American Ace Read online

  spoke of the misery and wretchedness

  of the hundreds of stolen people chained

  to each other in the holds of slave ships.

  He won: England abolished the slave trade.

  The university that bears his name

  was founded in 1856, the first

  HBCU in the United States,

  its first students the mixed-race children

  of rich, guilt-ridden Southern slave owners.

  Plagued by financial insecurity,

  tornadoes, and arson, it still survives,

  welcoming students of all faiths, races,

  and ethnic and national origins.

  Its motto: Suo Marte: “By our own strength.”

  Ray Charles donated two million dollars

  for a Music Department scholarship.

  Lines of O O O O O O O

  The bare oak branches outside my window

  scratched the screens like pets wanting to come in.

  The moon’s light was magnified by the snow.

  Gray clouds scudded across like ocean liners.

  I bent over the desk in my bedroom,

  scribbling from margin to margin to hide

  the poem I’d been writing about Amy:

  O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O.

  Love made every molecule of me smile

  every time one of them thought of Amy.

  Did Ace sometimes look out at the moonlight

  writing poems about Nonna Lucia, his girl?

  We drove to campus through mixed rain and snow,

  behind a windshield smeared by wiper blades.

  With Dad’s new Handicapped parking permit

  we parked near the library’s main entrance

  and elevatored upstairs to meet Jake.

  The three of us studied The Forcean,

  trying to figure out how to find Ace.

  Jake said, Maybe Ace is a cul-de-sac.

  (I asked him later: That means a dead end.)

  Let’s start with the initials M and S.

  We can ask the Department of Defense

  if the men we find have service records.

  Ace

  Jake said he thought Ace might be a nickname;

  Nonna’s Ace might be an aviator,

  the victor in many aerial battles.

  We know your Ace was a pilot, don’t we?

  Maybe he was a very good pilot.

  Maybe he was a Tuskegee Airman.

  You’ve heard of them, right? The famous all-black

  fighter pilots in the Second World War?

  I think the name’s related to the wings.

  Look at the junior class: They’d graduate

  in 1940. Is there a junior

  with the initials MS? More than one?

  We’ll send the DOD the matching names.

  Maybe one was stationed in Italy.

  We found Mozelle Scott (wide brow, close-cropped hair,

  square jaw, straight teeth, large eyes something like Dad’s:

  Alpha Phi Alpha, Industrial Arts Club),

  and Mannie Sparks (side-parted curly hair,

  a trim mustache, eyebrows something like Dad’s:

  Omega Psi Phi, Wilberforce Players),

  and Marvin Stallings (light enough to be

  Sicilian, with a bright, confident smile

  something like Dad’s: Alpha Phi Alpha, Sphinx,

  Varsity Basketball, Class President).

  Together in the Kitchen

  I thought wow all the way back to the van,

  and on the highway and the city streets.

  I felt like a helium-filled balloon,

  only the helium was the word wow.

  Dad looked out the passenger-side window.

  He said, I’ll have my DNA tested.

  It’s possible this fiction isn’t true.

  Odd, that black blood should be invisible.

  But everything in this story is odd!

  He raised his eyebrows, shrugged.

  That Mannie Sparks was a cool-looking cat.

  I bet he swept the ladies off their feet!

  He taught me how to brake without a skid,

  and how to steer through one, if one happens.

  We passed a couple of fender benders,

  and heard ambulance and police sirens.

  Hypnotized by snowflakes in the headlights,

  I chewed my lip until we got back home.

  We wound up together in the kitchen:

  Mom, Dad, Theresa, and myself, chopping,

  sautéing, stirring, setting the table,

  discussing what we knew of history.

  Theresa said, Wow! Now I feel prouder

  of President Obama and Michelle!

  Cringing

  I was in my room doing my homework

  when Amy texted that her family

  would like me to come over one evening,

  to meet. I gulped, then I texted back k.

  The evening happened a few days later.

  Emily, Mr. Grandall, and myself

  sat sipping seltzer in the living room,

  while Mrs. Grandall came and went with trays

  of beautiful low-calorie hors d’oeuvres

  she’d made with fat-free food equivalents.

  Then we all sat down to eat brown salmon

  with a green bean and mushroom soup side dish.

  I know everybody’s not Italian.

  All families aren’t families of cooks.

  But I can’t help noticing ruined food.

  And nothing less powerful than Amy’s

  smile could have gotten me through that dinner.

  Mr. Grandall saying, We’ve had many

  garlicky feasts at Mama Lucia’s.

