Black Dove, White Raven

by Elizabeth E. Wein

  ‘Pleased to meet you,’ I said, and like most people, he did a double take when he heard me talk.

  ‘You’re a Yank too! I thought –’

  ‘You thought he was my bodyguard or something?’ Em guessed. I nudged her with my elbow, but she didn’t shut up. ‘Or maybe my hired boy? We’re not in the USA here. It’s not a free country.’ Her voice rose a pitch, going dangerously cold. ‘Maybe you thought he’s my –’

  ‘Pipe down, Em,’ I said through my teeth.

  We both sat there, breathing hard. It was like poking at a sore that wasn’t healing. For a moment we glared hatefully at the black American pilot, basking in his official independence, while we sat freezing in our invisible glass prison.

  ‘You thought what?’ Em pressed Cooper, with her eyes narrowed. She looked like a honey badger going after a hyena.

  ‘I thought he was from around here,’ Billy Cooper answered her with easy cool, and I could tell he was a smooth customer and I liked him. ‘You must be the last pair of American kids in Addis Ababa. What are you doing loafing in front of this den of thieves? You waiting for the next train home or something?’

  ‘Our momma isn’t going anywhere,’ Em said. ‘She gets paid to take aerial pictures for people, so she’s still getting plenty of work.’

  ‘Oh!’ The man’s face lit up as he put a bunch of jigsaw puzzle pieces together in his head, and suddenly he knew more about us than we knew about him. ‘Your momma’s a lady pilot? Is that her Romeo out at Akaki? The one with the bust tyre?’

  Em froze up again. ‘Maybe,’ she allowed coldly. ‘Say – what’s your business?’

  He smiled. ‘I’m in flight training. Trying to help out with the emperor’s air force.’

  Em leaned forward a little, curious and hostile. Now she reminded me of a lion or leopard inching up behind its prey, hiding on its belly in long grass. ‘Like Horatio Augustus?’

  ‘Not like him.’

  ‘But you’re doing his job?’ Em asked. ‘Let me get this straight – you’re another American pilot hired by Haile Selassie to train Ethiopian pilots? Doesn’t the emperor ever give up?’

  ‘Don’t think he does,’ the American said, smiling. ‘Yeah, that’s me, another ferenji hired by the Ethiopian emperor to train his pilots. You know his financial advisor is American too, Everett Colson? I’m not as official as Colson, but I’m a little more official than Augustus. I’m here with Colonel Johnny Robinson, the Brown Condor. You heard of him?’

  ‘Who’s he?’ Emmy asked.

  ‘Why, he’s the man responsible for putting the Challenger Air Pilots’ Association on the map! He’s the man responsible for turning Harlem Airport in Chicago into the centre of Negro aviation! Just this year we got a state charter from Illinois to form the first Negro Military Order of the Guard, Aviation Squadron. They don’t allow us in the state National Guard, but we have our own Aviation Squadron, thanks to Johnny Robinson. And a crowd of us signed up to come out here to beef up the emperor’s air force. American Negroes are behind the emperor’s fight one hundred per cent. Ethiopia is the last and only independent black African nation.’

  That made me guess that no one back home was paying any more mind to slavery in Ethiopia than we had, and I ached for Delia and her ignorance.

  ‘There’s a crowd of black American pilots here?’ Em asked, wide-eyed. ‘Things have changed for sure since we left the States.’

  Billy Cooper gave a soft and bitter laugh. ‘Oh, not so much. Only me and Robinson actually made it out here. They wouldn’t approve passports for anyone else. Didn’t want to violate the US government’s Neutrality Act. I already had a passport. So I’ve been here two weeks now.’

  We knew all too much about the Americans not approving passports.

  ‘So what do you think?’ Em asked evenly. ‘What do you think of Ethiopia, now you’re here?’

  ‘Bigger challenge than we expected,’ the airman answered cautiously.

  ‘Yeah,’ Em agreed in a grim voice, and she and I exchanged that quick, dark, knowing glance which was like our way of poking at the sore that won’t go away.

  ‘Your momma used to be the White Raven, right?’ Cooper asked next. All those barnstorming pilots back in America in the 1920s, everybody knew everybody. ‘Didn’t she used to be a double act? Black Dove, White Raven?’

