A Tyranny of Petticoats

by Jessica Spotswood

  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.”

  You make your own luck, her momma’s voice reminded her drily.

  Ma Vencill exclaimed, “What I want to know is why don’t the dad-blamed white newspapers print Bessie Coleman’s name?”

  “So what happens now?” Tony found that the warmth and freedom of the company made her as bold as if she were talking to her sisters. “Miss Coleman’s never going to buy a fleet of planes. She’ll never start a school for colored pilots.” Tony blinked back tears. “She’ll never show that newsreel to another school or answer another Physics Club’s questions about aerobatics.”

  “Well, shoot, girl,” said Wade Vencill. “You can find out about aerobatics yourself, for a start. Just ask these fellas what you want to know.”

  “You got the jump on Miss Coleman,” Myrtle Vencill said gently. “Don’t you know you make your own luck?”

  Tony was trying too hard not to cry to force a smile. “My momma says that too. But I don’t get what you mean.”

  “You won’t have to go to France to get someone to teach you to fly, like Bessie Coleman did. She sowed the seeds of change herself. Her dream is not going to die with her. We are all going to keep Bessie Coleman’s dream alive.”

  “We’re so glad you came, Antonia,” Louis Manning said quietly. “But it’s a long way to come and a hard journey for a schoolgirl. You could have mailed that notebook here and saved your train fare. Why’d you do it?”

  Tony looked around. She’d come because she wanted to find people who cared about Bessie Coleman and who understood the science and miracle of flight. And she’d found them. She’d come for this.

  For this. For this one evening under the electric light where her skin and being a girl didn’t matter one bean. For these people whose heads were full of airspeed and wind speed and engine power and Bernoulli’s principle. For the woman with a heart big enough to mourn two different people because they were both flying high and came to earth hard. To know that in some people’s eyes, the only color was the sky behind you.

  She looked around at the friendly faces waiting for her response.

  “I wanted to meet the people who’d sell an airplane to a Negro woman,” she told them honestly.

  The Vencills lau
ghed. The black and white pilots around the table answered nearly in one voice. “Here we are!”

  Tony didn’t literally leave the ground. But something inside her began to take flight.

  This story is based on the true events surrounding the death of the pilot Bessie Coleman, the first black woman to gain a pilot’s license and the first American, black or white, male or female, to earn an international pilot’s license. Four enormous funerals were held for her in three different cities after her tragic death in 1926, a testimony to how deeply she’d won people’s hearts.

  Except for Tony and her family, most of the named characters in this work of fiction are drawn from real people: Myrtle and Henry Wade Vencill, Louis Manning, William Wills, John Thomas Betsch, and of course Bessie Coleman. I have put words into their mouths based on what little I know about them. I hope I have respected my characters’ historical counterparts.

  For the full story of Bessie Coleman’s life, try Queen Bess: Daredevil Aviator by Doris L. Rich.

  CALEB NEWCASTLE HAS WANTED ME since I turned thirteen. That’s when I robbed my first bank.

  He was only fifteen then, not even a real lawman. His daddy deputized him, and he was the cock of the walk after that.

  Sitting up in a pecan tree, I watched him strut back and forth in the woods. His gun drawn, his hat tipped back, he stalked me. Eighteen now, he was cut out of all-American cloth, his blue eyes sharp and his long legs swift.

  Too bad for him, and lucky for me, he didn’t have the sense God gave a goose. If he’d looked up, even once, he’d have seen me. I’d picked a bad tree to climb. It wasn’t real tall, and it didn’t have a lot of leaves. Usually, my escapes were cleaner than this. I’d been caught off guard — Caleb had showed up while I was still in the bank this time. He got the jump on me, and I still got away. Which made it especially sad, the way he was carrying on.

  Back and forth he went beneath me, until he lost his temper. Throwing his hat, he kicked a cottonwood tree. All he got for that was a stubbed toe and a shower of dead leaves.

  I pressed myself flat against the trunk of my pecan and tried real hard to hold still. To keep from laughing, I bit down on the heel of my hand.

  It was hard, though. He was cussing up a storm on account of nobody could hear him do it. In town, he was always saying “gol’dangit” and “dadblame”— he wanted people to think he was a moral authority. Butter wouldn’t melt in that mouth, he’d have liked you to think.

  Well, I had news for him. God could hear him cussing when he thought he was alone. And when he was alone, Caleb Newcastle’s mouth was filthy.

  Sometimes, though, his mouth was sweet as lemonade. Just right for a stolen kiss behind the church, or down the lane where nobody could see. Probably, he wouldn’t want to kiss me if he knew I was number-one Most Wanted in Posey County. That would be his loss, though. Mine too, I guess. When he wasn’t being awful, he was downright delicious.

  Caleb stuffed his gun in the holster. Then he retrieved his hat. Didn’t look a bit ashamed about his tantrum, but that’s because he didn’t know I was watching.

  Shifting, I tried to get comfortable on my branch. It seemed like I’d need to settle in for a while. Then, the second of two things happened that just about ruined my day.

  The branch I was on cracked.

  It rained pecans down on Caleb’s head. Hilarious. At least until he looked up. I wasn’t caught quite yet, but I sure was spotted.

  (The first thing came this morning — I read about Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow getting ventilated on a back road in Bienville Parish, Louisiana. It’s not that I approved of their shooting and killing people, I just did not. But I felt a certain kinship to Bonnie, being that we were sisters in crime.)

  At the moment, that was their problem and I had plenty of my own.

  Caleb knew I was there. There weren’t no point in pretending I was a bird. From the bandanna around my face to the laces on my shoes, it was evident that I wasn’t nesting. Gruffing up my voice, I raised my hat in a friendly hello.

