‘Just ’cause you’re the White Raven is not going to make him change his mind.’
Delia wasn’t being sarcastic or mean. She just sounded sad. She’d talked to the airfield owner already and she knew he wasn’t going to budge.
Momma stabbed at our eggs like she was going to kill them.
‘Now, Rhoda!’ Delia gently took the fork and fry pan out of Momma’s hands. She was still wearing her pretty hat and her flying coat and she squeezed Momma around the waist. Then she started to stir the eggs herself.
Momma stomped over to the kitchen window and stared out with her arms folded over her chest. If ever a human being could look like a covered pot about to boil over, she did.
‘It’s not fair, Delia,’ Momma said. ‘It’s not fair and it’s not right. Bessie Coleman wouldn’t ever fly if she couldn’t have a mixed crowd watching. She’d have refused and we should too.’
‘We don’t have Bessie’s draw,’ Delia said, ‘or her backing. Maybe some day we’ll get a newspaperman sponsoring us like she did, but that has not happened yet, and her falling out of a plane and killing herself didn’t do us any favours. We just don’t pull the crowds like she could and that means we don’t make the money. And we have more mouths to feed.’
Momma stood simmering.
‘We have got to do it, Rhoda. We have got to go ahead and play to whatever crowd we get.’
‘I won’t.’
‘Well, then, I’ll do the show myself,’ Delia said.
Momma turned around to glare at her. ‘You dirty double-crosser.’
Delia took the iron skillet off the stove and started to pile forkfuls of egg into two saucers that Momma had put out for us.
‘I never double-crossed anybody,’ Delia said calmly. ‘I’m just feeding the kids.’
Momma let out one enormous, choking sob, just one, and swiped the back of her hand angrily across her eyes.
‘It’s not right, Delia. They don’t do this in Pennsylvania or New York and when they tried it in New Jersey we didn’t cave in like this. We never caved in like this before.’
‘’Cause we haven’t had to yet.’ Delia took hold of Momma’s shoulders and made her sit down with us at the table. ‘Listen, honey, I want to tell you my wild idea.’
Then she knelt between me and Teo for a few seconds, with one hand on each of our shoulders now. ‘I want to tell you all my wild idea.’
Delia got up and sat down across from Momma and held out her hands over the table. Momma took them. Teo and I sat watching with our scrambled eggs getting cold in front of us. We knew that wall they were up against. Doing air shows south of the Mason-Dixon was like being in another country; crossing that invisible border between Pennsylvania and Maryland took you into another world. You had to follow a different set of rules. Delia probably hated them worse than Momma did. But she was better at playing along.
‘You thinking of going back to France?’ Momma asked. Her voice was low and husky. ‘I’d go back there in a heartbeat. Remember how no one cared when we sat together at the café in La Chênaie, drinking Chartreuse and rocking our babies in the same baby carriage? A coloured girl and a white girl wing walking and flying aerobatics as a team would pull sensational crowds in France.’ Momma paused. ‘How do you say Black Dove and White Raven in French? La Colombe Noire – Le Corbeau Blanc.’
‘Blanche,’ Delia corrected. ‘You’re a girl.’
‘No. Raven is masculine,’ Momma said.
‘But you’re not,’ Delia laughed.
She suddenly realised she was still wearing her hat, and let go of Momma’s hands for a moment to take it off and lay it on the table. Teo shot me a warning look and I carefully moved my plate closer to me so I wouldn’t risk getting grease on the soft charcoal-grey material. But Delia wouldn’t have noticed. She had something more important on her mind. She pulled Momma’s hands back across the table and said quietly, ‘I don’t want us to go back to France. I want to go to Ethiopia.’
This is the moment I remember – not my earliest memory, but the best. Delia and Momma gripping each other’s hands across some stranger’s enamel kitchen table, staring hard into each other’s eyes. Their hands were clasped in front of us, Momma’s strong and pale, Delia’s slender and brown. Momma’s gold wedding ring and Delia’s rose-petal-red painted nails. I want to go to Ethiopia.
