I wrote A Pair of Wings, a historical fiction about the original Hidden Figure, pioneer aviatrix Bessie Coleman, whose story has waited one hundred years to be told.
On a snowy evening one week before Christmas, the Wright Brothers flung themselves into history and gave the world quite possibly the greatest Christmas gift of all time – the gift of flight. An unlikely spectator, 11-year-old Bessie Coleman, a Texas cotton laborer and chambermaid, was watching.
Coleman would go on to become the first of her eight living siblings to go to college, live as a single woman in Chicago and work as a manicurist. While a dozen or so stoic photos seal our image of her as exquisite and poised, what we don’t get a sense for in vintage sepia is her ability to strategize, and to solve the seemingly unresolvable. Coleman was coming of age in an America where women were just gaining the right to vote, lynchings went unprosecuted and Jim Crow was the law.
When access is denied to her because she is both female and Black, and it becomes clear that she will not be able to train in the U.S.; Coleman is undaunted. France appears to be her only option, but first she must learn how to speak French. At age 26, Coleman enrolled in Berlitz night classes. After working all day as a men’s manicurist, and later, a restaurant manager, she becomes fluent within three years. Indomitable, peerless, tough, charismatic, funny, gorgeous, resilient, resourceful, and Black––there are not enough adjectives to describe her. And at thirty-four, when I first learned who Coleman was, it seemed impossible that the world did not already know her, let alone celebrate her. It was unthinkable that this woman, who had done so much for aviation, civil rights, and gender rights wasn’t a name that rolled easily from people’s lips.
I came to learn of Bessie’s life when I began pursuing my own lifelong dream of becoming a pilot.
I came to learn of Bessie’s life when I began pursuing my own lifelong dream of becoming a pilot. In an effort to find out how one would go about doing this, I went to a Women in Aviation Conference, as well as to an Organization of Black Aerospace Professionals (OBAP) convention. At the former, I met a beautiful woman named Captain Jenny Beatty, picture Winona Rider, in Black Swan. And once I met Jenny, I believed that I could make my own dream a reality. When the three-day affair of seminars and job expo wound to a close, Jenny gave me a gift. It was a coffee mug. On one side was a picture of Bessie Coleman, on the other was a two-paragraph story about Coleman’s life. In a convention hall crowded with colorful displays, I stood turning the mug over in my hands. A cacophony of five thousand voices swelled, yet I heard nothing other than Coleman’s story in my head.
My sense of outrage that I, and most people I knew, had never come across Bessie Coleman in a history book, began to grow. That needed to change, and so I decided to write a book.
I knew this book had to appeal to a wide audience. I wanted a single woman on a beach vacation to be so enthralled that she had to be reminded to put down her book and tan on the other side. I wanted the business executive flying on a transcon to sink into Coleman’s story. I wanted a married woman with children to take a peek before putting away toys or packing tomorrow’s lunches and find that she was still reading in her kitchen chair when the sun came up. I knew each of these audiences intimately, as I had been each of these women – a human resources executive, a scuba diving, upper East Side single woman, as well as a busy suburban boy Mom, who was in charge of exploding volcanoes for the science fair. Coleman, too, had been multifaceted. She flew loops over Kaiser Wilhelm II’s Potsdam Palace, and she could explain the physics of lift to a fifth grader. I wanted young women everywhere to let Coleman show them that pursuing their dreams, no matter how unlikely the dream seemed to others, was both worthwhile and possible.
How in three years did she learn to be fluent, not merely conversational, in French so that she could learn the complexities and nuances of flying these warbirds? How did she find, cultivate and convince allies to support her efforts to accomplish the impossible? How did she restore her soul when her detractors cut her to ribbons?
Armed with only a handful of black and white photos, in which a stoic, self-possessed and self-assured woman peered back at me, I desperately wanted to explore who this sepia bombshell really was? How in three years did she learn to be fluent, not merely conversational, in French so that she could learn the complexities and nuances of flying these warbirds? How did she find, cultivate and convince allies to support her efforts to accomplish the impossible? How did she restore her soul when her detractors cut her to ribbons? What did her career choices cost her in sacrifice–both in her love life and her ability to bear children? And what was it like to fly one of these delicate, finicky crafts that weighed less than a modern-day minivan, yet had the tensile strength to carry bombs, fighter pilots, and machine guns?
To answer this last question, I went to a 2,700 foot-long, grass strip on Martha’s Vineyard. Mike Creato, who runs Classic Aviators and sells biplane rides to tourists, let me fly with him. His 1941 WACO was constructed two decades later than Coleman’s Curtiss Jenny, but the two handled similarly enough so that I could get the hang of flying an open-air, cloth and wood biplane.
So that I could understand the type of flying that Bessie performed, we flew some of the same stunts—barrel rolls, loops, spins, and hammerheads. Later, I’d fly with Eric Campbell. I would arrive at sunrise to warm up the planes with Eric, then I’d leave before the first paying customers arrived, taking Eric’s two young sons with me to care for along with my own two boys. The experience this time brought with it a host of revelations.
The biplane was a baby carriage to fly, light and easy in the air, yet it could be gnarly to land. There were other details — I was accustomed to a yoke, but in the biplane there was just a stick, as if a car’s steering wheel had been replaced by a gaming joystick. If the biplane was a two-seater, with a bucket seat in the front and rear, the flying pilot operated the stick and rudder from the rear seat. On a takeoff roll, the rear-seated pilot gauges how straight the path is only by peripheral objects on either side of the grass strip, a parallel row of pine trees, a fence or a stone wall for example. Meanwhile, the reconnaissance spy, or shooter, sat up front to operate the machine gun. It’s only when the plane is going fast enough that the rudder becomes effective, and the tail flies up from the ground, allowing the pilot in the rear to see in front. This happens right before launch at about the same time that the sharp shooter takes aim.