  It sounded strange to hear it in its original context, since those names were so connected with ourselves by now.

  ‘Yeah, that was Momma and Delia,’ Em said. ‘Delia Dupré.’

  ‘I remember. Bird strike. Terrible accident. I’m sorry.’

  We both nodded.

  ‘Which of you actually flies?’ Cooper asked.

  I glanced at Em. She was the one who looked like a pilot, after all.

  ‘Teo flies,’ she said. ‘He can land a plane in his sleep.’

  In fact I often do when I’m dreaming. Usually after hitting a flock of invisible glass birds which tear my face and the fabric of the wings apart as they shatter. I’ve started to dream extremely creepy Glassland nightmares which I haven’t told Em about. I’m often Black Dove, in trouble, in my dreams.

  Even if she won’t admit it, Em can land the darn plane too, awake, although she’s unbelievably heavy handed. She tore up the patched tyre again after Momma came back from her air clinic tour last month. Getting the tyre fixed properly is another reason for us to be here in Addis Ababa so soon before the Big Rains.

  ‘You Delia’s boy?’ Billy Cooper asked me. ‘How many hours you got?’

  ‘Fifty-some,’ I answered.

  ‘You sixteen yet?’

  I hesitated. It was as though I had invisible bruises that he couldn’t see and which he kept bumping into without meaning to. I took a deep breath and said carefully, ‘I’m not sixteen till October.’

  ‘Come back in October,’ the American offered, grinning. ‘I could license you.’

  Em nodded, still eyeing him suspiciously.

  ‘Sure, thanks,’ I said with hollow enthusiasm. Because who knows where we would be in October – where our plane would be – where I would be.

  ‘You kids staying here in the Hôtel de France?’

  ‘We stay with my uncle,’ I said.

  ‘We’re out here looking for trouble,’ Em said.

  Right on cue, there was a big slamming of doors and shouting and carrying on from inside the hotel. A lot of the yelling was in French, but some of it was in English and it was Orange-blossom Mouthwash type stuff. Then storming out on to the veranda burst Horatio Augustus – the Ebony Eagle himself, after all these years – cussing out the French hotel owners and the Italian Air Force and the Ethiopian government. He’d just moved on to the American people when he saw us mooching around there with Billy Cooper.

  ‘Why, you and your pal Robinson are the very punks to blame for it all,’ he snarled at Cooper explosively. He was still dressed in his sky-blue pilot’s uniform, but the gold thread of the epaulettes was fraying.

  Cooper stood up. ‘Hey, I don’t know what you’re talking about –’ he started to say.

  ‘You’re trying to muscle in on my act, you and your bootlicking boss, taking my job.’

  They faced each other at the top of the steps – two ferenji fighting over how to run their host country. One of them had his face twisted up with rage, and the other just looked astonished.

  ‘I’m not here to muscle in on anything! I’m here with the Military Order of the Guard, Aviation Squadron! Shoot, don’t we need all the men we can get?’

  ‘You don’t know this place like I do,’ Augustus snarled. Then, as though he just wasn’t in control of his own body, he pulled back his fist and let it fly forward right into Cooper’s jaw.

  Suddenly they were slugging it out like a pair of boxers, raining blows into each other’s faces and stomachs, until they locked together and rolled thumping and clattering down the stairs and into the dusty road. They bowled over Em on the way down, just catching the edge of her leg so that she tumbl
ed down the steps behind them. But while they stayed down, rolling around and trying to kill each other, Em jumped to her feet.

  Her costumes usually have little finishing touches that no one can see. She hadn’t told me about this one.

  She raised her arm straight up at the sky, like the Statue of Liberty holding up her torch, and suddenly the world seemed to explode around her with an ear-splitting bang.

  ‘Em Menotti!’ I yelled. ‘Don’t you dare –’

  She shrugged. ‘Everybody else has a gun.’

  She was holding a small revolver, a lady’s revolver, not much bigger than her hand. She’d fired it over her head to get the fighting men’s attention, and now that she had it, she stood pointing the little gun in their direction.

  ‘The nifty thing about this one,’ she said, talking over her shoulder at me rather than at the two grown men she was aiming at, ‘is that it came with ammunition. It’s not as big as those antique Italian rifles the other kids carry, but I can shoot mine.’

