Copyright 2011
By
Ron Billingsley
Shoo, shoo little bird. Tell me of your love.
-Melody D'Amour
One
In the pitch blackness of the night it is impossible to see the AD’s propeller, but I can sense it. Four big blades, cutting an eternal circle into the darkness. I can feel that circle like a hand, steady and sure, pulling me through the night to the target.
What was the first circle in my life? Probably the turning propeller of a toy airplane thrust out into the wind. The light was glittery and alive, dancing and rippling off the spinning blades, as I held the small plane in my hand. Now I guide a much larger plane into the wind as the control stick gently throbs against my palm in a reassuring and familiar way. It seems as if I have always been in this cockpit, high above the earth, moving forward in space and time, guided by a constant memory on a mission that was always there.
When does memory start anyway? I don’t know, somewhere around the age of two I guess. For me, there was the beginning of memory and there was flying. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t want to fly. . .
I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t checking the face of the gauges: the tachometer, the oil temperature gauge, the cylinder head temperature, the altimeter, the compass. Yes, the engine is functioning perfectly, yes I’m at the right altitude, yes, I’m on the right heading. Yes, everything is correct . . . as I head for the target.
It’s true, growing up, no one that I knew had ever flown an airplane or even been inside of one. Yet, from the beginning, there were the dreams, flying dreams. Dreams so real, so powerful and so vivid that I would bolt into wakefulness with all the images and sensations of the dream still prickling my flesh and stirring within my limbs.
I would awaken from those dreams with the absolute conviction that I could fly. I could still feel the flight I had just made within my body. In my dream I would rise up from my bed and move away from the house top, merely by pushing down against the air with my hands. My body and legs formed the fuselage of an airplane and my arms and hands were the wings.
The air was marvelously responsive, reacting exactly like the water in a swimming pool. I could pull against it in a breast stroke to go forward, flap downward with arms and hands to go up. I had perfect control and so I could maneuver very precisely around telephone wires and large trees without the slightest sense of fear.
The control I experienced in those flights felt natural and absolute. I could go forward or backward, up or down with perfect precision. The muscles flexed in my arms and hands as they worked the air. No wonder, when I woke up, it still seemed totally plausible that I could fly. I had already lived it. For me, there was the beginning of memory and there was flying. I had already been in this cockpit.
But did I ever actually believe that I would some day fly a real airplane? I don’t know that I ever thought of it that way. It was simply an ideal that I always carried with me. And then, one day, it was true . . . It was true.
“You fly these things Butch?”
I can see now why it caught my father by surprise. And yet, maybe he was the cause of it all. He’s the one who took me on those first magical rides high up into the sky.
I can still remember the sunny mornings in the kitchen of the old house on 42nd street. All the light came in from one side and the ceiling was very high and far away. In mid day the room was filled with shadows, especially up near the corners of that high ceiling. But for a little while, early in the morning, the kitchen was bright, when the eastern light would come flooding in with a warm slant. I liked the morning best, by afternoon the light-yellow walls had dimmed down into blue-grey shadows and the room felt somber.
On some of those mornings, my father would come in and pick me up before he went off to work. He would hold me along the sides with his big hands and raise me up to his level so that I could look right into his bright eyes and see his rounded cheeks bulging with a smile.
“Whatta ya say Butch? I think I’ll call you Butch. Whatta ya think of that?”
“Now Skipper, don’t you start calling that child Butch.” My mother would say. “His name is Daniel-Raymond. I don’t want him going through life with a nickname. He’s got a beautiful name. Don’t you try to give him a stupid nickname like the one they put on you.”
My father’s name was Owen, but everyone called him “Skipper.” I never did find out how he got that name, but it always seemed to fit and he obviously preferred it to Owen.
“Is that right Butch? You don’t want your daddy to give you a nickname?” I don’t remember answering. Maybe I was too young to even frame a reply. I know I couldn’t have been much over two years old and I know I surely didn’t care. Anything he did was all right with me. I was high in the air, resting with complete security within his hands and the light of his smile.
“Whatdaya say Butch? You want to go for an airplane ride?
He would start to toss me up in the air. Tossing and catching as I squealed with excitement. The far corners of the ceiling suddenly rushed toward me, getting big and clear, then I would fall away, back down to his waiting hands. Again, the ceiling would suddenly rush toward me . . . then away. I would fly into those corners. Magically, I would hang still for a moment. Then the ceiling would drop away and I would be back in the secure grip of my father’s hands, against his chest, and within the deep resonance of his voice . . . then flying up again.
Sometimes he would sing to me as he held me and tossed me up in the air.
“Off we go into the wild blue yonder,
Climbing high into the sun.
Here they come zooming to meet our thunder,
At ‘em boys, Give ‘er the gun!”
From her position at the stove my mother would usually say,
“Skipper, stop throwing that child up in the air like that. Don’t you know you’re going to make him sick?”
“Oh, Anita, I’m not making him sick. He loves it. Listen to him laugh.”
