Mare's War

by Tanita S. Davis

  Peaches says it doesn’t hurt none, they give you gas and you don’t feel a thing, but first thing I see is a needle in there, and I come over sick. They tell me they give me gas if I need it, but I tell them no. They poke at my teeth, and I try not to bite down. Dentist say I got a jaw like a bear trap.

  “No cavities,” the man says, and he says he don’t have to drill.

  Peaches doesn’t have no drilling, either, but poor Dovey Borland came back with her head all wrapped up in a scarf and lay down in her bed. I wish I had some clove oil. That’s what Mama put on Feen’s teeth when hers got sore. Course, I’m not thinking about Mama or anything.

  I wrote a letter to Mama care of Sister Dials, but nobody answered me yet.

  Today, some new white girls came in, and I looked at ’em real hard, see if I can see Miss Beatrice Payne anywhere. I wonder if she ever got on to Daytona and away from her mama and her ladies’ college. I wonder if Saphira Watkins’s boy is really in the navy, if the colored boys have their own barracks and their own mess and their own company, too. Don’t nobody—nobody—sees no colored boys around here nor any boys, but there are all kinds of men. Some old army men are coming down to see us march next week, I hear. That’s what Annie says, and she finds out all kinds of “latrine gossip.”

  Tomorrow, Sunday, is my birthday. Back home, Reverend Morgan at the AME is gonna ask Mama where I am. I wonder what she will say. Maybe she will stay home so Sister Dials can tell the gossip without her. Maybe Mama won’t go to service anymore at all. Maybe she and Toby will stay home.

  Tonight, the sad “taps” song, as Peaches calls it, doesn’t make me cry, but it still makes me miss Feen. I did right to come here, I know it. If I can just hide out without anybody sending me home, I will make a little money and put it by till Feen is done with school. They say we going to go to school here, and I will learn something to help me keep body and soul together later on. Maybe I will learn to type and be a secretary and get a good job in a city.

  In my mind, I talk to Feen and tell her all about it. I lay in my bunk with my eyes open, listening to the crickets outside. I pretend that this is my room, in my house, and Feen’s tucked up in her bed. I pretend I am twenty-one and we are going to services in the morning, where we will wear our good hats, and I will wear red lipstick from Woolworth’s, and Feen will wear a gold circle pin.

  Feen will wear my green coat and borrow my gloves. I will wear pearls.

  Someday.

  10.

  then

  Lieutenant give us inspection in the morning. Peaches gets full marks, but Annie has her cap tilted on her head, and Hundley tells her to fix it, like she does almost every morning. Annie say that hat is too ugly to go straight on her head. She likes to have a little style. Hundley says if Annie doesn’t cut out that mess, we’ll never win our inspection. Whichever company wins inspection gets to march with the flags and be the color guard. We have not won yet.

  The first time I see KP by my name on the duty roster Sunday, I know I am in for it. Annie says kitchen policing is the hardest job on the post. They are always tryin’ to tell us to “police” something around here. Those of us who have KP fall in and march toward the mess hall. It smells like dirt in the mess hall kitchen, dirt and grease, and there is steam hissing from big old kettles. It is hot, and something is burning over on the range.

  “You gals get an apron on,” the cook hollers, “and lend a hand here!” She looks like Betty from Young’s, and her arms are as big as a man’s.

  The Army must think all girls know how to cook and such, but they have another surprise coming. I know for sure Miss Ruby Bowie hasn’t hardly ever turned her hand to a spoon, and she keeps trying to duck out the back door and have herself a break. She picks up a chicken like it’s gonna bite her, and Cook has to tell her two or three times how to pluck it. That girl probably can’t boil water to save her life.

  The second time Ruby jumps back from steam in a pot, Annie laughs out loud.

  “Ruby, what do you do at home when your mama tells you to get in the kitchen?” Annie teases her.

  “I make sure I’ve got a good place to hide!” Ruby says, and we laugh.

  “Have a heart, Annie,” Ina White says from where she is rolling out biscuits. “You’re the only girl in your family, so you got all your mama’s time to teach you. Not every girl has three brothers!”

