'Mare's War' - Tanita S Davis

[bookgazing]

Octavia and her older sister Tali are dreading the upcoming summer. Instead of hanging out with their friends, or earning money towards a car they’ll be taking a road trip to a family reunion, at an undisclosed location, with their grandmother. The girls grandmother, Mare, isn’t like other people’s cuddly grandmothers and Tali describes her like this in the novel’s early pages:

‘My grandmother has long, fake nails and a croaky hoarse drawl, and she’s always holding a long, skinny cigarette – unlit, otherwise my dad will have a fit – between her fingers. She’s loud and bossy and she drinks bourbon with lemon juice at dinner. She has a low-slung red coupe, and Dad says she drives like a bat out of hell.’

I imagine that at this point all the adult readers will want to meet the loud, glamorous main character of ‘Mare’s War’ by Tanita S Davis. Teenage readers will cringe for Tali – how embarrassing, why doesn’t her grandmother just knit quietly like everyone else’s? The girls would rather not spend any time stuck in a car with someone so caustic and different.

What the girls don’t know about Mare is...well pretty much everything, as their mother hints at the beginning of the book. While they’re taking the most roundabout tourist route ever to their unknown destination, Mare shares her life story with her granddaughters and the reader begins to see Mare (Marey Lee Boylen) navigate her later teenager years, as her life unfolds through flash back chapters.

Marey Lee’s story is narrated in the present tense to make it feel more immediate and relevant to teenagers, than her life might seem if it was related in third person by an eighty year old character. Her story begins with the dramatic events that caused her to run away from home and 1940s small town Alabama life. Her mother’s boyfriend Toby tried to rape her younger sister Feen, who Marey Lee has always been charged with looking after. Although Marey Lee tackles him before he can hurt Feen and their mother throws him out when she realises what he’s tried to do, Feen is sent away to stay with relatives for her safety. Marey Lee and her mother’s relationship becomes frosty, because of the incident. When the opportunity arises for Marey Lee to escape by joining the army, she takes it, lying about her age and forging her mother’s signature to ensure she’s taken on.

Marey Lee joins the Womens Army Corps during WWII as part of the ‘free a man to fight’ initiative. She joins the regiment for African American women, part of the 6888th Battalion. Her early army training is explained and there are dramatic obstacles, like gas training, to overcome in what I think of as the training montage section (if this book were a movie the training would be shown as a couple of minutes of inspirational montage shots, accompanied by music, ending with a fist pump moment of triumph as the recruits overcome their biggest obstacle). My favourite thing about ‘Mare’s War’ was what an intimate portrait Tanita S Davis created of the women’s army life. A great proliferation of female recruits, other than Marey Lee, get just a few mentions and quick character sketches are provided of the officers. Despite the lack of in depth character development for these characters the small details brought by their presence and their words build up to create a the feeling of a real world. Readers also get a strong feeling for the friendship between Marey Lee and one of the other soldiers, Peaches Carter, as many small events bond them together and lead to a deep trust being developed that lasts their whole life.

Marey Lee’s friend Ruby is a character who has been developed in an intriguing way. When dissecting her appearances in the book, it’s clear that Ruby often turns up to represent an important point the author wants to emphasise, for example she starts the conversation about whether British white women should date African American men. However, Ruby’s is easy to picture and there’s a strong sense of her personality whenever she appears. Maybe this is because she’s one of the most conventionally minded characters, so any blanks in her on page personality can be filled in by the reader’s previous reading experience, or maybe the connection between her and the reader is established by Davis’ unobtrusive craftwork threading small reported details and moments into her novel. I’m unsure, does anyone else have theories about why Ruby feels so full of life though she’s not often given much space on the page?

After completing training Marey Lee works at the army base in Des Moines before travelling to Britain to work as part of the huge operation sorting and sending the post for the frontline troops. Her army duties aren’t as exciting and potentially dangerous as Ida Mae’s job ferrying planes to army bases in Sherri L Smith’s 'Flygirl’ but ‘Mare’s War’ still show the drama of army life during WWII, for example Marey Lee and her comrades boat to Britain is chased by a German submarine. The novel also shows dramatic personal circumstances like the attempted assault of Marey Lee’s sister and the girls being chased through a London train station by bigoted, white soldiers.