“Of course he’s laughing; he’s filled with hysteria. That baby’s scared to death. And what if you dropped him?”
“Oh for God’s sake Anita, you’re just going to make a sissy out of him.”
The two of them, so different in personality and in physique. How on earth did they ever come to marry? I can still see him, tall and dark with broad shoulders and a deep chest tapering down to a 30-inch waist. And way below him, short and fair is my mother. She was actually under five feet tall and probably weighed at that time, barely 100 pounds. As I rested in my father’s arms, my eyes were up with his and I looked down to see the beam of her impatient face turned up at him. She seemed way below us, but not small. Even from my father’s height I felt her as a force.
I could sense my father accept her remarks. His arms would stir and I could feel him starting to put me down, even before he did it. I would look at his big brown hands as he placed me on the floor; the fingers were full and round. The tips of the fingers were rounded too and carefully clipped. They looked like my hands only browner, fuller, and so much larger. His head would go away, as he put me down, moving way back up there - far above me. And then the hands too would pull back.
“Again daddy” I would say. “Again!” And sometimes, he would lift me up once more. And send me soaring for one last time. I could look right down into his shiny eyes. I could see his cheeks stretching with his smile. I never wanted him to stop. Finally he would remember that he had to go to work and he would place me gently on the floor before disappearing through the swinging door of the kitchen. I would reach for a toy airplane which I would fly in my imagination across the room until it was time for breakfast.
The engine gives one of it’s periodic little spasms and the tachometer blips up for a moment before settling back down. Everything is looking normal, its steady pulse a reassuring vibration coming to me through the frame of the seat and the body of the airplane. The mission is go . . . and Nat is dead!
The telegram is in the pocket of my flight suit. I know it is there. But, how can he be dead? How can he be dead? I can see his face on the windshield and the eyes glare fiercely at me across the pool table.
“So you told em’ you were willing to die for the fatherland?”
How could he ever understand? How could anyone if I told them that I had always known that I could fly. Even though I don’t think even I really believed that it was ever going to happen. Still, it was always there. The reality of it was always there.
And Joan, assuring me that I could . . . Her absolute certitude. “But I know one thing. I know that you can accomplish anything you want to do.” Always certain. And yet . . . she made it so hard . . . “Who is this woman?” I kept thinking . . . “Who is this woman?” Being with Joan can be so uncomfortable. “Do you mean, I can’t imagine what it would be like to deal with all those people who wouldn’t approve . . . all those people who would hate us because we’re not the same color. Do you mean I can’t deal with them . . . or, you can’t deal with them?”
Who is this woman . . . ? Is she for me or against me?
The aircraft feels different tonight, heavier with it’s ordnance load hanging off the wings . . . and Nat dead! How can he be dead?
I try to relax my grip on the stick. I’ve got to bring my eyes out of the cockpit. I’ve got to get beyond his reflection on the windshield, beyond his face, looking back at me. I have to keep my position, I’ve got to keep track of the red tail-lights of my flight mates. I have to watch what I’m doing. I have a mission to complete; I have to fly this airplane through the darkness to the target.
Just a few weeks before we deployed I was flying off the coast of Oregon on one of those solidly overcast, totally black nights. A night much darker than this, no moon, no horizon, no lights . . . nothing. The night was a featureless animal with a huge black mouth that had somehow swallowed me up. It was like all those times I used to hide deep in the back of the large cedar lined closet in my parent’s bedroom, back beyond the second row of clothes. I would burrow into the total darkness, seeking even greater blackness by pushing my face into the closely placed coats and dresses that hung at the far back. It was scary, but no one could ever find me there. I was completely safe. My parents would never think to look there and none of the other kids would brave such darkness to seek me out.
After a few moments I would settle in. My heart would stop its rapid pounding; my breath would subside to practically nothing. I would watch my body gradually slowing to a halt and my mind following after, steadily slowing down. In the absolute blackness thoughts would slip away. The mind itself would seem to stop, and come to rest in a space of luminous stillness. I would find myself safe, and at peace in the blackness among the thickly hung garments.
In the absolute blackness of this night, the cockpit of the AD is my private closet, a plastic bubble filled with soft red light. I know that I am flying at 150 knots, on a heading of 310 degrees at 5,000 feet above the sea. But in the midst of the all encompassing darkness, such data coming from my instruments feels abstract. The reality seems to be that I am voyaging into the back of the deepest, dark closet in the world, into the bowels of the night itself and I wonder if I will reach its end.
He said, “You’ll never make it.”
On that night off the coast of Oregon, in spite of all logic, I felt compelled to look out of the cockpit, trying to see something in the darkness. The effort was totally futile. Each time I looked all I saw was a myriad of reflections bouncing off the windshield and my own face, spread in a broad distortion of flattened features. My eyes look slanted, almost as if they’re crying beneath the red and gold helmet.
