Sources of Light (7 page)

"I hear you teach art up at the college," Stone said. Everyone went quiet. I had never before seen or heard anyone approximately my age change the subject as he had.

"Art history," my mother said.

"I don't know about all this modern art," Mrs. McLemore said. "I just know I like what I like."

"That's right, honey." Mr. McLemore poured everyone more drinks.

"Mom's hoping to take me to Europe soon," I said, trying to follow Stone's lead.

"Greece, actually," my mother said. "I used to love to travel. Anywhere. I miss it."

Mary Alice's mother said she didn't like Europe at all because she said it was too hilly. She shook her head and said it was a wonder how little old her got to travel as much as she did, but she said her husband did enough travel for the both of them. He often went on business trips to the coast and had even heard Patti Page and Peggy Lee sing.

"We saw your picture in the paper," Mary Alice said, smiling.

Mary Alice's mother shot her a look. "Don't be rude."

I loved Mrs. McLemore more than ever right then.

"What do you want to do when you get out of school, Mary Alice?" my mother asked. She always asked this of her students.

Mary Alice said she wanted to be a Delta Airlines stewardess and then a homemaker.

My mother nodded. Somehow, I knew what she was thinking. She hated them all and she thought she was better.

No one even bothered asking me what I wanted to be when I grew up. It didn't matter anyway. Wasn't I going to Randolph-Macon Women's College as my aunt had or Ole Miss as my father had and as all my cousins were surely to go? I didn't know what I wanted to be anyway. I just knew what I didn't want to be: a teacher like my mom. I didn't want to be anything like my mom. I wanted to be more like Mrs. McLemore.

"I know you think you were doing some kind of good out there at Tougaloo," Mrs. McLemore said in a newly serious way. "But you're just wasting your time."

"I just don't understand why they have to get all riled up," Mr. McLemore said. "They don't have such bad lives. Our Mattie's happy. Go and ask her yourself."

Mattie was their maid. Mary Alice said Mattie did everything—cooked, cleaned, and even made out the grocery lists. "If she had front teeth, she'd be real pretty," Mary Alice said. Mary Alice wore a charm bracelet that jingled each time she passed around the deviled ham and cheese on crackers.

"Oh, don't get me wrong," Mrs. McLemore went on, looking into her glass. "The coloreds serve a purpose here. Unlike the Chinese." She put one manicured fingernail in the drink and came out with a gnat, and then rolled it between her fingers.

"And now they want to integrate into our schools," Mr. McLemore said. "They're just going to ruin things for our children."

"I don't see how that can ruin things," my mother started.

"The quality of our schools will plummet if we agree to integration. Don't you want your daughter to have all the advantages that you didn't?" Mrs. McLemore asked my mother.

My mother smiled. I braced myself and only wished Mrs. McLemore knew to do the same. "What makes you think I didn't have all the advantages?" My mother paused to breathe and look steadily into Mrs. McLemore's eyes the way she did sometimes with me to make me listen. "And why would you think that having advantages makes a bit of difference in the formation of a human being?"

Mrs. McLemore looked up and down and all around my mother. Her eyes couldn't settle down.

"Did we mention we knew your husband's people, the Russells?" Mr. McLemore said, patting his wife's knee. He talked about my great-grandfather Frank Russell, who had once been a schoolteacher. Frank Russell and his father had helped settle parts of Smith County, and he sold goods he brought up from New Orleans in his wagon. I was surprised Mr. McLemore knew so much about my father's relatives.

"The Russells are all buried in a pretty little cemetery on the property where my husband grew up," my mother said. "Sam has spent a lot of time out there with her grandparents."

Mrs. McLemore smiled. "It's important to know your family tree."

"She's a regular little Mississippi girl," Mr. McLemore said, squeezing my shoulder. I don't know why, but I breathed a sigh of relief, as though I'd passed some test. I didn't think my mother had, though.

I watched Stone watching my mother, who smiled and said nothing more. Stone had Elvis lips, but his eyes weren't so boyish or sad.

***

At the dinner table I sat next to Stone and I tried to keep breathing to steady my heart. We all held hands to say grace. His palms were hard and cool. His big hands with long, slender fingers were just turning into man hands. I had never held a boy's hand in any religious or romantic way before. My knee brushed against his.

