Black Dove White Raven

Special thanks to Dr. Fikre Tolossa for sharing his expertise on Ethiopian history and culture

Copyright © 2015 by Elizabeth Gatland
Cover design by Whitney Manger
Cover photo © Andrii Muzyka / Shutterstock
Cover photo of boy © Jane Sweeney / Getty Images
Cover photo of girl © Rebecca Parker / Trevillion Images

Excerpt from Code Name Verity copyright © 2012 by Elizabeth Gatland.
Excerpt from Rose Under Fire copyright © 2013 by Elizabeth Gatland.

All rights reserved. Published by Hyperion, an imprint of Disney Book Group. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information address Hyperion, 125 West End Avenue, New York, New York 10023.

ISBN 978-1-4847-0780-7

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For Susan

SINIDU TOLD ME I SHOULD aim for the sun.

I still have a plane. There must be some way I can get Teo out safely. I think Momma’s hoard of Maria Theresa dollars is enough to pay for the travel. I am hoping my new passport is waiting for me in Addis Ababa. But Teo…Teo is trapped. I have thought about trying to get him a British passport—Colonel Sinclair has friends who have not left Ethiopia. I could throw myself at them in disguise as Helpless Young American Girl All Alone.

I wonder if I could sweet-talk someone at the British Legation. But Momma couldn’t even sweet-talk the Americans in our own legation, and of course the British probably can’t do a doggone thing for Teo even if they want to. Legations have not got all the powers of embassies, and I don’t know if they are even running anymore, since the invasion and the shooting started. I don’t know anything that’s happened in the past four months, except what I’ve seen from the air.

What about the French? Momma was still friendly with Pierre Ferrand and those Imperial Ethiopian Air Force pilots last time we were in Addis Ababa. But we’re not French, either, and I don’t even know if they’re still here.

It is a waste of time trying to pass Teo off as Italian. I think I pretty much burned that bridge when I stole a plane from the Italian air force.

Sinidu is right. I am here at Lake Ashenge, north of Korem, and the emperor is in the hills above the town. There isn’t anyone else who can help me.

I have nothing to lose. I am going to dare it. I will aim for the sun.

March 4, 1936

Yekatit 25, 1928

Humble greetings to Your Most Imperial Majesty, Haile Selassie I, Emperor of Ethiopia!

I am writing to you (politely, I hope) to beg you to forgive my brother, Teodros Gedeyon, for the bond he owes your servant Ras Amde Worku and to grant him an Ethiopian passport.

We have not met you, but we saw you just before your coronation and again when you landed for a few minutes at Tazma Meda. You know our mother, the photographer and flier Rhoda Drummond Menotti, who works in your progressive clinic there. You used to let her land on your airfield in Akaki near the capital. Her aircraft has also been flown honorably in your service by my brother, Teodros. He was given his pilot’s license by the same man who trained your own Imperial Ethiopian Air Force pilots.

Your Majesty, I am a white American myself, and I don’t believe you will expect any national loyalty from me. But my foster brother is an Ethiopian citizen because of his Ethiopian father. I count on your mercy and wisdom as I beg you to shower your blessing and generosity on Teodros. I have lived in Ethiopia since I was a little girl and am brokenhearted to have to run away as it is falling.

I am on my own. I am desperate. I don’t know where else to turn for help. But I know that you can grant Teo a passport. You have children, too, I know, and some of them are not grown up yet—Princess Tsehai is our own age, and Prince Makonnen is very young. You must understand what it is to fear for your family.

I thought I would send you some things my mother kept, our baby stories and our older stories, some writing exercises, and our flight records. I hope they help you understand what has happened to us.

I am embarrassed that everything is written in English. Teo and I both speak Amharic, but we don’t write it very well, and I know that your translators are busy. My apologies! Also, I’m embarrassed about the writing, which is silly here and there, especially in the beginning. But we both like to write, and sometimes I feel as if the only thing I can do is write. It helps me think. Maybe you know what I mean.

I beg to tell you all that we have done for Ethiopia—and for you—this year.

I anxiously await your response and remain

Your obedient servant,

Emilia Drummond Menotti

P.S. The captured Italian aircraft is also for you. I hope it is payment enough for the big favor I am asking.