“I never used to cry before I met you.” She said. But I know it wasn’t just me. I saw her crying in her sleep. I was gradually learning more and more about her world, learning what was behind the newspaper articles. Joan lived in the world of SNCC as I lived in the world of the navy. She seldom told me the stories she was hearing every day from the south. But I could guess. I got more than I wanted from the newspapers. And sometimes I could see those stories on her face when we got together for the weekend. And, of course, Joan didn’t forget. How could she. That’s what they talked about every day down at her office.
“The parents of those little girls,” she kept saying after I shook her awake. “Never coming back to them. . . Did you see the faces of those parents? To think that something like this could happen in our country. I just can’t accept it. I don’t know how you can just sit there, how you can be so hardened to it.”
All those newspaper stories between us, between what we were each trying to achieve. I was so afraid that she would never really understand, never really grasp what it meant . . . I was afraid that she would always judge me. Joan can be so tough.
“Whaddaya want from me? Whaddaya want from me?” I screamed it at her, demanding to know, demanding to know what I already knew. What I know now. And yet always, her eyes were unwavering . . . coming up to mine.
“You might have to go out and kill people. Are you prepared to do that?” And I had answered her, out of anger, really without thinking.
“Yes, I’m prepared for it.” I glared at her and she turned away.
I need to focus. The instruments are swimming in front of me. I listen for the reassuring throb of the engine. I need to concentrate on the round red dials on the instrument panel. Those dials, and the red tail lights are my reference points, my hard data telling me what’s happening and assuring me that there is a reality beyond Nat’s death and the black belly of the night. Some times the tachometer makes strange little jumps of 50 – 100 rpm, indicating a surging engine. Maybe something’s wrong. But no, tonight everything appears to be normal. Still, once again I check all the major dials: oil pressure, oil temperature, cylinder head temperature, fuel pressure. Everything looks all right. Then I try to go back to the flight instruments: altitude, airspeed, heading. Again everything seems normal and . . . Nat is dead.
The AD’s engine is an enormous, eighteen cylinder, aircooled radial design, the Wright R3350. It seems like an incredibly complicated and fragile device. But it puts out 2,700 horsepower and among pilots it is considered very reliable. Right now it is turning over at a gentle 1800 rpm. It sits right in front of me, only the few layers of the firewall separate us. In times past, I have taken my helmet off to listen. There is nothing smooth or elegant about the way it sounds. It reminds me of a thousand washing machines, all running together, and each one agitating at a different rhythm. The cacophony is tremendous.
Yet I love this engine. I love to look at it when the cowling is off and many of the hundreds of parts are on display. I love to watch it when I start it up and it chokes and coughs it’s way back to life – belching and churning out puffs of white and grey exhaust until it catches hold and roars fully into life. I especially love to see-hear-feel it at full throttle when we are strapped to the catapult with the blue and red flame roaring from the ten exhaust pipes. I live for those few seconds before launch when I know in a moment the catapult is going to send us streaking off the front of the carrier and hurl us into the air.
“ Shoo, shoo little bird. Tell me of your love.”
I glance at the windshield where Prof stares calmly back at me. He’s almost Nat’s opposite. Although he never understood the flying either. For him it just wasn’t rational, especially for a negro. Why would a negro who was sane want to join the United States military? That would be his take on it. Only “suckers” no matter what their color would go and fight for “the man” that oppressed them, the man that was going to make money on their blood and their labor. “What did Eisenhower call it? The military-industrial complex.” But Prof never raged and ranted like Nat. He was always clinical in his questions and explanations.
I knew that he was trying to warn me. And I had always listened closely to what he said. I liked that he never preached. He just laid out “the facts of the case” as he liked to put it. And Prof’s facts were impeccable. I understood that. So I listened. But I really wasn’t ready to deal with it. I couldn’t truly discuss it with him. He’d never been in the navy, never trained and flown with a bunch of guys, become close to them. Yes! I hated the prejudice, the restrictions, the murderous hatred, as much as he did. But the country itself, it’s basic ideals, it’s physical beauty. How could you hate that?
For some reason, I just couldn’t imagine saying that to him, and certainly not to Nat. But then neither could I give up what I knew to be true.
If you could just see it from the air . . .
That night, off the coast of Oregon . . . flying in absolute darkness . . . then gradually, without realizing it, emerging into a large opening in the clouds. They were pulling back and the heavy humidity that is so typical of the area was dispersing. One moment I was looking at the instruments and recalculating my position and the next I looked out into a new night sky, a sky of marvelous clarity. Not only were the stars visible, but it was so clear that they had an almost tangible quality. The Milky Way was a huge misty sweep of light in front of me, and all of the countless points of light within it seemed to have emerged as distinct entities while still being part of that broad arc of luminous bodies.
Below me the sea was absolutely still. It had become a black mirror. Because it was so dark, there was absolutely no horizon, no line of demarcation between the mirror-like sea and the sky above. There was no way to tell up from down. The stars were everywhere. I was flying into a sea of stars. I was in a domain of total beauty with stars above me and stars below me. Everywhere I looked, there were stars. The aircraft, itself, seemed to drop away. Direction no longer meant anything because I was at some kind of center where the universe stretched out equally from me in all directions, stretched into a blackness speckled with a million points of light - a living darkness, pulsing with light.
