Free Sources of Light by Margaret McMullan

keep it there."
    "Mom," I said. "I just want to sleep."
    She took out her hearing aid. She unhooked the string of pearls around her neck. I used to like playing with this necklace and would until she made me stop. She picked up the framed picture of my father from my nightstand and stared at it.
    Mary Alice told us girls at school that sometimes her mother declared a "pajama day" and they both stayed in their pajamas all day and watched TV and played board games and anything else you could do in bed. They ate meals on trays and had lots of girl talk. Oh, how we all envied Mary Alice.
    After my mother finally left my room, I listened to her mumbling to herself in her bedroom. I knew she was talking to my dad. For my mother, my dad was always there with us. For me he was gone most of the time, except when I chose to think of him. I wondered, had she married him just to leave home? And now was she looking to leave again, this time with Perry? I rolled over and faced the wall, half wishing she'd come back.

CHAPTER 5
    I N THE FOLLOWING WEEKS my mother kept getting anonymous letters in the mail, and she wouldn't let me read them. Then, after she listened to one nasty phone call, she told Willa Mae I was no longer allowed to answer the phone. One morning, when I came back from my daily picture-taking walk, I found a black cat lying dead on top of our newspaper outside our front door. My mother put a stop to my early-morning photo sessions, so I started taking pictures after school.
    If this part of my life had been a short-answer test like the ones we took at school, some of the questions would have been these: What would my dad say to all this? What was the right thing to do and when would I know it? Would he want us to stay here in his home state, or go, just go? Would leaving mean running away? Or, would he want us to stay here, close to his family?
    Perry came and put new bolt locks on our doors. At night, he came by to check on us. He looked tired and sweaty, his shirttails hanging out, but he always smiled and made my mother laugh. He brought photography books for me to look through too, pointing out pictures taken by "famous" people I'd never heard of: Alfred Eisenstaedt, Ansel Adams, Margaret Bourke-White, Robert Capa, Walker Evans, and Dorothea Lange.
    Perry was the only white person I knew who lived in an all-black neighborhood. Every day after he finished teaching, he taught kids in his neighborhood about photography. He was helping their parents register to vote too.
    Every few days I gave my film to Perry and we stood side by side in his darkroom, developing pictures. Sometimes he talked while he worked, telling me how important it was to stay alert for good photographs, how to really
look
and
see,
or how he thought these difficult times in Mississippi were probably his most productive period. Once he got all worked up, saying that being here was better than the riots he'd photographed. No way was he budging. No way was he leaving.
    "I'm finally
part
of a place," he said that afternoon. "I'm not just taking pictures." I couldn't help but think how I didn't feel quite the same way yet about living in Jackson.
    This was in the fall of 1962, when winter was coming up on all of us. Weeks went by and then the leaves on the trees and the leaves on the ground were all washed in gold and burgundy and that's all you saw. Then
finally
people seemed to forget about my mother guest lecturing at Tougaloo, because there was other news.
    A black twenty-nine-year-old air force veteran named James Meredith had enrolled at the University of Mississippi, or "Ole Miss," in Oxford as a transfer student, and at the end of September, on a beautiful warm Sunday night, in front of a building called the Lyceum, middle-aged men who didn't want Meredith attending an all-white university egged on students to attack the National Guards President Kennedy had sent down. There they all were at our state's institution for higher learning, running around