The Radical Element

by Jessica Spotswood

  “Remember when you asked me why I came to this particular case?” I say softly, and Alexander stops shuffling papers at the desk.

  “Fortunate timing, you said. I happened to agree with that. It was most fortunate, in that it allowed us to meet.”

  He smiles. He hasn’t a care in the world. And right there and then I hate him for it. “Truth is, Mr. Holmes, I lied.”

  He stills. The room grows dead silent.

  “Carrie Buck’s case . . . I’ve followed it since it was in the Circuit Court at Amherst County. My county, as a matter of fact. We’ve never met. She’s from Charlottesville and my family lives in Schuyler. We’ve never even crossed paths. But we have a lot in common, Carrie Buck and I. And I wanted to believe she had a chance.”

  “It’s better for all —”

  It’s better if you keep your head down. It’s better if you leave to stay at your aunt’s. It’s better if you hold your tongue. It’s better if you forget your dreams.

  “If what? If we start deciding who’s good enough? Who matters enough to deserve rights and sovereignty?”

  “She is feebleminded.”

  “She is human,” I say flatly. “Eugenics has nothing to do with the public welfare.”

  Alexander sits down in one of the high-back leather chairs. He rakes his fingers through his hair. “You said you and Carrie Buck have a lot in common.”

  We do. I want to tell him that I know too well what it feels like to be lesser, to be constantly judged and found wanting. That after seventeen years, it still seems to me as if the rest of the world knows rules that I was never taught. That sometimes my mind snags on words, phrases, repetitions. That I can pretend, but it’s all I can do.

  But maybe that’s not entirely true. This city overwhelms me with its busyness and noise, but for the first time, I want to shout back.

  I breathe in sharply. “We have more in common than you may think. Feebleminded? By whose standards?” I take a step forward, and all the words that have floated just out of reach snap into place, fueled by rage and despair and everything I’ve ever wanted to do and be and reach for. “Carrie Buck is a girl like me. Despite everyone telling her that she didn’t matter, she came here to fight for her choices. She has the inalienable right to do so. But instead of recognizing that, we assign value to her, to each other, to ourselves. We tell her she isn’t competent enough. She isn’t fit enough. She isn’t equal enough. Do you know what would be better for all the world? If instead of fighting to limit her rights — our constitutional rights, our fundamentally human rights — we fought to embrace them and strengthen them. If we limit equality, we can never be truly equal.”

  I am trembling all over, and I am relieved.

  Alexander has paled. He trembles, too.

  “You really should be a lawyer, Miss Allen.” He extends his hand, but he doesn’t acknowledge my words. “Come, let me apologize and take you to lunch. I know a quaint little place close by that I’m sure you would appreciate. The weather’s turned again. We could walk the Mall and talk, perhaps.”

  I regard his outstretched hand. His words are stuck in my head. You really should be a lawyer, Miss Allen.

  I really should be a lawyer.

  When I said I wanted to believe Carrie Buck had a chance, I wanted to believe I had a chance.

  I keep my hands to my side. “It was a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Holmes, and a greater pleasure still to spar with you. And I will be a lawyer one day.”

  Before he can respond, I turn away. I walk out of the room, and through the hallway, underneath the proud dome, where the sandstone walls rise high and golden light filters through. I hold my head high.

  When it’s better for all the world that we are not to be given chances, the only option we have left — the only option I have left — is to grab them instead. To fight for them, even if it means courting probable failure.

  I hope Aunt Elizabeth will be at her office. I want to reschedule that tea. Perhaps she can introduce me to the dean after all — though I will do this on my own merits. I want to do this on my own merits, no matter how much time it takes. I curl my fingers around the pebble in my pocket. I’ll carve out my own space.

  I believe I may be starting to understand what Aunt Elizabeth meant. Given time, I could grow to love myself. And in a world where we are considered undesirable elements, Carrie and I, perhaps that is the most radical act of all.

  In the first half of the twentieth century, most states adopted sterilization laws. Based on Laughlin’s Model Eugenical Sterilization Law, these laws focused on intellectually and developmentally disabled people and mentally ill people but also included physically disabled people, d/Deaf and blind people, and people considered “dependent (orphans, ne’er-do-wells, the homeless).”

