Sources of Light Read online

  Sources of Light

  Margaret McMullan

  * * *

  Houghton Mifflin

  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  Boston New York 2010

  * * *

  Copyright © 2010 by Margaret McMullan

  All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce

  selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  Houghton Mifflin is an imprint of

  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

  www.hmhbooks.com

  The text of this book is set in Weiss Medium.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  McMullan, Margaret.

  Sources of light / by Margaret McMullan.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Fourteen-year-old Samantha and her mother move to Jackson,

  Mississippi, in 1962 after her father is killed in Vietnam, and during the

  year they spend there Sam encounters both love and hate as she learns

  about photography from a new friend of her mother's and witnesses

  the prejudice and violence of the segregationists of the South.

  ISBN 978-0-547-07659-1

  [1. Coming of age—Fiction. 2. Race relations—Fiction. 3. Photography—

  Fiction. 4. Segregation—Fiction. 5. Mississippi—History—

  20th century—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.M4787923So 2010

  [Fic]—dc22

  2009049708

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  4500214680

  * * *

  For Pat, who gives me courage always

  and

  For Jim Whitehead, who continues to inspire

  CHAPTER 1

  THE YEAR AFTER MY FATHER DIED, my mother took a job teaching at a small college in Jackson, Mississippi. It was 1962. I was fourteen years old. My father had been in the army, and when they came and told us about his death, they said that he stayed with his wounded soldiers after the helicopter crashed and that he died later under enemy fire. They said he was a hero, and I believed them.

  The cicadas came that summer, the summer my mother and I moved to Jackson, and they made it nearly impossible to roller-skate, climb a tree, or generally do anything a person would want to do outside. With every step you'd hear the Crunch. And even when you weren't stepping on their shells, you couldn't get away from the sound of them. Most days we could hear nothing but cicadas. Together they made a loud, sharp, nonstop noise that sounded like a hum and whistle combined, a sound my mother called "primordial." Even when I wasn't actually hearing them, I heard them in my mind. I imagined that I would be hearing that humming for years.

  The morning of my first day of high school was no different. I was ready for the humming to stop. I was ready for the summer to be over. I was ready to fit in to this new town and make some friends.

  To prepare me, my mother trimmed my bangs while I sat still on a stool at the bathroom sink. Over the summer I'd finally quit my bad habit of sucking on the ends of my hair. When my mother put down the scissors, I put on my cousin Tine's old green dress, snapped two plastic barrettes into my hair, ate a bowl of Frosted Flakes, then set out to walk the three blocks to school. Other girls at my school would be wearing new shoes and dresses. I knew this. My mother didn't think of things like new school clothes, though she always made sure I had books, pencils, and paper. Already we'd gone to her office at the college, where she'd opened the supply cabinet so that I could make my selections.

  ***

  Jackson High School had been built next to the Baptist church, which had new swing sets, but we were supposed to be too old now to play on swings. Inside the school, the tile walls were the light green color of a public restroom, and the lobby display cases were full of football and cheerleading trophies, pretty much the only two extracurricular activities anyone bothered with.

  This school was big, and there weren't many windows. There were a lot of corners and walls, and the hallways smelled of Bazooka bubblegum. I walked into my classroom and took a seat near the front.

  I just sat there and mostly listened while everyone around me talked. They talked about Red Skelton's crazy costumes on last week's show, who was coming up next on Ed Sullivan, and which girls in our class already had hair in their armpits. The girls whispered about how a girl named Mary Alice McLemore had changed altogether over the summer. One girl whispered that Mary Alice wasn't chubby anymore, and couldn't they all see a training bra through her dress? She didn't even try to hide the outlines the straps made!

  I didn't need a training bra. I hadn't grown much at all over the summer, up or out. My mother said I shouldn't be in such a hurry for my growth spurt, but I was still impatient for it.

  When I finally figured out who Mary Alice was, I saw she wore a pink dress with a matching sweater. I didn't even know that girls' dresses came with matching sweaters. She wore pink knee socks too, the ribbed kind. She wore gold posts in her pierced ears. My mother wore earrings that clipped or screwed on. My mother promised me that someday soon I would get to wear clip-on pearl earrings.