  She held the little gun in both hands. It glinted, engraved nickel and mother-of-pearl. Augustus and Cooper stayed still. And then about half a dozen foreign reporters came tumbling out of the hotel.

  ‘Put down the gun,’ everybody said at once.

  ‘It’s Mrs Sinclair’s,’ Em told me. ‘She kept it with her costume jewellery, and she left it all behind. She only took her good stuff with her.’

  ‘Pilferer,’ I said.

  Em laughed. Then she made the gun disappear back into whatever part of her outfit where she’d hidden it in the first place.

  ‘Fellas, I want you to get up and shake hands. Act like there’s a war about to start and you’re both here to help us win it. OK?’ Em directed.

  Cooper got up at once. Augustus got to his feet slowly. In a million years I don’t ever want people to look at me the way the European journalists were looking at that man today.

  I came down the stairs to stand next to Em and hissed in her ear, ‘Don’t you ever do that to me.’

  ‘You know you’ll never make as much of a fool of yourself as Horatio Augustus,’ Em whispered back. ‘So I won’t have to.’

  The two men stepped away from each other, their backs turned a little, aware of the small crowd that was watching them. Some of them were taking notes. One of them was taking pictures. Someone came running out of the hotel demanding to see if he had a permit.

  ‘Smoke?’ Cooper asked with patient generosity, offering Augustus a cigarette. He murmured, ‘Better make it look like we’re old friends.’ I knew exactly what he was doing: trying to rescue the reputation of America’s Negro pilots in the eyes of the press hyenas.

  Taking the hint, Augustus accepted the cigarette and said quietly, ‘Thank you.’

  They bent over Cooper’s lighter and turned their backs on the reporters, shoulder to shoulder. Cooper rubbed at his jaw.

  Horatio Augustus said, ‘It is the grand disappointment of my life that I will not be flying for the emperor any more. I fear I should have deduced that before I returned here. But he has given me a regiment of foot soldiers to run up north.’

  ‘It all counts,’ Cooper said quietly.

  Augustus nodded, smoking. ‘I have contacts in the northern provinces anyway.’

  For a little while the two American pilots stood so still and quiet that most of the crowd got bored watching them and went back inside. Em and I both sat down on the steps again. You wouldn’t have guessed they’d just tried to beat each other’s brains out over someone else’s war.

  ‘I am about to give you some celestial advice,’ Augustus said suddenly.

  ‘Yeah?’ Cooper was cautious.

  ‘That boy there –’ Augustus waved his smoke in my direction. For a moment he forgot to talk like a poet. ‘You got the low-down on him?’

  For the last ten minutes both men had been acting like we weren’t even there, and now they were suddenly talking about us.

  ‘Yeah, what’s the low-down on him?’ Em repeated, leaning over my shoulder.

  ‘It is advice from a higher authority,’ Augustus told Cooper loftily. ‘Test that boy and bestow an international aviator’s licence upon him. That will make an impression on the emperor. Teodros Gedeyon Dupré is his father’s son, and he is destined to fly for Ethiopia. The law that applied to his father applies to him.’

  Em’s mouth dropped open. She suddenly gripped my shoulder with fingernails that were like little daggers. Horatio Augustus sounded like he knew. He’d said the same thing when we first met him. And he’d just said he had connections in the north – he could mean in Aksum. He might know about Ras Amde Worku and his outmoded aristocratic ways.

  Em swallowed. She let go of me, stood up and dusted her hands on the seat of Fiona Sinclair’s riding breeches. She smiled the starlet smile which she inherited from Momma and learned from Delia. I knew there was only one thing on her mind now, and that was how to keep Augustus from saying anything else to Billy Cooper about us – about me. If Momma wasn’t going to tell the passport office about it, we sure weren’t going to tell some American stranger we’d only just met.

  But Cooper was curious now. ‘When’s your momma coming back?’ he asked us. ‘You really know how to fly a plane, huh? You got time to come out to Akaki with me and strut your stuff?’

  I glanced desperately at Em.

  ‘Teo doesn’t show off,’ she said. She let the smile land on Augustus. ‘Not like some.’

