Black Dove, White Raven

by Elizabeth E. Wein

  We have written down everything about our agreement with Ras Amde Worku and made copies of it so all of us can have one. We all signed everything (I signed as a witness). These pieces of paper have no legal meaning in any country, but making a thing like a treaty made us all feel a tiny bit less hollow. You can see why the emperor does it. There was that Friendship Treaty between Italy and Ethiopia in 1928, and it is just as much of a joke.

  The title was Momma’s idea.

  Toward Emancipation

  (April 18, 1935/Miyazya 10, 1927)

  1) The law forbids Christians to sell slaves. Ras Amde Worku will never negotiate a financial or trade transaction that involves Teodros Gedeyon Dupré.

  2) The conditions of the relationship between Teodros Gedeyon Dupré and Ras Amde Worku are void beyond the borders of Ethiopia.

  3) Teodros Gedeyon Dupré will not cross those borders without first notifying Ras Amde Worku. In exchange for this trust and for Teodros’s continued freedom of movement in Rhoda Menotti’s household, Teodros will not attempt to escape from Ethiopia.

  4) A requested act of recompense, to be required in the event of war with Italy, may nullify this relationship.

  5) All other current law (including the legislation of 1923, 1924 and 1931 in the Gregorian calendar, Ethiopian years 1916, 1917 and 1924) and future Ethiopian law will apply.

  Amde Worku

  Rhoda Menotti

  Teodros Dupré

  Witnessed by Emilia Menotti, April 18, 1935

  Flight Log Entry

  Date: June 10, ’35

  Type of Machine: Beechcraft B17L

  Number of Machine: NC 14405

  Airfield: Akaki, Addis Ababa

  Duration of Flight: 1 hr 10 min

  Character of Flight: Training

  Pilot: Billy Cooper

  2nd Pilot: Teodros Dupré

  Remarks:

  Sinidu had the most sensible reaction. At least we thought it sounded sensible. ‘Why did you even come back to Tazma Meda? Go straight to the American Legation!’ she scolded Momma. ‘Go right away to the Americans and they will defend you!’

  Momma was snuggling baby Erknesh while Sinidu made us breakfast. Momma has finally given up trying to stop Sinidu cooking for us – when Sinidu comes bouncing into the house in the morning it is impossible to stop her. But Momma will not let Sinidu do it with the baby tied up on her back, even though that is what Sinidu does in her own house. (She also does it when she’s working in the clinic, and in fact Momma sometimes works in the clinic with the baby tied up on her own back. Everybody fights over who gets to snuggle Erknesh.)

  ‘Ras Amde Worku is one of the last respected slave-owners and Haile Selassie will not dare offend people like him. A good general on the Eritrean border is more valuable than gold and salt. But America is the land of the free! Slavery was abolished there nearly a hundred years ago!’ Sinidu insisted. ‘They will take care of you!’

  ‘Oh –’ Momma blew her breath up out of her lower lip so that the hair on her forehead trembled in the wind of her disgust. ‘It was not ended that long ago and we were the worst slave traders the world has ever known. And we have other problems now.’ She gave another angry sigh and bent over, holding Erknesh between her knees and cupping the baby’s head in her hands. ‘But you’re right, and it’s a good place to start. It’s five years since the kids got here, and Em and Teo need their passport endorsements renewed. They’re listed on my passport which is good for ten years, but their endorsements only last for five because they were under sixteen when I put them there. Em’s expired when she turned sixteen. I should get it fixed before those Italian clowns take the plane away. I don’t think they’ll do it as long as I keep bringing them pictures of goat tracks where maybe they can drive an armoured car across the Simien Mountains, but I don’t know how long I’ve got.’

  ‘As long as the rest of us. The Italians will wait till the Big Rains are over and then they will attack. You should leave before the Big Rains.’

  ‘How can I leave Ezra alone with the clinic?’ Momma said. ‘And you, Sinidu? Because if there is war, you will need me to help.’ She stared into the quiet baby’s eyes and said sorrowfully, ‘Anyway we can’t just up and leave. We can’t fly out, because Ras Amde Worku has deals going with all the Italians on the Eritrean border and they’d take the plane away the second we landed and send us back. Plenty of people in Eritrea have got slaves too – they know how it works. And we can’t even take the train out of Addis Ababa because Ras Assefa works for the railway, and he is Ras Amde Worku’s brother.’

