Black Dove, White Raven

by Elizabeth E. Wein

  The guardian looked down at the bundle in his arms. There was a corner of something poking out – a corner of smooth black stone, rough and glittering, like the deep sky above Delia’s Dream last night. He swiftly gathered up the cloth to cover it.

  But I saw.

  Anyone else would be blinded on the spot if he saw the Ark of Zion, Mateos had said.

  I saw it. I looked away too, when I realised that I should, to be polite. My eyes were stinging with the heat of the fire behind the tabot. But it was just an old stone.

  I carried them both up to St Kristos Samra, him on my back, the tabot in my arms. I did it in relays so the tabot, all carefully wrapped up again, didn’t go out of his sight. It took me three hours. Habte Sadek welcomed me with tears.

  Teo told me he’d seen the Ark of the Covenant and I shook my head without speaking. I swallowed and opened my mouth and shut it again. After a moment I said, ‘Who told you that would make you go blind? The priests at Aksum? Ras Amde Worku? Habte Sadek?’

  ‘Mateos said so, the day I went to the emperor’s palace with him in Aksum. He said I’d be killed if I touched it. I didn’t touch it, but I saw it.’

  ‘You mean it? Some superstitious legend from someone who isn’t even connected with it, and you’d give that a second thought? Teo! You said yourself it was just an old stone! And even if it was the most magical thing in the whole world, do you believe God would do that?’

  ‘I saw it,’ Teo said, ‘and now I can’t see. God’s vengeance.’

  ‘Are you crazy? That’s not how God works! What makes you think you’re so special anyway? What about Momma? She didn’t see the danged Ark. How come she got a bucket of iprite in the face? What about Ezra? What did he do wrong that he got gunned down, being a doctor for the Red Cross, trying to protect Sinidu and his baby girl? What did Erknesh do wrong that her father is dead? People go right ahead and hurt each other all the time! Don’t blame God!’

  ‘So how does God work?’ he demanded furiously. ‘Are you going to tell me how God works? All you believe in is White Raven!’

  ‘Yes, because White Raven is inside me!’ I was furious too. ‘So yeah, she is sort of like God, guiding me, helping me figure out the right thing to do! Isn’t that what you told Miss Shore in that stupid essay last year? “God is in you . . . waiting for you to feel him there.” You said that! God works through us. Through people doing the right thing. Through you. Through Momma giving you her gas mask and covering you up!’

  He didn’t answer right away.

  Then he whispered, ‘I am so scared.’

  ‘Well, don’t blame that on God! Least you’re not by yourself. I’m here,’ I vowed. ‘We are in the soup together. And I have an idea.’

  Your Majesty, I pray to the God who guides you that you will choose to help us.

  SS Earl of Craigie

  Port Said, Egypt

  March 31, 1936

  Dear Momma,

  We are on our way.

  I don’t know if you will ever get a chance to meet Haile Selassie again or to take him a message. He must know by now that he cannot win on his own. The Italians want him as a prize, dead or alive; so he has to get out too, while he can, in order to live free and be able to return some day.

  Maybe I will come back with him. For him.

  Here is what happened after we said goodbye to you and Sinidu the morning after the attack.

  Emmy spent two hours helping people drink and trying to clean burns, and asking anyone who could talk where to find Imperial Ethiopian Air Force planes. She knew Haile Selassie wouldn’t be far from his Beechcraft or the place where it landed. She said she wanted to deliver her captured Italian aircraft to Haile Selassie. She found out how to get there.

  She took me with her – guided me into the front cockpit. I couldn’t see a thing because I couldn’t open my eyes.

  ‘Let me sit in the back! I can’t fly!’

  ‘I’ll fly,’ Em said with total confidence. ‘You sit in the front where I can see you. I like flying from the second cockpit because that’s where you and Momma always put me! There isn’t a lot of fuel left, but we only have to go about ten miles – the ridge on the other side of the plain. Up there where the caves are, like on Beehive Hill. I’ll land as close as I can get. We are going to ask the emperor for help. I know the plane will get us an audience –’

  I let her strap me in.