  Carrie Buck was one of the first recommended for sterilization under the Virginia Sterilization Act of 1924. Her case became a trial case to test its constitutionality.

  When Carrie Buck became pregnant from rape, her foster family petitioned to have her committed to the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded for showing hereditary traits of social inadequacy. After losing the case, in part due to her attorney’s not putting up a defense, Carrie Buck was sterilized. Under the guise of a routine surgery, her half-sister was also sterilized; she only found out many years later.

  Diagnoses were commonly wielded as weapons. This was true for Carrie Buck, who was not “feeble-minded,” but was deemed undesirable/inconvenient.

  In the name of eugenics, over sixty thousand people were forcibly sterilized. Among and alongside disabled people, women of color were disproportionately targeted. Buck v. Bell has never been explicitly overturned.

  Further reading on this subject: Paul Lombardo’s Three Generations, No Imbeciles (about Carrie Buck’s case) and Angela Davis’s Women, Race and Class (specifically: “Racism, Birth Control and Reproductive Rights”).

  Before the war, moonlight used to taste like sugar and butter and fresh cream. Mama would fold in the ingredients until it fluffed up like meringue. She’d even sprinkle it with cinnamon. But now she’s only got sprigs of mint, a few basil leaves, or a stem or two of rosemary from her kitchen garden, and sometimes the soil won’t even give her that. Still, she’s always made sure I’ve never tasted it raw. Pure. Straight from the sky. It’s too bitter and sharp.

  The water around my ankles is still cold for late spring. Oak Bluffs hasn’t warmed yet. It always feels like Massachusetts — especially Martha’s Vineyard — is the last place on Earth to grab heat and let it press down into the water and into the land. We’ve been here five years, and it feels like it’s colder and colder every year.

  Standing in the small lake behind our house, I grip the two canning jars and wait. It seems like I’m always waiting these days.

  For Molly to come over.

  For the moon.

  For another spring cotillion.

  For something, anything, to happen.

  The feeling rises up like a tide ready to flood my insides, drown my heart, choke my voice, and swallow me whole.

  I watch the sky. It looks different now. Maybe gunpowder gets trapped in clouds and these have drifted across the Atlantic from the battlefields. Maybe it’s just me — and my eyes have changed and I can’t see the same things anymore.

  The clouds break to let out the moon. It’s fat and slightly blushing with a halo. Mama will be happy. This is one of her favorite types of full moons.

  The rays hit the water’s surface. They climb over the cool ripples step-by-step as if called to my legs.

  I let the beams kiss my skin, make the light brown glow like fireflies, before I dip the jar into the water. The liquid does not enter. Instead, the moonlight itself folds into the glass receptacle, attracted to the blood coating its inner walls. Mama’s blood tonight. Mine tomorrow. Daddy’s the next night. We take turns with the bleeding.

  The light thickens like sweet pudding.

  I fill both jars, then stand th
ere as if the great glowing orb could tell me something. When will the war end? Will we have to move again? Will I ever get to see the world on my own? Is this how my life will always be?

  I wait for the moon to leave words etched onto the water or spread letters through the clouds or send down messages in the beams.

  But it gives me nothing but its light.

  “Emma, get in here right now. Been out too long. It’ll spoil without a covering.” Mama’s voice carries from the back of the house to the lake. It can always find me, especially when I’m thinking of something she wouldn’t approve of.

  “Coming!” I holler back.

  “You want to wake the whole world?” she snaps when I walk in the house. She stares down at me like I’m a little girl again and too loud during a church service.

  “You yelled first,” I mumble.

  “What did you say?” she asks.

  “Nothing, ma’am.” My cheeks burn with heat, and a wish bubbles up inside my chest: a desire to be free of her and on my own for a little while.

  She stands in the doorway, her hair spilling over with pin curls that poke out from under her scarf. Her freckles cover her light-brown cheeks like chips in a cookie. Not that there is much chocolate with the rations these days.

