It's the late 1990s—Tupac is taking over radio waves, Inkster, Michigan is as Midwest as ever, and a young Khadijah Queen has just been recruited to join the U.S. Navy while working her day job at RadioShack. In light of her dwindling college tuition fund, her mother’s alcoholism and sisters’ addictions, and an impending future of minimum wage retail jobs, Bootcamp doesn’t sound so bad.
But soon after Khadijah completes her grueling training and boards her ship, finds herself in even more traumatic situations among strangers far from home. Surrounded by men in the sonar room, she struggles to maintain her dignity day after day while dealing with near-constant sexual harassment, weeks-long demeaning labor assignments, and overt racism from her coworkers. At first, she tries to bring honor to herself, her family, her division, and the navy, taking pride in her work while studying to become an officer and leaning on poetry to lift her spirits. Queen begins to wonder the issues she is faced with are worth what she was promised.
Queen must conceal a miscarriage, a subsequent pregnancy, and domestic violence while enlisted. She must decide where her loyalties lie: the life that was prescribed to her, or the new, unknown life that awaits her? Masterfully penned,
Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea is a searing chronicle about family, survival and autonomy, and one woman’s attempt to content with a workplace that is hostile to women.
We stay fighting, even if we don't call it war.
Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea is a poet’s memoir about family, survival, and one servicewoman’s search for autonomy. Yanked out of college and torn from her sunny hometown of Los Angeles in the early 1990s, Khadijah Queen finds herself sharing a basement apartment with her mother and sister and working two retail jobs in snowy, tiny Inkster, Michigan. Longing to escape the cycle of her family’s poverty, incarceration, and addiction, she joins the US Navy, determined to earn money to finish college and make it back to L.A. on her own terms.
But soon after Queen completes her grueling training and boards a doomed destroyer, she finds herself faced with near-constant sexual harassment, demeaning labor assignments, and overt racism. Stuck on a ship with nowhere to hide, she looks to poetry, literature, and letters from home to get through the long days and maintain her dignity. She keeps her head down until the workplace hostility against women spills over into her dating life and threatens to derail everything she has worked for.
In trying to break through the unspoken code of silence between sailors, Queen must decide where her loyalties lie: with the Navy or within herself. Unflinching and masterfully penned, this memoir questions the promises of service to reveal the true price of being a woman at sea.