  I could see light, changing shades of red and orange and pink behind my swollen eyelids. The plane lifted off the ground and I could feel the sun on my face and the shadow of the upper wing crossing the cockpit as Em turned carefully away from the field hospital. I could feel her straightening out again. I couldn’t hear much though, over the roaring of the engine – until I heard the cannon fire.

  ‘Dang it! That’s the emperor shooting at me again,’ Em yelled through the speaking tube.

  ‘What?’ I nearly laughed, except that she sounded serious. My stomach swooped as she pulled back on the control column, shoved on power, and we soared steeply upward.

  ‘It is the same old German anti-aircraft gun he had in Dessie! Teo –’ This time her yell was hesitant. ‘Teo, can you fly?’

  ‘I can’t see!’

  ‘Yeah, but can you fly? If I set the trim, can you just keep us level? Because I have a plan –’

  Yes, Momma, she did what you would have done. No secret greeting or disguise – just herself and her crazy, beautiful ideas.

  ‘I’m going to aim for the sun!’ she yelled.

  I felt the machine turn, felt the sun on my face, the warmth and the light. I took the controls and held the plane steady. Then I felt Em climbing up on to the fuselage behind me – felt the shift in weight and the increase in drag. I inched power on. If we weren’t level I wasn’t going to be able to see us going out of balance and you really can’t always feel it.

  She leaned in close to my head and yelled into the wind at my ear, ‘Hold her straight like that! Real straight – we’re only about five hundred feet above the mountaintop! I’m going to stand up and wave as we go past. He might shoot me, but I don’t think he will.’ She squeezed my shoulder four times and stood up.

  I flew that stolen plane blind for probably not more than a minute. It felt like hours.

  I could feel Emmy’s weight close behind me, the unnatural balance of it as she clung to the wing struts over my shoulder. Eternity went by. I flew by colour, trying to keep the light inside my eyes an even shade of orange, keeping the sunlight on my face. I felt Em carefully shifting her weight again. Suddenly her voice came through the speaking tube, sounding normal.

  ‘I got her, Teo. Ready to land now.’

  ‘You OK to land, Em?’

  She gave a choked gasp of laughter. ‘Ready for anything now!’

  The American pilot Billy Cooper, right-hand man to the emperor’s personal pilot Johnny Robinson, met us on the field.

  I sat still in the front cockpit. I didn’t dare to move without help. I heard Emmy climb out behind me, I heard her bare feet hit the soil and I heard her give a little grunt of pain. I don’t know how bad the burns on her feet were because I never saw them. They are healing now.

  ‘Lord!’ Cooper exclaimed as he recognised her. ‘I didn’t realise you could fly!’

  ‘I have a new plane for the emperor,’ Em said. ‘And I want him to pay me for it.’

  Momma, we met him. We met Haile Selassie himself.

  Someone escorted us. I didn’t realise Em was leading me into the cave where the emperor was camped until I felt the silk carpet under my feet. The second I stepped on to it, the strange, unreal kiss of smooth soft silk against the soles of my bare feet instantly exploded into memory – of the rehearsal for Haile Selassie’s coronation, and my foot on the smooth red carpet behind the rope barrier, and how I looked up and saw him standing there, a small man in a black silk cape and white sunhat, and how Emmy and I both bowed, and how he’d laughed at us.

  I was so sure he was standing at the other
end of this carpet under my feet now that I bowed three times.

  Then I knelt the way I had on the airfield in Aksum, expecting to be shot.

  The Emperor said in Amharic, ‘Tell the American pilot he may sit.’

  He meant me. I didn’t realise it at first. But, of course, he wasn’t talking directly to me.

  Someone else repeated to me in Amharic, ‘You may sit.’

  I sat on the thick silk. There was a short, awkward, strange period of silence. Then the emperor said in Amharic, ‘You may go.’

  This time he wasn’t talking to me either. Em says he made them leave us alone with him.