The Europeans all still use its old name, Abyssinia. But the Americans who are enchanted by it call it by its own name, in its own language: Ethiopia.
‘That’s crazy,’ Momma said, giving Delia’s hands a shake and a squeeze like she was trying to wake her up.
‘It is not crazy.’ Delia was forceful, but she still didn’t sound like she was being stubborn or mad – her voice was just warm and determined. She really meant it. ‘I told you it was a wild idea, but it’s not a crazy one.
‘I have been thinking and thinking,’ Delia went on. ‘Maybe I wouldn’t have ever heard of Ethiopia if I didn’t go to France and meet Gedeyon and have Teo, but I bet I’d still have the notion to go to Africa. You and me both used to listen to that Marcus Garvey talking about Liberia being the new Black African homeland. I don’t have reason to go to Liberia, but my son is half Ethiopian. I want him to feel at home there.’
‘But that’s like running away,’ Momma objected. ‘And Ethiopia isn’t my homeland.’
‘No, your homeland is that Alice-in-Wonderland horse farm in Pennsylvania where nobody fights wars and nobody gets lynched, and you go every Sunday to those starchy Friends’ meetings where nobody ever sings or says anything, and you left when you were eighteen because it was so boring! You know that isn’t the real world – that’s not living in the U S of A!’
‘What about the NAACP trying to change things lawfully for Negroes in the USA?’
Delia hesitated. And finally she said, ‘They’re changing too darn slow. They help people in court; they don’t do a thing on the street. Being a mother is making me selfish. I don’t want my boy to have to wait. Ethiopia is a country of African people, run by Africans and it always has been. It’s not like Liberia, set up by the USA as a colony for freed slaves. Ethiopia is the only country in Africa never to be colonised!’
Delia knew what she was talking about. She went on, ‘They’ve got their own culture and their own language. Rhoda, you still look at those wonderful books of photographs Gedeyon gave me in France. You were looking at them before we left Pennsylvania. You know you want to see it for yourself. Imagine if you could take pictures like that yourself!’
‘You temptress,’ Momma teased.
Teo and I loved those pictures too. Even before we could read the books, we made up stories around the pictures. Churches a thousand years old, carved in rock. Crazy-looking hornbills so top-heavy that their beaks should make their heads fall over. Black-and-white monkeys with beautiful long tails, men playing strange stringed instruments and women in embroidered robes weaving patterned baskets. Crowned priests carrying fringed umbrellas and horsehair fly swatters.
‘And now Ethiopia is respected enough to be a member of the League of Nations,’ Delia said. ‘They just sent a diplomat to the President of the USA! It’s turning into a modern nation so let’s be the first to go!’
Momma sighed again, shaking her head. ‘It’s a dream, Delia! Ethiopia is poor. People there don’t have money to pay to watch a pair of girls wing walking.’
Delia was ready for this.
‘We could make a business for ourselves, finding game for white hunters. Or taking exotic aerial pictures for magazines. You nursed people before – I bet they need nurses. We could fly to out-of-the-way places and help out. I don’t know, but something! So our kids will grow up in a place where no one will ever say to them, “You can’t ride with each other because one of you is coloured. You have to eat in different rooms because of the colour of your skin.”’
That was something Teo and I hated. We all hated it.
‘I don’t want my boy to have to fight for his right to g
et a drink of water or eat in a restaurant,’ Delia said. ‘I want to live in a place where people like him can do what they like, and that is ordinary.’
Staring her straight in the eye, Momma gave Delia the single, curt nod that she used to tell her she was ready for aerobatics. It meant she was ready. Ready to go. She just hadn’t said it out loud yet.
‘Teo’s dad is dead,’ Delia said. ‘But even before Teo was born I had to work things out for my own self and I’m not counting on any man to help me now. You and me are in the same boat there. We need to do this ourselves. And we can. Cut back on little things – nail varnish, new clothes –’
‘That’s you,’ Momma said. ‘I don’t spend on myself.’
‘All those dang magazines,’ Delia reminded her. ‘Film for your camera.’
Momma laughed. She tightened her hold on Delia’s hands.
