Midnight Without a Moon

 “Colored folks didn’t go to Chicago to visit. Colored folks went to Chicago to live. In the last few years it seemed everybody had been leaving. Folks were fleeing Mississippi so fast it was like birds flying south for the winter, except they were going north, or out west to California. ‘Migrating’ is what my seventh-grade teacher, Miss Johnson, called it. ‘A great colored migration,’ she said. ‘Like a flock of black birds.’ Except, unlike birds who returned in the spring, these folks rarely came back.”

By relocating to Chicago, Rose’s mother, Anna; her stepchildren; and her husband, Mr. Pete, are joining the Second Great Migration, a mass exodus out of the south by Black family groups and single individuals. As is the case among Rose’s relatives, many southern Black families became fractured by these geographical distances separating them, the reluctance of those who had moved away from the south to return, and changes in perspective that often accompanied exposure to a different way of life.

“Mr. Pete shook his head. ‘I don’t want that kind of life for Callie and Christopher.’ He gestured toward the open window, suggesting the cotton fields beyond it. ‘They deserve better.’ ‘Better than what?’ Papa asked, his eyebrows raised. […] When I was little, watching Mama pamper Sugar and Li’Man, I used to think if I had light skin and long hair like Sugar’s, she would love me that way too, maybe even let me live with them.”

Anna believes her stepchildren, Sugar and Li’ Man, are deserving of “better” but her own children are not. Constantly reminded that the women around her believe her deep skin tone renders her unattractive and unworthy, Rose does not consider that culpability for her decision lies with her mother and not with Rose herself.

“And Aunt Clara Jean never would tell a soul who Queen’s daddy was. Folks said he was white. And that wasn’t too hard to believe, seeing that Queen was light enough to pass for white if she wanted to, and seeing that her long hair never needed the heat of a straightening comb. Plenty of folks in our family were yellow, but Queen was different. And with the way she never lifted a finger to even wash a plate, she acted like she was white, too. Folks said that when Queen was born, Ma Pearl took to her like ants to a picnic. They say she snatched that newborn baby from Aunt Clara Jean’s bosom and claimed her like a hard-earned prize. That’s because Ma Pearl favored pretty. And to Ma Pearl, light equaled pretty, even if the person was as ugly as a moose.”

Colorism is a pervasive theme throughout Midnight Without a Moon, crystalized in Jackson’s depiction of the relationship dynamics between Queen, Rose, and their grandmother, Ma Pearl. Both of Ma Pearl’s granddaughters were born to unmarried teen mothers, a frowned-upon set of circumstances for the period, but only Rose feels like she is punished for being born.