“You won’t have to go to France to get someone to teach you to fly, like Bessie Coleman did. She sowed the seeds of change herself. Her dream is not going to die with her. We are all going to keep Bessie Coleman’s dream alive.”
“We’re so glad you came, Antonia,” Louis Manning said quietly. “But it’s a long way to come and a hard journey for a schoolgirl. You could have mailed that notebook here and saved your train fare. Why’d you do it?”
Tony looked around. She’d come because she wanted to find people who cared about Bessie Coleman and who understood the science and miracle of flight. And she’d found them. She’d come for this.
For this. For this one evening under the electric light where her skin and being a girl didn’t matter one bean. For these people whose heads were full of airspeed and wind speed and engine power and Bernoulli’s principle. For the woman with a heart big enough to mourn two different people because they were both flying high and came to earth hard. To know that in some people’s eyes, the only color was the sky behind you.
She looked around at the friendly faces waiting for her response.
“I wanted to meet the people who’d sell an airplane to a Negro woman,” she told them honestly.
The Vencills laughed. The black and white pilots around the table answered nearly in one voice. “Here we are!”
Tony didn’t literally leave the ground. But something inside her began to take flight.
This story is based on the true events surrounding the death of the pilot Bessie Coleman, the first black woman to gain a pilot’s license and the first American, black or white, male or female, to earn an international pilot’s license. Four enormous funerals were held for her in three different cities after her tragic death in 1926, a testimony to how deeply she’d won people’s hearts.
Except for Tony and her family, most of the named characters in this work of fiction are drawn from real people: Myrtle and Henry Wade Vencill, Louis Manning, William Wills, John Thomas Betsch, and of course Bessie Coleman. I have put words into their mouths based on what little I know about them. I hope I have respected my characters’ historical counterparts.
For the full story of Bessie Coleman’s life, try Queen Bess: Daredevil Aviator by Doris L. Rich.
CALEB NEWCASTLE HAS WANTED ME since I turned thirteen. That’s when I robbed my first bank.
He was only fifteen then, not even a real lawman. His daddy deputized him, and he was the cock of the walk after that.
Sitting up in a pecan tree, I watched him strut back and forth in the woods. His gun drawn, his hat tipped back, he stalked me. Eighteen now, he was cut out of all-American cloth, his blue eyes sharp and his long legs swift.
Too bad for him, and lucky for me, he didn’t have the sense God gave a goose. If he’d looked up, even once, he’d have seen me. I’d picked a bad tree to climb. It wasn’t real tall, and it didn’t have a lot of leaves. Usually, my escapes were cleaner than this. I’d been caught off guard — Caleb had showed up while I was still in the bank this time. He got the jump on me, and I still got away. Which made it especially sad, the way he was carrying on.
Back and forth he went beneath me, until he lost his temper. Throwing his hat, he kicked a cottonwood tree. All he got for that was a stubbed toe and a shower of dead leaves.
I pressed myself flat against the trunk of my pecan and tried real hard to hold still. To keep from laughing, I bit down on the heel of my hand.
It was hard, though. He was cussing up a storm on account of nobody could hear him do it. In town, he was always saying “gol’dangit” and “dadblame”— he wanted people to think he was a moral authority. Butter wouldn’t melt in that mouth, he’d have liked you to think.
Well, I had news for him. God could hear him cussing when he thought he was alone. And when he was alone, Caleb Newcastle’s mouth was filthy.
Sometimes, though, his mouth was sweet as lemonade. Just right for a stolen kiss behind the church, or down the lane where nobody could see. Probably, he wouldn’t want to kiss me if he knew I was number-one Most Wanted in Posey County. That would be his loss, though. Mine too, I guess. When he wasn’t being awful, he was downright delicious.
Caleb stuffed his gun in the holster. Then he retrieved his hat. Didn’t look a bit ashamed about his tantrum, but that’s because he didn’t know I was watching.
Shifting, I tried to get comfortable on my branch. It seemed like I’d need to settle in for a while. Then, the second of two things happened that just about ruined my day.
The branch I was on cracked.
It rained pecans down on Caleb’s head. Hilarious. At least until he looked up. I wasn’t caught quite yet, but I sure was spotted.
(The first thing came this morning — I read about Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow getting ventilated on a back road in Bienville Parish, Louisiana. It’s not that I approved of their shooting and killing people, I just did not. But I felt a certain kinship to Bonnie, being that we were sisters in crime.)