  We have been to Addis Ababa three times since then, and we still haven’t got the passport issue figured out.

  Momma has not dared to bring up the other issue – the slavery issue – because without the first one being solved we don’t have a leg to stand on.

  Getting paperwork done is just as much of a pain with the Americans as it is with the Ethiopians. The first time we went to the legation, they told us we needed to make an appointment ahead of time, so we planned to come back and see them again in two weeks. The second time, Momma filled out a lot of forms and then they told her to come back in another three weeks. That brings us to now. And Emmy’s endorsement expired back in February when she turned sixteen, so she has no legal document saying she’s allowed to be here. I don’t know which of us is in bigger trouble. (She thinks I am.) The only good thing about it is that we are in the soup together.

  I have never seen Momma come so close to punching a civil servant in the nose as she did today.

  ‘You can’t validate these endorsements.’ The clerk was thin and sweating, and kept glancing over his shoulder out the window, like he expected the Italians to start bombing the city at any moment. ‘These are not renewable.’

  ‘But they have been valid for the past five years!’ Momma spluttered. ‘October 1930 to October 1935! I have already filled out the forms and now you just have to renew what’s there!’

  ‘The endorsements are only available for children under sixteen. Emilia’s expired on her birthday in February. You can’t carry an endorsement for another adult on your personal documentation. Emilia will have to submit an application for her own passport.’

  ‘But I – I already tried. It’s your fault the endorsements haven’t been renewed! OK, not your fault, mister, but the fault of this office. Now you’re telling me these kids need their own passports, not new endorsements?’

  ‘If you want passports for both of them, you’ll need to provide supporting documents for Teodros Dupré. His name isn’t the same as yours. He’s not your son.’

  Em and I stood shoulder to shoulder, an inch apart. We didn’t dare to grab each other’s hands in a government office – boys and girls don’t do that in public. I have never seen Ezra and Sinidu hold hands, and they are married. Not your son. It felt like I was hanging on the edge of an amba cliff and neither one of them had a rope to throw me. All they could do was watch.

  ‘He’s a US citizen. He’s here on my passport!’

  ‘A birth certificate?’

  ‘He was born in France. His mother was American.’

  ‘Documentation from his mother or father?’

  Em and Momma both sucked in their breath at the same time. ‘His mother died in 1927!’ Momma said. ‘His father –’

  ‘Is his father American too?’

  ‘His father is dead,’ Momma said flatly.

  ‘Was he American?’

  I clenched my teeth. Emmy sniffed once and rubbed at her nose. Momma didn’t answer. She looked away. We all knew what we’d get if she told him my father was Ethiopian.

  ‘Do you have a birth certificate for him? A marriage certificate for his parents? A letter from his father? Something with his name on it?’

  ‘You are pussyfooting because my boy is a Negro,’ Momma snarled.

  The clerk turned away and coughed. ‘Excuse me.’ He mopped his streaming forehead with a grey handkerchief. ‘I am following regulations be
cause he is clearly not your boy,’ the clerk said. ‘If you want my honest opinion, Mrs Menotti, you shouldn’t have brought someone else’s child into a foreign country in the first place. We’ll let you know when Emilia’s passport is issued and you can leave before the endorsement for Teodros expires.’

  Momma’s eyes burned grey fire.

  ‘How long will it take?’ she asked through her teeth. He shrugged, avoiding her flaming gaze.

  ‘A couple of days?’ Momma pressed. ‘A couple of weeks? The rains are going to start and you won’t be able to get a message through to us in Tazma Meda.’

  ‘Then you’ll have to come back after the rains.’

  Momma was seething with the effort of remaining civil. But you have to. You have to, if you want to get anything done without a battle. That is why Haile Selassie still hasn’t given up on the League of Nations.

  So I asked carefully, ‘If it’s not too much trouble, would it be all right if we fill out the new form for Em today?’