‘So this is what we do,’ Delia said decisively. ‘We do these dumb, white-only shows. You practise keeping up that poker face you’re so terrible at, and we play to whatever crowd they give us and we don’t complain, and we don’t kick up a fuss about who they let in. It’s selfish, I know it. But it won’t take too long. Two years, maybe? We’ll make the money, then we’ll go!’
‘You are a little crazy, Delia,’ Momma said fondly.
‘You were with me from the start and you are with me now!’ Delia gave Momma’s hands a shake. ‘Think of the sky, Rhoda! Think of the sky in Ethiopia! What’ll it be like to fly in the African sky?’
They clung to each other across the table between me and Teo.
‘Rhoda? Say you’ll do it with me.’ She squeezed Momma’s hands three times: I saw her do it. Are you scared?
‘Didn’t I just say so? Didn’t I give you the go-ahead?’ Momma nodded one more time. Her voice was still husky and passionate. She squeezed Delia’s hands back. I counted to four. I am not scared.
Momma vowed to Delia, ‘We’ll do it. In two years’ time. We’ll do it.’
In that house we had one big iron bed with creaking springs for all of us to sleep in and that was our favourite kind of place to stay. When we all had to share one big bed, me and Teo got squeezed in between Momma and Delia, and there is no place I ever felt safer or warmer or happier. And that night I remember how Momma and Delia kept whispering and planning back and forth over the top of us:
‘– If we do a show in Washington, we can see if there’s an Ethiopian embassy or at least a legation –’
‘– That crazy Horatio Augustus knows all kinds of people. And he owes us money.’
‘– My folks can take the kids for a spell. For the whole summer, so we can do shows back to back –’
‘Aw, the kids can come along with us while we do that. They’re big enough to behave. They’re nearly big enough to learn to fly!’
‘Now that would be an act,’ said Momma, and they both laughed.
They made a plan. They kept track of their funds in a special notebook and they did everything they could to save for our new life in Ethiopia. Delia stopped painting her nails and Momma stopped buying magazines. Teo and I would page through the old ones while we waited on people’s porches or in the shady corner of some aircraft hangar. The pictures we looked at in magazines were always the same after that night to remember – except every now and then when Momma sold a picture she’d taken herself, and Harper’s or Popular Science would send her a copy of the issue that had her photograph printed in it. She didn’t stop buying film.
They still hadn’t saved what they needed when the empty, Delia-shaped hole got blasted in our world.
Here’s what we know about the crash:
It was a bird strike. That’s when a bird hits the plane in mid-air. Delia was flying, in the front cockpit, and Momma wasn’t tied in – she’d just climbed down into the back seat after a wing-walking show. They were only twenty feet above the ground and the propeller shattered and a piece hit Delia in the head. The Jenny stalled itself hard into the ground and flipped over. Momma, in the rear cockpit which isn’t under a wing, was thrown clear; they think Delia was killed instantly, when the propeller first hit her. But in any case, she didn’t survive the crash.
It happened in Illinois in the summer of 1927. I was eight and Teo was seven. The bird was a prairie falcon.
Momma was in the hospital for a week, stone-cold unconscious for the first two days. The cook from the diner next to the airfield took care of me and Teo until Grandma and Grandfather came out to get us. Then we waited for Momma to wake up.
I know this is hard to believe, but me and Teo didn’t know anything was wrong until the night they let Momma out of the hospital. We were just so used to having other people keep an eye on us from time to time; so used to getting left with a pile of Lincoln Logs on some stranger’s kitchen linoleum or playing with a cardboard box full of kittens on an unfamiliar front porch for an afternoon. We hadn’t been at the airfield when the Bird Strike happened, so we didn’t see it, and nobody told us about it. When Grandma and Grandfather got there they thought we already knew, so they didn’t tell us anything either.
Even Momma herself still didn’t know what had happened when she came to stay in the hotel where we were with Grandma and Grandfather. She was nearly as much in the dark as us because she’d been out cold for so long. Also Grandma and Grandfather were scared to talk about it to any of us.
