friends?
He asked me in a way that made me feel older, like we were working together.

"There's going to be a dance in November," I said. "Miss Jenkins needs chaperones."

"That's one parent duty I could sign up for," my mother said. "I'll call her in the morning."

Then I told them about my state project. Perry said he remembered those kinds of assignments. "Please, please don't be one of those kids who cut out pictures from a magazine, then glue them into a collage on posterboard."

That was exactly what I had planned on doing.

"Okay. So what should I do?"

"Easy. Take your own pictures."

"I don't have a camera."

"Here." He gave me the camera he had been using. "Now you do. Take it. Really. It's an old one, but reliable."

My mother went through all the reasons Perry shouldn't and couldn't lend me his old camera, but he insisted. "This camera is like me. It's indestructible. Really. Tell you what. Try it out, and if you like it, well, we'll see how it goes. Deal?"

It was a black Asahi Pentax, and it was heavy. He showed me how to load film and batteries and how to use the one lens.

"Film is cheap," he said. "Use it."

He showed me how to focus and refocus, telling me that exposure was based on the quantity of light that reached the film. Overexposure made negatives too dark, while underexposure made negatives too light.

When he tried to explain about the light and the shutter and how the aperture or lens opening could be adjusted like the iris of your eyes, I told him to stop because I didn't get it.

"All you have to know now is that a camera is like your eye. To focus, keep one eye closed, while you're looking with the other. It brings everything closer," he said. "You can hide behind a camera."