The Moon Above: Part 5

Chapters 9 and 10

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NINE

I Get Better

“AM I GETTING ANY BETTER?”

Dominique looked at me with her curious manner, her eyes half open but strangely intense, as if she was looking into my soul but found it a little boring.

“You are about good enough to go to a tourist restaurant in Paris and order something to eat,” she said, her voice its usual rasp. “That is about it. You try to talk to a regular Parisian, or Frenchman of any sort anywhere, and they would stare at you like you came from the moon and were speaking moon-speak.”

I slumped back in the chair. We had been having my lessons now for nearly six months and I studied my French whenever I could. I had hoped to show more improvement. One problem was that I had no one to speak French with aside from Dominique. Uncle Abe had still not given me clearance to admit even to my mother and father that I was having the classes, so I couldn’t practice it at home by myself, at least, not out loud. The French I spoke in my head was perfect but apparently was losing something in the translation. I had asked Uncle Abe if maybe there was somebody at the new congregation who could help, but he didn’t seem to think so, and as far as I could tell, he had not followed up on the matter.

“Johnny, I keep telling you that French comes from the heart, not the head,” Dominique said.

Her voice was syrupy and cooing — listening to her talk was like listening to a dove speak (a chain-smoking dove) — but her words frustrated me.

“But I still have to know the words and the grammar,” I complained.

“That is true. But think with your heart, not with your head.”

“You keep saying that, but it doesn’t mean anything.”

She reached over and slowly put her hand on my knee. From this angle, I had a view up her long white arm, a slender archipelago that led to the valley of her breasts.

“It means something, Johnny.” She looked at me a long time then, with those half-lidded eyes, until I felt very comfortable. Finally, she seemed to reach a decision. “I can help show you a way to think with your heart.”

Her fingers began to move on my knee. Before, the placing of her hand on my knee, her hand white and unmoving as marble, could be construed as the innocent act of a teacher reaching out to a student. Now, the fingers were writhing slowly like lazy snakes, and that could only mean one thing. I was not experienced with girls, not at all, and even I knew that. I would not say that I had tried to become experienced. There were some girls at school I knew and liked enough to become friendly with, and I had even kissed one of them several times, but I was not what you would call worldly. By today’s standards, I would be hopelessly behind, but I was just normal then, normal and shy.

“Johnny, do you want to get better?”

I had not really thought about the time when I would lose my virginity. It seemed to be something off in the distance, like an airplane hovering over the horizon. I had vaguely thought it would occur after my marriage to a beautiful, smart woman, maybe even a fellow pilot like Bessie Smith. I had not pictured a lanky, slinky, raspy white French woman in a neat but nearly empty apartment in a dumpy building, but that was the choice that was presented to me. I looked into her bright, half-shut eyes and realized I had an opportunity before me that every boy — every man, probably — in the city would kill for. I am not saying that when opportunity arises you should always take advantage. But I did.

“I want to get better,” I said, trying to make my voice deeper and scratchier than it was.

She laughed at that, but not in a way that made me feel bad, and slid a bit closer. She was not wearing any perfume that I could detect. In fact, she was nearly odorless. As her body moved before my eyes, I seemed to lose the ability to focus. I saw what looked like a wall of white coming across to take me over. So, I let it. I closed my eyes and she ran her fingers over my face, reached one inside my lips to touch my teeth. She ran one hand down my chest, peeling off to the right before she reached my belt buckle, making me want her more. I thought my pants were going to explode like a popped sausage. She took my hand and led me down the hall to her bedroom. I didn’t notice anything about the hall or the bedroom. I only saw her shoulder blades moving under her thin dress.

