Brave Bess, people had called Miss Coleman. How had she managed to fly free in a land so tangled in unfair rules? She wasn’t a lawbreaker.
She did things herself, Tony thought. She went places. She went to Chicago and found people who gave her work; she went to France and found people who taught her to fly. She came back here and found people who respected her enough to sponsor her, to manage her shows. And she went to Texas and found people who would sell her a plane. She took control. She made her own luck. Those places she went and those people who helped her are real. The editor at the Chicago Defender. John Betsch. William Wills. The people who sold her the plane. I can find people like that too.
I wish I could give that Curtiss Jenny’s maintenance book to someone who would care about it, Tony thought. Someone who knows what it means. Not just someone who believed in Bessie’s dream, but also someone who understands the mechanics of flight. Someone who knew her, or who knew the man who wrote it out . . .
Then she realized there was something she could do with William Wills’s satchel. There was a place she could take it and people who would care about it.
She was going to take that book and that satchel back to Love Field in Dallas, Texas, where it had come from.
Tony got dressed in the dark. Her sisters were awake the second she got out of bed.
“Where are you off to?” baby Alma Mae asked.
“I am going to Chicago,” Tony said. This outrageous lie was less outrageous than her real plan. “I am going to Bessie Coleman’s Chicago funeral, to her family funeral in her hometown.”
“Are you crazy?” hissed Sarah, who was jealous that she wasn’t in high school yet and had missed the lecture on Thursday.
“I gotta leave before Momma gets up. ’Cause I have to catch the six fifteen a.m. train.”
“I bet you gotta leave before Momma gets up ’cause you ain’t asked her if you can take the train to Chicago all by yourself,” said Alma Mae.
“How much school are you going to miss?” Sarah gasped, and repeated for effect: “Are you crazy? Are you really gonna spend all your saved-up money on a train ticket to Chicago so you can go to a funeral for someone you don’t even know, when you already went to two funerals for her?”
“Just don’t tell Momma till after the train has left, okay?”
Sarah didn’t answer. Tony wasn’t sure if that meant she would or she wouldn’t tell, but Tony guessed that if her sisters didn’t kick up a fuss now, they wouldn’t tell on her till later.
“You wearing your Sunday clothes? You’ll look good on the train,” Alma Mae said approvingly.
“Yeah, all dressed up so I can be squashed on a wooden bench for twenty hours in the colored car.”
“Least you got a good job to pay for your ticket,” Sarah reminded her sharply. “Least they let you ride. Least it’s 1926 and not 1826.”
“Yeah, least there is a train!” said Alma Mae.
“You two sound like Grandma. Times have changed since she was your age.”
Grandma had been a plantation slave when she was Sarah’s age.
Tony pinned on her hat. She felt under the mattress for the flour-sack bag and tucked her schoolwork, her notebook, and her coin purse inside it. Alma Mae and Sarah listened to her blind last-minute packing without saying anything else for a short while.
Then Alma Mae told Tony reassuringly, “Daddy is gonna tan your hide when you get back.”
“You hush,” Sarah told Alma Mae, and Tony knew she could trust them.
“Thank you,” Tony said, and kissed each of them good-bye in the dark.
It took Tony nearly two days to get to Dallas. The colored car was crowded and stifling and stank of sweat and the one toilet — Tony had no choice but to contribute to both. The last three hours of the journey through the fields and banks of tossing bluebonnets made her so crazy for fresh air that she began to contemplate leaping from the train to join the workers hoeing the cotton fields just so she could be outside. She ate the last of Momma’s biscuits, the ones that were supposed to be her school dinner. She had Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery open on her lap, because she was supposed to be reading it for school, but she kept putting it down because yes, she knew that education was going to lift her above her grandma’s past. But she couldn’t write out any of her missed work on the swaying, crowded train.
The flour sack and its contents didn’t weigh heavy on her cramped knees, but they did on her heart.
When Bessie Coleman rode this train, which maybe she did just last month, she’d have had to sit in this car just like me, Tony thought. Queen Bess, the queen of the sky, jammed on a wooden bench in the stinking colored car.
Tony looked out at the bluebonnets and thought, Blue, blue, the color of the sky. Not white. Not black.