‘Mare’s War’ is a novel that seeks to teach and expand readers knowledge about the racial situation in 1940s America, Britain and mainland Europe. Davis is also eager to look at the challenges the 6888th battalion faced as African American women in each new location (in England people stare, while in Paris the women fit into the more racially diverse population) alongside the problems they faced because they were women, for example as women the soldiers are cast as sluts in the newspapers back home, as African American women they receive notice that the Red Cross has set up a separate hotel for them when they stay in London as they feel the 6888th 'doesn't think [we] colored girls are "happy" mixing with the white girls at the enlisted WAC hotel in London.'. There was no legally segregation in Britain at this time, but that didn’t stop private segregation being enforced under any available guise. Davis has created an engaging cast of characters to walk the reader through these issues and through lesser known areas of history (women training for the army, African American service women stationed in Birmingham). But we could equally say that Davis has picked an intriguing period of history to allow her to showcase the determined, female characters she has imagined. It’s hard to separate out which is Davis’s most important mission, telling the story of a character she has created and cares about, or giving greater visibility to an important part of history filled with relevant issues. The fact that it is so hard to separate out which Davis gives more importance to is the mark of a great novelist who understand everything that readers need from a novel.

While Marey Lee’s life story is the most dramatic element of the book and it happens to her while she is a teenager, her story takes place in the past. She experiences many things that differ from life today and I suspect that Davis thought teenage readers might need time to fully identify with her struggle, especially as she is so sharp with the present day teenagers Tali and Octavia. Octavia’s first person narrative and Tali’s reported speech provide a second entry point into this book for teenagers. Tali and Octavia have their own struggles to overcome, Octavia is afraid of driving and Tali is battling the universal unfairness of being a teenager that all readers will recognise. Although their troubles differ greatly in scale of importance from the events Marey faces in the past narrative, they matter to the girls and modern teenage readers might be able to identify with them quickly because their concerns relate to modern life.

The girls troubles also allow teenagers to contrast their worries with those of past generations and perhaps discard some of their cynicism about things that adults say, like ‘Back in my day...’. The girls provide modern context and voice some of the scepticism teenagers might have about Mare’s story, At first Octavia and Tali are hostile towards Mare’s stories of the past. Tali refuses to accept that her grandmother was really poor as neither she or her parents have ever lacked for money. Octavia brings up the disparities between modern life and 1940s life for teenagers when she asks why Mare was already working at fifteen, or why the family didn’t call the police when Toby tried to attack Feen.

At times I felt like the girls were a little too naive about the past, for example when they wondered why anyone would care if Peaches was a lesbian. It felt like this and similar questions comments about people of different races dating were inserted as teaching moments and felt rather obvious. Maybe that’s unfair though, maybe I think Octavia and Tali would be more informed about historical people’s prejudices because I grew up in a different generation from these teenage characters. I really liked that the girls questions and dismissals of older, intolerant attitudes suggested that Davis believes a teenagers might be more accepting.

After spending time in Britain, the battalion travel to Paris where they remain until the end of the war. Mare’s story doesn’t quite end there though as she has to return home to confront her mother, who has remarried while she’s been away and work out what she’s going to do after the army. The present day road trip is coming to an end, just as Marey-Lee’s story reaches its conclusion. If you’re anything like me both endings will squeeze your little heart, but the present day one will smoosh you up good. Not to be sappy, but I felt privileged to be guided so easily and entertainingly through this period of history by a narrator like Marey Lee and a writer like Tanita S Davis. And that’s why I bought 'A la Carte’ right away.

Bonus personal reasons I loved this book:

The 6888th is based in Birmingham while they’re stationed in England. Birmingham is the biggest city in my area and it was so exciting to see some localish history, that I never knew about turn up in ‘Mare’s War’. I’ll be following up on the suggested reading in the acknowledgements to learn more.

Mare briefly mentions how some women aren’t meant to be mothers, when she talks about her relationship with her son – more of this in books please.

Peaches is an African American, lesbian soldier, who gets her own dramatic moment in Marey’s story and does not end up being involved in any kind of tragedy. She goes on to have what sounds like an exciting, happy life and Mare remains close friends with her. Happiness for a lesbian character in a historical novel is the rarest of eggs. I wasn’t expecting to see a lesbian character in this book at all and then half way through the book there was Peaches, almost coming out to Marey Lee and admitting that her mother is friends with a lesbian. That made me think of this piece of wisdom from Aja’s post ‘I know you care for him as much as I do’:

‘It's one thing to start out a book, like Swordpoint and Havemercy did, introducing your main characters as gay from the start. Because from the outset the reader knows, the reader can choose whether they approve, or tolerate, or whatever. They can put that book down and walk away.

But reality doesn't let you choose. Reality is when your best friend turns to you and says, "the thing is, I'm gay," and your entire world turns upside down.’

A quote that can only be followed by ‘Yes – this!’

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Reading in Color (subtitled I Should Call My Grandmother. You Should Too, a title I absolutely understand now)
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A Chair, A Fireplace & A Tea Cosy
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