Everything changed that year: Lawrence Powell died at the age of fifty-six from complications of hypertension. Medications for high cholesterol and high blood pressure weren’t as advanced or readily available as they are nowadays, and succumbing to such illnesses wasn’t uncommon, particularly for black people who had limited health care options. To lose this tender, kind, and soft-spoken parent was an unimaginable blow to the family. Gladys was now a widow at the age of forty-seven. Her eldest daughter was working for the Red Cross in Arizona. Elinor, just twenty-two, was in New York. And her youngest daughter was a student at Howard University in Washington, D.C. Gladys was now alone, something she had dreaded ever since leaving her large family in Kentucky.

With a nursing degree in hand, Elinor had decisions to make about her future. She could work at a hospital in Boston and live at home with her mother. A single woman didn’t live by herself if she had family close by, let alone if her mother was a widow. But moving back home after spending three years living independently in New York City wasn’t an attractive proposition. For one, the thought of living in the family home without her father and under her mother’s very close watch seemed oppressive.

She also didn’t relish the idea of working at an underfunded and overcrowded city hospital. Elinor knew that despite her comfortable upbringing and good education, there was a strong chance that if she stayed in Boston, she’d be relegated to a low-paying nursing job with limited advancement and lower wages.

She would very likely run into the same problems in New York. In the early 1940s, Elinor could find work in a New York City hospital that accepted black medical staff, but she would be paid significantly less than whites who held the same positions. She would also most likely be forced to live in racially segregated neighborhoods in Manhattan or the other boroughs, or a bit farther north in the black areas of Westchester County.

Joining the military had first crossed her mind when she heard about black nurses being accepted into the U.S. Army Nurse Corps in 1941, before the attack on Pearl Harbor. But when the United States entered World War II the idea of enlisting became more personal. She’d always been very proud of her father’s service, and following in his footsteps may have become more important to her after his death. There were only a handful of black women in the Nurse Corps, just 160 by 1943, unlike the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, which accepted thousands of blacks, although in segregated units. But Elinor wasn’t easily discouraged by the low numbers, and having been raised almost exclusively among white people, she wasn’t uncomfortable with the prospect of being a minority in any given situation.