A Tyranny of Petticoats (29 page)

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.

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.

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.

Blue.

There was a jitney bus that ran from the middle of Dallas out to Love Field, but Tony didn’t realize that until three of them had passed her on the five-mile walk. When she set out from the train station, she was so rumpled and frazzled and exhausted she didn’t actually know what time it was. She didn’t notice the city around her until it was almost gone, and the last quarter of a mile was so rural that she started passing cotton fields again. Gray people bent over their monotonous hoes, and no one looked up at Tony as she passed, bedraggled and gray with travel dust herself. No one waved. A strange dreamlike daze began to creep over her, and she began to feel she no longer even knew what
year
it was. Surely this was what these fields looked like when her grandma had worked them under the overseer’s lash. There was no overseer in sight. That was the only difference.

Then an engine began to clamor and rattle not too far away.

The spell was broken. It was like a kiss in a fairy tale. Suddenly Tony was wide awake.

People looked up for a moment, stretched, and grinned. Someone waved at Tony at last. An aircraft appeared, flying low over a stubborn row of scrawny young live oaks along the edge of the field, and climbed steadily overhead.

“Looks like they got another of those old Jennies back in the sky,” someone said knowledgeably.

“Go along with me to Love Field and take a look before dark?” said his friend in the next row.

Tony adjusted her hat against the sun that dazzled her stinging, tired eyes. Now she noticed how far down the sky the sun was, and she realized she was going to arrive at her destination just before sunset. And there she’d be, in the dark, five miles out of town, with no place to stay and nothing to eat.

Least she wasn’t dead. Least it was 1926 and not 1826.

She was nearly there. There wasn’t any point in turning back.

Love Field was so big, and there were so many aircraft sheds and so many actual aircraft standing in front of them and on the field, that for a moment Tony was overcome with a feeling of unreality. This wasn’t 1826. But it couldn’t be 1926, could it? This must be what 2026 was going to be like.

She had a moment of terrible panic when she saw the two white men in greasy caps and overalls standing on the porch of the office with a newspaper spread over the rails, shaking their heads. This was going to be the Paxon Field office disaster all over again. Texas had the worst Jim Crow segregation laws in the country — what in the world had made Tony think she’d be better off revealing her accidental theft here than at home, even if these people had tolerated Bessie enough to sell her a plane?

Both men watched Tony as she straggled to the foot of the porch steps, and she wished desperately she could spruce herself up a little before she had to face them. What could she possibly say? Calling her names was the least they might do to her. Putting her in jail wasn’t even close to the
worst
. She’d been crazy to come. Sarah was right.

Tony stood at the bottom of the porch steps, feeling fully ready, for the first time since watching that terrible plunge from the sky five days ago, to burst into baby tears.

One of the men had a pipe clenched in the corner of his mouth. He took it out and gave her a pleasant smile. “Any chance you’re the next Bessie Coleman?” he said.

Tony’s mouth dropped open.

“Aw, look at her. Don’t tease her,” said the second man. He touched his cap with two fingers, a sketch of a salute. “You need help, kid? There’s a telephone in the office.” He called over his shoulder. “Hey, Louis! Got a sec?”

A young, slow-moving, mild-mannered black man stepped out of the office and onto the porch. “What’s going on?”

The man who’d greeted her waved his pipe at Tony. “Don’t think she wants to buy a plane like the last gal,” he said. “But it looks like she’s come a long ways to get here.”

“Welcome to Love Field,” the black man said to her. “I’m Louis Manning. Mechanic, parking-lot attendant, receptionist, publicity specialist, parachutist, pilot!”

“He’s kind of a jack-of-all-trades,” said the man who’d saluted.

“You can call me Louis,” said the jack-of-all-trades.

Still astonished by their friendliness, Tony was able to pull herself together a little. “I came by train from Jacksonville.” She saw the sober shift in their expressions — all three of them stood listening and alert, side by side on the porch with their attention fixed. They knew exactly what “Jacksonville” meant this week.

“I saw it happen,” she said huskily.

Now it was their turn to look astonished.

“Come on inside, honey, and sit down,” said Louis. “You got a place to stay here in Dallas?”

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.”