  “They all can cook, too,” Annie laughs. “Come on, girls, excuses aren’t the GI way!”

  There are potatoes in the mess, and we got to fix potato salad for Sunday dinner. Potatoes is something I know—Mama made me peel potatoes, snap beans, and mix up biscuits for Sunday dinner back home since I was eight or nine. I peel potatoes like I was born doing it.

  “Marey Lee,” Annie say, “now, how do you do that, make the peel all come out in one curl?”

  I just grin. I might not know nothing about nothing in this man’s army, but I sure can handle myself in a kitchen. Miss Ida should see me now. “Just hold your knife like this,” I say, and all my squad turns toward me. Sure feels good to teach them something for a change.

  Later, we go to the post chapel for service. It is a tall brick building with nothing but high windows and a slant roof, but we know where we is when we get inside. The pews is all lined up straight just like at home.

  The chapel is blessed quiet, with nobody hollering about nothing to anybody. Some girls from the squad—Doris Smith, Maryanne Oliver, and Dovey Borland—all sit with me in the front pews, right where our mamas taught us to be. Doris and Maryanne are both from little farms and little old towns like me. Doris homesick for a boy she was sweet on, but he got the draft, and she hasn’t got nowhere else to be but here, waiting on him. She tell us she joined up to make the war go shorter. Dovey joined up for the same reason as me—to get away from home.

  “I had a look at things, and I can tell you what—I wasn’t going nowhere in that town,” Dovey says, shaking her head. “I could go to secretarial school, but what would that do for me? They weren’t gonna hire a colored woman to work in an office, not where I come from. I was gonna go to the city, but I read about the Women’s Army in the colored paper, and Mama said I couldn’t do better than working for Uncle Sam.”

  Peaches comes in almost late and sits with Phillipa and that stuck-up Gloria Madden on the row behind us. Peaches pokes me in my back and smiles, and I smile back, but I don’t have nothing nice to say to Gloria Madden, even in God’s house, so I turn around quick.

  Dovey sings real sweet, and we all get quiet to hear her singing the hymn. Then Gloria sing, too, only louder, so we can all hear her, and even though Miss Gloria Madden works my nerves, I sure wish I could sing like that. How can a girl with such a sweet voice have such an evil way about her? Mama always say the good Lord don’t make no mistakes, but sometimes I am just not sure.

  After hymns, we say our prayers and sit down. We don’t have a reverend, but one of the officers says she is chaplain for the day, and she speaks the Word as good as any man preacher. Captain says we can go to church in town sometime. I might just do that.

  Even though she makes full marks on her uniform now, Peaches is still helping me. Sunday night she show me over and over how to make the bed the GI way. We got to have that top sheet folded down six inches, long as our toothbrushes, and they got a measuring stick to tell for sure. I hate them tight sheets, but when we have inspection, Lieutenant Hundley tears it up if it is not “right and tight.” First time I actually saw a quarter dollar bounce on just some sheets, I knew I had to learn that trick.

  “Tuck it tighter than that,” Peaches say. “You make it loose, and nothing’s gonna bounce off it but the covers when Hundley pulls it apart. Do it again.”

  “Don’t know why anybody wants to make a bed like that anyway,” I mutter. “Can’t breathe in there.”

  “You’ll be glad you can’t breathe later on. It’ll be down-right cold in here come winter.”

  I learn how to make that bed just right, but i
t does not stop me from tryin’ to get into it without messing it up and slide out in the morning to pull it straight. Peaches just looks at me like I’m pitiful and shakes her head.

  Monday we get back to the everyday work—rising at 0530, making beds, washing up, and picking up cigarette butts the folk drop down, then sweepin’ the walks the officers walk on. We march to breakfast, stand cleaned and starched and shined and ironed for inspection; we march to classes by 0800; we march to a meal break at lunch, 1200. We eat, and study till 1600, and march some more. We march to the parade grounds and practice raising and lowering “the colors,” which we call the flag.