This is what I had always known about flying. This is what I always wanted to share with Joan. My eyes coming up from the red field of the instruments and seeing . . . realizing . . . knowing . . . that I was flying through the heart of the universe.
Two
Tonight is not so clear, no million points of light through the windshield, only the enveloping darkness of a moonless night and the red taillights leading to the target. The telegraph is there in my pocket. Nat is dead, I will never see him again. How can that be so when he is right here in front of me on the windshield.
Right here, blaming me. Spitting out the names, “Schwerner, Chaney, Goodman.” As if I had done it and intended to do it again, as if he really believed that I was somehow responsible. I held the receiver away from my ear, trying not to get angry. Wanting to hang-up, knowing it was a waste of time. I would always be the enemy and he was never going to forgive me . . . But I was wrong . . . In spite of all his anger at me over the past few years. In spite of that terrible Christmas dinner with he and Skipper screaming at one another. In spite of all that. I still remember . . .
The look on Skipper’s face when he was playing ball with Nat, how his eyes would gleam with the swift whirring sound of the ball moving precisely back and forth between the two of them. They were the perfect pair, both great athletes, both most alive on the ball field . . .
Nat was his son too. All those years, watching him on the ball field, listening to him talk. Even when Nat was in high school he and Skipper would throw the ball around in the backyard. I don’t think Nat cared about pleasing anybody else, but he wanted to please Skipper. And he did, he did please him. Nat was the son my father should have had.
During the summer, Skipper and his friends always played in a local semi-pro league. Nat and I loved to go to those games where people we knew were able to live out the baseball dramas that we usually only heard on the radio or watched on television. Here was baseball up close and we had our own hero to cheer for. We would sit side-by-side in the rickety, wooden bleachers with a handful of other spectators. Many of them were friends of Skippers or his team-mates.
“Come on Skipper, come on babe. Show these bums that you know how to pitch . . . Hey Skip. Go ahead and chuck that thing. Mow em' down man.”
My mother and my aunt Dolores would usually come. They too would yell encouragement from time-to-time, but mainly they were busy chatting about their own affairs. Dolores was much taller than my mother with a fuller figure. She may not have been beautiful, but most of the men around there seemed to find her desirable. She emphasized her assets with tight clothing, bright lipstick and a ready smile. When Dolores walked down to the side of the field to buy an ice-cream cone for us you could see the heads of the players from both benches turn to look at her.
Nat’s head would also shift as he observed the men watching his mother. She obviously enjoyed the attention and clearly it bothered him. He didn’t have a father like I did. So he had to contend with the seemingly endless line of men who came to take his mother out over the years. It was a long time before I found out what had happened between Dolores and Nat’s father. I had never seen the man, never even heard him discussed. There was no picture of him on the dresser. And, of course, he never showed up.
We knew that two of the ice cream cones were for us. And sure enough, as Dolores strolled back toward my mother she would beckon us over. Although she always bestowed the cones with a bright smile, Nat never seemed pleased with her. He would immediately return his gaze to the ball field and to Skipper out on the mound.
It was obvious that Skipper loved being out on that ball field where the mound was center stage. He was an entertainer. There were times when he would sometimes give a particularly aggressive stare at the batter in front of him. This hard stare was especially likely if the batter was hugging the plate, infringing on his territory. Skipper didn’t approve of that. He would give the batter a sharp look between each pitch and then throw a fiery "brush back" pitch that would go directly toward the batter's head forcing him to dive to the ground. Often there would be a series of fierce stares between Skipper and the batter.
Usually the brush back seemed to work. The batter would move away from the plate and the final pitch, which was often inside, would catch him swinging late. Skipper would strike him out.
After the game, Nat and I would go over to mingle with the players where they congregated next to the fence in their dusty uniforms. My uncle Bob, who played centerfield, was always there and Skipper’s best friend Duke Harrow. Bob looked very much like my father, only shorter and more compact. I always liked to hang out with him. He was probably the most enthusiastic and amiable man I ever knew. And, like me, he greatly admired Skipper.
Usually the three of them were in a huddle with us below them. They smoked cigarettes and passed a bottle back and forth as they talked. Duke was tall and slim. When he spoke there was a kind of intensity and the oriental eyes in his dark face seemed to take in everything. Right now they flicked back and forth from Bob and Skipper to Dolores who was standing beside the bleachers talking to several players. Nat and I stood below them, watching as the talk and the bottle went back and forth. We tried to assume the same nonchalant postures. Like Duke, Nat would shift his attention between the men above him and his mother's animated conversation with the ballplayers.
There was no doubt, that my father was the star of his team and various players from the other team would frequently come up to congratulate him on his victorious pitching.
Often they would bend down and talk to us.
