A Tyranny of Petticoats (28 page)

The pilot straightened up, but not in time. The Jenny was too low now — trees loomed ahead of it at the edge of the farm field across from the racetrack. For one more vain second, Tony hoped the plane would miss the treetops. But the landing gear hanging down from its belly got caught in the top of one of the tall slash pines, and the aircraft took the tree’s highest branches with it as the plane flailed and flipped itself over and hit the ground.

Then everything was quiet.

Tony had forgotten John Betsch, who’d been standing right beside her watching the whole thing too, until the moment when he tore across the airfield, running as fast as he could go. The policeman pelted after him. So did the boys who’d been watching from the road.

Dazed, Tony ran a couple of steps after them, when suddenly she remembered the figure who had fallen out of the tumbling aircraft. It hadn’t happened directly above the airfield, but over a neighboring cross street. Tony ran away from the fallen plane, along Edgewood.

There was a little crowd gathered ahead of her. Something about their sober silence made Tony stop in her tracks before she got close enough to see what they were gathered around. A knot of men knelt over the inert form in the middle of the crowd, talking to one another in hushed tones. Around the edges of the crowd, sobbing women stole agonized glances at the scene and quickly looked away again, holding one another by the hand and around the waist.

There was something in their quiet reverence — the way the women were wiping one another’s tears, as though the broken body in the center of the crowd was family — that made Tony sure the body was that of the famed Bessie Coleman.

After a moment a couple of people stepped back, but no one moved fast — no one went running for an ambulance or a doctor.

Then suddenly the young policeman who’d tried to turn Tony away from the airfield was back on the scene.

“Hey!” called the policeman. “Hey, you, nigger girl with the questions! Get over here!”

Tony closed her eyes for a moment, reeling with the shock of what she’d just seen and the sheer horror of the law singling her out in a crowd of onlookers.

“You!” He was advancing on her now. She thought about running and suddenly became aware that she was carrying her books on their string over one shoulder and William Wills’s satchel over the other. If she ran, it would look like she was trying to steal the satchel.

Oh, Lord have mercy, maybe it already
did
look like she was trying to steal it?

A sudden wave of anger drowned Tony’s unhappiness for a moment. She’d run to the fallen pilot because she’d been trying to
help.
One of America’s great heroes was tragically dead, and wasn’t that more important than tracking down an anonymous schoolgirl? Tony stood her ground as the policeman stomped toward her, his eyes narrowed in a suspicious frown.

That was when they heard the rush of thunder as what was left of Bessie Coleman’s Curtiss Jenny flying machine, a quarter of a mile away, exploded into a tower of flame.

The policeman escorted Tony back to the airfield office. He told her she was a witness; that’s all he’d tell her. For half an hour he drank coffee with the man who was handling the telephone, but they didn’t offer any to Tony. They didn’t offer her a seat, either, so she stood warily in a corner of the office, trying to be invisible. She didn’t dare set down the bag or her books. Her arms began to ache.

But she couldn’t help overhearing what was going on, as the man on the telephone relayed information. The police and three technicians were already attempting to pick over the wreckage to find out what had gone wrong with the plane, newspapermen were out there ghoulishly taking pictures, and a pair of undertakers were on their way.

“Can you beat that — having to call two different undertakers?” the telephone man exclaimed to the policeman. “One for the pilot, one for the nigger girl! Nobody having a good day except the undertakers.”

At that moment, a man in overalls came slamming into the airfield office. He was so soot covered from head to toe that he looked like he was performing in a minstrel act.
“God-damned loose wrench!”
he swore, his mouth and lips garishly wet and red in his filthy, blackened face. He announced to no one in particular, “There was a God-damned wrench jammed in the works of that plane. That poor bastard Wills didn’t stand a
chance.
No pilot in the world could have straightened a machine in that kind of trouble. A
God-damned loose wrench!
I don’t blame the pilot. I blame the mechanics who left it there!”

The furious mechanic suddenly noticed Tony. “Pardon my French! But I guess you hear a lot of cussing where you live. Well, it’s
bad,
girl, bad.” He turned to the policeman and the receptionist, dismissing Tony as someone who got cussed at a lot. “The explosion was caused by that Negro Welfare League boy lighting a cigarette to calm his nerves. Tossed his match on the ground and whoosh! There was fuel spilled everywhere, and the plane and a couple of trees just went up in flames. One cop’s pants caught fire. They hauled the colored boy off to jail.”

Tony tried to hold back her own strangling anger, but words burst out of her. “You mean John Betsch? They took him to jail? What for?”

“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?

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:

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.