Dominique was thin and angular, but she could move like melted butter. I had never seen a naked woman before — or, rather, not for any length of time, as I had occasionally spotted mother or Aunt Eveline or even Katherine in various states of undress — but Dominique answered all my questions about what they looked like, and then some. She used every part of her body and showed me what to do. I had masturbated before. I’m not ashamed to tell you that, it’s a perfectly natural thing; so, I had some idea of what was to come, but it was so much better with her than I could have imagined. She looked me in the eyes as I shoved my young penis into her, after she helped me get there, and then she reached her warm hand down and pushed against my thigh and showed me the right rhythm. I began to move with her instead of just against her, or into her, and once I found that slow rhythm it felt like we were dancing.

After a short while, she started to lose that rhythm, became jerky and wild, and then gripped my back like a grizzly bear. She cried out and fell back against the pillow. I don’t know whether she really had an orgasm, or whether she was trying to make me feel better about the whole thing, but it worked. I ejaculated into her after that and it felt like I was shooting away some vital organ. It burned deep in my core and left me sprawling atop her marble body, limp and exhausted.

“Say something,” she said.

“Like what?”

“No, no. Say something in French.”

I told her I did not want to say anything in French. But I said it in French. My voice was tired, husky, slurred.

“Very good,” she cooed. “Very, very good.”

She ran one hand up and down my chest. I was half dead but began to feel the stirring again in my groin.

“See, French is from the heart. And from here,” she said, and began to stroke me back to strength.

We started having classes twice a week. I began to improve rapidly.

C’est la vie.

TEN

Mr. Coffey and Mrs. Brown

THERE IT WAS, right in front of me. It was not much to look at; a flat stretch of ground, a strip of concrete with tufts of grass breaking through, a couple of tattered windsocks, some metal buildings that looked like one good storm would blow them away. On the far side of the strip of concrete, in one of those buildings, was my destiny. Because, as it turned out, I would not have to go to France to learn to fly. A place willing to educate Race men in the ways of airplanes was coming to me, right there in Chicago.

I heard about it, oddly enough, straight from the horse’s mouth. I had been reading about Race aviation in the pages of the Defender, but I heard about the new school from the mouth of Robert Abbott himself, the paper’s founder, the legend.

I had gone to the Defender office that day to carry some lunch to my father. He had forgotten his but was going to be eating so late that I had time to bring it after school. Today was not one of my French lesson days, or he might have had to do without. I was heading back to the press room when I nearly ran over Mr. Abbott. I apologized, but then he seemed to recognize me and started talking.

“Let me have a look at you, son.”

He wore a shiny brown suit and sharp fedora. He looked me up and down in an exaggerated motion, like I was a horse he was interested in buying. His round face creased into a big smile. “You are the spitting image of your father. I believe that if you brought me an old photograph of your father, he would look exactly like you. I mean, exactly like you!”

“Th-thank you, sir,” I stammered, wondering if he was paying me a compliment or not. He didn’t say whether he considered my father and myself to look good, he was just saying we looked alike. Maybe we looked equally bad.

As I’ve said before, Robert Abbott’s words, or the words his paper had published, were very strong among the forces that had brought my family to Chicago. His words calling for Race people to leave the South and get what they were entitled to had been read all over the country, carried from railroad porter to farmer to banker like some easily transported disease, although it was a disease that opened men’s minds and made them move. In person, he was not that prepossessing, at least not physically. I was already taller than him and I wasn’t out of high school yet. I was a lot thinner, too, because he was a man about town and he liked to eat and had plenty of chances to do it. His face was round and smooth as a baby’s. He had a presence, though. You could not stand near him and not pick up on that energy that had driven him for decades, had driven him to uproot families like mine, to change, in fact, the racial layout of the entire country.

“Your father tells me you are very interested in airplanes and human flight,” he said, having dispensed with the chitchat.

“Yes, sir, I am.”

“You know about Bessie Coleman, about James Banning and Thomas Allen?” he asked.

“Yes, sir, I do.”

“You probably know that the Defender has championed them all?” he asked, raising his chin in unrestrained pride.

“I do. I have read the stories.”

“You’re a well-informed young man,” he said.

I started to laugh until I realized he wasn’t making a joke. He was that proud of his newspaper, and I suppose he should have been.

“You know, son, that Race men can make a difference in every walk of life, don’t you?”