“Hi ya doing little guys? You boys going to be ball players when you get bigger?” Of course, we nodded vigorously that we were. Above our heads Uncle Bob was praising his brother as other players came up to share the bottle.
“Well the old Skipper really burned em' today. Did you see those jokers hitting the ground when he threw his dust-off pitch?”
“Yeah the Skipper wasn't takin' no shit from nobody today.” Duke added. “Not even that big first baseman of theirs. And that first baseman was lookin' mighty mean Skip. The second time you dusted him I thought sure he was coming after you.”
“Yeah, well hell man. I just decided it was him and me. I was gonna push him back from the plate and if he wanted to tangle over it, then we were just gonna have to get it on.”
They were into it now, into the ritual-like conversation that I had heard so many times before. Duke carried the theme.
“You can't back down man, you can't. I can still remember the time I come running home from school with two white kids after me who were flat out intent on beating my butt. Just as I got to the front door my old man steps in my way. Blam! I just ran right into him. 'I don't know where you think you're going Bud . But, if you think you're coming in this house, you're gonna have to fight with me. And I'm gonna put more knots on your head than those two kids outside ever thought of.’ I mean I figured out in a hurry that it was a hell-uv-a-lot easier to hassle with two white kids than my old man.”
As Duke and Skipper talked above us, Bob squatted down to show us how to box. Nat was listening to Bob, while I found myself paying more attention to the voices above me. To this day, those voices still resonate in my head.
Bob was trying to demonstrate proper boxing technique.
“Now you gotta remember to keep the thumb tucked in. Keep the wrist straight, see. Try to put your shoulder into the punch like this. Bob put up his open hands in front of us so that we could use them as targets for our punches. He would move his outstretched palms from side to side. Encouraging us to hit them solidly. “That’s right Nat, follow through, follow through. OK, let’s give Danny a chance here. No Danny, you’ve got to throw you punches a little faster, throw em like lightning. Atta boy, good try.” Bob was always encouraging no matter how poorly I performed. And then, I was also listening to Duke talking above me.
“Cuz I knew that razor strap of his was going to tear my butt up something awful. So I went back out in the street and me and the white kids fought until they got tired and went on home. And you know those two guys never did bother me no more. I mean, I learned in a hurry. Sometimes you just got to get out there in the street with your hands and take care of some business. Don’t matter who you got to deal with. The worse they can do is put some hurting on you. But you can always be a man.”
Looking back, I now realize that Nat also had more than one thing on his mind. He glanced away toward his mother who was getting into an automobile with one of the players. As Dolores left Nat returned his attention to Bob. Suddenly he released a flurry of punches against Bob's open hands.
The message coming from above our heads was clear. A real man doesn’t retreat from danger. Always move forward to meet what you are afraid of. This is the world I had also gotten used to on those bright Sunday mornings in the kitchen when I listened to my father sing.
“Well whatdaya know it’s mornin’ already. And the dawnin is beginning to break. It’s time to climb into my saddle. And ride the Navajo Trail.”
Skipper would sing his cowboy songs when he cooked on his day off. He was a much better cook than my mother. I can still remember looking up at him and feeling the joy from his voice hovering all around me. I always wanted to be able to sing like that, with such exuberance and with such sweetness. In later years I tried to sing all of his songs: “The Navajo Trail,” “The Streets of Laredo,” “The Old Chisholm Trail.” Those were the days when I knew that I could be that lonesome cowboy out on the Navajo Trail, watching all the rich colors of sunrise, moving with an easy rhythm to the motion of my horse, tall and very secure in the saddle. The horse was not really an animal in my mind, but rather a gently moving platform, almost like the deck of a small boat bobbing easily across the prairie with the endless pressure of the breeze from my father’s voice pushing it along.
In hindsight, my childhood fantasies are absolutely hilarious. Because in reality I was a negro kid, who was afraid of horses. Hell, I got nothing but a very sore butt the few times I was on a horse. But at the time that contradiction didn’t occur to me. The cowboy was the prototype of all the western heroes I came to admire and identify with down at the Tivoli Theater. I loved Hopalong Cassidy, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Randolph Scott and John Wayne. I was sure that I could be one of them.
The Tivoli also showed lots of military movies. Sitting next to Skipper I watched American fighter pilots engage in aerial combat against the Germans during World War II. Just like the cowboys, the fighter pilots were always victorious in protecting their bomber fleet and the Nazi aircraft would drop in flaming debris from the sky. Boys don’t think of military combat as death and suffering. They only think of it as thrills and glory. So it was with me. Watching the turnings of fighter planes high above the fields of Europe I was seeing a totally fulfilling activity. I was in that cockpit, moving with the aircraft, turning in my dark theater seat and feeling the pull of Gs on my body as I bore down on the enemy pilot in front of me.
I can still remember what it felt like to swagger out of the theatre after the film was over, still joyous and energized by the triumphs I had just witnessed on the screen. My father was beside me as I walked back to the car in the cowboy boots that my Aunt Ella had provided. In those days we walked in sync. And I knew that I could be the real man that he expected.