  I hand her the glass jars. She lifts them up and sucks her teeth. “You could’ve caught more than two jars’ worth. We’ve got to keep the stores full. Always.”

  “I will tomorrow. It was sluggish tonight,” I lie.

  “Seems more like you are.” She eyes me. “You’ve been walking around here dragging your tail these past couple of weeks, and I’ll have no more of it.”

  “I don’t —” I start to speak, then swallow the words. I want to tell her that I’m tired of always doing things her way, that I haven’t been a child for a very long time and I’m tired of being treated like one.

  “Go to your room. I’ll wake you when it’s ready.” She shoos me upstairs.

  I slam my bedroom door and ignore Mama’s shout of displeasure.

  Mama jostles me out of bed before dawn. The house smells like fresh biscuits and bacon and honey. The moon fades into a pale-blue sky as the sun starts to poke its head above the horizon.

  Mama has the candles lit in the kitchen and at the table. She doesn’t like to waste electricity when the sun’s about to come up and do its duty. Daddy reads the paper, using a thick candle bearded with drippings as a paperweight. The headlines almost scream in thick black ink:

  I slide into the seat beside him. “’Morning, Daddy.”

  “’Morning, butterbean.”

  I stare at the pictures of General MacArthur’s men and ships. I toy with a question. It rolls around on my tongue and teases my vocal chords. I’ve always been able to talk to him. Mama says he’s got a listening spirit, and it was one of the reasons she married him.

  Daddy looks up from the paper. A crease mars his forehead like the wrinkles in a raisin, and his left eyebrow hitches up. “What is it? I can see something knocking around in there.”

  “You think the Nazis will make it over here?” I ask.

  “They could.”

  A deep shudder ripples through me. Every day the radio hosts warn listeners about the presence of German U-boats off the eastern coast, and how if the Nazis came here, they’d tear America up just like they were doing in Europe.

  “Then, why are we staying this time?”

  Daddy scratches his beard. “I’m getting tired of moving, butterbean, and this has been my favorite place of all the ones we’ve lived.” He pats my hand. “Also, I don’t really think this war will reach us.”

  “But if it did, what would we do?”

  “What we have always done.”

  “Leave,” I say, and grit my teeth.

  “Yes. Find a faraway corner to hide in.”

  “But what if the Nazis spread to all the states? What if they find out about us? What would happen?” My heart knocks against my rib cage, each thundering beat anticipating his answer.

  “We’d make sure we weren’t found. Cross the border into Canada again or go back down into Mexico. You know what’s at stake if anyone figured out what we can do.” He takes a deep breath. “They’d lock us up in their hospitals. They’d poke us with their needles and measure our skulls and take our blood. They’d study us like the animals they already think we are.”

  “Would you join if you could? To help keep us safe from the Nazis?” I ask in a whisper.

  “Join what?”

  I point at the picture on the front page. His lips purse, and he doesn’t look up.

  “You already know the answer to that question, and you know I don’t like to talk just to hear myself. It wastes the good Lord’s air.”

  “But this time we stayed!”

  “We don’t get involved. We’re not patriots,” he says. During the Civil War, we left New Orleans for a small village in Mexico, and when America entered the first Great War, we headed north out of New York City to Canada. When the wars ended, we came back.

  He continues to read the paper. The silence thickens between us as I try to gather the courage to ask him another question. The word patriot reverberates like a ghost floating through the room, setting my nerves on edge.

  The ration coupons sit on the kitchen counter like paper-thin reminders that the world is starving. The radio reports the body count each day and reminds us how perilous life is for our soldiers in Europe and the Pacific. The two white boys who used to bring the papers into Oak Bluffs enlisted and died. Now the newspapers warn that Japan could invade from the west and Germans from the east if we don’t fight back.

  I’ve never seen any of this before. Mama and Daddy always took me far away, where all of these things were legend and myth. War never felt real before.

  Now it’s everywhere. On the tips of people’s tongues. In every newspaper. On every radio program. Part of every passing conversation.

