‘What kind of a girl steals the clothes from a dead man’s back and runs off to join the army?
A desperate one, that’s who.’
The Carnegie Medal, awarded annually to ‘the writer of an outstanding book for children’, is notorious for selecting novels which confront contentious issues and/or have the potential to spark controversy and debate. This year’s winner, Tanya Landman, is certainly no exception. With her brutally honest report of what it was like to be a young black woman in America’s Deep South during the country’s most troubled and bloody period, she presents her young readers with questions about humanity that would trouble even the most philosophical amongst us.
Beginning her life as a slave girl in the cook-house of the wealthy Delaney family, Landman’s narrator dispenses with her ‘fancy’ given name of Charlotte, just as she had relinquished all knowledge of her age or family history. As ‘property’ of Mr Delaney, she knows the best she and her fellow workers at the plantation can hope for is to keep a low profile and work hard, despite the verbal and physical abuse that has her question why skin colour matters when all blood looks the same.
Civil war between North and South, in which Lincoln’s Yankee soldiers are fighting for a united America devoid of slavery, brings hope to those on the plantation, and they eagerly await the brave cavalry who will set them all free. Although Charlotte doesn’t know what freedom is exactly, she senses it’s something good and clings to that feeling with excited anticipation of its arrival.
Except freedom doesn’t come with the battle-weary soldiers who burn the plantation, kill Delaney and take the workers with them, indiscriminately raping and killing as they rampage across the country. Nor does it come with news of the Confederate South’s surrender, nor with the assurance of an all new Promised Land.
After witnessing the rape and murder of those closest to her, and encountering the remains of atrocities carried out upon black families, Charlotte loses all hope for freedom. Frightened by the soldier’s mistreatment of women, her vulnerability becomes the only thing in the world she can control. By dressing as a man, she discovers that she becomes a man in the eyes of others (‘Folks see what they expect to see’). And so, seeking freedom and protection, she enlists as a soldier. But even here, within the United States Army, Private Charley O’Hara finds racial prejudice is just as prevalent as ever.
As the years pass, Charley witnesses the cruel treatment of her fellow soldiers by a white race unable or unwilling to rearrange the pre-established social order. Battle-hard and world-weary, devoured by hatred and fuelled by stories of savagery, Charley releases years of rage and social injustice on another of America’s ‘nuisance’ races, the Native Indians. She stands by her fellow soldiers as they evict entire Indian communities from land earmarked for new schools and homes for white families. Oblivious to the irony, her distaste for the Indian culture is soon brought into question by the arrival of another frightened soul sheltering for survival within the US Army – one who knows her secret, understands her fight, and with whom she has the greatest chance of finding freedom.
Landman’s novel charts a tumultuous period in American history, straddling both the pre-War barbarism of slavery, and the post-War turmoil that went on long after the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery in December 1865. Whilst the American Civil War is often pored over in film and literature, the perspective is predominantly male, claims Landman, and even rarer is the voice of the young black female. As so many writers do, Landman says she heard Charlotte’s/Charley’s voice clearly as she wrote, and this is evident in the narrative that rings out loud and unfiltered from the pages. In her Deep South dialect, Charlotte lays down the truth about the barbarities of that period – first as an innocent child asking all the questions and trying to make sense of the world with only a handful of pieces of the puzzle, and then as an adult, hardened by loss and war, and defying long-buried feelings of truth and justice.
Whilst Buffalo Soldiers charts just one woman’s journey, its themes of freedom and identity relate to all American citizens regardless of race during that period, and indeed all members of the human race before and since. Charlotte asks some heavy questions of her listeners, ones that can have no agreeable answers – certainly not from today’s readers who live in a world striving for equality and a voice for all. Nor does Charlotte shelter her readers from the things she has seen: brutal rape, murder and mutilation – surely the most horrific of atrocities one human can commit upon another. But Landman trusts her young readers with the truth – the truth as she has discovered it during research for this and other novels – and Charlotte is the medium by which that truth is communicated. Through Charlotte, Landman ensures that new generations remember and learn from the experiences of those who have gone before us, and, perhaps more importantly, plays her part in giving those who were once voiceless, a chance to be heard in a world now ready and able to listen.
Find out more about Tanya Landman and her work at www.tanyalandman.com.
http://www.carnegiegreenaway.org.uk/carnegie/recent_winners.php
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_United_States#Civil_War_and_emancipation