Wednesday, October 11, 2017

On Books 6: Hamilton's Battalion Part 3: That Could Be Enough

This review is the third and final part of my series on Hamilton's Battalion, which I was given an ARC of by Rose Lerner, the author of the first story in the book.

I have to say, I was not as enamored with Alyssa Cole's That Could Be Enough as I was with the other two stories in Hamilton's Battalion. Part of that is certainly that I'm not in the target audience. A story about two professional black women falling in love in early-19th-century New York City was certainly not written for a whitish girl like me to see herself in, and I'm not complaining about that. Not every story should be for me.

I do, however, think it's worth talking about the fact that that this story relies on two romance tropes that make me really uncomfortable regardless of who's falling in love.

The first of these is the "force her out of her shell" trope. The protagonist, Eliza Hamilton's maid and amanuensis Mercy, has responded to a series of past heartbreaks by repressing her emotions and, as a result, her creativity. Along comes the beautiful and clever Andromeda, granddaughter of one of the major players at the Battle of Yorktown, to tell Eliza her grandfather's story; and Andromeda decides that Mercy is an attractive puzzle to solve, and that it's her job to get Mercy to believe in love again and, specifically, to love her.

This leads to all kinds of violations of consent on Andromeda's part, from uninvited caresses, repeated simply because Mercy does not outright reject them; to a date hastily planned without any input from Mercy, because Andromeda knows Mercy will like where they're going; to a series of increasingly improper letters that eventually wear down Mercy's resolve to not respond. Andromeda is a jerk, and she doesn't learn to be less of a jerk. The whole story is about her "fixing" Mercy by dragging her precipitously from the lifestyle she's chosen into one that Andromeda thinks will fit her better (it's no coincidence that Andromeda is an expert seamstress), and she faces no consequences for the methods she uses.

This was discomfiting enough. But the story's not done: it also has dramatic miscommunication.

Andromeda learns that the man she wants to buy her sewing shop from is no longer willing to sell to an unmarried black woman. So while she's out of town visiting sick relatives, she asks an old friend to print her up a fake marriage announcement. Mercy sees the announcement in the newspaper, the morning after she and Andromeda have had sex, and recognizes in it the same sort of betrayal she's gotten from past lovers. So she gets mad at Andromeda, et voilà! Tension.

I hate any kind of dramatic twist caused by characters who really should trust each other enough to communicate effectively not communicating at all. It's so frustrating to see characters making things difficult for themselves, and it happens in so many stories that it's officially a hallmark of poorly constructed mainstream romantic comedies. It makes me sad to see a story about women of color making their own way in life fall into this trap. Not only that, the last quarter of the story shifts blame for the miscommunication in a way that makes Mercy and Andromeda's relationship more uncomfortable and unpleasant than even the aforementioned violations of consent.

The confusion is mostly Andromeda's fault. Yes, Mercy should have asked her about the headline after seeing it; but Andromeda should have mentioned that she was doing this thing in the first place! When she showed up at Eliza's door in the middle of a storm, I expected her to be outbound, stopping by to do Mercy the kindness of telling her that she was going off to visit her relatives and make the fake marriage announcement. Instead, she was already on her way back, the deed done, consulting no one, and especially not the one person she should most want to trust her.

The fault is Andromeda's, but the climax of the story is Mercy deciding that it's all her own fault, and the narration and Andromeda's actions making that seem true. Mercy tells herself that she's acting like the women who have broken her heart in the past, and that she needs to apologize. So she takes the blame for all the trouble caused by Andromeda's lapse of judgement, and accepts Andromeda's offer of a new dress, and then she is forgiven for something she didn't really do and their relationship is back on track.

This is not what a healthy relationship looks like. Andromeda should know, given how often she mentions relying on her parents and grandparents as romantic role models. She rushed Mercy into a relationship with no respect for her boundaries, and now she's complicit in shifting blame for her own actions onto Mercy, so that all she has to feel is clever for solving a "puzzle," for fixing someone who did not want to be fixed. That it arguably worked, making Mercy more in touch with her emotions and able to write poetry for the first time in a decade, does not excuse Andromeda's actions or the rationale behind them.

There were some bright spots on this journey of self-discovery that Andromeda has dragged Mercy along on. The brightest is the all-black theater group at the Grove, for whom Andromeda is making costumes and to whose performance of As You Like It she takes Mercy on their hastily-planned date. Mercy starts writing plays for them in the epilogue; and with that creative outlet, I hope she no longer needs Andromeda's control over her to bring meaning to her life.

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