THE ADVENTURS OF BLACK DOVE AND WHITE RAVEN

Theme for Miss Shore by Emilia Menotti

Subject: “My Earliest Memory”

Beehive Hill Cooperative Coffee Farm

Tazma Meda, Wollo Province

19 October 1934 (Teqemt 9, 1927)

YOU DON’T HAVE MUCH CHOICE about what your parents make you do until you’re big enough that they can’t tie you down. I am not sure this is my earliest memory, but it is the oldest one with details in it. It is of being tied into the open cockpit of a Curtiss Jenny flying machine by Cordelia Dupré. When I was little, Delia took up more space in my head and heart than my own father did. In fact, she still takes up more space there. Delia is the most important thing that ever happened to our momma.

I know that this memory takes place when I was five years old because I was five years old when Momma and Delia bought the Jenny, their own airplane. It was a biplane that looked a lot like the one we have now, one wing above the other, with open cockpits. Well, there were four of us to fit into the Jenny’s two cockpits, counting me and Teo. Teo and I weren’t very big when we were five, but Momma and Delia figured out ways of taking us along.

This memory is not of my first flight. My first flight was in France in 1919, when I was five weeks old, not five years. My father, Papà Menotti, did the flying. Momma carried me against her belly in a scarf tied around her waist and under her big leather flying coat—they didn’t want anyone at the airfield to know they were taking me along. It was the day of my baptism. Momma’s parents are Quakers, and they don’t hold any kind of religious ceremony, but Papà is Roman Catholic and Momma wanted to make him happy. So she agreed to have me baptized if they did my “baptism in air” on the same day. Momma thinks I might have been the youngest person ever taken for a flight in an aircraft then.

But I don’t remember that. What I remember is, when I was five years old, Delia lifting me out of Momma’s arms and putting me into the Jenny. Delia was crouching between the wings, and Momma was standing on the ground, holding me up to her. I remember reaching to Delia, how pretty she looked in her leather flying helmet, which was exactly the same dark brown color as her skin, with her hair peeping out around the helmet like a soft, crimped frame for her face. She had on pink lipstick because she and Momma had just finished performing in an air show, and Delia always prettied herself up for the crowd. She lifted me into the plane and plunked me on the seat in the cockpit, squeezing me in next to Teo.

“There they are, in the soup together!” She laughed. “Rhoda, get up here and look at our kids—they are a double act, just like us.”

It was the first time they’d ever taken us flying in the US of A because they’d never owned their own plane before. None of the owners of the borrowed planes they flew wanted to get a bad name if their plane being flown by a woman (Momma)—or, even worse, by a Negro woman (Delia)—crashed with a couple of little kids inside. If anything like that had happened, it would have shut down an aircraft owner for good. But now that Delia and Momma owned their own plane fair and square, they could do whatever they wanted.

Momma must have stood on her toes to peep up over the edge of the cockpit, and she and Delia both laughed.

“Tie ’em down,” Momma said, and Delia laughed again.

I craned my neck to see Momma hop up onto the fragile body of the aircraft behind us, straddling the fuselage like it was a horse. (Once, when she’d first started wing-walking, she put her foot through the fabric of the lower wing and broke her ankle and couldn’t get it out. Delia had to land the plane with Momma all balled up in the wing struts. Delia was the best pilot alive.) Momma watched while Delia tied us down, and I remember Delia doing it—how I felt like I was going to be the safest person in the whole world when she was finished.

I remember Delia’s slender, dark fingers and her rose-red varnished nails. On her left hand, there was a shiny pink scar in the shape of a heart, which she had got when she was learning to fly and spilled hot engine oil on her hand. She strapped us up with white silk aviator scarves because the aircraft harnesses were too big for us; then she tied us together.

“Now, you hold on to each other,” Delia said. “Like this.”

She crossed Teo’s left hand over to mine and crossed my right hand over to his, so our arms were woven together.

“You are going to be the new Black Dove and White Raven, so your two mommas can retire!” Delia told us. Momma laughed. I clung to Teo’s hand because—I remember this so well—I thought she’d meant we were supposed to make the plane go, and I was worried that I didn’t know how to. (Now I know she tied us down so that we couldn’t grab hold of the control wheel in front of us. There was one in each cockpit.)

