Midnight Without a Moon

Rose pretends to be sick, exhausted after three full days of picking cotton. Alone in the house except for Queen, still asleep, Rose wanders into her grandmother’s room and examines herself in the mirror. As a child, Rose prayed that God would lighten her complexion, aching to look like the other women in her family. Rose believed that then she would be perceived as more beautiful, and she hoped to escape the constant, condescending reminders of her appearance. After seeing an ad for the product in Jet, Rose applied her Aunt Clara Jean’s bleaching cream every time she visited Queen’s mother’s home, with no results. Rose turns on her grandmother’s radio and slips her nightgown off, standing in her undergarments. She is struck by how lean and sinewy she is, a product of her constant physical labor. Swaying to the music, she imagines traveling north to Chicago, where she might one day be lauded as one of “the most beautiful women in Negro society” (170), like the light-skinned women who had so often been presented as the ideal in Jet. When her grandmother storms into the bedroom demanding to know what she’s doing, Rose improvises, saying that she took her slip off because she felt feverish.