Summary
Organized in lines of verse and narrated in the first-person by Moth, a sixteen-year-old girl, Me (Moth) opens with a definition of a moth egg. The three-part description calls a moth egg a round object that is laid and contains a developing embryo, a “roundish home” from which the hungry sprout emerges, and a boundary from the living. There is also a quote attributed to Moth’s Gray-Bearded Grandfather, who is a “Rootworker” (Hoodoo practitioner): “This is long work. A finding spell for roots destined to twine.”
Moth explains that her parents Jim and Marcia called her Moth while her brother Zachary received a normal name. She has considered changing her name now that there is no one who would mind if she did. She says names “hang to your bones like forever suits,” akin to flesh and skin. She speculates that, when she dies, people will comment on her talent as a dancer. Her deceased brother was a pyromaniac. Her deceased parents were fans of Shakespeare. She says that headstones remind us that “names slouch on without bodies.” She says she must live with her name, even though it is strange, because that is what her parents named her.
Two summers ago, Moth and her family were in a freeway accident while driving down from New York to visit Aunt Jack in Northern Virginia. Their car split in half like a candy bar. Though they all were brought to the hospital, only Moth survived. After, Moth moved in with Aunt Jack in a mostly white Virginia suburb. Moth goes to a school with only six Black kids, and they don’t talk to her. She says Black kids didn’t talk to her in New York either, like she is invisible. Her aunt began drinking after the accident, which has led to neglect. Everything Moth wears is secondhand and borrowed. Moth comments that the same stereotypes about Black people she heard in New York exist in Virginia. Stereotypes such as: all Black kids like sports, Black people like fried chicken, watermelon, rap, twerking, and being loud. She herself, as a child, believed the stereotype that Black girls can’t be ballerinas. The prejudice motivated her to try hard to excel as a dancer. But she gave up dancing after the accident.
Moth lists Aunt Jack’s rules: Don’t talk about the accident, unless praying; always have wine and whiskey in the house; never touch the urns; never mourn loud enough to make flowers wilt. Moth’s personal rules include: Don’t live too hard; be silent as a seahorse; choreograph dance in your mind; pour Aunt Jack’s wine and whiskey down the sink; let your hair grow; don’t crack; don’t dance like Misty Copeland (the first African American female principal dancer with the American Ballet Theatre). Moth can’t afford a car, so she is the only junior to take the bus with the freshmen. She pushes her long green locs, which resemble seaweed or Medusa’s snakes, over her shoulder and stares out the bus window. Every house is white and every lawn is green. She guesses that people who don’t speak to her or bother bullying her are being sensitive to her family tragedy and the scar down her face from that accident. The white kids give the two other Black kids new insulting names every bus ride.
In homeroom, a new student arrives. He has long black hair that falls attractively over his golden eyes. Moth doesn’t know what ethnicity he is. When he drums his pencil, the rhythm stimulates something in Moth, deep in her gut. She is compelled to dance. Ashley, a blonde girl with fluttering eyelashes, asks the new boy, “What are you anyway?” He doesn’t reply or react. Moth comments that she doesn’t use the shared locker she is assigned because the first time she tried someone put her books on the ground beside it. At a pep rally, Moth criticizes the dance team to herself. She envisions herself dancing over the “flawless butterflies” and stomping them out like cigarette butts. She says she lives a lot and dances a lot in her head. Moth explains that before there were flames and torches and artificial sources of light, moths used transverse orientation to follow the angle of the moon. This celestial navigation worked for millions of years before artificial light outshone the actual moon.
Mr. Hardened Lava Hair (the new boy) takes the empty seat next to Moth, a seat other kids avoid because a few years ago a girl died during an asthma attack while sitting there. He swallows two small pills without water and closes his eyes tight. He says his name, Sani, softly. She replies with hers. He recognizes it as a reference to Midsummer Night’s Dream. They get off at the same stop. Sani lights a cigarette and comments that her parents must love Shakespeare. She says they were English professors. He says he is from the Navajo Nation, in New Mexico. She says her grandfather’s best friend was Navajo. He says, “That explains it,” but won’t elaborate. They learn that they live only ten houses apart. He asks if he can call her and she says she doesn’t have a phone.