But Momma figured it out. And so did we, the first night we had her back. I think we figured it out because for the first time ever, ever, it was just Momma and me and Teo all together in a strange bed. We weren’t sandwiched safely between anybody. We were all by ourselves on each side of Momma, a strange pale ghost of herself, painted ear to ear across her face with a bruise like a purple raccoon mask, lying on her stomach and shrieking into the pillow as if we weren’t even there.
‘What am I going to do?’ she choked wildly. ‘What am I going to do?’
That’s how we knew Delia wasn’t coming back.
When I woke up in the middle of the night, Teo and I both had our arms tight around Momma. She was sound asleep, but every now and then she’d make a little gasping sob like she was still crying in her dreams. We knew we had to take care of her because Delia couldn’t do it any more.
After the Bird Strike, we all went back to Grandma and Grandfather’s farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. And Momma stayed in her old bedroom for six whole months.
Teo and I are a double act, like Delia said. We have each other. So the Delia-sized hole in our lives is bigger for Momma than it is for us. The only thing that has ever come close to filling that hole is the African sky, and that is why we live here now.
Theme for Miss Shore by Emilia Menotti
subject: ‘Home is Where the Heart Is’
Beehive Hill Cooperative Coffee Farm
Tazma Meda, Wollo Province
Oct. 26, 1934 (Teqemt 16, 1927)
Momma has four sisters (she’s the oldest) and her parents run a riding school called Blue Rock Farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Teo and I lived there for three years after Delia died, and that is where we learned to take care of ourselves. Momma was too busy crying to pay much attention to us the first year we lived on Blue Rock Farm, and then she went away to Africa without us for the next two years. When Teo and I came to Ethiopia for the first time it really felt like we were coming home, because finally, after three years, we were back with the Momma that we knew and loved.
But when we first came to Blue Rock Farm, in the summer of ’27, Momma mostly stayed in her room till Christmas. We’d only see her if we went in there looking for her, or met her in the hall on her way to the bathroom.
‘It’s like living with a ghost,’ Aunt Connie complained to Grandma. She was still in high school at Fox Friends in Lambstown, the only one of Momma’s sisters not already grown up and married. ‘I don’t believe Rhoda could be more miserable if her own husband died!’
‘She couldn’t,’ Grandma agreed. ‘Don’t judge her, Connie. She’s lost her sou
lmate.’
I loved that word: soulmate. We asked Grandma what it meant and she said, ‘Two people who understand each other without talking about it. Two halves of a whole.’
‘Like being married?’ I asked.
‘No,’ Grandma said. ‘It could be anybody. Father or mother or sister or friend. A teacher or someone you work with. Anybody. Any two people who understand each other so well that one of them can fly blindfolded and the other will stand unafraid on the wing of the plane.’
We have never been sure if she was exaggerating or if Momma and Delia really did that once. But soulmate. You would trust your soulmate with anything, so they might have.
Now Momma was alone.
Teo and I learned to take care of ourselves during that time, but we learned to take care of Momma too. Together. We’d figure out what we were going to pester her with and then we’d let Teo do the pestering. He can be very persistent and very patient, and she’d wake up a little for Teo. She couldn’t ignore Delia’s baby.
Here’s the kind of thing Teo would do. He’d shove an open book under her nose and say something like: ‘Momma, you have got to tell us why this tree has fallen on the boy and if he’ll be OK – Momma, how come he’s only got one hand? He only has one hand in all the pictures, not just this one here where the tree is squashing him.’
The fallen tree picture is the most terrifying and intriguing picture in Freckles by Gene Stratton-Porter, and neither of us could read yet.
‘I’m sleeping now. Come back later and I’ll tell you.’
‘I’m going to leave the book here by your head, OK, Momma? Don’t lose the page,’ Teo would warn. ‘And it’s one of Aunt Connie’s books from her special shelf, so don’t throw it. She’s already mad at us for getting the cover wet.’
‘Please go away, kids.’ Momma would turn her back on us and pull a pillow over her head.
‘Come on, Em, let’s make her coffee.’
In an hour we’d trail back up there with coffee and Teo would start on her, patiently, all over again.