Sources of Light by Margaret McMullan Page B

important to hate? Something else must be at stake—something I couldn't see before me there in that store on that street in this town. They were scared of something bigger.
    Being black or white wasn't supposed to make any difference. That's what I had been taught by my mother and my father both. This was so easy to say. Now I was realizing that it was a lie. And the rules, the rules I was supposed to follow, went against what we believed.
    "Don't be scared," Willa Mae said.
    I looked at her. "Aren't you scared?"
    Willa Mae looked at me and said, "Shoot. Only thing I'm afraid of is that I'm going to do something I'll regret." We kept walking. In my mind I could still hear the sounds of people yelling "They're not going to eat with us and they're not going to vote with us!"
    "Being scared is just one more thing to turn into what you want it to be," Willa Mae said. "The thing with fear is, it's like anger. You've got to change it into something else. Make it your weapon. Some can just turn it into smarts. The best of 'em can turn fear and anger into love." She looked out toward our neighborhood. "I'm not there yet."
    "Have you ever voted?" I asked. She and I both knew there weren't many black people registered to vote in Mississippi.
    I had never seen Willa Mae laugh out loud, but she laughed then and I saw that she was missing her side teeth. Willa Mae didn't usually look people in the eye, but she looked at me then.
    "I tried to vote once," she said. "Clerk asked me how many bubbles it took to make a bar of soap. I thought it was one of those trick questions, and I said bubbles don't make soap, soap makes bubbles. He said I was wrong and I couldn't vote."
    "What do soap bubbles have to do with voting?" I asked. "Did you ask?"
    "Ask? I don't ask nothin'." She sounded mad. "I am colored. I am a colored woman. That's what I am."
    I stopped myself from saying
I know how you feel
because what did I know? What could I know what it would be like to be black? To be the only girl in this white-personed world who was black? Would I ever really know what it was to step off a sidewalk to allow another person to pass because of her skin color?
    I felt like I didn't know a darned thing. Seven years before, a Negro boy my age from Chicago had been tortured, tied to a cotton gin machinery fan, shot, and found later at the bottom of the Tallahatchie River. Even though nobody I knew in Mississippi spoke his name, news of Emmett Till gradually traveled to me and to Tine, but we never really could get anything more out of our parents. They held back as they did on most things that were happening. Now I supposed I knew why. To think on such dark happenings was almost more than a body could stand.
    It started to rain, and Willa Mae and I made a run for the house. I was shivering, and even though I know she didn't believe me, I told Willa Mae it wasn't because I was scared.

CHAPTER 6
    "I KNOW YOU'RE BUSY AND I KNOW WE JUST DID THIS , but would you help me develop my film?" I asked. Perry Walker and I were standing in the hall outside my mother's office at the college while she sat grading papers.
    He didn't hesitate. "Let's go."
    We worked side by side in his darkroom. All along his shelves were cameras of every shape and size. I picked up a particularly small one, one I hadn't noticed before. Perry nodded and smiled.
    "That little puppy's a gem," he said of his smallest camera. I brought it to my eye while he talked. "It's perfect for when you want to take pictures and go unnoticed. I used that to shoot a military hospital in D.C. Two full pages in
Life.
The nurses didn't even know I was taking pictures."
    Before when we developed pictures together, I'd watched him while he did most of the work. This time, he watched me.
    "My dad gave me my first camera when I was eleven," he told me. He pointed to a big old black camera on the shelf. I thought better than to touch it. "It was just after the war, when rations were over and people had more