  The man looked at me in surprise. I don’t know if he was surprised because he hadn’t realised I was able to speak English, or if he hadn’t expected me to be so polite to him, or even if this was the first time he realised I’d been standing quietly against the wall with Emmy, waiting for him and Momma to finish arguing.

  ‘Well, I guess so,’ he said, mopping his brow again. ‘If you have a photograph with you.’

  Of course that is the one thing we are always able to provide.

  They let Momma fill out a fresh passport application for Em. They would not let her apply for a passport for me. There is nothing to prove I am a US citizen.

  When she’d finished, Momma herded us out of the office without smacking anything except the stack of papers on the desk – she kicked the desk too – and she slammed the European-style door behind her so hard it rattled the walls. Then she took two steps down the hall before she sat down and pulled her arms up around her knees and burst into sobs.

  Em and I stood like guards in front of her, trying to hide her. We didn’t look at each other.

  There is only one official document in this country with my name on it, and that is the registration that Ras Amde Worku filed when I was born.

  Em turned around suddenly and bent down to hug Momma’s shoulders. I knelt beside Momma and grabbed her hands and held them tight. But she didn’t squeeze them.

  ‘What am I going to do?’ she choked wildly. ‘What am I going to do?’

  ‘They make me feel so dumb,’ she moaned as we straggled back to Mateos’s house, where we are staying in the city. ‘They make me feel like such an idiot. Oh, it isn’t fair. The emperor’s closest advisor is American, that Everett Colson – so why is it so hard for us to get help from the Americans themselves? All I’ve done –’

  ‘Why the heck didn’t you try to get the passports fixed as soon as we got back from Aksum?’ Emmy joined the wailing. ‘Now Teo is stuck here –’

  ‘I did try! Do you really want to leave?’ Momma said, wiping her nose. ‘Anyway, we’re not leaving Tazma Meda without Teo!’

  ‘I don’t mean I want to leave,’ Em said. ‘I love Tazma Meda. But I want the choice. And whatever Teo wants –’

  She trailed off. I love Tazma Meda as much as Em does, but she and I both know that no one is ever going to let me build airplanes or fly around doctoring people without some kind of education, which does not include being registered as a slave to a prince in a small highland city on the Ethiopian border with Eritrea.

  Momma cut Em off. ‘I don’t want to leave Tazma Meda either,’ she admitted unhappily. ‘I guess that’s why I dragged my feet. We are safe there.’

  It’s true that in Tazma Meda nothing has changed. Not even anything in my life has changed. But for the first time ever I am ready for the Big Rains to come and never stop. Always before I have nearly gone crazy when the Big Rains come. It’s why I’ve read everything on Vera Sinclair’s bookshelf ten times. It’s why I’ve translated nearly half of the Romeo’s maintenance manual into English using a pocket Italian dictionary. It is during the Big Rains that I always start to wonder if I could possibly ever go to France to learn to design aircraft.

  But this year I want to stay stuck in the mud in Tazma Meda for the rest of my life and never turn sixteen and never have to go back to Aksum to fulfil that undefined thing called a ‘requested act of recompense’ in our agreement with Ras Amde Worku. None of it touches Tazma Meda.

  We are all in Mateos’s house in Addis Ababa now, deeply uneasy and in a panic about official documents – the ones we have and the ones we don’t have – and we are so determined to keep it nobody’s business that we haven’t even asked him if he knows about Ras Amde Worku and my father. It doesn’t make any difference and no one wants to talk about it anyway.

  In her disgust at the Americans, Momma has gone back to the Ethiopians. We don’t know what she offered them or what they told her. We don’t know when or if she has to give up the plane. She spent the whole day at the parliament building today. I think they might have paid her in person this time.

  At any rate it meant she left me and Em alone in Addis Ababa. We probably should have stayed in Mateos’s house playing gebeta or working on The Adventures. We have written a lot of episodes in the past couple of months. In the Buck Rogers comics Buck is always rescuing Wilma – the hero rescuing the girl – but in The Adventures it is always the other way around, White Raven mostly rescuing Black Dove. I know she will make it come out all right – I mean, we will make it come out all right – but the episode where they get lost in the Maze of Mirrors and Black Dove keeps running into dead ends because he can’t see his own reflection is spooking me.

