All the white women freeze over their worktables. Bundles of white gauze sit like small pillows in front of them.
“Can I help you with something, miss? Are you lost?” one of them says. She hitches a blond eyebrow up at me.
“I — I wanted . . . Are you taking more volunteers?” I squeak out.
An older woman wearing a nun’s habit approaches. “Yes, of course. Many hands make the Lord’s work lighter.”
The room’s so quiet, you could hear a mouse tiptoe. She leads me to a corner table, and we settle across from one another.
“I’m Mother Powell.”
“Emma,” I whisper. “Emma McGee.”
“And where are you from?”
“Oak Bluffs.”
“Of course. How did you hear we were in need of help?”
“I saw a poster about the Red Cross.”
She nods. “Very well, then. Wash your hands in that bowl.” She points to a water basin. “Must keep them clean. Then use this here.” She places a square template in front of me. “Fold in on all four sides.”
“What are these?” I whisper.
“Medical bandages for the soldiers.”
The conversation in the room picks up as I fade into the background like a vase on a stand. The other girls discuss boys they fancy and the music on the radio and what might happen to the world if Hitler succeeds.
Hours pass. Girls and young women drift in and out. I fall into a rhythm. The simple folding action fills a hole I didn’t know existed. The ache of needing to do something, anything of meaning besides collecting moonlight. The bundle of bandages becomes a mountain.
“We’re closing for the day, dearie,” the nun says.
I gaze up and realize I’m the only one left.
“Thank you for volunteering.” She transfers the bundles to boxes. “You are most industrious. You have a good touch.”
I walk toward the door. Her desk has a pile of Army Nurse Corps forms. My fingers float over the pages, feeling buzzy and light.
“Will you come back? We could use more hands. Always,” Mother Powell says.
I reach for the doorknob and fight the smile tickling my lips.
“Yes,” I reply.
I swipe an application before slipping out. I press it to my heart.
“Maybe we should leave again.” Mama’s voice carries up the stairwell, where I’m hiding and listening.
I should still be asleep. I should be waiting for her to wake me for our early-morning breakfast and moonlight. She caught the rays tonight as I watched her from my bedroom window.
“I like this place,” Daddy replies.
“This war could be worse than the others. What happened at Pearl Harbor was bad. And even though it feels far away, maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s coming and will show up on our doorstep before we’ve even gotten the chance to plan. I won’t live with soldiers around ever again.”
The scent of bacon finds me. My stomach gurgles. I hold it so it won’t give my hiding spot away.
“Where would we go, Matilda? We’ve found a good place here. It’s a sleepy community. One that avoids suspicion. We know how to get through the worst of it.”
“Maybe Toronto? Or Montreal?” Mama frets. “Or back to Mexico, even.”
“I’m tired of running. Packing and moving. Then unpacking and trying to settle back in somewhere new.” Daddy’s paper crackles. The candle burns out. “Light me another, please.”
“Malcolm, maybe —” Mama says.
The hiss of the match echoes.
“I’ll think about it. If the Nazis or the Japanese make it to our shores, then we must go. I won’t allow what happened to you before to happen again. I promised you that many years ago.” He reaches for Mama’s hand. “I do what I say I’m going to do.”
“I know,” she replies.
“We’re safe when we’re together. We’re better when we’ve thought things through together.” He kisses her hand. “Go on and finish breakfast. The bacon’s burning.”
Mama’s cast-iron skillet makes a bang. “Emma’s walking around fussin’ about the war. You seen her?”
“She’ll be all right.”
“You always say that,” she says. “It doesn’t feel like it this time. She’s changing.”
I hold my breath.
“She’s been our little girl for almost two hundred years. Surely she’ll remain that way for two hundred more,” Daddy says.
“I don’t want to be your little girl anymore,” I whisper under my breath, then clasp my hand over my mouth.
“She’s got an itch that I’m not sure I can scratch out of her.”
“Well, we’re going to have to,” he says. “We have to just focus on the moonlight.”
It takes me an entire month to gather all the documents needed to join the Army Nurse Corps and sign up for training. I steal Mama’s nursing license and graduation certificate from her nursing school out of a tin she keeps in the bottom of her desk. We have the same name — Matilda Emma McGee — even though everyone calls me Emma. I change the dates to last year — no one will believe I was old enough to graduate nursing school almost twenty years ago. Then I forge Daddy’s handwriting to write a note about my good health, and write a letter from Molly testifying to my moral and professional excellence.
I try to quiet all the troublesome worries in my head: Emma, you don’t know anything about medicine. Emma, you aren’t a nurse. Emma, you could hurt someone. Emma, Mama would be so upset and say this is unethical.
“I will pay attention to every bit of training. I will not take any risks with anyone’s life. I will ask to be assigned simple tasks,” I tell myself.
I use my best pen to fill out one of the numerous birth certificate forms Daddy has stockpiled in his office. I will my hands to stop shaking. I write in a new birthday — December 12, 1921. I’ll be twenty-two years old. That seems like a good age. One that implies trust and responsibility. One that fits within the requirements: twenty-one to forty years old. One that I can pass for.
