Mare's War (9 page)

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!

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
.

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 flag. 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?”

My grandmother looks at me over the frame of her sun-glasses. “She was fifteen, the same as you are, but she wasn’t about to let anyone push her around.”

I thump my foot against the door, wishing that Mare would come to the point.

“The people who dragged her kicking and screaming off of that bus certainly were what you could call white supremacists,” Mare continues. “She had to have known that something was going to happen if she kept sitting where she wasn’t wanted. But she stayed seated,” Mare goes on, flicking a glance over her left shoulder and smoothly changing lanes. “Sometimes you just have to act on the strength of your convictions, no matter what someone else might think.”

I curl my toes in my sandals. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Skinheads, neo-Nazis, white supremacists—they believe what they please, but don’t let that change
you.”

I open my mouth, but Mare keeps going. “Granted, I’d better not catch you
ever
rolling down your window and shouting like you don’t have some kind of common sense, but you can’t let people control how you act. Don’t let them make you afraid.”

“I’m not afraid,” I insist. “I just don’t want to get killed because stupid Tali gets all road-rage-y and yells at some skinhead.”

“Shut up, Octavia. For your information—”

“Hush.”
Mare’s voice is flint.

I sit, seething, while Tali leans back and looks out the window.

“So, whatever happened to Claudette Colvin?” I blurt. “If she was so great, why hasn’t everybody heard of her?”

Mare sighs. “Well … the civil rights movement had a minister as one of its foremost leaders. Claudette got pregnant by a married man just about the time her case came to trial, and they decided she wasn’t such a good poster child for equal rights.”

Tali clicks her tongue in disgust. “That is
so
completely wrong.”

Mare sighs again. “Well, things were different back then.”

The sun continues to climb in a cloudless blue sky. The CD ends, and Mare turns on the radio again to NPR and is listening to an author interview. Tali is staring out the window, looking glazed.

Just before Mare says it’s time for a bathroom stop, we pass an old truck with Tennessee license plates, a gun rack, and a Confederate flag in the rear window. The truck is dusty and brown; the driver, old and leather-skinned. Unable to stop myself, I risk a look into his face, feeling my stomach clench as our gazes meet.

He gives me a brief, impersonal glance, then his eyes return to the road.

In a moment, he’s a receding speck in the mirror, just one brown truck out of many on an endless road.

All week long, the lieutenant has us marching our close drills. It is hot on that parade ground, and we stand and sweat till our clothes stick to us, but we do the best we can. When it is too hot, some people faint. First time that happened, folks start to break ranks and carry on, and Lieutenant says we can’t be doing that—we have got to keep our eyes
forward
, no matter what. She calls it “military discipline.” I call it crazy. If I drop dead out there, somebody better be coming to pick me up!

Sometimes I don’t know what Uncle Sam needs with women in this man’s army. They tell us we here to “free a man to fight,” but I don’t see no men being freed up by all this marching back and forth in this hot sun. They got a song they sing, the WAC song, which is all about duty and defending our country’s honor. Well, I don’t know about
that
. All I can say is, “Better the devil we know.” And I know we sure don’t need no Japs coming all the way from across the water trying to boss folks around.

Some of these girls would like to have died when we had to clean the latrine—but Lieutenant said, “Ladies, make us proud,” and we did. That commode at Miss Ida’s gave me all kinds of practice, and I make sure everyone sees I don’t mind getting
my
hands dirty. We clean it once, then we study at class, then we polish it again—on our knees. Lieutenant said she wanted to eat off that latrine floor, and she could. I can’t wait to write Feen and tell her we
all
get to use the flush commodes here. Won’t hardly know how to act when I get home.