  Cooper laughed. ‘Well, I didn’t ask the right way then. How would you like to try out an Imperial Ethiopian Air Force Potez? Or maybe the new Beechcraft? Staggerwing’ll do over two hundred miles an hour. Faster than the Italian Fiat fighters –’

  ‘Like fun!’ Em scoffed.

  ‘No kidding. Sweet little plane. We ordered it for the emperor and got one of the Frenchmen to fly it down here from Europe. It still has its American registration. My boss, Johnny Robinson, is supposed to be the main pilot for it, but he broke his arm right before he came out here, so I get the lion’s share of the flying until he’s mended.’

  You know, somebody makes you an offer like that, out of the blue, and suddenly you forget everything else.

  Faster than the Italian fighters.

  This was why Momma and Delia learned to fly – in the sky there are no boundaries.

  ‘Yes!’ I said. ‘Now?’

  ‘Teo!’ Emmy was scandalised. ‘Are you plumb crazy? The emperor’s plane?’

  Neither one of us knew, till that moment, how easily I could be bribed.

  Cooper laughed. ‘It’s got dual controls – I’ll be the chief instructor. Come along with us! It’s got an enclosed cockpit and there’s room for a committee!’

  ‘How we going to get out there?’ Em protested. ‘What are we going to tell Momma?’

  ‘You’ll be fine,’ Cooper assured us. ‘I have a car.’

  That means he is incredibly important, or his boss is anyway. Not even Ras Assefa the railway official has a car.

  Em tried not to act impressed. She jerked her thumb over her shoulder, pointing to Horatio Augustus, who stood sulking at the backhanded reminder of his coronation rehearsal crack-up, even though everybody had been tactful enough not to mention it.

  ‘Is this fella coming along?’ Em said brazenly. ‘’Cause he still owes our mother twenty-five dollars.’

  Boy, do I ever wish we had documentation to prove that.

  Not a Flight Log Entry

  Sanni 3, 1927

  Teo is scribbling away about his Beechcraft flight. Like me he has started to use his flight log as an excuse to complain about anything under the sun, but eventually he will get around to raving about speed and power and how tight that plane can pull a turn. Whatever he writes about the actual flight will hardly be worth the pencil stubs he is writing with.

  The plane was fabulous. It’s true. White with dashing streaks of red and a gold Lion of Judah painted on the fuselage. It’s the first time either one of us has ever been in a closed cockpit! So
easy to climb into, and so easy to see out of, and we were all together in one cosy little cabin, like a car, with Teo and Billy Cooper side by side up front, and me behind them. You could actually hear each other without having to scream at the top of your voice. And there is no wind in your face.

  Augustus didn’t come – he wasn’t allowed on the airfield. Not after his coronation disaster five years ago. Poor guy, stuck on the ground. You have to admire him for coming back to Ethiopia at all.

  But maybe he feels the same way about it as we do.

  It was a strange flight. At first we circled the city and the Entoto Hills, over the Empress Taitu’s palace and Haile Selassie’s new palace, but we stayed high. When we got back to Akaki we didn’t land; Cooper made Teo climb up to four thousand feet above the airfield and try out tricky aerobatic manoeuvres – not just emergency recovery like Momma makes us do, but air-show stunts that she would never have let either one of us try in a million years. And boy, was Teo game for that.

  Gosh, he can fly. He is so confident in the air. Even in a plane he’d never flown before, even when he’s trying something new – he is so unhurried and unfussy that it was almost like being in the plane with Momma.

  Actually, this is so strange – strange that I can even remember – but the steady way he flies reminds me of Delia. I know Momma has said that before. But this time I thought of it all on my own.

  Teo landed back at Akaki just as smoothly as he’d flown. I don’t know how he did it either because it’s so different being inside the plane.

  So – why did Cooper decide he had to see Teo fly today? What was so important about that flight that Teo was allowed to take off in Haile Selassie’s new plane? We’re going home tomorrow and we will be stuck in Tazma Meda till the Big Rains are over and Teo isn’t sixteen yet. And Cooper doesn’t know about Amde Worku’s horrible requested act of recompense. It was like he had to get this flight in as soon as he was able, in case he didn’t get another chance – as though it meant something.

  I think Horatio Augustus knows about Amde Worku’s racket, and that there is something fishy going on that no one is explaining to us.