Then everything was quiet.
Tony had forgotten John Betsch, who’d been standing right beside her watching the whole thing too, until the moment when he tore across the airfield, running as fast as he could go. The policeman pelted after him. So did the boys who’d been watching from the road.
Dazed, Tony ran a couple of steps after them, when suddenly she remembered the figure who had fallen out of the tumbling aircraft. It hadn’t happened directly above the airfield, but over a neighboring cross street. Tony ran away from the fallen plane, along Edgewood.
There was a little crowd gathered ahead of her. Something about their sober silence made Tony stop in her tracks before she got close enough to see what they were gathered around. A knot of men knelt over the inert form in the middle of the crowd, talking to one another in hushed tones. Around the edges of the crowd, sobbing women stole agonized glances at the scene and quickly looked away again, holding one another by the hand and around the waist.
There was something in their quiet reverence — the way the women were wiping one another’s tears, as though the broken body in the center of the crowd was family — that made Tony sure the body was that of the famed Bessie Coleman.
After a moment a couple of people stepped back, but no one moved fast — no one went running for an ambulance or a doctor.
Then suddenly the young policeman who’d tried to turn Tony away from the airfield was back on the scene.
“Hey!” called the policeman. “Hey, you, nigger girl with the questions! Get over here!”
Tony closed her eyes for a moment, reeling with the shock of what she’d just seen and the sheer horror of the law singling her out in a crowd of onlookers.
“You!” He was advancing on her now. She thought about running and suddenly became aware that she was carrying her books on their string over one shoulder and William Wills’s satchel over the other. If she ran, it would look like she was trying to steal the satchel.
Oh, Lord have mercy, maybe it already did look like she was trying to steal it?
A sudden wave of anger drowned Tony’s unhappiness for a moment. She’d run to the fallen pilot because she’d been trying to help. One of America’s great heroes was tragically dead, and wasn’t that more important than tracking down an anonymous schoolgirl? Tony stood her ground as the policeman stomped toward her, his eyes narrowed in a suspicious frown.
That was when they heard the rush of thunder as what was left of Bessie Coleman’s Curtiss Jenny flying machine, a quarter of a mile away, exploded into a tower of flame.
The policeman escorted Tony back to the airfield office. He told her she was a witness; that’s all he’d tell her. For half an hour he drank coffee with the man who was handling the telephone, but they didn’t offer any to Tony. They didn’t offer her a seat, either, so she stood warily in a corner of the office, trying to be invisible. She didn’t dare set down the bag or her books. Her arms began to ache.
But she couldn’t help overhearing what was going on, as the man on the telephone relayed information. The police and three technicians were already attempting to pick over the wreckage to find out what had gone wrong with the plane, newspapermen were out there ghoulishly taking pictures, and a pair of undertakers were on their way.
“Can you beat that — having to call two different undertakers?” the telephone man exclaimed to the policeman. “One for the pilot, one for the nigger girl! Nobody having a good day except the undertakers.”
At that moment, a man in overalls came slamming into the airfield office. He was so soot covered from head to toe that he looked like he was performing in a minstrel act. “God-damned loose wrench!” he swore, his mouth and lips garishly wet and red in his filthy, blackened face. He announced to no one in particular, “There was a God-damned wrench jammed in the works of that plane. That poor bastard Wills didn’t stand a chance. No pilot in the world could have straightened a machine in that kind of trouble. A God-damned loose wrench! I don’t blame the pilot. I blame the mechanics who left it there!”
The furious mechanic suddenly noticed Tony. “Pardon my French! But I guess you hear a lot of cussing where you live. Well, it’s bad, girl, bad.” He turned to the policeman and the receptionist, dismissing Tony as someone who got cussed at a lot. “The explosion was caused by that Negro Welfare League boy lighting a cigarette to calm his nerves. Tossed his match on the ground and whoosh! There was fuel spilled everywhere, and the plane and a couple of trees just went up in flames. One cop’s pants caught fire. They hauled the colored boy off to jail.”
Tony tried to hold back her own strangling anger, but words burst out of her. “You mean John Betsch? They took him to jail? What for?”