  When we were alone he spoke to us in Amharic, directly to us, as though we were his advisors or his own children. I don’t think he’d have done that back in Addis Ababa. But here on the eve of battle, with his field hospital half-destroyed, after he’d tried to shoot us down and we’d brought him a captured enemy aircraft, he made an exception.

  He said, ‘Emilia, forgive me for the number of times I have fired on you in flight.’

  He’d read her letter by then, though not everything else, of course.

  Emmy answered graciously, ‘You didn’t have a choice. You did what you had to do.’

  Momma, she sounded just like you. I mean, her voice sounded just like you. I hadn’t noticed it in the plane because of the speaking tube and the wind and the engine noise. And I’d never noticed it until I couldn’t see her talking. But she sounds exactly like you.

  The emperor spoke my name. ‘Teodros.’

  Suddenly I wasn’t afraid of him – or of saying or doing the wrong thing. I knew we didn’t matter to him much – he had more important and terrible things to deal with. I thought he’d probably forget about us as soon as we were out of his sight. But I also knew that right now he cared enough to try to help.

  There was a little silence. Then he said my name again.

  ‘Teodros. I owe you a debt of gratitude.’

  ‘Your Majesty,’ I told him, ‘you don’t owe me anything.’

  ‘I owe you your freedom, if nothing else, because your military service affords you that. Did you not know this? It is one of the measures in place to finish slavery in this kingdom. All those who serve in my militia are free men. I am ashamed no one has told you yet – all the more so since you are named for Teodros, who first outlawed slavery nearly a hundred years ago.’

  I opened my mouth and couldn’t think of an answer. Not even thank you. No sound would come out. If I had picked up a spear in Tazma Meda and walked to the front with Ezra’s Ethiopian Red Cross unit, or joined Ras Assefa’s personal guard like Mateos suggested, I would have automatically been free.

  You can see why Amde Worku didn’t mention it.

  Momma, you taught me to fly so that I wouldn’t be forced to become a soldier. But knowing how to fly forced me to become a slave.

  I still can’t really believe that any of these laws could ever apply to me, just because of who my father is. But I guess it makes as much sense as that I should have the right to an American passport just because of who my mother is.

  ‘I am going to dismiss my American advisors and command them to leave Ethiopia,’ the emperor said, and his even voice was heavy with disappointment and weariness. ‘Some will go before the others. You must travel with one of the American airmen. John Robinson will take you to Addis Ababa today, and William Cooper will escort you from there.’

  He paused. I didn’t know if he was gathering breath to speak again or waiting for a response from me, and after a moment it just felt natural to protest:

  ‘I don’t have to leave. I’m Ethiopian as well as American.’

  ‘And you can prove neither nationality on paper, in the way of civilised nations,’ he reminded me gently. ‘I have thought about what will be best for you. And I have asked William Cooper to adopt you as his American son. Your fellow American, the statesman Everett Colson, will sign the necessary papers.’

  That is how Haile Selassie solved the passport problem for me. The emperor more or less ordered Billy Cooper to adopt me. I don’t think it makes the faintest difference in the world to either one of us, since I’m sixteen now. But it sure did make it easier for us at the passport office. Of course it also made it easier for us that Colson, the emperor’s financial advisor, sent an official letter telling them what to do.

  And as for Emmy – her new passport was waiting for her in the US legation when we got to Addis Ababa! All thanks to you filling out that application last June, Momma. Em says she is never going to let it expire again.

  I can see, Momma. I can see well enough to write this letter and I am getting better and better every day. I hope you are too.

  When you are back in Tazma Meda, please tell Habte Sadek that I am safe and well. I hate how quickly pain is aging him and I know there’s a good chance I will never see him again. The day I crashed in Tazma Meda, he gave me his blessing and we made promises to each other. Please tell him I will not forget.