  “You kiss your mama with that mouth?” I asked.

  Caleb cussed again and started up the tree. Now, the fact was, it wasn’t much of a tree to begin with. From the cracking, he should have been able to tell that it was barely holding my weight, let alone his. But lack of sense and righteous indignation sent him shinnying up after me. That fool tried to pull out his gun as he climbed.

  “You’re under arrest,” he informed me.

  With a grin he couldn’t see, I said, “No, I ain’t.”

  The tree groaned once, then snapped. I crashed to the ground. A hail of pecans pelted me, leaves and bark and God knows what else raining down at the same time. I gaped like a goldfish out of a bowl, trying to catch my wind. But since I was down, and Caleb was tangled in the branches, this was my chance.

  Scrambling to my feet, I stopped long enough to laugh at him. Then I hitched up the hem of my pants and bolted. Everybody always said I had long legs like a colt. Most of the time, they said it when they could admire them under my skirt. It was a shame none of ’em saw me run. I was just exactly like a foal, wild and free. Jumping everything. Barely looking back.

  A shot echoed through the woods.

  That cake-eating dog was shooting at me!

  This posed a problem, what with him having a real gun and me without. Out of principle, I didn’t carry one. If I ever got caught, I figured the judge would go easier on me if he realized I was never armed. If I wanted to hurt a bank teller, I guess I woulda had to take off a shoe and hit him with it.

  Caleb fired again. I skidded down a hill. Brambles bit my hands. Thorns caught my clothes, and I was gonna have a hell of a time explaining this to my mama when I got home. Another shot hit the tree right next to me. Splinters flew, and my heart stopped. I didn’t like to be pessimistic, but I was afraid I wasn’t gonna make it home alive for Mama to take a strip off of me.

  Nope, not acceptable. I knew the Wabash River wasn’t too far. If I made it there, I could lose Caleb. Ducking another shot, I tried to count real quick. Was that three bullets or four? Did he have three left or two?

  I decided it was two, because that was better odds for me. Grabbing a rock off the ground, I heaved it into the distance. As soon as Caleb shot in that direction, I took off running. I know I’m supposed to be a good girl. I know I’m supposed to be happy doing needlework samplers and baking potatoes in coals and whatnot.

  But Lord, I love running from the law.

  Now, I reckon some would say it ain’t moral to rob a bank. I’d say I didn’t have a choice.

  Things had been going pretty good for my little family. Daddy was a supervisor over at the mill, and Mama made pin money selling eggs out our back door. Our pantry was full enough, our bellies round enough, our sleep sweet enough.

  We were a lucky-sad family on account of my being an only child. Mama and Daddy always meant to have a houseful. It just never came to be.

  I suppose, come fall of 1929, that was a good thing. One October Wednesday, Daddy come home from the mill with a gray face and lines on his brow. A bunch of fellas up in New York City lost fourteen billion dollars. I didn’t see how you could misplace a number with that many zeroes, but Daddy said it blew no good wind.

  Dinner was fried chicken, collard greens, and silence. Once that news was lying on the table, it took up all the air in our little house.

  I was only ten then, so I didn’t understand. By 1931, I understood.

  Nobody but banks had any money left. People had to scrabble. They couldn’t buy lumber for houses or fences or chicken coops, and the mill closed down. Mama still had her pin money, because chickens eat what they find. But it wasn’t nothing close to Daddy’s salary.

  Swan’s Holler wasn’t a big town, so Daddy started hitching rides to the next town over, and then the next. He looked and looked for a job that nobody could offer him.

  Mama let out my Sunday dress. Then she sewed a stripe out of the rag bag along the hem to get it b
ack to my knees. I wasn’t the only patchwork girl in town, neither. Things were rough all over, and only got worse when the new banker came.

  The old one, Mr. Pickery, was big on grace. He understood didn’t nobody have any money. Everybody wanted to pay their loan receipts, but they couldn’t. He said, all right, maybe next month. And Mama would say, I just fried a chicken: you take some home to Eugenie. It went on that way for months, Mama sending Mr. Pickery away with eggs or chicken or soda bread instead of money.

  By the end of the year, Mr. Pickery moved on to his final reward. The way my parents said that, I got the impression it was a trip he neither wanted nor deserved to take.

  Then a new fella showed up to run the bank. His face was gaunt and his accent corvine. According to my mama, that means “like a crow,” and she went all the way to eighth grade, so you can believe it. It likewise tells you everything you need to know about Mr. Shepherd. On our front step (he refused to come inside), he cawed about interest and payments and wouldn’t take any of Mama’s good food home.

  That was a bad sign, Mama said. She wasn’t wrong.

  Mr. Shepherd called in all the loans in Swan’s Holler. All at once. The Cunninghams lost their house first. That didn’t sit right with anybody, because Jesse Cunningham built that house with his two hands and owned it outright. I guess they’d used it against a loan for a new tractor, though. Least that’s what I gathered from hushed conversations my parents had when they thought I was sleeping upstairs.

  The Cunninghams had six boys, and they worked a piece of land right outside town. Always had. We thought they always would too. But we were wrong. The next thing we all knew, the Cunningham pew was empty at First Calvary, and the bank auctioned off the tractor and the house both.

  After them come the Stricklands, who were sharecropping. They didn’t own the land they farmed; they rented it. The problem was, the landowner got stripped to the skin in the stock market crash. He stopped paying his receipts, and Mr. Shepherd turned up with two police officers to run the Stricklands off their plot. They had beans and corn in, and the bank let those rot.