The more things change, the more they stay the same... yet Amelia went missing in 1937. She didn't see the unfolding of the Second World War, or the aftermath. She didn't learn about the Holocaust, or fully understand the power of the atom. She never saw photographs of shadows pressed against vacant walls in Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
By the time she returns in 1980, the world is different. Looking at this through the prism of race relations, I turn to seminal moments, some were public, Martin Luther King Jr's March on Washington, Malcolm X and the Panthers, the subsequent assassinations. Some more personal, my sister was a Freedom Rider. I was terrified for her and incredibly proud. In elementary school I had one best friend, her name was Mildred Patterson and she was black. I know it mattered, but I can't say how or why. We were just friends, we played together. We liked each other I suppose and then life moved on and we moved with it.
In Muriel's book she speaks about the day she and Amelia ran off to school in their newly sewn dresses and discovered that a classmate, "Lulu May, a Negro" was wearing the identical print. "I was embarrassed as the similarity of our dresses seemed to serve notice to the world that our father could afford nothing better for us than that which Lulu May's father, who was a porter . . . got for his daughter." Class and race had mixed to form a potent brew. The girls ran home to change at midday and their Mother who was truly quite progressive, she let them wear bloomers and eventually got divorced at a time when few women would have dared . . . admonished them. In Muriel's telling, she forced them to see the other side. How would Lulu May feel? And of course Muriel lets Amelia take the lead, it's Amelia who declares she won't change her dress. Muriel follows suit. Muriel's Amelia has a strong moral compass.
This story stays with me as I draw Amelia into our world. I believe she would look deeper, and see more than what would obviously compel her initially. Scientific advancements would matter, but no more than social change. She would have such a unique perspective. . .it would truly be a gift.
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I don't know whether AE was aware of Bessie Coleman's existence, but she did know, and was glad, that there were a few black women in aviation. In her scrapbook of newsclippings about women in non-traditional career fields, there is a 1930 clipping from a Los Angeles newspaper about Marie Daughtery's parachuting performances at a local airshow hosted by William Powell's flight school, which was one of only two all-black flight schools in the U.S. Daughtery was a student pilot at the time. The fact that this black woman was among AE's collection of interesting women stories tells me that AE took her inspiration wherever she found it. Later on, in the mid-1930's, she visited the other black flight school then in existence, in Chicago. Janet Bragg, one of several women at the flight school, says AE came to see their facilities and gave them her encouragement.
ReplyDeleteEvery comment you make is fascinating. I like to think that she knew of Bessie, there's a certain wonderful symettry there, and I'm very taken with the way Muriel offers this story. It's one of many that shows both she and Amelia were raised to be independent thinkers.
ReplyDeleteI don't know anything about early African American pilots but I do know that Paul Laurence Dunbar - an important African American poet - was childhood friends with the Wright Brothers. (A long time ago a composer wanted me to write the book for a mucial about the Wright Brothers and this was one of the facts that stuck in my mind from the research)
ReplyDeleteI don't know a whole lot about the Wright Brothers. I'm betting you do though. . .so how did they end up childhood friends, where did they all grow up? Just asking . . .
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting to think of what a progressive would think of the way things have turned out, considering that most prognosticators are usually wrong. I'm amazed at these talking heads who describe what the next decade will be like, when the weather report's usually incorrect if it's done a week in advance!
ReplyDeleteLet's just hope you're right since every time I read a post that claims to know our economic future it's bleak, bleak, bleak.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the nice remark about my comments. :)
ReplyDeleteCompletely meant!
ReplyDelete