  Amy tells us it’s your family business.

  Mrs. Grandall saying, Amy’s told us

  you’re part Italian, part Irish, and part—

  um . . . something else you can’t see.

  I still cringe over the way I said Yes.

  DNA

  A few days later Dad got his results:

  48% Iberian Peninsula

  24% Great Britain

  8% Ireland

  7% Benin/Togo

  6% Cameroon/Congo

  4% Europe West

  3% European Jewish

  Well, I’ll be damned, he said, shaking his head.

  That’s SIX more peoples, not just one or two!

  So Ace connects us to the larger world!

  Just imagine how all those peoples met.

  We spent some evenings googling history,

  caring about our people’s sufferings,

  taking pride in their arts and their triumphs.

  It’s like having more teams you can cheer for!

  At school I felt like everyone should know

  I’d become a citizen of the world.

  Maybe the difference was only in me.

  I walked between classes in slow motion,

  seeing the ancient intertribal wars

  still being fought, in the smallest gestures.

  Little things I hadn’t noticed before:

  the subtle put-downs, silent revenges.

  Thanksgiving Gasp

  As usual, the Bianchinis had our feast

  in Mama Lucia’s private banquet room.

  Uncle Frank and Uncle Petey were our chefs.

  Four brothers and one sister—Aunt Kitty, the youngest,

  who runs a hair salon, three children, and

  her husband, Uncle Don, like someone born

  with a title. Uncle Petey’s a veteran

&nbs
p; with PTSD, divorced, no children;

  Uncle Father Joe’s a Roman Catholic priest.

  But the other Bianchinis were fruitful:

  Dad’s son Carlo was there, with wife and kids.

  Plus Theresa, me, and eight first cousins.

  A gas fire danced in the fireplace.

  Our eyes sleepy with that post-turkey glaze,

  we were still shoveling in the ravioli

  when Dad clinked his water glass with his spoon.

  In the silence he stood and cleared his throat.

  Before the pie, I’d like to share my thanks

  for what Connor and I have learned from the ring and wings

  my father left with Mama, and Mama left me.

  Apparently, Ace was just his nickname,

  earned as a crackerjack fighter pilot.

  (Applause.) And he was African American.

  He may have been a Tuskegee Airman.

  Now That We’re Colored

  One evening a few days after Thanksgiving

  Dad’s phone rang. We were clearing the table.

  He sat down. We kept working around him.

  Hey, Carlo! You still eating leftovers?

  Great to have you and the grandchildren here!

  What? My goodness, Carlo . . . Sorry, son . . . Wait!

  Dad looked at his phone, then he looked at Mom.

  He says bad news should be told privately.

  He should have known before the family.

  He would have liked to tell his kids himself.

  One of his kids asked, on the drive back home,

  “Will we still have friends, now that we’re colored?”

  “Now that we’re colored.” Dad repeated that.

  Over and over, in the next few days,

  he’d look up from something, and look at us.

  At school it was time for final exams

  and decisions about spring semester.

  I’d decided to write an honors thesis

  on what I could find out about our Ace.

  I told Dad as I steered through snow flurries,

  concentrating hard on the road ahead.

  When he responded, his voice sounded slurred.

  I turned, asked What? His face was lopsided.

  I drove straight to the emergency room.

  Acute Care

  Discovering the Tuskegee Airmen

  Submitted by Connor G. Bianchini

  for U.S. History Honors

  Handsome black men with white in their eyebrows,

  they stand, or sit at attention in wheelchairs,

  saluting Old Glory, watched by a mixed crowd

  of multiethnic young’uns who don’t know

  the half of what they went through to serve her.

  In aviator glasses, red blazers,

  and military insignia caps,

  with lifted elbows and unbending backs,

  they watch their flag progress, remembering.

  We see them on TV, and at local

  parades: heroes of a long-ago war,

  celebrated for being Negro firsts.

  Ho-hum, we think. How many veterans

  are going to turn out this Fourth of July?

  How many wars will be represented?

  But the Tuskegee Airmen are different.

  Theirs was both heroism in action

  and inward heroism, where they fought

  to prove themselves moral superiors

  to institutions and shortsighted men.

  It’s a historical phenomenon:

  Victims finally defeat oppressors.

  In the struggle of whose rights and who’s wrong,

  economics finally lose to ethics.

  Rehab

  Add what you learn in twelve Februarys

  to what you’ve learned about the 1 percent.

  Now, close your eyes and imagine Master

  whipping an enslaved man with a bullwhip.

