Sources of Light by Margaret McMullan

yelling at the group of black people, but I couldn't hear what they were saying.
    Willa Mae tapped my shoe with her shoe, and then motioned toward the door.
    "One minute," I whispered. "Please?"
    A group of four or five college students and what looked to be their professors, black and white, came into the drugstore and sat down at the end of the counter, all quiet and businesslike. They waited to order, but the woman behind the counter did not move from where she stood near me.
    All of the other white people seated at the counter stopped talking and stood up. They put their money down, leaving full plates of burgers and fries, and then they left, mumbling and shaking their heads. Willa Mae and I both could feel something happening then, except I could tell that she wanted to leave and I wanted to stay.
    The place began to fill up. The angry white men from outside came inside, yelling now at the black and white students and professors sitting together at the lunch counter. These angry white men used every word I was never allowed to use, and then some. Three policemen came in too. They stood by, listened, and watched. I knew what they knew. Black and white people were not allowed to sit together at any lunch counter in Jackson, Mississippi.
    Just then I thought about the samurai warriors I read about in
National Geographic
and how they prepared themselves for battle by deciding that they were dead already so they had nothing to lose. Had my father done that? What was the right thing to do now? Was this feeling I had now what he'd meant when he said "You'll know"? I kept the camera at my hip and snapped more pictures. The yelling inside around the lunch counter was loud enough now so that no one heard my camera clicking.
    Willa Mae stood against the wall close to the door. I could tell by her eyes that she had gone somewhere deep within herself, as if willing herself to disappear. We were the same like that.
    One of the black women seated at the counter was a tall, pretty college-aged woman who carried a purse and two books. She could have been one of my mother's students, except that she was black. She stared down at the space on the counter in front of her, saying nothing.
    "You've got to learn to see," Perry Walker had said to me, loading my camera with film. "The camera is gonna record whatever it's aimed at. It's up to you to pick what you want to record."
    I brought my camera to my right eye, then closed my left, and from then on, the me that was me was gone and I was just seeing, watching everything through that lens. Mostly, I kept my focus on this girl, so pretty and so calm, staring down at a full glass of water somebody else had left behind.
    Old and young white men closed in on that small group at the counter, and their focus was the same as mine. They called the girl names. She said nothing. The people at the counter with her said nothing. The white men standing behind her poured ketchup and then sugar over her head. She did nothing. The people at the counter with her did nothing. Young men gathered to jeer and gape, their cigarettes dangling from their lips. One punched her arm. She fixed her eyes on the lunch counter or on the glass of water—I couldn't tell which. She did nothing. If I had been her, sitting there, while all those nasty white boys poured a mess over my head, saying all those mean things, would I have been able to keep my cool like that? I thought of what gave her courage. She wanted to sit at the counter, but I also knew there was more. She wanted what I had and what I didn't even think twice about. She wanted to live her life, just like me and everybody else.
    Those white men and boys were attacking her and she'd done nothing, but just by
being
there, by sitting there where she was not supposed to be sitting, she was doing something. They were screaming and getting so angry, their faces turned red. They made so much noise and their voices were so loud, you had to go quiet. I kept my eye