  I’ve dreamed about it since the attack on Pearl Harbor, since President Roosevelt declared war. In my dreams, the war comes like a great storm, a blizzard of dust with angry spirals and sizzling lightning and thick gunpowder clouds that rage in the sky and cast a suffocating darkness over the world. It feels like the hand of the Devil sweeping over us with his fingers gathering into a fist, ready to squeeze us all. I wake up soaked from head to foot.

  Daddy glances up. “What is it?”

  “Don’t you want to help? Use your medical —?”

  “Help?” He thumps the newspaper.

  I stuff my mouth with a piece of biscuit. Its folds are fluffy like what I think a cloud might be like, if I could catch it like I catch moonlight.

  “War is not a fairy tale, butterbean. Men die.” His wire-rimmed glasses slide down the bridge of his thick nose. “I’m much too old to entertain heroics, especially for a country that doesn’t care about people who look like you or me.”

  “I know. But —”

  “But what?”

  “We never do anything. We just move.”

  Mama overhears me and fumbles with a plate stacked high with biscuits. They tumble along the table, leaving tiny buttery fingerprints on the tablecloth. “Best be dropping the topic.” Mama resets the pyramid of warm biscuits and hands out milky glasses of moonlight.

  “But you’re a nurse, Mama. And, Daddy, you’re a doctor. Don’t you feel like you should help this time?” After the first Great War ended, we moved to the capital, where Daddy and Mama studied at Howard University and worked in the colored hospital there. I thought it might be the place we finally stayed — Mama seemed happier and even let herself have friends — but people started asking questions after they both served ten years at the hospital without a single change in their outward appearance.

  Mama’s hazel eyes narrow. “I was a nurse, and your father didn’t study medicine as some kind of duty to others. We did it so we could always take care of ourselves, so we’d never have to go and ask for medical attention. Now, let’s move on. You’re
gonna make me fly off the handle, and the Lord doesn’t like ugly, especially this close to Sunday.”

  “Let’s remember we’re blessed. We’re alive. We will be here forever. We have the moonlight.” Daddy lets his eyes linger on mine before turning to Mama.

  The McGees mind their own business.

  The McGees hold on to their own breaths, Mama says.

  The McGees only worry about the moonlight.

  I already know this. It’s settled deep in my bones and tissues and soul. We lived through slavery, and we survived. We moved north after Emancipation, and we survived. We kept our heads down and mouths shut, and made our way out of no way.

  The moonlight always provided.

  Mama raises her glass. We all follow, just like we always do. I tip the rim to my lips and let the liquid tease my mouth. I wonder how quickly I’d age if I didn’t drink it. Would my body shrivel within a month? Would my bones start counting the days and weeks and months and years like everyone else’s? Would I feel even more empty than I already do?

  It goes down like flames every time. A hot surge that travels through my throat like a snake and curls into my belly like a fire in the hearth. Daddy says it’s worse than Scottish whiskey, but I’ve never had more than a sip of champagne. Mama says it burns because it’s pushing into our bones, keeping us alive no matter what. She says it’s a gift from the Lord. I’ve had it once a month since I turned sixteen on December 12, 1768, on Honey Alley Plantation outside of Jackson, Mississippi.

  I’m 191 years old. But I have always been sixteen.

  “This one is too puffy, I think.” Molly prances through her bedroom, twirling in her cotillion dress. Her willowy arms are the color of the honey caramels Mama used to make and give as gifts when we lived in Philadelphia. The dress is too puffy; Molly looks like she belongs on top of a wedding cake.

  I mostly look out of her little window. All the houses line up like gingerbread ones in a fairy tale with primrose-pink and lemon-yellow and robin’s-egg-blue piping, and flower boxes spilling over with spring blooms. Rocking chairs creak on tiny porches that reach like poked-out lips onto Clinton Street. Mrs. Brooke tends to her victory garden. Mr. Jordan hobbles along with the help of his granddaughter, Sadie. The church ladies pass by in their pillbox hats and white-gloved hands with big smiles swallowing their brown faces. The click-clack of their heeled shoes creates a melody. You can hear everything so clearly now. The gasoline ration means most people are walking these days.