...'one of them told me that if you were born to a slave before 1916 then you are automatically a slave too. They are still a lot of old laws in place.’
‘Good thing you were born in 1919,’ I said.
He turned to look at me and he was crying. ‘1916 is the Ethiopian date,’ he said. ‘You know how the Ethiopian calendar is a little over seven years behind?' [p. 182]
Elizabeth Wein's World War 2 novels (Code Name Verity, Rose Under Fire) have really impressed me, and have stayed fresh in my mind for a decade or more. I suspect they may be intended for a younger audience, but that doesn't mean that Wein softens anything. In Black Dove, White Raven she deals with the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935; with slavery; with racism and sexism; and with wartime atrocities.
Her narrators are Emilia ('Em') and Teo, who've grown up together. Their mothers were stuntflyers after the First World War. Em's mother Rhoda was the White Raven, and Teo's mother Delia was the Black Dove. (The novel begins with Em recalling the problems they had performing south of the Mason-Dixon line, and the prejudice against Delia and Teo.) Then Delia died, and -- after going into a decline -- Rhoda decided to move to Ethiopia, the last free Black nation in Africa. Only gradually do we get an idea of the children's fathers. Em's father, Orsino Menotti, is a pilot in the Italian air force; Teo's father Gedeyon Wendimu, who died of influenza in 1919, was an Ethiopian pilot. Em gets to spend some time with her father in Ethiopia, while Teo discovers some unhappy truths about his own father. But it's Teo who is entrusted with a secret, and vital, mission...
Em and Teo are very close, and they've spent much of their childhood creating stories together -- stories of Black Dove (who can become invisible, even more so than Teo when he's trying not to be noticed) and White Raven (who is heroic and dashing and taught herself to fly). Part of the novel is told through their increasingly sophisticated collaborations, part through letters and school essays. And part, of course, by the reader reading between the lines, seeing that racism and misogyny are present in Ethiopia as well as America, albeit in very different ways.
I loved the descriptions of flying (even when Em hated it); the dry wit of Teo; the sense of Ethiopia as a country, and the Ethiopians as a people with a long heritage of Christianity and a vivid history. I'm intrigued by the relationships between Rhoda and Delia, and between Rhoda and her husband Captain Menotti. And Wein, as she has before, brought tears to my eyes. Now of course I want to read more of her work...
Fulfils the ‘set in. landlocked country’ rubric of the 52 books in 2024 challenge.
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