“I think so, sir.”

“I mean, your father makes a big difference by coming in here and helping me put out this newspaper, isn’t that right? And Race men can make a difference as bankers and bakers and garbagemen and men that work at the slaughterhouses and put food on the table,” he said in a big gust of words. “What I’m driving at is that sometimes people only pay attention to the flashy things, like Race people who fly airplanes. But there are other ways to make a difference.”

The man whose newspaper had introduced me to flying Race men and women was trying to talk me out of flying? I didn’t want to hear that.

“I know that, sir. But I want to fly. I’ll go to France, if I have to.” He chuckled.

“You ever been to France, son?”

I had been to Alabama and Chicago and that was it, and not even much of either of those.

“It’s just that you say that like it’s a bad thing. That’s not exactly paying a heavy price. You speak French?”

“Uh — no.”

My lessons were still a secret, because Uncle Abe had not released me from my agreement with him, so I couldn’t admit that I did, at least a little. I doubted that the issue would ever come up between Mr.

Abbott and my father, but you never know.

“As it turns out, it’s just as well. I have just been asking you all this because I want to make sure you’re really interested. There are some things going on here, and we’re going to have a story about it soon.”

“About flying?”

“Yes, about flying. You ever hear of a man named Cornelius Coffey?”

“No, sir.”

“No reason you should. But you will. He’s going to establish a flight training school. He’s a Race man, and he will teach other Race men to fly and maintain airplanes.”

“This will be in the United States?”

He spread his stubby arms wide. “In the United States? Mr. Nicholas, it will be right here in Chicago! At Harlem Airport!”

I must have made a very funny face because he looked at me like I was about to float right out of the room. “Right here on the South Side.” I couldn’t believe it.

He left me after that.

Still stunned by the news, I took my father his lunch. And a few weeks later, there was the story, in black and white, complete with a picture of Cornelius Coffey. He was a hero to me, instantly, without my having met him, but he didn’t really look particularly heroic in the picture. He stared off into the distance with a faint smile on his face. He did look determined, though, and the article backed up that determination with his story. He and another Race man had applied to the Curtiss Wright School of Aviation, also in Chicago, and were let in despite its whites-only policy. The school didn’t know they were Race men and, when they found out, tried to turn them away, but their employer, a Chevrolet dealer, threatened to sue if they didn’t get in. So, they got in, and graduated, but later Cornelius Coffey decided he wanted to create an aeronautics school where Race men could walk in through the front door with their heads high.

So, I went to see the place. Robert Abbott had exaggerated when he said the Coffey School of Aeronautics was going to be on the South Side. The South Side of the planet, maybe. It was a long stretch from Chicago, or at least my part of it. I had to take the L and two streetcars and then walk for a while. Then I took a bus. I took the wrong bus at first, adding about half an hour to my journey, but I finally made it.

A small plane buzzed overhead as I approached the airport, and I wondered if it was a white man flying it, or a Race man. It made me glad to think this was a possibility. I walked past the terminal building, where the ticket man had told me to go, and around the edge of the runway until I found the school. There was a young woman there, a Race woman, pretty but with a very serious face. I thought maybe she was some kind of secretary.

“The terminal is up that way, young man,” her voice was stern but not unkind.

“Is this the Coffey School of Aeronautics?”

She looked at me funny and then stepped a couple feet to the right so that I could see the sign she had been blocking: Coffey School of Aeronautics. It was a plain metal sign. My father could have done better, and with wood.

“Can I help you with something?”

“I just wanted to find out more information about it. I want to study here.”

“You’re a little young, son.”

“I know, but in a year or so I’d like to study here.”

I was fourteen years old but the year before I had hit a growth spurt and was now as tall as my father; taller, if he stooped, which he was starting to do. If I remembered to keep my smile in check and my voice a little bit low, I could sometimes pass for an eighteen-year-old.

“More like five or six years,” she said. “You need to get through school first.”

