Sources of Light by Margaret McMullan Read Free Book Online Page A

mother. All these mothers looked the same, with their bright colored dresses, their frosted pink-lipsticked lips and bubble hairdos. They looked like they never worried about promotions, jobs, or money.
    Mary Alice was still wearing the nightgown she called a Lanz, which I guessed was special because the other mothers grew hushed and quietly came over to examine the white rickrack at the hem.
    My mother wore a gray suit and a white blouse and black pumps, and she looked like a prison warden. This on a Saturday.
    "Ready?" my mother asked. When people spoke of my mother they used words like
arty
and
intellectual,
and it was never in a good way either. She didn't wear lots of makeup like other women. She only put on bright red Revlon lipstick, blotting her lips with a square of tissue or whatever old envelope she had in her purse. She hated taking too much time getting ready for anything. She quit wearing hats and gloves like other women too because she said it was silly, and in the summer it was too hot. All the other mothers wore rollers at night to do their hair like Jackie Kennedy's. I'd seen them come out in the morning for their papers, their hair still done up. My mother kept her hair short so she didn't have to curl or fuss with it and it looked as though she were always wearing a black bathing cap. She wasn't pretty the way other mothers were pretty. My mother was striking.
    Now she was breathless, thanking Mary Alice's mother, then putting her arm around me as we hurried toward the car. The sun was one big white unshuttered lens in the sky. It was Indian summer, and the warm air smelled of leaves burning.
    "Why are we running?"
    "We're late for Tougaloo." A few of the mothers turned at the word
Tougaloo.

    ***
    Striding through the halls of Tougaloo, the all-black college in north Jackson, my mother was a different person. She held her head high and smiled. A passing student called her Professor even though she was just a visiting lecturer. She didn't correct him. She was happy here and I wondered why she wasn't like this all the time at home.
    The lecture wasn't in a classroom like I thought it would be. It was in a big auditorium and there weren't but a handful of people there, all of them black, none of them looking too thrilled to be inside, in school on Saturday morning. I could tell my mother was disappointed in the small group.
    I didn't see him at first, but Perry was already there, taking pictures. He was white, but nobody took notice of him. I wondered how he did that.
    I had never been to Tougaloo, and I had never sat in a room with more black people than white people, and neither had I wondered about how that might feel, being one of a few. I didn't like it one bit because there was no way to blend in.
    I didn't make eye contact with anyone. I looked down at my shoes or I picked off the rest of the pink polish from my nails, while my mother showed slides of paintings of virgins, Old Testament patriarchs, bloodied St. Sebastians, and Jesuses getting beaten by the mobs. I looked up to see a few students listening. One was asleep. Her lecture was on religious icons and martyrs from the past, but it felt as if she were suggesting that this past had everything to do with our lives right then.
    The students who listened sometimes nodded their heads in agreement. At the end, they clapped. Someone, not Perry, snapped a picture. I felt clearly then that the students who listened liked her and what she said, and it surprised me because it was only my mother.
    ***
    Monday morning after the lecture at Tougaloo, my mother and I found the flowerpots at our front door knocked over, the dark, glossy leaves of our sasanqua bushes trampled, and the words WE'RE WATCHING painted in red on our front door. Garbage was all over our lawn and it wasn't even our garbage. We both started picking up the lawn when we saw that among the garbage was that morning's paper with my mother's picture there on the front page of