  Sometimes I thought the more money you had, the more you mattered. Who knows where I picked up that idea. Pittsburgh, where we used to live, maybe? Or maybe money was in the air that year in Jackson, like the buzz of those cicadas. My mother and I weren't rich, but we weren't poor either. There was my dad's army pension, and that summer we had collected enough'S&H Green Stamps to redeem for an oscillating fan. We didn't buy anything my mother called "extra." We used dishes that came free in detergent boxes. My father did come from a good Mississippi family, whatever that meant. My mother was from Virginia. My parents had been young and good-looking when they met and married there, rich only in love. We'd gone to church when my dad was alive and now we didn't go to church.

  In class, someone said something about the governor of Mississippi, Ross Barnett. Someone else said something about that man named Nixon who'd lost the presidential election two years before. Our teacher walked in and interrupted us: "Richard Nixon has snake eyes. People don't favor anybody with snake eyes, so now we have a Catholic in the White House."

  Once again, even though I had spent the summer hoping, I still hadn't gotten one of the young teachers, one of the cool teachers. I never did, no matter where we lived. Miss Jenkins was old and skinny, with peach fuzz hairs on her upper lip and all along her cheeks. She took attendance, and when she got to my name, she called me Samantha.

  "People call me Sam," I said. I heard some giggling. Some boy said they had a dog named Sam. Miss Jenkins looked at me over her bifocals. She had a tiny pink nose, a nasally, country accent, and she kept a Kleenex tucked into her sleeve.

  "All right then," she said. "Sam." She hissed it out, snakelike.

  That first day and every day afterward Miss Jenkins wore a dark blue dress and stockings that sagged, the seams in the back going crooked by noon. She kept her salt-and-pepper-colored hair tied up in a bun, and we never saw her smile. She had two warped Ping-Pong paddles hanging by a leather hoop behind her desk. One had holes in it, one didn't. If we were lucky, we would get the one without the holes. That one would hurt less. We were in high school. We had grown out of playground equipment but we had not grown out of paddlings.

  Miss Jenkins passed out our books and I opened one to the newer pages in the back, the only parts that hadn't been read by last year's class, and pressed my nose into the crease. These pages still had a new-book smell.

  Miss Jenkins told us we had two big projects this school year. We would have to write a speech and we w
ould have to speak it out loud to the class by the end of the year for a new subject called communications. She also gave us a used textbook called Your Mississippi, which she said we would need for our state report, part of which was due by Christmas. We were each supposed to do a report on Mississippi.

  In science, we would get to use microscopes, beakers, and even Bunsen burners for our experiments, and I heard Mary Alice say it was no big deal because she had already done the same using her older brother's chemistry set.

  When a boy came in late, Miss Jenkins sat him next to me. I didn't care. Boys didn't bother with me and I didn't bother with them, mostly because they had nothing to say. Most of them just spent all their time watching Gunsmoke or Bonanza.

  He had black hair and his skin was powdery brown. I heard someone whisper that his father was full-blooded Choctaw. In Pittsburgh, I had known a boy who looked kind of like this boy, except that the boy I knew was called "colored." The boy I knew in Pittsburgh was named Alec. Once on a field trip our class took a bus to a factory outside of town to see how bread was made. We each got a free loaf. On the trip back, most of the kids tossed around their free bread loaves. Some even opened their bread on the bus, rolling the slices into dough balls and then using them as weapons, throwing them at one another or out the window at passing cars. We didn't say anything to each other, but Alec and I stayed close together in the back of the bus that day, tucking our loaves under our arms, keeping our free food safe. Neither of us dressed well, because our families didn't have much money. We were the same. After that day, Alec was my friend. He was my first friend, and I forgot that we were different colors. When I brought him over, my mother said how proud she was that I had a friend like Alec, that deep down, we were all the same. I thought she said that because he was a boy.

  "I'm not too good with Indian names," Miss Jenkins said.

  "Some folks call me Ears on account I have big ones," the boy said.

  "All right then: Ears it is," Miss Jenkins said.

  Miss Jenkins also announced that we would be having a dance at the school in November and our parents were welcome to be chaperones. I swallowed hard. I had never been to a dance—not here, and not at any of my other schools.