Moth explains the four stages of how a moth “blossoms”: egg (harden), caterpillar (grow), cocoon (rest), and moth (live). She says the cocoon stage is a miracle and asks the reader to imagine transforming into another being. She falls asleep the night before the last day of junior year thinking of Sani and feeling like she is not going through the accident again. She remembers her grandfather and the magic he taught her. Moth’s dream involves meeting with her grandfather at a graveyard and watching him perform a Hoodoo ritual in which he buries together some of Moth’s nail clippings, a tuft of hair, a photo of the two of them together, two tiny seeds and a crisp white feather. He calls it a “finding spell” that ensures that their “roots” are “destined to twine.” He speaks of their people’s history as slaves in the United States; he says the ancestors believe “the ground & the roots work the same” despite being stolen from their homeland. Moth comments that she practices the Hoodoo her grandfather taught her every summer they spent together in South Carolina. She uses roots, herbs, soil, and the candles he left her to make an altar. She has her breakfast on a white plate so that the ancestors can partake in the food.
In drama class, Ashley asks Sani if he believes in ghosts. Moth likes that he doesn’t reply. Moth comments that Hoodoo incorporates “tidbits of Native American magic,” and Grandfather used to whisper and chant with his Navajo best friend. After class, she hides behind a soda machine and looks at her reflection, thinking about how it is selfish of her to have lived when the rest of her family died. Later, Moth discovers Sani playing piano in an empty room. He sings personal lyrics about his stepfather wanting to “erase” him and how it is hard to fulfill people’s expectations of him. He is dismayed when he notices Moth eavesdropping on his private moment. However, in the hall, they make up and he gives her his number. He asks her to find a phone and call or text him as a way of apologizing for listening to his song.
At home, Moth takes her aunt’s iPhone from her purse and texts Sani. He offers the information that his white mother left his Navajo father and now wants him to live in her white house with her new white partner. They discuss how their passions for dancing and music, respectively, have been coming up despite their efforts to suppress them.
Analysis
The opening pages of Me (Moth) immediately establish the book’s unique form: As a verse novel (also sometimes called a “novel in verse”), Me (Moth) is distinguished from regular prose novels by the way sentences are broken into lines of verse. The effect is that each of the book’s short chapters reads as a poem. By writing in this style, author Amber McBride adds new layers of meaning to her words, free to play with the visual appearance of the text by grouping lines into stanzas and adjusting where particular words are spaced on a line. McBride’s use of enjambment (continuation of a sentence beyond the end of a line or stanza) also allows the author to subvert a reader’s interpretation of a sentence by modifying the first half of the sentence’s meaning on a subsequent line.
In the opening pages of Me (Moth), McBride also establishes several of the novel’s major themes: grief, isolation, abandonment, ritual, trauma, and transformation. When discussing her uncommon name, Moth hints at the grief she is dealing with when she says she has thought about changing her name “especially now with no one to really mind.” In the next chapter, she reveals that there is no one to mind if she changes her name because her brother and parents died two summers earlier in a car accident. As the only survivor (or so Moth believes), Moth lives with the trauma of remembering the event that changed her life irrevocably.
McBride develops the themes of grief, trauma, and isolation by establishing the difficulty Moth has in adjusting to her new existence. While Moth has her aunt to live with in the Virginia suburbs, their communication is depicted as emotionally strained since Aunt Jack refuses to talk about the accident. Moth has made no friends—or enemies—after two years at her high school, leaving her isolated in her grief with no one to talk to. Moth briefly addresses the possibility of speaking to a therapist, but her tone is dismissive as she imagines how the conversation would consist of the therapist reprimanding her for not embracing life.
Things begin to change for Moth when Sani enters her life. A recent transfer to the school, Sani joins Moth’s homeroom just before the summer break. She is immediately drawn to his good looks and his indifference to Ashley, a pretty and popular girl who Moth dislikes. When Sani takes a seat next to Moth, McBride shows how Sani is the first and only person to pay any attention to Moth. While Sani’s attraction to Moth is evident when he asks for her number, it is worth noting that Sani immediately takes mysterious herbal capsules when he meets her. This gesture hints at the fact his attraction to Moth brings up an internal conflict McBride will eventually reveal.
The theme of ritual arises with the dream Moth has about her grandfather. Just after meeting Sani, Moth recalls the time she accompanied her grandfather to a Nashville, Tennessee cemetery to cast a spell under a willow tree. A child at the time, Moth didn’t understand the significance of the objects Grandfather buried in a hole. However, she understood from the length of her grandfather’s prayers that the spell he was casting was of grave importance. As the story progresses, McBride will reveal how the “finding spell” Grandfather cast that day is the reason behind Sani and Moth’s fated connection.