I pack a small satchel with just the necessities — clean underwear, a few dresses, toiletries, the only two stockings I have left after a year of rations. I leave room for the moonlight jars.
Mama peeks her head into my room. “Come help me pluck the string beans for supper.”
I pull one of my pillows over all the forms. “I promised Molly I’d help her pick out a dress for the cotillion.”
“And when might you be picking your own?”
“I don’t think I want to do it this year.”
“You don’t think?” Her mouth purses.
“Yes, ma’am. I thought maybe I could not have a debut.”
“Everyone has one. You know this.”
“I’ve had so many. Maybe we can do something diff —”
“Different?” she says.
I nod.
“What’s all this different talk?” She steps farther into the room.
I shrug. I want to tell her I’m tired of being sixteen. I’m tired of going through the same rituals and milestones every year. I want something new. But she lifts her eyebrows and purses her lips. “It’s nothing. I’ll pick my cotillion dress tomorrow, Mama. I promise.”
She eyes me, then smiles. “Whichever one you choose will be beautiful. You always look lovely in them.” A sadness creeps into me, and I wish I could tell her the truth and make her understand.
I take out the cotillion dress I wore in 1934. We’d returned to New Orleans, and I loved being back in the city, especially to ride their new trolleys. I’d been escorted by Christophe Laurent, and he’d left tiny grease stains all over the waist of the dress from all the food he ate that night. Mama liked him. If I were a girl who could get married, she’d have picked him for me.
I leave the dress on the bed with a note for Mama that I think I want to alter this one since the war rations will make it near impossible to buy another of equal value and beauty. I bet she can do something about the grease stains and a
lter it so it doesn’t look nearly a decade out of fashion. But I don’t plan to be around for the cotillion.
I ride my bike into Vineyard Haven with all the documents tucked into the front wicker basket. A new summer breeze pulls some of my hair from its bun. The stickiness of late June has now settled over the island. The sound of bleating frogs and chirping crickets mixes with the few cars still moving across the Vineyard roads and risking their gasoline ration.
The Junior Red Cross has fewer volunteers today. Fewer people to stare at me and wonder what a colored girl is doing outside of Oak Bluffs.
Mother Powell nods at me and motions to a table with a bowl of water. I wash my hands and start to work on bundling the bandages. She smiles at me. The monotony of the work usually makes me forget how many hours have passed, but today I can’t help stealing glances at the parcel of paperwork I’ve brought. It almost has its own heartbeat.
If I turn it in, the process starts. I will have to leave Mama and Daddy and take a ferry to mainland Massachusetts and then a bus to Fort Devens. I’ll be trained to be a war nurse and then shipped off to Great Britain.
In 191 years, I’ve never been away from them. I don’t know what it would be like not to see them every day, not to have Mama mix up the moonlight, not to hear Daddy’s voice.
I close my eyes and imagine my future: me in a nurse’s uniform, sitting on a ship headed across the sea, tending to men like Raymond. Then Daddy’s warm smile and Mama’s hurt eyes erase the picture.
My stomach knots.
A hand touches my shoulder and I jump. My eyes snap open.
“You all right, child?” Mother Powell gazes down at me.
“Yes.” I hand her the parcel before I lose my courage. “I want to help in the war effort.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes.” I rest my hands on all the paperwork. “I want to join the Nurse Corps.”
“You’re a nurse?”
“I am,” I lie, and tell her a few old nursing stories Mama used to tell me after coming home from the hospital when we lived in Washington, D.C.
“The Vineyard ferry’s leaving tomorrow around sunrise. Some girls headed up to Fort Devens will be on it. If you want to go, show up there.”
The moon is high by the time I get back home. I park my bike in the garage beside Daddy’s car and try to slip through the door into the mess room.
The light flickers on. Mama stands in the doorway, arm jammed to her hip and a scowl across her face. “And just where have you been?” she barks.
“At Molly’s.”
“How about you try again with the truth?”
“I . . .” My stomach bubbles up like it might come out.
“Clare called me about whether you would want to have a lady do your makeup before the cotillion. She was going to set it up for you and Molly. She told me you hadn’t been by today.”
I nibble my bottom lip. A dozen more lies flicker through my mind. None settle. None feel good enough to withstand Mama’s interrogation.
“We don’t lie to each other.” Tears brim in her eyes, and she’s shaking mad with upset.
I sigh. “I went to volunteer.”
“Where? And for what?”
“The war effort. Women are folding bandages and putting together care packages at the Junior Red Cross in Vineyard Haven.”
Her fists ball. “You’re to stay out of it, you hear me?”
The light bulb goes out, and we’re bathed in darkness. Only the moonlight illuminates the cobblestone driveway.
“Did you hear me, Matilda Emma McGee?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Guilt and anger tangle inside me. I’ve never defied her before.
I climb down into the cellar with an oil lamp. I hold my breath as my feet seem to hit every creak in the wooden ladder. It’s as if my own feet want to give me away and wake up Mama or Daddy. A menagerie of moonlight illuminates the room like hundreds of fireflies sprinkled across a dark cornfield. The glow awakens inside the glass cages as it senses my presence. Shelves upon shelves of mason jars cover each wall, full of surging moonlight. At least three years’ worth.