Mr. McLemore poured my mother another drink. We ate roast with pearl onions, scalloped potatoes, and tomato aspic with olives and celery. My mother and I never ate like this on a weeknight, and I had never seen anyone cut his meat the way Mr. McLemore did, holding his fork like a dagger and then sawing away with his knife. Stone did the same. I thought of how my father had cut his meat, all the power coming from the tips of his fingers.

We used colored paper napkins too. At home my mother and I each had our own cloth napkin that we only washed once a week. I thought now how disgusting that might be to some.

No one spoke while we ate. My mother insisted on conversations at the table. She asked the McLemores what they had done that summer. I tried not to notice my mother watching Stone waving his fork as he spoke. I just listened. He had been to the bridge over the East Pascagoula, even fished in the same spot where those two shipyard workers said space aliens abducted them. He told us about the Mississippi Gulf Coast, where they went for family vacations, the alligator and turtle races in Long Beach, the Deer Ranch, and his favorite, Beauvoir, Jefferson Davis's house in Biloxi.

If my dad were alive, I would tell him about Stone. In my mind, we all would have gotten along.

Stone and his father said something to each other that sounded like gibberish but was really just man talk, separating themselves for a moment from the rest of us.

I was glad not to be a boy in Mississippi. Boys couldn't just be smart. They had to be smart in school, then pretend to be hunters and farmers even if they weren't. They had to say "ain't" and use the wrong verbs every now and then, just to show others they hadn't gotten beyond their raising. If boys were smart they had to be two people all the time.

"What, are you two in a klavern or something?" my mother said. She sounded drunk and she kept smiling, giggling even. When they were together, my mother and Perry often made fun of the KKK and all that was happening. They said laughing about it helped them get through a day of listening to crazy people. "You aren't Kluckers, are you?"

Mr. McLemore cleared his throat. Mrs. McLemore disappeared into the kitchen to get something.

"Ma'am?" Stone asked, filling my mother's water glass.

My mother and Perry had gotten too used to mocking anything having to do with the Ku Klux Klan, it had become habit. Once she'd told me, "The whole thing is so barbaric and so absurd."

"Mom?"

"I'm fine," she whispered, then quietly hiccupped. "I'll behave. I promise." She began drinking water.

I excused myself, thinking I was going to be sick. I couldn't watch Stone or Mary Alice watching my mother and me as if we were some free freak show at their dinner table. And I didn't want to stick around to see what wrong thing my mother would do or say next. Luckily, I knew where to find the air-raid shelter bathroom, so I knew where to hide in order to collect and prepare myself for the worst, which was my mother after three drinks. This was so much worse than a nuclear bomb explosion.

In the downstairs powder room, I splashed cold water on my face. I took three deep breaths. When I opened the door, Stone was there.

"There you are," he said. "I've been looking for you."

"You have?"

He smiled. "Sure I have." He stepped closer, closer than any boy had ever stepped. "Hey."

"Hey," I said, swallowing.

"Samantha." He called me by my full name like that and then stepped even closer. "I was wondering. Will you come to the dance with me?"

This moment felt so new, I wished it would slow down. I wished I had time to step back and look at it from a distance, with a long, wide-angle lens. This handsome boy I admired and liked to look at appeared before me just like that, as though he had dropped down from outer space, and there we were, face-to-face in his air raid shelter, safe from the Russians and all the other grownups. He had asked me and I would say yes and we would be going to the dance. Me. Samantha Thomas would be going to a high school dance with Stone McLemore.

"Sure," I said, trying to sound as casual as you please. But it came out sounding like a cough.

He lifted my chin the way handsome men did to pretty women in the movies. He closed his eyes. I had never before seen a boy up close with his eyes closed. It felt private and personal, and I held my breath so I wouldn't mess up this perfect moment. We kissed, and I hoped I wouldn't burp up the onions from dinner. When I opened my eyes, he saw and stopped.

"You're supposed to keep your eyes shut," he whispered.

"I didn't know."

He smiled. "You're like some kind of purebred. My dad's told me all about your family. I think my kin might even have known your kin way back."