  To understand the Tuskegee Airmen,

  you have to add up a lot of stuff like that:

  the years of slavery and of Jim Crow,

  the tricks of finance, unequal laws,

  the notion that blacks are inherently

  inferior. The army studies finding

  Negroes to be “barely fit for combat.”

  The U.S. Army Air Corps being all-white.

  In 1941, Yancey Williams,

  an HBCU student, sued to join

  the U.S. Army Air Corps.

  So the army started a segregated

  unit to train black pilots and ground crews,

  at Tuskegee (tus-KEE-gee), the HBCU

  founded by the great Booker T. Washington,

  famous again every February.

  Yancey Williams was the first Tuskegee

  air cadet, first in the experiment

  testing if Negroes can be taught to fly.

  The Negro airmen aimed to prove they could.

  Daily Visits

  Their name for themselves was Lonely Eagles.

  Their commanding officer’s story suggests why.

  Colonel Benjamin O. Davis Jr.,

  son of the first black general in the army,

  was the first black general in the air force.

  At thirteen years old, he was allowed to fly

  with a barnstorming pilot. That first thrill

  of noisy soaring showed him his future.

  After the University of Chicago,

  he won a nomination to West Point

  (from the only black U.S. Congressman),

  which he entered in 1932.

  The lone Negro cadet, Davis was shunned.

  Nobody spoke to him, or roomed with him,

  or ate or studied with him, for four years.

  This silent treatment made him determined

  to graduate at the top of his class.

  He was thirty-fifth of two hundred seventy-eight.

  Rejected for the air corps (no blacks allowed),

  he was assigned to an all-black regiment

  and not allowed into the officers’ club.

  To avoid having him command white men,

  he was sent to Tuskegee to teach ROTC.

  He was there when Tuskegee Field opened.

  Watching Dad

  Come Back to Life

  There were big stories in the Negro press.

  (Some of their names: the Pittsburgh Courier,

  the Chicago Defender, the Amsterdam News,

  the Bay State Banner, the Cleveland Call & Post.)

  Their headlines read “NEGRO PILOTS GET WINGS.”

  Their stories answered who, what, where, and when, but why

  was answered in the hearts of 10 percent

  of America, men and women newly proud.

  Photos showed scenes from the pilots’ lives:

  A white colonel pins wings on the jackets

  of five black lieutenants, members of

  the graduating class of Negro Firsts.

  Cadets stand at attention for review:

  the head erect, face straight, the chin drawn in,

  arms straight, the fingers curled so the thumb tips

  just touch the first joint of the forefingers,

  the legs straight, but without locking the knees,

  the heels together, with the toes forming

  a 45-degree angle in shoes

  polished until they are leather mirrors.

  Cadets, seated, “eat square” in the mess hall,

  with their backs a fist’s distance from the chair,

  both feet flat on the floor, lifting the fork

  straight vertic
ally, then straight into the mouth.

  Reading Dad the Headlines

  Connie Napier saw a lynching as a child.

  His great-grandfather was a Cherokee chief.

  He made model airplanes, studied physics.

  His after-school job bought flying lessons.

  He soloed as a sophomore in high school.

  A straight-A student and a star athlete,

  he tried to volunteer for the air corps,

  and was rejected, based on black incompetence.

  He begged to be examined. Told he had failed,

  he asked to be retested in two weeks.

  This time, they said his score proved he’d cheated.

  He wrote to the President, and got in.

  One day, flying out of Tuskegee Field,

  his P-40 sputtered and spat black smoke.

  He landed in a ripening cotton field:

  rows and rows of green plants with round white eyes,

  being picked by prisoners in a chain gang.

  Fifty black men in black-and-white-striped suits

  and striped caps, dragging long, black cotton sacks,

  stared at him, round eyes white as cotton bolls,

  teeth-missing mouths wide with astonishment.

  He stopped, his prop raising a cloud of dust.

  Ignoring the white guards with their shotguns,

  he grinned and saluted the prisoners.

  Holding Dad’s Juice Glass

  Southern congressmen tried to cut the funds,

  to kill the new black program on the vine,

  to keep blacks on the ground where they belonged.

  But First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt

  went to Tuskegee, demanding to be flown

  by a black pilot. Photos hit the news

  of Mrs. Roosevelt in a Piper Cub,

  wearing a flowered hat and a big grin,

  piloted by smiling Chief Anderson,

  the nation’s first Negro licensed pilot.

  The Tuskegee Army Air School breathed again,

  its first class the 99th Pursuit Squadron.

  After training, their deployment was stalled