American Ace Page 4

  for months, until they were finally sent

  to North Africa in 1943,

  to fly secondhand P-40 aircraft.

  Attached to a previously white unit,

  the 99th pilots were limited

  to ground attack: They were ordered not to engage

  in air-to-air combat. Then they were criticized

  for failing to attack, for cowardice.

  Southern congressmen threatened to disband

  the squadron. It was moved to Sicily.

  There, it earned a Distinguished Unit Citation.

  Feeding Dad a

  Salisbury Steak Dinner

  Tuskegee graduated more pilots;

  the all-black 332nd Fighter Group

  with three squadrons was sent to Italy

  in 1944. The 99th

  was assigned to this group, under the command

  of Colonel Benjamin O. Davis Jr.

  Equipped with P-47s and P-51s,

  they painted the tails of their aircraft red,

  and thus became known as Red-Tail Angels.

  From Ramitelli field they flew escort

  for bombing raids into Nazi strongholds

  as distant as Poland and Germany.

  Of almost two hundred bomber escort missions,

  the 332nd lost significantly

  fewer bombers than other fighter groups,

  and shot down a hundred and twelve enemy planes.

  None of them shot down five or more, so none

  were actually “aces,” but ninety-five

  were awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.

  On one spring day in 1945

  Colonel Davis and his Red-Tails escorted

  B-17 bombers to their target,

  a heavily defended tank factory in Berlin.

  On that day they shot down three German jets.

  Wheelchair to Walker

  The pilot gets up at 6:30 and packs his stuff,

  shooting the morning’s bull with his tentmate.

  If he misses breakfast, he’ll feel starved by noon,

  so he drinks the powdered coffee, eats powdered eggs.

  At 8:00 they’ll be briefed for an escort run

  to Turin, maybe, with B-17s

  and B-24s, to bomb the railroad yards.

  Whenever enemy fighters show up—

  Messerschmitts and Focke-Wulfs—

  the white pilots chase and get victories,

  but they hang tight as ordered, and bring in

  all of the bombers unblemished as newborns.

  They leave Turin’s railway twisted debris

  and fly to refuel at the base on Corsica,

  looking down on green peaks, cliffs, the moving blue.

  It hurts to see a crash. But c’est la guerre,

  he thinks. Thank you would be his constant prayer,

  especially boots on the ground and belly full.

  With luck, this will be an ordinary day,

  one of a series of days that will keep him safe,

  and will take him home to a long, happy life.

  With luck, he will not fall spiraling from the sky.

  With luck, he will live to hold his grandchildren.

  He lies on his cot, thinking about luck.

  Rehab Christmas

  On a plate-glass-window, ceiling-unlimited morning,

  a squadron of Mustangs scrambles into the sky

  to a rendezvous at twenty-five thousand feet

  over Umbrian villages and the lie of peace.

  Despite his sheepskin jacket, Lester shivers,

  more from anticipation than from cold.

  The pilots of the bombers he’s escorting

  might refuse to shake his hand, but what the hell:

  Homefolk Chicago teachers write to him

  and send kids’ crayon drawings signed with love.

  Black dots emerging from blue clarity

  develop into Messerschmitt 109s.

  Lester approaches to two hundred feet,

  thumbing his fire button to release

  an ack-ack burst of steel. The Hun explodes.

  A second Hun buzzes in at three o’clock.

  Lester banks right and fires. A tail of smoke

  follows its spinning dive. A parachute

  blossoms at seven thousand feet. A third

  bandit shoots gray lines past him. Lester chops

  his throttle, falls behind, and fires a burst.

  The Hun rolls upside down, screaming toward green.

  The brothers radio verbal high fives,

  regroup around the white boys, bring them in.

  Moving Dad Home

  Meanwhile, here in America,

  the Army Air Force established a new

  unit: the 477th Bombardment Group,

  comprised of pilots, gunners, and bombardiers,

  to be deployed in 1944.

  The 477th was stationed at Freeman Field,

  Indiana: four hundred black officers.

  But they weren’t allowed into the officers’ club.

  Ordered to sign papers saying they understood

  the officers’ club was for white officers,

  they refused. Their sit-in termed a mutiny,

  they were arrested and court-martialed.

  The 477th was inactivated,

  then integrated with the 99th,

  returned from Europe. Under the command

  of Colonel Davis and other black officers,

  the new 477th Composite Group

  was ready to go, when the war ended.

  Of nine hundred ninety-two Tuskegee pilots,

  three hundred and thirty-five were deployed,

  sixty-eight of them were killed in action,

  and thirty-two of them were prisoners of war.