For some reason I remembered just then that I was wearing Tine's old red dress. Tine drooled when she was nervous. I hoped I wasn't drooling all over myself.

I could hear Mrs. McLemore in the living room upstairs, saying that we weren't required to obey northern laws.

When we went back up separately, I couldn't stop smiling. Not even the sound of Mary Alice's charm bracelet tinkling could wipe away my grin.

My mother was saying that Mississippi had isolated itself from the rest of the nation.

"It's not a separate nation-state," she said. She was no longer jumbling her words. She had her teacher voice on. I wasn't sure which was worse. "It's not like we're unaccountable to a higher authority. If that's the case, then we're living in a totalitarian state."

"You sure do have some ideas," Mr. McLemore said, grinning.

"I didn't understand a word you just said," Mrs. McLemore said, laughing, fanning herself with her napkin. "Mary Alice, clear those dishes, would you, dear? Jeffy, quit running around. You're wearing out my last nerve."

"Your husband's family, they're fine people, good people, your husband's people." Mr. McLemore's voice went low and soft. "I just know they don't want you agitating and stirring up trouble here where you're trying to start a new life and all."

My mother and Mr. McLemore stared at each other then and something happened between them. Something understood just between the two of them. My mother nodded. "Thank you for the advice." Then she turned to me. "Sam, we should be going." She wasn't serious rude. Just serious polite.

As we were leaving, Mr. McLemore took my mother's elbow and drew her close. "Honey, this isn't your fight." He was almost close enough to kiss her. "Let's us leave the serious business of governing to our governor."

My mother just smiled. "As long as the governor works for
us
."

Already little Jeffy had turned on the TV. A previously recorded performance was on
The Ed Sullivan Show,
and even though the McLemores' TV was the biggest I'd seen, that box didn't seem like it could hold the sounds coming out of Louis Armstrong's trumpet.

***

When we got back home from the McLemores', my mother pulled off her black shirt and skirt. It seemed she couldn't get out of those clothes fast enough. She pulled on one of my dad's old shirts to sleep in, and for a change she climbed into my bed with one of her big art books. She was so caught up in her books—huge picture books of art and art history, books two times the size of her head. She once told me she got hooked on art because every year her mother gave her a big art book for Christmas. My mother loved art and sometimes talked about old paintings like they were old friends. She told me that when she was my age, looking through her art books was an escape, and when she looked hard enough and long enough at the pictures, she was where she wanted to be. Now every night when she climbed into bed, sometimes even when it was still light outside, she'd haul these books in with her, opening them on a pillow so the corners wouldn't jab into her stomach, then with a pencil behind her ear and a notepad nearby, she would read these books, even the captions, and study the pictures until she had them memorized.

She had seen the Acropolis only in pictures. She was reading about Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli. She had just finished rereading Euripides. She wanted to do a study on all the different versions of Aphrodite and what every culture from different times saw as beauty.

When I climbed in beside her, she turned off the light. I couldn't stop thinking of Stone. He had kissed me. My first kiss and it was from Stone McLemore. Lying there next to my mother's warm, soft body made me feel weird.

"Kitty-cat," she said, tracing the outline of my ear. She sounded a little drunk.

"Quit it."

"Pookie-poo." I could smell the wine on her breath and the Pond's cold cream on her face.

"Why do you have to be so strange, Mom?"

She was laughing and I was not.

"Because that's the way God made me." She was making a joke, imitating someone now, but I didn't know whom. A McLemore?

"Are you making fun of them?"

"I wouldn't be at all surprised if each of them had white sheets and hoods in their closets. They are as bad as the people who painted our front door." She picked up some of my hair and twirled it around. I batted away her hand.

"Stone is not a member of the KKK, Mom."

"Honey," she sighed. "Don't go falling for a boy like Stone. He's not our kind."

"Leave me alone, Mom." Our kind? What was that supposed to mean? I didn't care if Mary Alice or Stone was our kind, but I sure knew I wanted to be Stone's kind. I thought of the whole McLemore world that had just opened up to me. It was a family world where they took vacations together, ate casseroles, held hands and said grace. I had never been skiing, but for some reason the McLemores looked like people who skied or who would eventually ski.