  This ship is going through the Suez Canal just now. It is marvellous – a giant work of civil engineering that just goes on and on. Em is a little bored by it, but mainly she is grumpy because she is full of gloom anticipating when we will have to change ships at some point, to get across the Atlantic. She still remembers how they wouldn’t let you and Delia sit on the deck together on the American ship when we crossed from France when we were three years old. All I remember is the hammock Delia made out of sheets in the cabin for me and Em. Em is dreading that we will have to stay inside the whole time.

  We can’t share a cabin on this ship anyway because Em is a girl. She is sharing with an Englishwoman who reminds us a lot of Miss Shore. I am with Billy Cooper. He has had a couple of dirty looks at the bar, but no one has refused to serve him. It will be strange and hard coming back to the USA. But we have a plan.

  We have a plan! I have four, count them, four written recommendations to enrol as a design student at the Curtiss-Wright School of Aviation in Chicago – one from Everett Colson, one from Billy Cooper and one from Johnny Robinson which is just a single scrawl of a sentence, but is also signed by the emperor himself. That counts as the fourth, if you ask me. Curtiss-Wright is where Cooper and Colonel Robinson both trained. And I’ll be able to continue flight training with the Challenger Air Pilots’ Association at Harlem Airport in Chicago. I could be an instructor, Momma, or an aircraft designer.

  Things have changed since Bessie Coleman had to go to France because no one in the USA would teach a Negro woman to fly. I don’t think they’ve changed a lot, but they’ve changed a little. They train men and women at Harlem Airport now – whites and blacks.

  Momma, just the way you had to decide what you wanted to do, Emmy is going to have to decide what she wants to do next. I know she is thinking about it. Grandfather sent us a telegram to welcome us home before we even get there – he wants to send us to high school at Fox Friends in Lambstown, where you and Connie and the aunts went to school. I am not going to do that. I am not going back to a white high school in Pennsylvania after being a slave and an air-force pilot in Ethiopia.

  I don’t think Emmy will go back either.

  Maybe she won’t want to do the same thing I’m doing. I guess we won’t be together forever. People grow up and leave home and they make new homes. Em and I both know we can go it alone if we have to. Whatever she does is up to her.

  I hope she comes with me.

  Your loving son with a new name,

  Teodros Cooper

  (Still really your Teo.)

  Also by Elizabeth Wein

  CODE NAME VERITY

  ROSE UNDER FIRE

  Special thanks to Dr Fikre Tolossa for sharing his expertise on Ethiopian history and culture.

  Author’s Note

  My Author’s Note for The Lion Hunter begins with an Ethiopian proverb: To lie about a far country is easy. I feel the pressure of this proverb even more acutely now than I did then. Dr Fikre Tolossa, who generously offered
his expertise and encouragement in checking this novel for accuracy while it was still in manuscript form, asks the question, ‘Can fictional writers retract, make up or distort history to achieve their goal or prove their point, when they deal with historical situations?’ In my earlier books set in Ethiopia, the events of fifteen hundred years ago were so murky that I did not worry too much about playing fast and loose with them. Since I’ve started setting my stories in the twentieth century, I am less comfortable with this juggling of reality. I try hard not to make up or distort history. I see myself as slipping plausible characters and situations into a historical setting without changing the actual facts – like a discreet time traveller. It is true that the very nature of historical fiction lends itself to factual error. I try to avoid errors, and I hope I am not so much distorting historical events as drawing attention to them.

  The heart of any novel, for me, is the characters who inhabit it, not the historical details that adorn it. Rhoda and Delia are both riffs on my own mother (again, fast and loose); I got the idea for Teo and the Guardian communicating via pictures from my own experience of drawing with Tigrayan children at the foot of the amba at Debre Damo. These emotional connections are the real truths of this story.

  So with that disclaimer, here are a few notes about what’s real and what’s fictional in Black Dove, White Raven.

  • The Ethiopian calendar runs a little over seven years behind the Gregorian calendar. The extra few months means that sometimes the conversion makes the date appear to be eight years behind instead of seven. Megabit 22, 1916 is the Ethiopian date of Haile Selassie’s slavery reform act of March 31, 1924.