The Man Called Brown Condor Read Free Page A

big sport to all us black kids. To kite fight, the boys would fasten razor blades or broken glass to the tails of their kites to try to cut their opponents’ kite strings. Johnny designed a kite with wings like a bird and could make it dip and then go straight up. He was considered the best, the best at everything he tried. He could sit backwards on the handlebars of his bicycle and pedal as fast facing backwards as we could forwards.”
    Sightings of planes were rare, but while flying his kite one day in 1916, Johnny saw a Navy flying boat making its way along the shore. It had come from the Navy’s new flying school, established in 1914 in Pensacola, and was headed in the direction of New Orleans. Johnny talked about it for days.
    One clear March afternoon just at sunset, Celeste stepped off the streetcar that ran along the beach between Biloxi and Pass Christian. She noticed a boy flying a kite and recognized it was her son, Johnny. That boy and his kites. Celeste was about to call Johnny when the kite caught her eye. It was made from white butcher paper. The reflection of the sun, now a great orange ball touching the far western horizon, flashed for just a moment on the white kite fluttering down on a dying breeze. For just an instant, the kite appeared to burst into orange flame as it fell rapidly to earth.
    Celeste felt a cold shiver of fear and called to him, “Johnny Robinson! You get yourself home! You got more to do than sit down here playing with a kite and dreaming ’bout airplanes and such foolishness.”
    Johnny gathered his kite and string and approached his mother.
    â€œYou get your mind off all that and put it on your schoolwork and making something of yourself. Daddy Cobb is working extra to put up money for college for you and your sister, and so am I. You’re nearly fourteen, old enough to get your attention on important things.”
    Caught by surprise and hurt by the scolding, Johnny was confused. “Why you so mad at me, Momma? What did I do?”
    Celeste couldn’t answer. Her anger had covered the unexplained feeling of fear she had felt watching the kite fall against the flaming orange sun sinking into the Gulf of Mexico. She put her arm around John. “I’m just tired, I guess, and I’m gonna be late with your Daddy’s supper if we don’t get on home. Here, you carry the groceries and I’ll carry the kite.”
    â€œMomma, I’m workin’ hard at school.”
    â€œI know you are, son. Your daddy and me are gonna do everything we can to help get you to Tuskegee Institute, but you got to help, too. You old enough to get a little work on your own.
    â€œAnd you gonna have to put away all that dreaming ’bout flying. The truth is, no black man got any business fooling ‘round with airplanes.”
    Johnny took the bag of groceries and walked silently beside his mother across the streetcar tracks and shell road and on north past the neatly painted frame houses of the white middle class that lived south of the L&N Railroad tracks. Presently they crossed the tracks into the Big Quarter with its mixture of small frame structures, some painted, some with bare weathered siding, and some with tar paper nailed to their sides. Few had grass lawns in front, though nearly every one had a small garden and a chicken pen out back. Here and there along the way there was an occasional small enterprise: a corner grocery, a used clothing shop, maybe a barber or beauty shop, a small general store, a café, a bar or two. In a converted frame house across the street from the Cobb home was the J. T. Hall Undertaking Company, which had just opened.
    As they neared the corner, a boy about ten came by rolling a tireless bicycle wheel down the street with a stick. “Hey Teddy, Teddy Collins!” Johnny called to him. “Come here! I got something for you.”
    Teddy controlled the wheel with his stick so that it made a perfect turn over