Three
I could barely catch a baseball, and could never really hit one. But I tried. When my father had time between his morning and afternoon jobs we would practice in the backyard. He wanted to help me become a good ball player, maybe another Jackie Robinson. His throws would come straight and sharp, right to my glove, while at least half of the time, mine would be terribly erratic, forcing him to root around in the bushes behind him. It was painful to watch him continually searching after my errant throws. I could see the enthusiasm steadily bleeding out of him. Gradually he would move closer and then even closer in an effort to reduce the possibility of the ball going beyond his reach.
I hated to see the growing look of disappointment on his face, so I really worked hard to get it right. But it seldom happened. How did people throw baseballs anyway? Whenever I threw a baseball, almost immediately my shoulder would start to hurt. And when I was catching, in spite of the leather glove, the palm of my left hand was quickly in pain. The hard ball seemed to drive right into the bones threatening to shatter them with each catch.
“Don’t just stick your mitt out in front of you like that Danny. Pull back with it as the ball enters, like this. Pull back naturally with your whole arm.”
But no matter how many tips I got, baseball was a sport that totally eluded me. It wasn’t that I didn’t like it, I simply wasn’t suited to it as midgets don’t seem suited to basketball. I never did figure out how people were able to play baseball. I couldn’t catch, I couldn’t throw accurately and I sure as hell couldn’t bat. I never understood how it was possible and my father never understood how it was not possible.
On many of those baseball afternoons we would both be relieved by Nat’s arrival. My father’s face would instantly brighten when he saw Nat coming, but he would wait patiently and try to hide his rekindling enthusiasm. Here was someone to play with. We all knew what was coming and we all wanted the same thing. After a few minutes I would say, “why don’t you catch for little while Nat?”
“OK” he would respond. And then the yard would echo with the swift whirring sound of the ball moving precisely back and forth between the two of them. There in the growing afternoon shadows every throw ended in a crisp smack as the ball entered the properly held glove. The air would fill with the pleasure of their softly encouraging remarks to one another.
“Nice catch . . . Good throw . . . Yeah, that one was in there . . . Wow, that baby had some steam on it! . . .Watch it old man, watch it. Here I come . . . Stand back youngster, this ball’s gonna have some of Skipper’s magic on it.”
They were both skilled and even though I was envious, still I couldn’t help but enjoy the sight of the perfectly thrown and perfectly caught ball flying back and forth . . . the clear sense of pleasure that they got from playing with one another. The setting sun would cast a final warm orange glow against the white wall of the house and my father’s face would take on that faint orange hue, shining with sweat and pleasure. How I wished that I could put that look on his face.
On other days my father would be relieved of his baseball chores by the intrusion of my mother.
“Danny, its long past time for you to come on in here and practice the piano. Caught between two distasteful choices I would feign interest in the baseball because at least it would give me my father’s support.
“Aw Momma, we just got started playing a few minutes ago.” Her responses never changed in the slightest.
“You heard me. Come on in here. And I want to hear that piano a full hour. Not five minutes of playing and ten minutes of sitting, like you do.”
My father would try to come to my defense although we both knew it was useless.
“Anita why don't you leave the boy alone and let him have some fun.”
“Would you please keep your mouth out of this. The last thing I need is some help from you. If you had your way this boy'd be drinking down on the corner with you and your cronies .”
Their remarks to one another hardly varied by a word and I knew what the result would be.
“You don't know what you're talking about. The boy needs to play sports. You’re going to turn him into some kind of piano playing dude.”
She would close the conversation with . . . “Danny get on in here and start practicing.”
If Nat was around, my father would not even bother to protest. The ball would immediately begin to zip back and forth with the familiar whirring sound. I would reluctantly go to the piano and start to practice knowing that I would not likely ever have that kind of relationship with my father. And the piano was not an adequate substitute.
I had thought that I was going to like piano lessons. I enjoyed the music I heard on the radio and on record players. But my teacher, Mrs.Lundberg, Nat called her “Mrs Dumb-berg”, never allowed me to play popular music. Listening to and playing “that kind of music ” would “ruin “ my ear. So I had quickly come to look on practicing the piano as a kind of drudgery. My mother agreed with Mrs. Lundberg, so when she was outside on the porch listening I knew I had to practice with some diligence. Unless, of course, Dolores was around then she would not really be paying attention.
Often, in the summer when it was warm, my mother and her sister would sit on the porch and talk. Their conversation sometimes drifted in through the open window. I loved to listen in on grown-up conversations. Maybe it has something to do with being an only child. I always seemed to enjoy hanging out with grown-ups more than with kids. Of course, I particularly enjoyed listening when the conversation was about me or Nat. On this afternoon the sisters were onto a familiar topic. By playing softly and stopping occasionally to carefully study the music I could listen in.
”I don't know how you get Danny to mind you the way he does.” Dolores said. My mother’s response was the one I had heard her give a hundred times before.