While I could have taken lessons from a tailwheel instructor, what made flying with Mike and Eric special was that each was an expert stick who could offer me, a tailwheel novice, insights into aerobatic flying with a confidence that one acquires only through experience and sheer love of a thing. I grew to understand the joy of flying a plane so agile that I thought of turning and the rudder had already complied. I gained a deep appreciation for the skill and patience that flying these warbirds demanded.
This led me to consider the post-war environment in which women were trying to enter this field. Days before Coleman arrived in Paris in the fall of 1920, a fatal crash took the lives of two female students at the school where she planned to study. As a result of the accident, the school had closed its doors to women: to paraphrase the school’s owners, France could not lose its mothers and daughters to this game. So even though Bessie had her acceptance letter in hand, she nevertheless, was turned away.
Forced to find an alternative or go home, she packed up her few belongings and made her way to the coast of France, more than a hundred miles north of Paris. There, Coleman convinced René Caudron to admit her to his school. Like the Wrights, the Caudrons were brothers who designed, built, fixed, and flew airplanes, and at the time, the school was the most famous in all of France. On the beaches of Le Crotoy in the Bretagne region of northern France, Coleman learned how to fly from some of the most experienced airplane designers of the day. Beach flying demanded an understanding of the moon and its tides, as landings had to be made when there was enough of a sand strip to put a plane safely down. On my own trip to Le Crotoy, I gained a whole new level of respect and understanding for the expertise needed to do such a thing. And then there was the persistent threat–money–or more accurately, the lack thereof.
In the 1920s, there was little extra. While Coleman convinced two wealthy, powerful Black Chicago men – one a publisher, the other a banker, to back her financially, they helped pay for two ocean liner journeys to Europe, but to finance her lessons and to eat and sleep, she would have been left to her own devices.
The publisher becomes her mentor and chronicles her adventures, while the other gun-toting mogul becomes her lover. Thus begins a two-continent quest, defying the odds and even gravity itself, to become this country’s first international civilian pilot. Coleman returns to the States after her first trip with bragging rights and history in her hand – the first civilian to earn a French brevet, with international privileges – yet she is still unable to find a job – flying the mail and barnstorming were the most common opportunities and so she returns to learn how to become the latter. She manages to turn war maneuvers into death defying stunts, worthy of barnstorming shows where tens of thousands look up into the sky and at her in awe. While I learned in the comfort of a fully-restored plane, Coleman flew warbirds, relics of the Great War, that still had Hotchkiss machine gun mounts. While the crosshairs were frozen on a phantom enemy, her very present foe – poverty, racism, sexism and circumstance remained both real, virulent and omnipresent.
Coleman chose a path that was full of risk. Her instructors were soldier aviators, straight out of the film 1917. They had been dog fighters from the Great War and in the air over battlefields these grizzled combat pilots were once mortal enemies, yet somehow Coleman convinced both enemy and ally to teach her daredevil stunts. They taught her the art of war in the airplane, and quite possibly she taught them the art of endurance in life. Born in 1892, Coleman was the daughter of a slave, yet she would rise in prominence to be called a Queen in the country of her birth that first rejected her efforts to learn to fly. In five short years in the U.S. press, Coleman would become known as Queen Bess.
Two years ahead of Amelia, Coleman is molded by battle-hardened French and German combat fighters, their death-defying bold fearlessness can be seen in her majestic loops, spiky barrel rolls and hairpin turns, all of which resemble the twists and turns of her own hardscrabble journey to learn to fly. Often her journey was splashed on the front pages of newspapers that trumped lynchings. Yet, Coleman even designs her own uniform, strapping up her knee-high lace-up boots with a moxie that leaves us breathless in a time that stole the very lives of people who loved her.
“A Pair of Wings” is about how Bessie Coleman is the only woman in the world who stood at the nexus of the dawn of aviation, as well as the dawn of the Great Migration – the movement of six million African Americans from the agricultural South to the industrial North.
Just as Margot Shetterly’s remarkable Hidden Figures is fundamentally a story about Black women who force unlikely parallels to intersect – the civil rights movement and the space age – A Pair of Wings is about how Bessie Coleman is the only woman in the world who stood at the nexus of the dawn of aviation, as well as the dawn of the Great Migration – the movement of six million African Americans from the agricultural South to the industrial North. When Coleman moved to Chicago, from Waxahachie, TX in 1915, she rode the crest of the very first wave.
My name is Carole Hopson and I am a Captain at United Airlines. I fly a Boeing 737 and my base is in Newark, NJ. Coleman cut a path in the sky and I am profoundly grateful to roam in the firmament that she once called home. I feel so strongly about the legacy that Coleman left, that I founded the Jet Black Foundation, with a mission to send 100 Black women to flight school by the year 2035.
Carole Hopson is a wife and mother of two college-aged sons. A captain for United Airlines, she founded the Jet Black Foundation, dedicated to sending 100 Black women to flight school by the year 2035. A Pair of Wings, a novel based on the life of pioneer aviatrix Bessie Coleman, is Carole’s debut novel.