The Radical Element

by Jessica Spotswood

  Molly jostles my shoulder. “I said, what does your dress look like?”

  I want to tell her I have a closet full of dresses. This is my twenty-seventh cotillion, though it’s my first in Oak Bluffs. The cotillion dresses I’ve worn in the past zip through my head like the turning of a film reel. I loved the champagne empire-waist gown I wore after Daddy bought our freedom from Master McGee at Honey Alley in 1809 and we joined the free colored society of New Orleans. Also, the blush-pink bustle one I wore in 1880 while in Atlanta. And the cream chiffon one with the trumpet-shaped bottom in 1902, when we lived in Chicago. Or the flapper-style one I swapped for the one Mama picked when we were in Harlem in 1922.

  But I can’t tell Molly any of that. We’ve known each other for three years now, and I know everything about her, and she barely knows anything about me. I should feel lucky Mama let me have a friend this time around. I haven’t had one since 1938 — right before we moved here — when it didn’t go so well in Boston. Mama let her guard down a little with the Brooks family, and little Lilly May found the moonlight. We had to spin so many lies to explain that Mama made us leave immediately.

  “Do you ever wonder about what’s going on over there?” I ask.

  Molly frowns. “Over where?”

  “In Europe. You’ve seen the papers, right? Heard the radio?”

  “I’d much rather talk about your cotillion dress. Did you get it yet? July’s coming quick.” She rubs her hands over the bodice. Tiny pearls catch the light.

  “It’s only the end of May,” I remind her, then take out the newspaper I borrowed from Daddy’s desk and spread it over her floor. The headlines talk of war, increased rations, an East Coast blackout, men dying, U-boats spotted in the Atlantic, and the Nazis.

  Molly smooths a loose curl from my bun. “You think George will be a good dancer? Caroline says his feet don’t work and his hands get all wet when he’s nervous, and I should’ve picked Brandon. We haven’t even practiced. I don’t want to look like a fool.” She prattles on and on. “Will you go with Raymond Finley?”

  I scoff. “He hasn’t asked.”

  “Well, George says it’s ’cause he can’t figure out if you actually like him.”

  I’m not supposed to like anyone. I’m not supposed to let anyone close.

  I shrug. “Maybe I won’t go.”

  “Won’t go?” Her nose crinkles with disgust.

  “It’s not like it’s my own wedding.”

  “It’s the first big thing that ever happens to a girl. Your wedding will be second,” she says.

  I won’t ever get married. I’ll always be with Mama and Daddy. The thought hits me in the chest. I’d always just accepted that. But now, the desire to do something, anything else burns inside me like a hot coal.

  “I heard Miss Claudine say we might not have any dessert to serve at the ball this year. Can you believe it? There’s not enough butter or chocolate to make a big enough cake to feed fifty people.”

  “Is that so?” My mind drifts off.

  “Also, my mother thinks I should wear my hair out. I don’t think we’ll have enough bobby pins for a full updo. She’s not willing to buy me some under the counter. She thinks they’re cracking down and that colored folks who get caught will be treated harsher.”

  “We’ll have to deal with worse if the war comes here.”

  “To Oak Bluffs?” She laughs. “Never. Nothing ever comes here except people on vacation.” She turns back to the mirror. “Why are you so worried?”

  I can’t find an answer. It all feels wispy and out of touch and half formed. I close my eyes and see the storm from my dream — a roaring black mass of death. The headlines, the radio news reports, the rations, the looks on people’s faces swirl inside the chaos. Maybe this is why Mama and Daddy usually leave. So we won’t have to see it, anticipate it, worry about it. So that we could always just come back after things were okay again.

  “I just am” is all I can muster.