  In 1948 President Truman

  integrated the U.S. Armed Services.

  Beginning

  Dad was released on Theresa’s birthday.

  She’d planned a bowling party with ten girls.

  We welcomed Dad with undiminished joy,

  followed his walker to his favorite chair,

  and took our usual seats around the room.

  Mom said, Tony, my love, we’re all so glad

  to have you home again. Thanks for solving

  Theresa’s dilemma. We’ll be back soon.

  She grabbed her keys; they left. And me and Dad

  sat there. For me, the last few months a blur

  of school and Amy, the most vivid hours

  were those I’d spent in Dad’s semiprivate room.

  The hours I’d spent watching Dad mend his brain:

  they were the only ones that held meaning.

  Those, and the hours I’d spent discovering

  the Tuskegee Airmen, that brotherhood

  of brothers. One of them was shot down twice,

  escaped twice from a POW camp,

  and walked home to their base in Italy!

  They were heroes of determination.

  I’d seen that determination in Dad.

  The doctors said he was very lucky.

  But it could be that you make your own luck.

  Shot down twice, caught twice, but free and walking!

  The Floodgates Opened

  We both said, So . . . at the same time. We laughed.

  I said, You’re home. Dad said, So, how’s Amy?

  I shrugged. She might or might not be the one.

  Dad nodded. Time will tell. And there’s no rush!

  I filled the pause with trivial questions:

  Could I bring him something? Make him some tea?

 
Did he want to see if there’s a game on?

  I didn’t know why it felt so awkward.

  We, who’d stood side by side looking at death.

  How are your Tuskegee Airmen doing?

  Have you made much progress on your paper?

  It was as if he’d opened the floodgates!

  I told him about the eager volunteers

  who rushed to enlist as soon as the news went out

  of the Tuskegee Air experiment:

  Men came from all over America,

  some from so far west they had never known

  another Negro family—or hate.

  Some came from high school, and faked their ages;

  some were Ivy League grads; from the Midwest,

  the South, from the Northeast: A thousand men

  pledged they would fight or die for their country.

  The way they were treated makes me ashamed.

  But the way they treated others makes me proud.

  Heroes

  We talked ’til he got tired. I helped him to bed.

  I ate a slice of Theresa’s birthday cake,

  when she and Mom got home. And the next day

  there was a letter from the DOD.

  Mozelle Scott and Mannie Sparks had both served,

  Scott in the 99th Pursuit Squadron,

  Sparks in the 332nd Fighter Group.

  So both of them were Tuskegee Airmen,

  both stationed in Italy. One shot down,

  one crashed when his landing gear malfunctioned.

  Black warriors. Potential grandfathers.

  Imagine: Heroes in our family!

  An almost faceless African American dude

  in a leather helmet and big goggles,

  a white silk scarf framing his jaw and chin,

  soft, warm brown eyes that could freeze to a steel gaze:

  a grandfather anyone would hope for.

  And my warrior father, giving death

  the finger as he fought to bring the lights

  back to the stroke-darkened parts of his brain:

  He was a hero in the family, too.

  Whoever Ace was, Dad was my hero,

  pushing himself forward for love of us.

  Strong, defiant, courageous.

  DMV

  Dad thought I should get my driver’s license.

  I’d been driving Mom here and there for weeks;

  he thought I’d been practicing long enough.

  We waited three hours at the DMV

  as a cross section of America

  entered, waited, was called to the counter.

  I aced everything, from the written test

  to parallel parking. And I looked cool

  and hot at the same time, in the photo.

  We’d been invited to Uncle Father Joe’s.

  The muddy vestiges of the last snow

  made puddles we splashed through as we drove there.

  In the car, I told Dad about Ed Gleed:

  how he was briefly Bing Crosby’s chauffeur,

  and then Bob Hope’s butler, how he was first

  in the first cadet class to graduate,

  and how he’d shot down two enemy planes.

  We pulled up at the rectory. Two guys

  stood there talking with Uncle Father Joe.

  One of them was Antwan. They helped Dad out,

  and walked him and his brother to the door.

  Antwan and I slapped palms, bumped fists, and grinned.

  This here’s Jameel. Jameel, this here’s Connor.

  Antwan bounced the ball and passed it to me.

  Beyond Skin

  You’d hardly notice that Dad drags one foot

  and sometimes sort of wobbles toward one side.

  I got an A on my honors thesis.

  Amy’s been dropping hints about the prom.

  Antwan’s working at Mama Lucia’s.

  I see him there a couple of times a week.

  I’m trying to save some money for a car.

  Inside, I’m both the same, and different.

  I’m different in ways no one can see.

