A Tyranny of Petticoats by Jessica Spotswood
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:
My country, ’tis of thee,
Sweet land of liberty,
Of thee I sing. . . .
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.
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.
From every mountainside,
Let freedom ring.
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
“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?