  “Well, my mama says there’s no use in worrying yourself sick about things you can’t change. I’m going to busy myself with the cotillion and George. Mama thinks he might ask me to marry him after we graduate.” Molly tries on another dress while prattling on about getting married. “This one’s my sister’s old cotillion gown from five years ago. You think it’s out of fashion?” She sighs with disappointment. “I hope no one remembers it. The rations have made it impossible for me to get another one made. You know I like more than one option. I’m not keen on either of these.” A deep flush blooms beneath her pale cheeks. Even in selfish anger, she’s one of the most beautiful girls I’ve ever seen. Mama calls her “Red Molly” and says her bones must be red on the inside ’cause her skin’s so light and pale and yellowy instead of deep brown.

  “Emma.” She squints. “What do you think?”

  The tulle blooms around her waist like a lovely upside-down church bell, and the sweetheart neckline shows off her perfect collarbone. The lace is like intricate frosting.

  “That one is delicate. Very pretty.”

  She beams, flashing a perfect set of white teeth. “Maybe I should go with this one, then. Even though my sister wore it.” She dances around the room, lifting her legs and swishing around while pretending to do the jitterbug. “Dance with me.”

  “No,” I grumble.

  “Yes.” She reaches out her hands.

  I groan but let her drag me up off the floor. She turns me in circles, then pulls me in for a slow dance. Her skin smells of lavender. She hums a popular song from the radio. We bob left and right, then left again.

  “What do you think will happen?” I whisper into her shoulder.

  “We’ll dance and sneak champa —”

  “No, in the war.”

  “I don’t know.” She pivots me around, then catches me again.

  “Don’t you think about it? Pearl Harbor?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?” I pull back and stare into her hazel eyes. We could be sisters in the winter, when the sun doesn’t color my skin so deeply and Mama pulls the frizz out of my hair with her pomades.

  “I have other things on my mind, as should you.” Molly places a hand to my forehead. “Are you ill? What’s wrong with you?”

  I break out of her grip and walk to the door. She calls after me, but I don’t stop.

  I let Raymond Finley put his tongue in my mouth even though I shouldn’t. I let him unpin my hair so it falls down my back in frizzy waves. I let him whisper in my ear about his plans to give me his grandmother’s ring when I turn eighteen like him. He was the first boy I met when we moved to Oak Bluffs. He tried to kiss me on the old fishing pier, but I didn’t let him until a month ago.

  I sink into this fantasy and pretend until my lips are swollen and I’m out of breath from kissing him. I’ve only kissed five boys in over a hundred years, and it always feels like the very first time every time.

  We’re in the large oak behind his house. Our legs dangle from its sturdy boughs, and its thick green leaves hide us from any prying eyes.

  “I’m going away,” he says, leaning back to stare into my eyes. He’s the color of a smudge of peanut butter and has the smallest gap between his front teeth that makes him look clever.

  I’d always thought I’d be the one leaving him.

  “I mean, I’m planning to,” he says. “So I will miss being your cotillion date.”

  “You haven’t asked me,” I say. “Where are you going?”

  His eyes dart all around. “You can’t tell anyone what I’m about to tell you.” He takes my hand, and I nod. “I’m enlisting.”

  His words are a firework exploding between us.

  “I filled out the paperwork and I’ll ship out soon.”

  “They’re going to let you fight?” My hands go all fluttery, and he grabs them to hold them still. My stomach pinches and I think about what it might be like to go to Europe or the Pacific or wherever they’re planning to ship him out to. I wonder what he’ll see.<
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  “In one of the colored units.” He kisses me again with a smile. “Will you write to me?”

  A searing hot wave of jealousy shoots through me.

  “Will you?” he presses.

  “Of course.”

  “I want to fly a plane.” His smile grows so big it almost swallows his face. It makes me think of what he must’ve looked like as a little boy.

  “What if I told you I wanted to go, too?”

  A small chuckle escapes his mouth. I clench my teeth and slide away from him. “War is no place for girls or women.” He reaches for me to bring me closer again.

  “Why is that?” I snap.

