Stagecoach Mary by Tanya Landman

One of the great pleasures of researching a book like Buffalo Soldier is coming across the real-life stories of extraordinary people. They don’t get much more extraordinary than Mary Fields.

This  powerhouse of a woman - six feet tall, cigar smoking, whiskey drinking, gun toting, hot tempered –was the first African-American woman to work for the US Postal Service.

Born a slave in Tennessee in around 1832,  Mary was freed after the 13^thAmendment was passed in 1865. In a world turned upside down by war her problem then was what to do, where to go, how to live?

Not a great deal is known about how she fared in the years immediately following the American Civil War but by 1870 she’d found work emptying chamber pots on a Mississippi steamboat. It may have been there that she met Judge Edmund Dunne whose family later took her on as a servant.

When Dunne’s wife died, Mary was given the task of taking his five children to Ohio to be cared for by their aunt – an Ursuline nun called Sister Amadeus.

For the next few years Mary Fields stayed with the Ursuline Sisters tending the gardens and grounds.

Sister Amadeus and Mary became close friends but in  1884 the nun was promoted to Mother Superior and selected to go to Montana to set up a mission and boarding school for Native American children.

Conditions in Montana then were primitive and in 1885 Mother Amadeus contracted pneumonia.  When the news reached Mary Fields she set out at once to nurse her friend back to health.

For the next eight years Mary helped with the building of the mission 19 miles from the town of Cascade.  Besides the construction work she also did the laundry, tended the gardens, looked after the chickens and drove the wagon that brought food and supplies to the mission.

Mary’s temper often got her into altercations and after a duel with a hired hand word of her unorthodox behavior reached the Bishop. He declared a mission school was no place for a shoot out and insisted she leave.

With the help of Mother Amadeus Mary moved to Cascade and set up a restaurant.  But Mary’s heart was a big as her temper was hot.  She’d feed anyone who was hungry – whether or not they could afford to pay.  She went bust.

But at sixty four Mary could harness a team of horses quicker than any man and so she got a job as a driver for the US mail. Sitting on top of the stagecoach, a jug of whisky at her feet, a pistol in her apron pocket, a shotgun by her side, wreathed in clouds of cigar smoke she must have made an impressive sight.

For eight years she carried the mail on a 19 mile route, never missing a day’s work.

In 1903 Mother Amadeus left Montana to carry out missionary work in Alaska.  By then Mary was too old to accompany her, and indeed too old to continue carrying the mail. She stopped driving the stagecoach  when she was around 70 but continued to work, running a laundry service from her home.

By then she’d become something of a local legend.  The Cascade Hotel provided meals for her free of charge. When her home was burned down in 1912 the townspeople rallied round to rebuild it for her. Stagecoach Mary was the only woman permitted to drink in the town’s saloons.

When her health began to fail the fiercely independent Mary left her house and lay down in a field on a freezing night, waiting for death. She was found and taken to the hospital where, on December 5^th 1914,  she died.

The whole town mourned her.  The service was held in the Pastime Theatre and was one of the largest Cascade had ever seen.

In 1959 Hollywood legend Gary Cooper – who’d met her as a child – wrote of her,  “Born a slave… Mary lived to become of the freest souls ever to draw breath, or a .38.”

YA - A Double Edged Sword? by Tanya Landman

Long ago, way back in the golden olden days when the world was full of lovely independent bookshops and I worked in one of them there was no Young Adult section.  So how did people manage? 

Well, they browsed.  And if a customer was buying a book for someone else and they weren’t certain if the content was suitable they could ask the bookseller for advice because in those days knowing the stock was considered to be part of the job.

There are still excellent independents out there but as we all know the numbers are dwindling and times are tough.  Bit by bit all that in-depth knowledge and expertise is being replaced by computers, labels and branding.

When I started writing it was for KS 1 and 2 and  I was put in the children’s section.  So far, so straightforward.  But then Apache came out: my ‘breakthrough’ novel.  It was a big moment.

I was delighted to be part of the YA brand:  it comprised the most brilliant, creative,  exciting writing that was being produced.  I was rubbing shoulders with my literary heroes – what was not to love?

On my first visit to a secondary school I was asked why I’d called the book Apache.  The student pronounced it “Apaitch.”   I was a little perplexed.  When I asked the audience if anyone knew what an Apache was hands went up all around the room.  I breathed a sigh of relief.  Then they all said an Apache was a  “helicopter”.

It came as a shock to realise that teens hadn’t been raised on the relentless diet of wall-to-wall westerns that I had.  No problem – it didn’t affect their enjoyment or enthusiasm for the book – but I realised that Apache had an extra resonance for adults.  The teachers and librarians who read the book really ‘got’ it.  But they were adults who were ‘in the know’.  How could I get it into the hands of general readers? 

With Buffalo Soldier I’ve got the same problem.  It’s accessible to teens, but I’d love adults to read it too.   And why wouldn’t they?  Well, because it’s a YA book.

 

Over the years I’ve given various books  (by various writers) to friends who have looked both puzzled and offended when they realised I was handing them a “kids’ book”. They considered reading YA would be dumbing down; an insult to their intelligence.   There are thousands of potential readers who are missing out because they have a mental block about the YA label.

A couple of months ago I had one of those in-between times, when I was waiting for a manuscript to come back from the editor. Instead of writing the synopsis I was supposed to be working on I went on Facebook (as you do) and asked a few questions.  And the warm, witty writing community came back with some wonderful answers. My apologies for reducing what were interesting and sometimes hilarious exchanges into this rather more banal summary:

1) When is a YA novel not a YA novel? There are the very obvious 'teen reads', but what about books marketed to teens that deserve a wider adult readership too? I'm thinking Mal Peet in the first instance. More examples, anyone?

Lots of names were put forward including Aidan Chambers, Celia Rees, Patrick Ness, Meg Rosoff. What was interesting was the amount of comments that came in alongside the suggestions: someone reported an adult who was embarrassed to be ‘caught’ reading The Book Thief because it was marketed for teens, for example.

We all agreed the YA brand is simply a marketing device and something that makes life easier for bookshops, but inventing a label to attract certain readers will inevitably put others off.

2) Which of the classics would get classified as a YA read if they were published today?

Sometimes books get labeled YA simply because they have a teen or child protagonist.  Again, lots of titles suggested – Great Expectations, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, To Kill a Mockingbird, Bonjour Tristesse, The Dud Avocado and all of Walter Scott’s 27 novels.

3) Are there any books out there that ONLY teens will enjoy?

Plenty of suggestions here too including Catcher in the Rye (“insufferably irritating”), Wuthering Heights (“barking mad”) and Twilight(“I died a little at each page I read”).  However, many of us know (and some of us weep over the fact) that there are grown, sensible adults out there who love the Twilight saga, so it seems the answer to my question is no.

What conclusions can be drawn from all this?   That a book is a book is a book.  Writing something that’s accessible to teens shouldn’t exclude an adult readership.  Yet “most adults won’t touch teen no matter how good it is” as one contributor to the discussion remarked. 

Love it or loathe it the YA brand is here to stay, so how do we get past the prejudice some adult readers have?  No idea, sorry.  I don’t have answers to this – just plenty of questions.