Nobody in her house wanted to go to the evening service, so Tony asked if she could go by herself. Her parents weren’t happy about it. “Too much, Tony,” her mother said. “It’s too much. You are spending a whole day mourning a stranger!”
“Bessie Coleman is not a stranger to me. I’ve been following her career since 1921. Watching how people came to respect her is why I wanted to go to high school — you and Daddy both know that! That’s why you agreed to let me go to Edwin Stanton! Why do you think five thousand people turned up at her funeral?”
“So long as your schoolwork’s done,” her father said, which was his way of giving permission.
So she went to the evening funeral too. When the service ended, Tony found herself swept up in the crowd that escorted Miss Coleman’s casket to the Jacksonville railway station. Five hundred people stood on the platform watching the porters lift the coffin into the baggage car. Someone behind Tony began to hum softly in the warm spring evening gloom. After a bar or so, another few voices joined in. Tony did too, buoyed by being part of such a unified crowd. Words in her head accompanied the tune:
My country, ’tis of thee,
Sweet land of liberty,
Of thee I sing. . . .
Later that night, after she got home, Tony sat on the creaky porch of the shotgun house that still belonged to her grandmother. The magnolia her grandfather had planted when her mother was born was now in glorious full bloom, scenting the whole street, and stars glimmered through its leaves. Their rustling mingled with the sound of Tony turning pages as she leafed through the pile of newspapers, both white and black, that she’d collected in the past three days. They’d cost her a week’s wages from the milliner’s where she worked after school.
Her mother came out to coax her gently to bed. “Child, you’re going to go blind there, reading by one candle like that.”
“Daddy said I had to put out the lamp. Tomorrow there’s going to be another funeral in Orlando, where Bessie lived, and then one up in Chicago, where her family lives.”
“Your daddy is worried about you. You are acting a little crazy, Tony.”
Tony was sick of the papers anyway. The way they reported the crash fueled the rage seething in her chest. Worrying about the aircraft’s maintenance log in the flour-sack bag under her the mattress wasn’t helping.
“See here, Momma, this article says her mechanic was teaching her to fly!” Tony flourished the paper. “And this one has got the story all the way at the back, and it just has a picture of the dead white pilot and it doesn’t even mention Bessie’s name, just calls her ‘the woman’! She is a ‘daring aviatrix’ in the Chicago Defender. But these white papers just don’t care about a colored woman — no matter what she does.”
“Well, that’s the truth.” Her mother sighed. “They don’t care. Come on to bed, Tony honey.” She hugged a thin arm around Tony’s shoulder and kissed her cheek with dry lips. Tony couldn’t see her face, but she could smell the Madam C. J. Walker oil in her hair.
“Momma!” Tony gasped in frustration. “Doesn’t it make you mad?”
“Would I be sending my daughter to the only colored high school in the city and letting her study physics if it didn’t make me mad?” her mother answered quietly. She began to gather the strewn newspapers.
Tony blew out the candle and stomped into the house. The porch shook.
She lay awake. Her mind was too full of the day’s images and the words on paper and the crowds of mourning people and the fact that none of it actually felt like it had anything to do with the warm, excitable person who’d shaken Tony’s hand and made promises to her three days ago. That dream of a flight school, the newsreels and the lectures and the encouragement — who was going to keep that going? All those thousands of people at the churches today — maybe one of them would step up and keep that dream alive, but right now, for Tony, her only connection to the sky was the guilty bag under the mattress, with the aircraft log book hidden inside. And Tony couldn’t show that to anyone, ever.
Tony listened to her sisters’ breathing. She tried to calm herself, running the wonderful scene of the humming crowd at the train station through her head like one of Miss Coleman’s film reels. The quiet music swelling in the dark had been one of the most magical things she’d ever witnessed: a crowd of strangers united in one moving voice.
From every mountainside,
Let freedom ring.
But other voices crowded in her head, jammed in the works of her mind.
A God-damned wrench.
Guess you hear a lot of cussing where you live.
One for the nigger girl!
For being a fool.
And then she remembered a woman’s voice.
You make your own luck.
And another woman, friendly, warm, and encouraging:
Soon it’ll be time for you to take flight.