  He twirls my hair around his fingers. “It’s a place where men fight and win, or fight and die.” He sounds like Daddy.

  “And you want to go there?”

  “I want to do something to help us, to help our people.”

  His words pluck the same feeling straight out of me.

  “But why?” I ask, and sound like Mama. I wonder why Raymond and I both want to go and fight but neither Mama nor Daddy wants to.

  He takes a piece of paper from his pocket and unfolds it to show me a torn-out article from the Pittsburgh Courier, a black newspaper Daddy often reads. He points at the headline:

  “We can change things here if we fight overseas. We can also fight for our rights.”

  “I want to be part of something, too,” I say, not sure exactly what that might be. Maybe helping other colored people or maybe the war effort. Maybe both. The confusion tangles into a knot in my stomach.

  He traces his finger along my nose and mouth. “I’m making a memory of you.”

  “You’ll come back,” I say, knowing that I most likely won’t be here when he does because Mama and Daddy might pack us up again.

  “Will you wait for me?”

  I kiss him long and hard, knowing this is our last kiss. I try to take in every scent of him, every flavor of his mouth, every part of his touch.

  I want to be him. I want to be able to enlist. I want to see the world. I want to do something that matters instead of always hiding.

  Martha’s Vineyard is shaped like a very old turtle and her babies. That’s how Mama described it to me when we first moved. With Oak Bluffs at the peak of the shell, and Aquinnah and Chilmark at the tail, and Edgartown at the head. The turtle’s babies float above her — the Elizabeth Islands across the sound.

  Mama and Daddy love it here. The colored community is quiet and small, mostly tending to their own affairs. No one has noticed that the McGee family hasn’t aged. The white folks aren’t the mean kind who spit or call you names or give you dirty looks. They’re the “all right” kind, Mama says. The kind we can live beside without any trouble.

  Out of all the places we’ve lived, the Vineyard is the most beautiful — and the most boring.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever been anyplace I wanted to stay until we got here, butterbean,” Daddy says as we drive to the post office in Vineyard Haven. The one in Oaks Bluff closed last year. He parks the car across from the filling station, where a little white boy throws a rubber ball into a wire-fenced crate for the metal-scrap drive.

  “Come, let’s be quick, Emma. Before Mama finds out we took the car.” Daddy leads me forward. “She’ll give me an earful about wasting the gas.”

  The bell chimes when we walk into the post office. Some white people let their eyes linger on us for a few seconds too long before setting brown paper – wrapped parcels on counters or joining us in the line to buy twenty-five-cent war stamps. We’re the only black people in here.

  Daddy’s tall frame curves like a question mark over the postal counter. A man behind us reads the newspaper. I crane to see the headlines:

  Worries seep out of everybody but Daddy. It’s in the way they purse their lips and knit their hands or fuss with their briefcases or purses. We’re all holding our breath and waiting for the world to fall out from under us.

  Cheers draw everyone to the post-office windows. Youngish white boys dressed in army uniforms jump into cars. The small crowd claps. The boys’ cheeks flush pink as they flash us their perfect teeth. I think of Raymond. How the olive green of his uniform will make his skin glow. How he’ll earn medals of honor to decorate the lapel with because he’s smart.

  A little girl sets her elbows on the window ledge. “I wanna be like them, Mommy. I wanna wear a hat like that.”

  The mother draws the little girl’s attention to a wall poster. “This lady has a hat on, too, Wendy.”

  It’s a pretty white lady in a green army hat. Buttons shine on her lapels like fallen stars. The caption reads:

  I take a step closer. My heart thuds in my chest as if it’s grown fingers of blood and tissue, ready to latch on, grip something other than all it’s ever known.

  “I heard them saying in Edgartown that there’re still men trapped in the ships at Pearl,” our neighbor Montgomery says to Daddy. They’re playing bid whist and sipping amber liquid from two glittering tumblers. Mama’s packing up a meal for Montgomery. She feeds him on occasion since his wife died last year. Daddy says Montgomery’s not a man who pays attention to details, so he’s easy enough to have around without our secret slipping out.