“Is Mr. Coffey here?” I asked, purposely looking around her as if she were blocking my view of Cornelius Coffey, who might not be so hung up on age.

“He is not and would tell you the same thing if he was,” she said. “But it is nice of you to show such interest.” I kept peeking around anyway.

“Ma’am, I would really like to speak with him, if I could. I came a long way.”

She gave me a sharper look than before. A very faint smile had been hovering on her lips, but it faded away now and they drew back against her thin face.

“Young man, talking to me is the same as talking to him. I set up this school with him. I am not his assistant. Now, you just go on home and come back when you’re older and have some money in your pocket.”

“I’m very sorry, ma’am,” I said, giving her my biggest smile. “My name is Johnny Nicholas and I very much want to go to this school next year. I guess I let my desire run away with me.” I stuck out my hand.

She continued to give me that hard look for a few moments, but then the faint smile flickered back into view, barely. “Well, Mr. Nicholas, although I think perhaps next year may be too soon, despite what you say, I hope you get here if you want it bad enough.” She gave me a firm handshake. “Willa Brown.”

The name hit me like a brick. I had read about her. This same Willa Brown had marched into the newsroom of the Defender a couple of years before and demanded coverage of an air show out at this very airport, and had taken the reporter up in the plane, to boot. It was a terrific story and I remember laughing when I read it, but for some reason, her name had not stuck in my head until now. Her face hadn’t, either. The paper with a photo of her had been an early print run and had a big smudge on it, which is what most of the Defenders I ever saw looked like. She looked much better in person, both prettier and more determined.

I started going back whenever I had a chance, which usually was no more than once a week. Sometimes, the trip would take me an hour, sometimes it would take two hours, depending on the buses, and there were a couple of times when I didn’t make it at all and had to turn back. It was not an easy thing for me but, like Cornelius Coffey himself, I was determined. I talked to Willa Brown, or Cornelius Coffey, who I met on my second trip out. Coffey was almost always busy, talking to the students or up to his elbows in an engine showing them how to reach some half-buried part. Willa was always busy, too, but seemed to find me amusing and usually found a little time to talk. I spent most of my limited talking time with them trying to convince them I was nearly old enough to go to the school, and to see if I could wheedle some sort of scholarship.

“The young Mr. Nicholas,” she would say.

“Next year, ma’am,” I would say. “I’d like to see if we could arrange some kind of work-study.”

“Next year, you will be planning to wear your first pair of knee pants,” she might say. Or, “Next year, you’ll still be wiping the milk off your lower lip.”

This went on for a good six months or more, probably more like eight months. I’m sure my visits annoyed them, but they put a good face on it, and eventually my persistence actually worked. One day, after a particularly long journey out there, Cornelius Coffey offered me a job.

“It’s not very much,” he said. “Just sweeping up around the place and keeping things clean. I can only pay a few bucks a week.” He gave me a little wink. “But if you want to come in and work during class hours, and keep your ears and eyes open, that won’t bother me a bit.”

I think I nearly flew all the way back to Bronzeville that day. I still wasn’t able to come back and work every day, but I came as often as I could. I came as early as I could and stayed as late as I could, and just as he suggested, I kept my ears and eyes open while I cleaned up. I paid so much attention that sometimes he had to gently shoo me away and remind me to get back to work.

Willa Brown was often a little more direct. “There is a spot of grease over there as big as your head,” she said one day when I was nearly peering over her shoulder to look inside the guts of an engine. “It would be really nice if you could find the time to clean it up.”

The truth was that I was having a hard time following what they were saying. There was an awful lot of math involved, more than even I had expected or hoped for, and a lot of technical terms about engine and fuselage parts that most of the time I couldn’t see, along with boring talk about regulations. I wrote down a lot of the terms whenever I could, carrying a pencil with me so much that it poked holes in all my pants pockets. Whatever I didn’t understand, I looked up in library books from school.

Willa Brown was right — I did not attend the Coffey School of Aeronautics the next year. It took three years and a war before that happened. But it did happen.

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