  Every day, we study worse than we ever did in school. We learn sanitation and first aid, military customs and who to salute; we read maps; we study German chemicals and gas and how to watch out from the air and defend from Japanese planes. We do supply runs and keep tabs on all the food, all the weapons, and all the uniforms and gear. We learn how to run a clean camp ’cause they say tiny little germs will kill us all if we let them.

  I learn my keyboard and type drills every day. We learn signal corps duty, about how they look for patterns in words and numbers to make or break a code. We learn our telegraph keys and listen to the little dit-dah-dit for the messages they be sending. After the first day, we can all tap out an emergency signal—three short, three long, and three short: SOS. I got to teach that one to Feen.

  When they call out my name at roll call, my legs start shaking, and I know it is a letter. I am not too disappointed that it is from Miss Ida. Bet she never wrote a colored girl a letter before that didn’t have nothing to do with cleaning her house!

  May 1944

  Miss Marey Lee Boylen,

  Though she won’t say, your mama is upset something awful about you going away, and I told her you thought you were grown, just like my Beatrice. Young girls today don’t have the good sense the Lord God gave you, leaving your homes to work with all of those men. You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Marey Lee Boylen. I have half a mind to tell those officers that you are not as old as you have said and haul you back home for your own good.

  Marey Lee, make sure you’re still a clean Christian girl when you get back. We hear how some of those girls are over there, sliding down to the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah.

  Your mama comes to help me now, and I am glad. They marched Italian prisoners of war into this town, Marey Lee, and I can’t sleep at night, just knowing that something terrible is going to happen.

  Gasoline is scarce as hen’s teeth, and we haven’t had butter in weeks. We make do on fish, and we save our meat rations for special occasions. I will be so glad when this terrible war is over.

  I remain,

  Mrs. Ida Barrows Payne

  Ooh, Miss Ida makes me mad. What is she talking about, hauling me back for my own good, and about the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah? She had better not tell nobody how old I am, and if I hear somebody is coming for me, I’ll run. Ain’t nobody going to make me go home before I am good and ready.

  I got a good mind to write Miss Ida and tell her a thing or two. She don’t—doesn’t—think I know how to act, but I will show her.

  I will show everybody.

  11.

  now

  The morning is so new the horizon still has bits of pink at the far edges of the sky. It’s just after five and too early to be hungry, but Mare makes us visit the hotel’s breakfast bar anyway, and we pack pastries, fruit, and small bottles of juice into our bags for later on. I don’t know how Mare got up at “oh-five-thirty” every morning and had an appetite to eat breakfast when she was in the army, but I guess they were on the move so much they ate as much as they could when they had a chance, even if they weren’t hungry.

  Most of the people we see on the road are alone in their cars, sipping coffee or applying makeup. I slump in the corner of the seat farthest away from my grandmother and look out over the flat yellowish landscape, thinking about putting my feet up on the dashboard. The map shows nothing exciting on the way for miles and miles and miles. Inside the car, we reflect the same featureless boredom—three people staring out at the morning with nothing to say.

  The traffic slows to a crawl as we reach a business district. Mare looks distracted, slips on her sunglasses, scowling. She turns on the radio, tapping her long nails against the steering wheel as we move through the slowdown.

  “In more news, the president has announced sanctions against—” Mare clicks her tongue and changes the station.

  “… stop-and-go traffic on the expressway, as police are still clearing the site of this morning’s big rig—”

  “Should players who fail steroid testing get into the Hall of Fame? Fans argue that—”

  “… amid rumors that the group will feature the recovering rocker in a reunion tour—”

  “Students at a German university rioted last night over proposed—”

  Mare shakes her head and pushes in a CD.

  From the backseat, Tali lets out a loud sigh as the gravelly vocals and twanging guitar of Muddy Waters fill the air.

  “Mare,” she moans. “It’s too early for blues. Can we at least listen to someone who doesn’t play guitar?”

  “Oh, Lord,” Mare groans. “You put in what you want, girl. God knows it’s too early to listen to you whine about my music again.”

  Tali rummages around in her bag and thrusts a CD case in my face.

