American Ace (4 page)

J
ake 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?

W
e'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).

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!

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.

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.

A
s 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

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.

O
ne 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.

Discovering the Tuskegee Airmen

Submitted by Connor G. Bianchini
for U.S. History Honors

H
andsome 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.

H
o-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.

A
dd 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.

T
heir 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.