When I was little, Mama would only stockpile a month at a time to keep it fresh. There’d always be one or two jars in the pantry or the icebox if she wanted it cool. The moon would provide forever. Now she doesn’t seem so sure.
I swipe four jars. Enough for one person for four months.
Outside, I gaze up at the house and the moon.
“I’m sorry, Mama and Daddy,” I say below their bedroom window, hoping and wishing that the message will somehow find them in their dreams.
I like history with a teaspoon of magic. I need it to counteract the pain and bitterness, making history more palatable for me as a black American. As a child learning about the horrible atrocities faced by my people, I realized quickly that this country — and history itself — was not kind to us.
I was inspired by one of my favorite books as a child: Virginia Hamilton’s The People Could Fly. It is a collection of black American folktales full of wonder wrapped into our historical experience. As a young reader, I loved falling into those stories about strong people who could perform otherworldly feats in the face of chattel slavery, the system of white supremacy, and institutional racism.
“When the Moonlight Isn’t Enough” seeks to grapple with something that bothers me: How can one be a patriot of a country that hates you? How can one participate in the protection of a place that doesn’t seek to protect you? How can one love and hate a country simultaneously? I set the story in Martha’s Vineyard because I’m fascinated with black communities that — against all odds and in the face of white terrorism — succeeded and built their own prosperous havens. My wonderful friend Allie Jane Bruce took me to Martha’s Vineyard last summer, and I fell in love with the island and its interesting black history. I knew that I wanted to explore this subculture of black folks who have lived, worked, and vacationed there for decades.
I was drawn to 1940s America partly due to music, mostly due to the fashion from the era, but also because it is one of the time periods (along with the 1950s) that many white Americans are most nostalgic about as a golden age of America, a time when America was “great.” My grandparents were nine and ten years old during World War II America; their childhood was marked by the war and its aftermath. There are very few stories about what nonwhite people endured at this time, and I wanted to explore that.
Last, I’m obsessed with the moon and its light. I hope readers can catch some of their own.
Mr. Pendergrass didn’t stand a chance.
As soon as we walked in and Sandra glimpsed the substitute teacher’s precisely trimmed mustache, she turned to me with a mischievous grin. She’d had it in for him ever since two weeks ago, when it had become abundantly clear that he wasn’t going to call on a girl for an answer, even if that girl was confidently punching the air, indicating that she knew every single one.
I snuck a second glance at the teacher’s rigid back as he wrote his name in neat block letters on the chalkboard. Judging by the handful of times he’d subbed for our class, he wasn’t the type to take a joke.
But I could see Sandra was ready and waiting for her lines.
He was doing the roll call now, looking stern any time he said one of the boys’ names, like he maybe expected them to try something. He seemed to have no such expectation for any of the girls. All we got was a smile dripping with condescension and, occasionally, a “Nice to see you again, dear.”
That sealed the deal for me.
What could I say? I got an inexplicable thrill from defying expectations. I actually, physically felt it on the back of my neck, a tingle that bubbled its way to the tips of my fingers and toes, like soda pop fizzing over.
If my mother knew about it, she would call it “unbecoming.”
But I lived for it.
I scribbled out the scene on a piece of paper and casually dropped it on the floor next to me. I heard the scrape of Sandra’s
chair right as Mr. Pendergrass got to my name.
“Rosemary Sweeney,” the teacher droned.
“Present,” I said in a calm, clear voice, belying my nervous anticipation for “Sandra Tanner” and “Bobby Weaver” — which would signal the end of roll call and the start of our scene.
Bobby had just announced he was present when I saw Sandra’s hand waving in the air. I leaned back just a smidge, ready to enjoy the show.
At first, Mr. Pendergrass simply pretended he didn’t see Sandra at all. “Mrs. Morris has written a note that you were to have started act 5 in Macbeth by today,” he said. But my best friend would not be deterred by something as trivial as being blatantly ignored. She waved her hand, slowly at first, and then as emphatically as a Dodgers pennant on game day, until it was obvious that every single person in the class — except for Mr. Pendergrass — was staring at her. I could even see some of them smiling in anticipation of whatever antics “Sandra” had come up with this time.
Finally, in the middle of tonelessly recapping some of the statistics of Shakespeare’s play (first performed in 1606, often called “the Scottish play”), Mr. Pendergrass addressed Sandra without looking up from his book. “You, miss, can go to the powder room after class.”
“And leave my nose unpowdered all that time? How barbaric,” Sandra quipped. “But, no, that’s not why I’m raising my hand, Mr. Pendergrass.”
He looked up at her, irritated. “Well, what it is, then? The lecture hasn’t started yet, so I can’t imagine you have some pressing academic question.”
“Oh, but I do. It has to do with Lady Macbeth,” Sandra said with a polite smile.
“Lady Macbeth?” Mr. Pendergrass asked, clearly still suspicious.
“Yes. Act 5, scene 1 is her big scene, isn’t it? Some would say her most famous scene.”
Mr. Pendergrass frowned but looked down at his book, skimming over the pages in front of him.
“Yes, I suppose that is likely true.” He said it like it was costing him something to admit she was right.
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