  I linger near the parlor door. The radio crackles in the background, reporting the latest news.

  “Let us not worry ourselves with such sad talk,” Mama says.

  “Them Nazis might show up here. I went and got me some blackout curtains, and I’m going to set up my own bunker.” Montgomery rubs the salt-and-pepper whiskers across his cheeks and chin before setting down a card on the table. “Then what we gonna do?”

  “No use in —” Mama calls from the kitchen.

  “There’s black soldiers headed there, too,” Montgomery adds.

  Mama joins them in the parlor with a skillet of golden corn bread and a jar of fresh honey.

  “They’re not going to let us fight. Really fight,” Daddy says, flicking a card from his hand. “Even if more of us wanted to. They’ll make us stay in the kitchen or mop up the blood of white folks.”

  “You’d think they’d want to send us over there to die, and be rid of us.” Montgomery reaches for a slice of the warm corn bread. “The colored newspapers been telling our boys to sign up. That we can fight for our rights abroad and at home.”

  My heart squeezes. My hands flutter, and I clutch them tight.

  “The Finley boy enlisted,” Montgomery reports.

  Mama starts a worried hum and rocks back and forth on her heels. I hold my breath.

  Daddy drops his head. “Now, why would they let him go on and do that?”

  “He didn’t give them a choice,” Montgomery says.

  “He up and left?” Mama asks, horrified.

  “Sure did.”

  My heart beats so loud, I’m certain they can hear it.

  “His mama cried and cried. He said he wanted to fight for his country.”

  “His country? This country?” Daddy slams his cards down on the table. “Who sold him that lie? That this has ever been or ever will be his country is the greatest lie ever told. When has this country cared about colored folks? Maybe when they were selling them on the auction block and needed them to pick cotton? But we’re nothing but flies in the milk here. That’s the way it’s always been and how it’s always going to be. Finley’s a damn fool. His father is probably grumbling around in his grave.”

  “We shouldn’t get mixed up in this. White folks’ wars always get the rest of us in trouble,” Mama says with fear crackling in her voice. She told me that before she met Daddy, she’d been taken by a British soldier, and that she had to resort to means she wouldn’t tell me to get away. Daddy told me the sight of soldiers kick up bad memories for her.

  I want to feel like Mama and Daddy. I want to not want to do something. I want to be like an untethered balloon, floating. I want to fight the urge swirling in the pit of my belly. I want to do things like we always have.

  Bu
t I understand Raymond Finley.

  His kiss still warms my mouth.

  I remember the people clapping and the pride of the soldiers Daddy and I saw at the post office. I remember the way the little girl looked at them. I remember the poster.

  I understand wanting to belong somewhere, wanting to be part of something, wanting to do something — anything — to make things a little better for all of us.

  I lean farther into the parlor as Montgomery starts to whisper.

  Mama’s eyes find me in the doorway. She strides over.

  I should step back.

  I should scamper up to my room.

  I should apologize.

  Her teeth are clenched. “This is grown folks’ business.” Mama closes the door right in my face.

  I put a hand on the door. My palm burns with the desire to shove it back open. I’ve been alive longer than Montgomery. I’ve earned the right to have an opinion.

  But I can’t muster the courage to push.

  The next afternoon I tell Mama I’m heading to Molly’s but ride my bike to Vineyard Haven and find the Junior Red Cross in the Brickman Building. I pace up and down the street. A few white onlookers stare, and a blush settles into my cheeks. There aren’t as many people who look like me outside of Oak Bluffs. My stomach flutters.

  I should go back home.

  I should go to Molly’s.

  I should remember the years and years when I was content with just doing what Mama and Daddy asked me to do.

  I take a deep breath, walk up the long staircase, and ease open the door. The bright-red cross blazes on it, almost alive with warning.