  Also, Mateos’s small house is very dark, which makes it hard to write. Meanwhile you can almost feel the city around you rumbling with unease, like a storm that hasn’t broken. There is a reddish dust cloud hanging over the line of the main road in and out, because so many soldiers are coming and going. All morning there were two boys our own age wrestling wheelbarrow-loads of rifles back and forth along the narrow lane outside Mateos’s compound. There was a circle of tailors sitting in the square at the end of the lane with sewing machines, their shammas propped up with sticks for shade over their heads like little tents, and they were fiercely stitching up real tents.

  ‘I’m not staying here,’ Em said. ‘Let’s go find someone who can tell us news.’

  It was hard walking around Addis Ababa with Em. She is more obviously foreign now than she’s ever been. Em’s current disguise is an aviator outfit. She is always asking herself What would White Raven do, and she says she is trying to make herself feel braver about flying by playing the part. I don’t know if it makes her braver, but it definitely makes her conspicuous, partly because it’s so outrageous to see a girl wearing slacks here.

  She is a convincing aviatrix in a white blouse of Fiona Sinclair’s and Fiona’s abandoned riding breeches. It’s the goggles hanging around Em’s neck and a long white scarf of Delia’s that really complete the costume. The American girl flyer Emilia Earhart! Ha ha ha. Americans – not just us – are being warned to get out of Ethiopia. Mrs Sinclair left and Colonel Sinclair went with her, although he swore he’d come back when he got her settled because he doesn’t want to abandon Beehive Hill Farm.

  Of course we can’t leave.

  Em and I ended up lounging on the steps of the Hôtel de France, looking pretty much like an idle Ethiopian youth waiting for a chance to carry somebody’s bag (me), and an extremely youthful and equally idle airwoman waiting to take someone on safari (Em). There are still tons of foreign journalists and photographers everywhere you go, so we didn’t notice the genuine airman until he was standing right next to us. He too blended in – he blended in the way I do, except for the shoes. Not even the emperor’s personal Imperial Guard wear shoes. Otherwise, this fellow was dressed like the French airmen out at Akaki. But he was a Negro, so we just assumed he was one of the very high-up official types who have bee
n educated abroad – someone like Ras Assefa in his well-tailored European suit.

  The black man stopped on the stairs to take in Em and her outfit. He had a narrow, stylish moustache which bunched up like a caterpillar when he grinned, and he gazed down at Em with amusement and surprise.

  After a moment Em said boldly, in Amharic, ‘You must be looking for help.’

  Because Ethiopians don’t stare. Nobody can help looking at Em, but people usually do it sort of sideways.

  ‘Pardon me?’ the stranger said in English.

  We both straightened up.

  ‘You’re American!’ Em and the stranger both accused each other at exactly the same time.

  ‘What in the world is a little white Yankee girl doing here on the steps of the Hôtel de France in Addis Ababa, dressed up like Amelia Earhart?’ the man asked. He squatted down on the steps next to us. ‘May I join you?’

  Em said, ‘We don’t own this porch.’

  She didn’t sound very welcoming, so I squeezed over closer to Em to make room for the American.

  He looked down at Em’s feet.

  ‘Do you fly barefoot?’ he asked.

  ‘I do everything barefoot,’ she said offhandedly. ‘You ever see an Ethiopian kid wearing shoes?’

  ‘You an Ethiopian kid?’ he teased. Em glared at him.

  ‘But you do fly?’ the airman pressed her.

  ‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘Maybe I just like dressing up like Amelia Earhart.’ She gave me a push in the shoulder to make me speak up for myself. ‘This is Teo Dupré. He’s a pretty good flyer if you’re looking for a pilot.’

  The American laughed. He had neat oiled hair and fine white teeth. He was good-looking and conservative and careful.

  ‘I wasn’t looking for a pilot. I am a pilot. Sort of takes one to know one.’ He offered Em his hand. ‘Colonel Billy Cooper.’

  ‘Miss Emilia Menotti,’ Em said pompously.

  Colonel Billy Cooper shook hands with her and turned to shake hands with me too.