  “This one,” she says. As usual, Tali doesn’t bother to say thank you or ask me if I had something else I wanted to listen to. She never thinks of me at all, and I’m right here in the front seat. Mare and Tali are completely alike—they both expect people to do exactly what they want exactly when they want. I slide down in the seat and cross my arms as the music fills the car.

  “Well, she’s got a nice voice at least,” Mare says grudgingly as the smoky-voiced musician begins to sing.

  “I thought you’d like her,” Tali says smugly. “You should try a little music from this century every once in a while.”

  Mare laughs, a surprised-sounding bark that leaves her coughing. “From this century?” she sputters. “What for? There’s no good music to listen to these days. Now, back in the day …”

  Mare and Tali are debating the relative merits of Erykah Badu versus Sarah Vaughn when out of nowhere, it seems, a raised pickup truck, red-crossed flag flying from the antenna, zips out of the stream of traffic. Swerving up from the right lane and into ours, only half a foot ahead of us, he barely fits himself between us and the next car. Mare slams on the brakes and, on a reflex, throws her arm across my body. The tires squeal and she swears as we lurch to a stop.

  “Jerk!” Tali yells, reaching around me to lower my window. The car behind us also screeches to a stop, the driver leaning on his horn.

  “Tali, don’t,” I warn her as she unclips her seat belt. “You’re not even driving.”

  “I don’t care,” Tali fumes. “That freak cut us off!”

  “Look at the flag on his car,” I say. “Isn’t that a Confederate flag? What if he’s a skinhead or something?” I can feel the hair on my arms prickling as my stomach tightens with dread. “Don’t go screaming at him, Tali. You don’t know what those people can do.”

  Mare sighs. “Miss Talitha, put on your seat belt, will you please,” she says calmly. “A lady does not shout at strangers, no matter how piss-poor their driving skills.”

  Tali says something particularly unladylike and slouches sullenly.

  “And, Octavia,” my grandmother adds after a moment, “for your information, the red Saint Andrew’s cross on a field of white is the state flag of Alabama, not the Confederate flag.”

  I shrug. Your point?

  “Folks mistake the state flag for the Confederate flag since we had a narrow-minded governor of Alabama who ran the Confederate up the pole at the capitol for years, but the Confederate flag is actually a blue Saint Andrew’s cross with white stars on a red field.”

  “Okay, so it was the wrong fl
ag. Whatever,” I say, bumping my foot against the door. We’re not even in Alabama, and the truck is long gone. I’m embarrassed to have been so scared, and I wish Mare hadn’t decided I need a history lesson right now.

  “So, tell me,” Mare goes on, “if this fool driving was flying a Confederate flag, how would that make a difference with Tali hollering out the window at him?”

  “Well, duh,” I say before I can stop and think it through. “People who fly that flag are skinhead neo-Nazis and white supremacists.”

  Mare’s penciled-in brows are high, thin arcs. “All of them? Really?”

  I know what Mare is objecting to, and I scowl. “Fine. Some of them,” I say. “A lot of them.”

  “And?” Mare continues to peer at me from over her sun-glasses.

  “And what?”

  “How does that make a difference to your sister?”

  “It doesn’t,” Tali interrupts angrily. “Anybody who drives like that—”

  “Well, it should.” I bite my bottom lip. “People have to be … careful.”

  Mare looks at me and nods slowly. “I see.”

  For a while, we drive in silence, just letting the music from Tali’s CD slide between us and allowing our heartbeats to slow. I have slouched back and have just leaned my foot against the glove compartment when Mare speaks again.

  “Octavia …”

  I quickly straighten. “Huh?”

  Mare sighs, and I change my response. “Yes?”

  “Do you know anything about Claudette Colvin?”

  “Who?” I ask, thinking she’s another character from Mare’s history.

  “Oh, I’ve heard of Claudette Colvin,” Tali volunteers. “She’s the girl who wouldn’t give up her bus seat in Alabama—before Rosa Parks.”

  Mare glances at me, and I shrug. “Well, I’ve heard of her now. What about her?”