aftertaste
Sometimes I wonder about the timing of book releases…I just finished reading Flygirl by Sherri L. Smith, and found myself making endless comparisons to Mare’s War by Tanita S. Davis, which I read several months ago. I’d heard great things about Flygirl and it was original and interesting, but it was hard to read the novel without standing the protagonist next to Mare–and I’m afraid, time after time, Mare won. My friend Laura first told me about this novel, I think, and may even have pointed me to a joint interview between Tanita and Sherri; and I recall at the time wondering if a book about passing would resonate with 21st century teens. Would it seem like “selling out” to them, or would it just seem like a fun sort of prank? Flygirl is about the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) who were recruited during WWII to help “free a man to fight” overseas. Ida Mae desperately wants to fly, but knows her race holds her back; she can go up north to a school that certifies black pilots, or she can stay in the South where both her race and her gender work against her. When the opportunity arises to interview for the WASP, Ida Mae decides to “pass” for white since she’s already often mistaken for a white woman with her straight hair and fair skin. Unfortunately, I wasn’t convinced by the author’s depiction of life in Louisiana for working class black folks. Like most black women, Ida Mae works as a domestic, but strangely, the whites whose homes she cleans are never around…Ida Mae has NO interaction with segregationist whites at all, which is KEY, I think, to establishing the motive behind the passing phenomenon. Yes, life is easier for whites in the South, but that’s just the “pull” factor—the “push” factor includes horrific, daily violence against blacks, including the regular sexual assault of black women by white men (especially those working in white homes as domestics). Later in the novel when Ida Mae falls in love with a white man twice her age, it was hard for me to invest in her emotions—same thing happened when she arrived at training camp and almost instantly bonded with two other white girls in the group. Granted, those girls were “outsiders” too–Patsy’s a carnival worker and Lily’s Jewish. But from what I know about the Jim Crow South, and from what I know about passing narratives in the African American literary tradition, it isn’t easy to warm up to folks who could turn and kill you on a dime—and from whom you’ve been socially segregated all your life. In most passing narratives, there’s a moment when someone from the character’s previous “black” life recognizes her and holds the power to destroy the entire illusion. There’s also often an instance of extreme violence, which either pushes the passer into the white world for good, or restores the black identity s/he foolishly tried to disown. Neither of those things happened in Flygirl. I needed more information about Ida; her relationships aren’t fully fleshed out, even though she claims to be passing in order to help her beloved older brother who’s fighting in a colored regiment overseas. In Mare’s War, the bond between the two sisters was established immediately, with Mare risking her own life to save Feen from a predatory male. We also see Mare riding the bus, and being humiliated by a white woman. Later in the novel, when Mare has the chance to socialize with white women in a London pub, she freezes—it’s awkward, and the interracial mingling ends with mob violence…THAT is believable to me b/c it corresponds with everything I know about race and gender relations. Ida’s behavior towards her one black female friend is appalling, and never resolved (she tells Jolene, “your skin’s so dark all you’ll ever be is a housemaid”). Um–what? So perhaps what troubles me is that Ida functions for most of the novel as a white girl, or “just a regular girl,” or as a pilot. And that IS her dream…but it leaves out a lot of the complexity of colorism and racism and the strained relationship between black and white women. There are some exciting flight scenes, but the training isn’t as rigorous as what Mare went through (remember that gas mask scene?) and the writing overall isn’t quite as riveting.
Now, I just picked up Walter Dean Myers’s latest novel, Riot. If you don’t already know, it’s a story about the New York City Draft Riots told from the perspective of a teenage girl…sound familiar? Readers already think of Octavia Butler’s Kindred when they read A Wish After Midnight; will the same thing happen when they read Myer’s Riot? Will my novel suffer for the comparison? I think I would have judged Flygirl much differently if Mare hadn’t already been in my head. But in the end, we need lots of stories told from lots of different perspectives, right? And each writer has to tell her story her way…
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