“For being a fool.” The soot-covered man eyed Tony slantwise. “Maybe for getting too many colored folk excited about aviation.”
The white policeman looked over at her in surprise, as though he couldn’t remember why he’d thought she was so important half an hour ago. It was obvious she couldn’t add any useful information to what the mechanic knew.
“Go on, scoot on home, girl,” he snapped. “Nothing you can do here.”
Seething at the pointless panic they’d made her endure, raging over their easy dismissal of Bessie’s pioneering ambition, Tony didn’t need to be told a second time to leave their mean-spirited company. She nodded once to the mechanic who had given her the awkward apology for his bad language. Then she walked with dignity out of the building. At the end of the block she ran for the Kings Road streetcar that would take her back to the center of Jacksonville. She was breathless with sobs by the time it came.
She’d already climbed on and was making her way to an empty bench before she realized that she was still carrying William Wills’s flour-sack satchel over her shoulder.
She couldn’t carry it around with her at school all day. But her heart galloped with fear and fury at the thought of taking it back to the airfield. Better just to drop it on someone’s trash heap . . . But then, what if someone else found it and brought it back to Paxon Field? They might ask John Betsch about that “nigger girl” who’d been following Bessie around, and he knew Tony’s name. She couldn’t just abandon the bag. Why in the world hadn’t she put it down in the airfield office? Getting noticed while she was already there, waiting for them to accuse her of stealing, couldn’t possibly have been worse than going back and volunteering for it.
The streetcar rattled slowly on its way into the city. Now the bag sat on her lap like some mischievous magic object out of a folktale, waiting to get her into trouble. The shoulder strap made it easy to carry, and it wasn’t even as heavy as Tony’s bundle of schoolbooks. She hesitated. Then she opened the canvas sack and reached inside, trying to look like she knew what she would find.
The cardboard notebook that she pulled out was very like her own but more heavily battered. Too deep in now to let herself consider the moral implications of invading a dead man’s privacy, she opened the book.
It was a maintenance record for the crashed Curtiss Jenny. Inside the front cover, Bessie Coleman had written her name, proudly declaring ownership of the aircraft. The confident sweep of her signature with its rounded O and A exactly matched the autograph in Tony’s own notebook. Tony’s breath caught in her throat.
She turned the pages.
The entries went back only a couple of years, though the notes in the beginning suggested the plane was older than that. The last few pages were dated like diary entries, describing work that had been done in the past couple of days. Tony guessed that Wills had made these notes during his unexpected landings in Mississippi on his way from Love Field in Dallas to Paxon Field in Jacksonville — a careful record for the aircraft’s new owner. It felt almost private to read it, intimate secrets intended for the woman who would have someday known that plane from the inside out.
Tony slid the notebook back into the bag. There was a soft cloth in there as well — a clean, folded shirt. And a rolled felt bag that Tony thought contained shaving equipment.
Tony folded the flour sack shut and closed her eyes, feeling the rhythm of the streetcar clattering over the rails. The only thing to do was to take the bag home and shove it under her bed and hope no one ever found it. Bury it in the backyard. Burn it. Try to forget the way those white men had talked to her. Try to forget the way they’d talked about Bessie. Try to forget the sight of Bessie Coleman’s falling body and the roar of the explosion that had incinerated William Wills.
Tony went to three church services that Sunday — her family’s usual one in the morning, then a funeral for Bessie Coleman in the afternoon at the Negro Baptist church, and then another funeral service for Miss Coleman that evening at the Negro Episcopal church. Tony got her whole family to come along to the afternoon funeral, even though they had to stand outside — only about a third of the mourners fit in the church. You couldn’t hear the eulogies, but everybody outside joined in singing the hymns. Maybe Bessie Coleman would have been cheered by a mixed crowd at the flying show that weekend, but Tony didn’t notice any white people at her funeral — it looked more like the entire Negro population of Jacksonville had turned out to say good-bye. Tony caught her mother wiping her eyes.
Her own eyes stayed dry. She couldn’t cry. How did you mourn a dead dream?