  For instance, when I see or hear the news,

  I think now, Yeah, but what about the poor?

  Hey, what about the people of color?

  I feel like there’s a blackness beyond skin,

  beyond race, beyond outward appearance.

  A blackness that has more to do with how

  you see than how you’re seen. That craves justice

  equally for oneself and for others.

  I hope I’ve found some of that in myself.

  Theresa and Dad and I agree that we’re proud,

  though we don’t claim to “be” African American,

  or brag about “our” Tuskegee Airman.

  Unlike Carlo. He says it’s God’s best joke

  that a white man like him could have black genes,

  and that polenta’s still better than grits.

  How This Book Came to Be,

  and Why an Older African American Woman Ended Up Writing as a Young White Man

  My father, Melvin M. Nelson, was a captain in the United States Air Force, a navigator, and one of the Tuskegee Airmen, the first African American military aviators in the U.S. Armed Forces. I have long wanted to write a book about the Tuskegee Airmen for young adults, and when I suggested it to my editor, she said yes—but write it for readers who know nothing about the Tuskegee Airmen. Write it from the point of view of someone who’s learning about them for the first time.

  Some people believe that young adult readers can only identify with young adult characters. I’m not convinced this is correct, and if it is, it might be something writers and teachers and editors should try to change. But I decided I needed a young adult protagonist—a central character other young adults would be comfortable reading about. And here came my first big challenge: Who would this character be?

  The story of the Tuskegee Airmen is an African American story and an important piece of twentieth-century African American history. Most African American young adults have heard about them during February, Black History Month. (At least, I hope they have.) Tuskegee Airmen in their red blazers attended President Obama’s inaugurations and appeared on television. So I couldn’t imagine telling the Airmen’s story as a young African American adult who was totally clueless about them.

  I wondered—could I move the story into the past? Could the protagonist be the younger brother of a Tuskegee Airman, or years later, a Tuskegee Airman’s son? I couldn’t imagine how or where to begin.

  Then I remembered the furor I’d seen on Facebook after the 2012 release of Red Tails, George Lucas’s movie about the Tuskegee Airmen. There was a lot of chatter about the fact that the only love story the movie told was a fantasy about one of the African American pilots and a beautiful young Italian woman. My African American Facebook friends wanted the love story to be between a pilot and the African American girl he’d left behind. I don’t think that would have been very dramatic: A movie about the exchange of love letters would be boring! And, since the Airmen were stationed in Italy, it’s possible that one or two of them might have been involved with Italian girls.

  I don’t know of any such romances, but one of my childhood friends, Brigitte, was a biracial girl born in 1946 to an African American soldier father and a German mother. The mother gave her away at birth, and she was adopted by a childless Tuskegee Airman and his wife.

  Recent genealogical and DNA research tells us that a large percentage of so-called “white” Americans unknowingly have African American ancestors. According to Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. of Harvard University, the percentage of self-identified white Americans whose DNA is at least one percent Afr
ican is, in some Southern states, as high as twelve percent.

  I thought it might be interesting to imagine a Euro-American family’s discovery that they are also African American. I remembered reading a powerful novel by Sinclair Lewis when I was a young adult. Published in 1947, Kingsblood Royal tells of a middle-class Euro-American man in a small Midwestern town who learns that one of his forebears was a famous African American explorer. He is delighted, proud. But when he tells his white friends, they snub him and rub his nose in the nastiness of racism. At the novel’s end, he and his few new black friends are barricaded in his house as his white neighbors march toward it with guns and torches.

  I thought the Italian American grandson of a Tuskegee Airman might not know anything about the Tuskegee Airmen, but that an interest in his own family history might ignite his curiosity and make him identify with the history he discovered in his research. And now I had my protagonist.

  I remembered my father’s class ring, which I always hoped I would inherit (instead, it was given to my younger brother, who told me years later that he gave it to some girl he liked in high school, whose name he no longer remembered). The ring takes on another life in this story. I did inherit my dad’s college yearbook. He went to Wilberforce. The yearbook also plays a part here.

  Many writers travel through a labyrinth of thinking to arrive at a story, a protagonist, and finally a book. My labyrinth led me to invent Connor Bianchini and his grandfather. I did not invent any of the facts Connor learns about the Tuskegee Airmen. That part of the story is true. And still amazing.

  About the Author

  MARILYN NELSON is a three-time National Book Award finalist, has won a Newbery Honor, a Printz Honor, several Coretta Scott King Honors, the Commander’s Award for Public Service from the Department of the Army, and several prestigious poetry awards, including the Poets’ Prize and the Robert Frost Medal. She has also received three honorary doctorates. She lives in eastern Connecticut.