  ***

  At lunch Ears asked me to sit with him, but I turned him down. I got brave and sat down at Mary Alice's table. The tanned girls went quiet as I opened my lunch: a peanut butter and banana sandwich wrapped in wax paper, which my mother still called parchment paper. For years I thought prisoners made the paper, because the name of the state prison in the Mississippi delta was Parchman. This is what I thought of each and every time I unwrapped my sandwich at lunch: prison.

  Luckily, Mary Alice kept talking. She had spent her summer swimming and writing to the stars. Already she told us all she had received "correspondence" from Bobby Vinton, Connie Francis, and Brenda Lee. Then she turned to me. "Your name is Sam, right? So what did you do this summer?" Her pigtails were tied with pink grosgrain ribbon to match her pink dress and socks. I couldn't stop looking at all that pink.

  "I got four jars just full up with cicada shells," I finally said. I didn't want to tell her anything about Pittsburgh or my dad or my mom crying all the time or our move. That was mine.

  Mary Alice looked at me. I could follow her eyes moving from my home-cut bangs down to my green hand-me-down dress.

  "That's what boys do," she said. "Collect bugs."

  "Well," I started. It came out a whisper. "I collect the skeletons."

  Mary Alice and her tanned friends laughed, and I laughed along with them as though I had meant what I said to be a joke.

  Mary Alice and her friends seemed headed for what every other pretty girl in Mississippi was headed for: a beauty pageant. I was never going to be as pretty as Mary Ann Mobley or any of the other former Miss Mississippis, especially not in my cousin Tine's old stained dresses. My barrettes dug into my scalp and hurt my head all the rest of that day.

  But then, in the afternoon, I saw him in the hallway as soon as the bell rang to let us out. He was tall and trim and he had a strong man's neck, not a boy's neck at all. He looked as though he would have a beard soon too, maybe even as soon as that fall. He smiled and waved to everyone as he walked, and when he saw me, he said, "Do I know you?" He had brown eyes shaded with dark brows, and his black hair was combed straight back.

  "I'm Sam. I think someone in my class has a dog named Sam. Maybe you're confusing me with him." I stopped then. What had I done? I had just equated myself with a dog.

  He laughed and shook his head. Then he did what any sensible boy would do: he walked past me and right on up to another girl, a prettier girl, Mary Alice McLemore, and my heart just sank. He leaned over her, and carried her books. They smiled and then walked out of the school together. Of course they went together. Of course. Mary Alice McLemore would never say anything as idiotic as what I had just said.

  I picked up my blue canvas schoolbook satchel, another hand-me-down from my cousin Tine, and I started walking. As I headed home, I thought of my cousin. Tine was short for Clementine. She was one year older than I was, but she pulled weeds slower and had a tough time following my grandmother's instructions in the kitchen. Tine had what they called a speech impediment. She stuttered and when she got scared, she drooled. The collars of Tine's shirts and dresses were always damp. I wore everything Tine wore. Would I end up stuttering, drooling and scared like Tine?

  Outside, the air smelled clean, piney, and mildewy too. It used to be that by the end of most summers my feet were tough from going barefoot, and it made me happy and triumphant to know I could walk on hot, newly tarred streets, or even the tops of acorns when fall came. When school started, my feet were always strong going in. Not this year. All summer, I'd worn shoes because of the cicadas. My feet were soft. Maybe I wasn't tough enough for this new high school. Maybe I wasn't ready for this new year in our new hometown.

  CHAPTER 2

  I HAD BEEN AN ARMY BRAT and already I had lived in four other places: Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Pittsburgh was where we last saw my dad going off to a war in a country that most people hadn't even heard about yet: Vietnam. After Pittsburgh, my mother and I moved here to Mississippi near my father's hometown to start our new life together. My mother was an only child and both her parents had died even before I was born. This time, my mother said we were here to stay. She was hoping to turn her one-year contract into a lifetime job of teaching. My grandparents were about an hour outside of Jackson, in Franklin, where my father grew up. I knew a lot about Mississippi, or at least I thought I did, because while my mother finished her graduate schoolwork, I had spent every summer since I was born in Franklin with my grandparents. They lived near other relatives out in the country, where they kept a neat kitchen garden, which my cousin Tine and I helped to tend and harvest. Every July we worked with my grandmother to cook and can vegetables and fruit.

  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 Bu
tler 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.