Moina grew up in a rural and religious community where everyone went to church on Sunday. They had two services a month; one week they went to the Baptist church, and the next week they went to the Primitive Baptist church. In her book, Moina pictured “those good women and those grand old men with long white beards praying and singing in church.”
Moina went to school at the Braswell Academy in Morgan County and then attended Martin Institute from 1883 to 1885. She did not graduate, however, because her parents ran out of money to pay for her education.
In June 1885, just before her sixteenth birthday, she started a school for the children in her neighborhood. It was a one-room vacant cabin on the hill. This lasted only a short time. About two miles from her parents' plantation in a small community where they received their mail, Monia found another vacant building that had once been the Robert Hale store. She taught in this school for five months and received eight cents a day for sixteen children.
The same year she moved to Liberty in Greene County, Georgia, where she taught again in a one-room school. Moina boarded with Mr. and Mrs. Watt Wray, whose son, Willis, went to her school. Moina described the Wray place as “a dream place” with tremendous groves of paper shell pecan trees, big vegetable gardens, and bordered flower gardens with peacocks strutting around the yard.
She taught four years at the Baptist Orphans Home, two years in Atlanta, and two years in Hapeville. Later, while teaching in Apalachee, she was called on to conduct a funeral. A little girl in the community had burned to death, and there was no pastor available to preach the service. The child's mother turned tearfully to Moina and asked: “Miss Moina, I simply can't bury my child without a funeral; can't you do it for me?” So Moina said a few words and got her students to sing “When He Cometh to Take Up His Jewels.”
Monina was on vacation in Europe when World War I broke out in 1914, and she remained there briefly to aid the tourists in escaping the war and getting back home.
When the United States entered the war in 1917, she gave a keepsake to each of her students who was going to battle. One boy named Louie, who joined the cavalry, received a pair of spurs from Moina. He took the spurs into battle with him, and he said that if anything happened to him, he wanted them returned to Moina Michael. Louie was in the first victorious battle fought in France-he was one of the men who kept the wires from being cut. It was a terrible battle, but Louie survived, and when the war was over, he took the spurs back to Moina.
In 1918, Moina, who desperately wanted to help the war effort overseas, took a leave of absence from the University of Georgia and went to the YMCA training conference in New York. After completing her training at the YMCA, she was barred from overseas duty because of her age-she was 49. However, she stayed with the organization and worked at the training headquarters until 1919.
We Shall Keep the Faith
While Moina was working at the headquarters, she came up with the idea for the Flanders Fields Memorial Poppy. A young soldier had left a copy of the November issue of Ladies HomeJournal on her desk. In her 1941 book, The Miracle Flower, she told how she became bored at the conference and picked up the magazine. In it, she found a copy of the poem “We Shall Not Sleep” (later named “In Flanders Fields”) written by John McCrae. The inspiration for this poem had been the death of a fellow officer, Lt. Alexis Helms, for whom McCrae had performed the burial service. In the poem McCrae describes red flowers blooming among rows and rows of white crosses in Flanders battlefields in western Belgium and northern France. Moina was mesmerized by the last verse of the poem:
“Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you with failing hands we throw
The Torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die,
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders Fields.”
Moina was so moved by the poem that she wrote a reply entitled “We Shall Keep the Faith.” The last verse said:
“And now the Torch and Poppy red
We wear in honor of our dead.
Fear not that ye have died for naught;
We'll teach the lesson that ye wrought
In Flanders Fields.”
Moina made a personal pledge to keep the faith and promised to wear a red poppy of Flanders Fields. With a gift of ten dollars she purchased twenty five artificial red poppies and pinned one on her collar. The rest she gave to the YMCA secretaries at the conference. In her book she described the experience as deeply spiritual, and the poppy became a sign of remembrance of all the soldiers who died.
