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Flygirl - Sherri L Smith
12/10/09 04:33
‘Flygirl’ follows Ida Mae, a young, African American woman who has recently graduated from high school and now helps run the family farm, while also working a job cleaning rich, white people’s houses. Ida Mae’s dream is to be a pilot, like her dead father, but being a woman she’s having trouble getting her pilot’s license from the bigoted examiners in her area. Of course it’s not only Ida’s gender that’s keeping her out of the clouds, there’s also her race and the fact that there’s a war on, which means that although her dad’s crop dusting plane sits in the barn Ida can’t fly it because petrol is scare for civilians. However, the war is about to provide Ida with a very special opportunity to pursue her own happiness and help her country.See, although Ida is African American she doesn’t look black. When her little brother shows her a newspaper clipping about an attempt to recruit female pilots to fly planes for the army and that newspaper clipping shows a female pilot, with a very Asian surname, Ida decides to try to ‘pass’ for white so she can take part in the training program. She gets her chance but at a personal cost. Her mother and her best friend, Joleen, feel hurt by what Ida is doing, her mother especially because she has bad memories of her husband’s family, who actively tried to breed their children light skinned. Ida creates a significant distance between herself and some of those she loves the most. She must also be constantly on her guard, meaning she can never be completely truthful with the friends she makes among her white colleagues. When she begins passing Ida’s mother warns her that race is not a line you can just cross back and forth between. As Ida begins to build a life on the other side of the line she begins to understand, just how hard it is to lead a double life, when there’s only one of you.
‘Flygirl’ is one of those books you want to love as soon as you hear what it’s about. The idea of a black, female pilot making her way through all the army’s hoops, in order to help her country, sounds like a rousing edition to the historical fiction canon, the kind of book you’d try and read even if you were warned off by reviewers. Fortunately ‘Flygirl’s unique subject matter is backed up by the friendly, yet determined voice of the main character, the iron bonds between Ida and the other characters and some really clever use of similes and descriptions.
I feel like I’ve left it a bit too long to review this book in depth, but it’s one I’ve already talked up to a real world friend. It’s a novel I’d really like to see everyone reading and talking about, because of the originality of the subject area it focuses on, as well as the spotlight it aims at race and gender issues of the past, not to mention the fact that it indicates the reasons why the women’s movement separated along racial and religious lines, despite the common causes of the movement. It seems I’m hearing so much lately about how groups with an oppressed history need to let go of their anger, but before people start talking about achieving serenity and forgiveness they really need to understand just what those groups have to forgive. ‘Flygirl’ will give them that education, expand the knowledge of those who feel they already know enough and at the same time, provide a story of aerial action and growing up fast in the middle of a war.
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