Tony shook her head.
“We’ll see what Pa and Ma Vencill can do for you tonight. They live over in the old officers’ mess. Let’s get you a cold drink. We are all mighty shook up over that crash — feeling kind of responsible, you know? Lost a good plane, a good mechanic, and the most forward-thinking woman flyer in the world. Come in and tell us what happened.”
The man with the pipe offered her his hand to help her up the porch steps. Tony stared at him, astounded. She’d never seen any white man do such a thing for a black woman.
Louis laughed. “Go on, let him be a gentleman. Doesn’t happen often!”
“But —!”
“But you’re a colored girl? We’re all colored here. Blue as the sky.”
“Bessie Coleman was a caution! Terrible loss. Did you see the last newspaper interview that young woman gave?” rumbled Wade Vencill, presiding over a very full dining-room table. He and his wife, Myrtle, cooked for the handymen of the airfield. Tonight’s guests were mainly young men and women, half of them the Vencills’ grown children and the other half mechanics or pilots — Tony couldn’t entirely figure out which was which, and some were both or all three. The crowd included Louis Manning and another black man, not to mention Tony herself. “Queen Bess said she’d just ordered four new planes! Four!” Wade Vencill gave a single, brief guffaw that managed to sound both fond and bitter at the same time. “That’s Bessie all over. The good Lord knows she didn’t have that kind of money. Four new planes! If I’d have known that antique flivver of a kite was going to be the death of her, I’d have loaned her another fifty dollars myself!”
“She talked as big as she dreamed,” Ma Vencill said. “She wanted things so fierce it must have seemed to her like saying them out loud would make them come true. That flight school she’s been raising money for! Teaching colored boys and girls to fly!” She wiped her eyes quickly with her napkin. “All right, Antonia, you have to tell these folks what really happened at Paxon Field. The only man we’ve heard from in Jacksonville is the undertaker, and all he wanted to talk about was how to get in touch with poor Bill’s family. It breaks my heart to think of that young man going up in flames!”
The pilots and mechanics leaned forward around the table, quiet and expectant.
“It was a loose wrench,” Tony said. “It got stuck in the machine’s mechanism — I don’t know how.”
“A wrench! A loose wrench!” everybody echoed. “How in the world —”
“Mr. Wills was working on that plane the whole way to Florida,” Tony said. “He had to make two unexpected landings because of mechanical problems.” With a quiet settling of her heart, she said evenly, “I brought you his maintenance log.”
It was the easiest thing in the world to say. I brought you his maintenance log. No one had any doubt about her honesty, or why she’d brought it here.
“We are mighty grateful for that,” said Louis Manning. “But what made the wrench get jammed? Were they stunt flying?”
They all looked at Tony.
She nodded. “The plane dived. I don’t know which one of them was flying. I thought Bessie might be doing it on purpose, testing the plane. Maybe she was.”
“Why did she fall out? Wasn’t she strapped in?”
“She wanted to lean up over the edge to look at the racetrack where she was going to do a parachute jump the next day. She couldn’t get up high enough to see out of the seat with the harness on.”
Pa Vencill said soberly, “There was that young fella killed himself falling out of a plane right here not ten months ago. I keep telling folk to strap themselves in, every time. Wish I knew why people still think they can fly without harnesses.”
You make your own luck, her momma’s voice reminded her drily.
Ma Vencill exclaimed, “What I want to know is why don’t the dad-blamed white newspapers print Bessie Coleman’s name?”
“So what happens now?” Tony found that the warmth and freedom of the company made her as bold as if she were talking to her sisters. “Miss Coleman’s never going to buy a fleet of planes. She’ll never start a school for colored pilots.” Tony blinked back tears. “She’ll never show that newsreel to another school or answer another Physics Club’s questions about aerobatics.”
“Well, shoot, girl,” said Wade Vencill. “You can find out about aerobatics yourself, for a start. Just ask these fellas what you want to know.”
“You got the jump on Miss Coleman,” Myrtle Vencill said gently. “Don’t you know you make your own luck?”
Tony was trying too hard not to cry to force a smile. “My momma says that too. But I don’t get what you mean.”