“Dolores, you just got to learn how to say 'No' to a man, and mean it.”
“Well I'm sure glad that Nat is at least around Skipper some of the time. At least he'll listen to Skipper.”
“That's because Skipper tells him exactly what he wants to hear. The two of em are just alike. I'm not sure it's good for either one of them.” That comment always stirred me with a sense of wonder and uneasiness. She was right, it seemed to me. Skipper was my father, but Nat was the son who gave him joy . . . the son he was proud of.
“Well Skipper's the only man that's really been in Nat's life for any period of time and I'm sure glad for that. I sure wanted him to get to know his daddy. I think that would-a helped.”
To which my mother replied “Girl, I don't know why you ever thought something like that. You musta been the only one in Baton Rouge that would of ever thought that man was going to have anything else to do with you or your child.” Again my mind was filled with wonder. Who was this father that never wanted anything to do with Nat? And why would he have rejected him and my aunt?
Sometimes when I was flying over the ocean those conversations would come back to me. On cloudy days I would look out across the flat, grey surface of the water to where it stopped at the horizon. I would see Nat’s grey eyes, dark like the rain clouds, yet giving off a soft light while he patiently waited for me to put down the model I was working on and come outside to play
It’s sad, that you can spend a lot of time with a person and not really notice very much. How old were we when I finally realized that he had grey eyes? Nobody talked about who his father was, but like most American negroes he was of mixed race and with his light skin, we all knew that his daddy had to be light. Very few negroes in America are one hundred per cent African. Those African women were getting raped by white men from the very beginning. So we were never surprised at the range of colors in a negro gathering. Nat was clearly a person of color, although he did not have dark skin. Yet his eyes were dark, so if you looked casually you would assume that they were brown. But in strong light you could see the grey. I was probably fourteen or fifteen before I actually realized that.
Nor did I realize that Nat’s companionship was one of the constants around which I had navigated. He may not have been my biological brother, but he was my functional brother. When I went away to college that finally dawned on me. I started to remember some of the things that he had tried to teach me about sports, and those times when he would turn to me for help with his school work. It didn’t happen often. Nat was never attracted by academics. School was a place that existed so that guys could get together to play sports. So there was never any question of him matching me scholastically. He seemed to respect my academic achievements, but he did not have the slightest desire to emulate them. He just wasn’t interested. Maybe because scholarship did not seem dramatic enough. But he was interested in me, and I know now that he loved me.
Nat would sit in my attic, which reeked with fumes from airplane cement, and try to pull me out into the back yard to play catch, out into the real world. He would watch me for awhile without speaking, but I could always feel his restless energy that was anxious to take me elsewhere.
“Come on,” he would say. “Let’s go outside and play with something real.”
“Nat, look at this baby,” I would hold up one of my little planes for his inspection. “This is a 51-D Mustang. Do you know how fast this little bird will go?” I would zoom the little plane past his head so fast that its propeller would twirl. Nat could hardly muster even a polite display of interest. But I realize now, that he always had a darker vision of the future than mine.
“Man, I don’t know why you mess with those things. Don’t you know that the white man ain’t never going to let you fly an airplane.?”
In the summer of 1950, when I was ten years old, I went for a flight in an Arizona sky. The black plastic propeller of my aircraft was a shimmering disc pulling me higher and higher, into blue brightness, into blue light. It was a sky that stretched forever and I was one with it. I was that sky of light.
The three of us were driving across the Arizona desert on the way to my aunt’s home in El Paso. Skipper was at the wheel of his “new” car, a 1947 Mercury station wagon that he had purchased just a few months before. It had imposed a strain on the family budget and on the relationship between my parents. But it was something that he had to have.
The Mercury was a shiny, deep maroon, with beautiful lacquered wood paneling. In years to come my father would have other cars, some of them equally beautiful and really brand new, but this was his first “good” car. The previous owner had kept it immaculate so it felt like new to us. How his face glistened with joy when he got behind the wheel and on this summer day his delight remained.
I liked the Mercury too because it had small jump seats way in the back that set up high and gave me a good view. But, best of all, I could sit with my hand out the window, holding a model airplane into the wind between the occasional warnings from my mother.
“Danny, pull your hand in. Don’t you know that something could come along and knock your arm off?” I would stick my hand out with the model airplane gripped between the thumb and fingers. Watching the circle of the propeller twirling in the wind. I would dream my way into the cockpit. And once there, I would twist and turn my little plane, imagining loops and rolls, and the sharp high G turns of a dog-fight. Sometimes I would fly the B-24 “Liberators” with fours engines and four twirling propellers.
Far away, in the front of the car, my father bulked behind the steering wheel, while only the head of my mother was visible above the seat. They seemed separate from me. I experienced them as vague shapes, and even the frequent tussle of their voices came through as only a soft rumbling at the periphery of my mind.
“Skipper, it was just foolishness for us to spend all that money on this car just so you can drive it around all day long and show it off to your cronies!”
“Aw Anita, you just don’t know what you’re talking about. You do more showing off in one afternoon to those lady friends of yours then I’ll do in a lifetime. Why don’t you just let me drive the damn car and keep quiet.”
“Keep quiet? Skipper you don’t seem to realize that you’re not the only one that is out working to pay for this thing. Why, with the money we spent on this car we could have . . . .”
I could see my father’s right hand move sharply up and away from the steering wheel in a gesture of irritation. I knew, just from the movement, what he was saying even though I could barely hear it
“Aw, for Christ’ sake Anita. You’re not the only one in this family that works hard and you . . . ”
As I watched the light on the whirling disc of the toy propeller my parents became even more remote, like the road droning away beneath me and even my own body. Everything became distant and inconsequential except that toy airplane with its shiny blur of a propeller and me inside of it soaring into high, blue space.
How strange it must have been to see that station wagon driving through the endless stretches of sand and cactus along a two-lane road, dwindling to nothing in the shimmering heat waves of the noon-day sun, with a child’s hand sticking out the rear window holding a model airplane for hours on end.
From my perch in the cockpit I could se the station wagon as a tiny speck moving across the desert below me. I could feel the slight vibrations of the airframe against the sides of my body and along my arms and shoulders as I banked the aircraft from one side to another to get a better glimpse of the land far below. The horizon was a long way off, mistily merging into scattered white clouds while above was an arc of pale blue sky with the golden disc of the sun at its center. It was all so how familiar . . .
Twelve years later as I sat in the cockpit of the AD out on the warm-up apron, I watched the familiar shimmering disc of light turning in front of me. I could see myself, feel myself, riding in the back of the station wagon and holding onto a model airplane. My glance would fall on the black gauges in front of me. Then I would look out of the cockpit. The ground already seemed far away, father down even than the distance from the back seat of the station wagon. Finally, I would taxi out to the duty runway, hold the brakes a moment before applying full throttle to the engine. The blur of the blades would become brighter, giving forth an iridescent light with a wisp of vapor curling off the tips. I would release the brakes and the aircraft would surge forward down the runway as those spinning blades pulled me forward, then up, up, UP, into the sky. The landing gear would contract into the body and then seat under the wings with a firm “thunk.” I was free.
“Shoo shoo little bird. Tell me of your love.”
I always knew it would be like this.
So I was a child that dreamed a lot, and of course I dreamed of flying. But those were not my parents dreams for me. My mother was always horrified at the thought of me in an airplane. From her perspective nothing could be more senselessly impractical and dangerous. “Horribly dangerous.”
What my mother wanted was an industrious little gentleman. Her expectations were backed up by a phrase that she continually repeated . . . “Never say can’t. Danny I don’t ever want to hear you use that word!”
During all of my formative years she would tell me over and over again, “You can do anything.” Whenever she heard the words, “I can’t” start to emerge she would immediately stop me and launch into her lecture.
“I never want to hear those words come out of your mouth. Not now, not ever! If you don’t quit and if you are willing to work you can accomplish anything!” She constantly repeated that message and tried to demonstrate it. And I have to admit, mother managed to enact her ‘Can Do’ philosophy with great success in most areas of my life. She proved her point with home work assignments that I didn’t think I could get done or yard work that seemed impossible to finish. No matter how late she was to an event she would insist on entering and usually get seated.
“You’re my child, you’re part of me. How could you not succeed?
I have only met one other person who was so insistent on my capacity to achieve.
“Oh . . . you just forgot yourself for a moment. Whatever it was, you just forgot yourself. When you remember who you are you can do anything . . . Well, I don’t know what interfered with your concentration. But I know one thing. I know that you can accomplish anything you want to.”
How do you know that? I thought to myself. And, as if, she was listening to my mind she said, “I just know. I know you Danny.”
Because mother worked all day, out of the house at her clerical job, and often had additional work that she brought home, she didn’t believe that I should be “laying around expecting to be waited on. Oh no Danny. You are over seven years of age. You have reached the age of understanding and responsibility. You owe it to this family to contribute. Do you see how hard your father and I work to support you, to put bread on the table. Well you need to understand. You have to do your part to help support your family.”
So my mother always had a number of “chores” for me to perform when I got home from school. The problem, from my point of view, was that the task were unending. As soon as I finished one she would remember something else that needed attending. Or else the job was not done adequately.
“Danny, I asked you to dust every thing in this room. Now look here on this counter. Looks like you didn’t even touch it. Oh, and you certainly need to water all the plants before you start to practice the piano.”
The work was not difficult for me, because I was a ten year old, it was difficult because I quickly learned that it was unending. With mother, there was always one more thing to do. There wasn’t any point in “finishing”, because there was going to be something else to deal with.
So in addition to airplanes, books were my escape. I quickly learned that if I was going to survive my mother, books were essential. I liked big historical novels by Frank Yerby and Thomas B. Costain; books that could carry me to distant places when I could fine a hidden spot away from my chores.