Delia told us, “Now, if you feel scared, just hang on tight to each other and squeeze. Three squeezes means, ‘Are you scared?’ and four squeezes means, ‘I am not scared.’ If you tell each other you’re not scared, you’ll feel brave. Then lean back so you can watch your momma, ’cause she’s going to do the showing off. You know you’ll be safe because I’m going to do the flying!”

I remember feeling so relieved it wasn’t going to be up to me.

“Oh, put a cork in it, Del,” Momma said crossly. Delia was always teasing Momma about not being as good a pilot as she was.

Teo repeated in my ear, “Put a cork in it,” because it sounded goofy. We both snickered.

When she’d finished tying us up, Delia pulled on her leather gloves, covering her tiny hands and hiding her pretty nails and her shiny scar. She leaned down and kissed us one at a time, leaving pink lipstick on Teo’s forehead and probably on mine, too, and she said again, “Now you are a double act like me and Rhoda.”

Their double act was not onstage but in the air. They were called the Black Dove (Delia) and the White Raven (Momma), and they did an aerial show together, barnstorming in flying circuses all over the US of A. They did aerobatics (mostly Delia, because she was the better pilot) and wing-walking (mostly Momma, who was not scared of getting out of a flying machine and riding it like a horse while it was in the air). Wing-walking doesn’t mean “walking” so much as it means “daredevil fooling around outside the airplane while it is flying.” Even just standing up between the cockpits counts. But also doing a handstand over the pilot or eating a picnic lunch on top of the wing. Sometimes Momma did parachute jumps, too. People are always impressed by anybody doing stunts like these, but especially a pair of pretty girls.

Black and white, night and day—that was what people used to say. On the ground, when people were watching, Momma and Delia milked that contrast all they could. But on their own and in the sky, they never paid any mind to black and white—they were just two crazy people who loved flying.

“All set, Rhoda?” Delia asked.

Momma answered smartly, “Aye, aye, Cap’n!” because whichever of them was piloting was the captain; and then Delia climbed into the pilot’s seat. Momma was straddling the plane, her wrists twisted into the straps she’d rigged in the wires over our heads as a kind of safety net. Someone on the ground in front of us must have swung the propeller to get the engine going. I remember feeling very excited but not nervous—if I leaned back, I could see Momma perched right behind me. Teo and I hung on with our arms crossed and nudged each other in the ribs.

“We are in the soup together!” I echoed Delia.

“Put a cork in it!” he echoed Momma.

We laughed like cackling chickens. It doesn’t take much when you are five.

And then the plane started to move, and soon it was bumping over the grass, and then, without me or Teo even realizing what was going on, we were flying. We were so little we couldn’t see out of the cockpit. All we could see were Momma’s arms in the straps over our heads and the upper wing like a big sail and the blue sky all around us, and all we could hear were the engine and the wind singing in the wires. And Delia was flying.

That is my earliest memory.

NOW I AM DONE WRITING for Miss Shore, but it is making me think about Delia, and I want to write about her some more, so I am putting it in another of Miss Shore’s blue theme books, which I pilfered from the “school cupboard” in the Sinclairs’ dining room. It has been more than seven years since Delia died, which is nearly half my lifetime ago, and I worry that I am starting to forget her. It would be a terrible thing to forget Delia, or how she and Momma made that promise to each other.

It was a little bit later. I don’t know where we were. I know it must have been somewhere in the South, because we were in some stranger’s kitchen—we always stayed in people’s houses south of the Mason-Dixon, instead of in hotels or boarding houses, because it was too hard for Momma and Delia to get rooms together.

It was a big kitchen in the airfield owner’s house. There was an old-fashioned icebox and an electric refrigerator on white metal legs, and a brand-new gas range that matched the refrigerator, all shiny white enamel with nickel trim. Delia had flown the plane from wherever we’d just left, and Momma had brought me and Teo with her on the train. Momma was making us scrambled eggs when Delia came in.

Delia was still wearing her leather coat and trousers, but she’d taken off her flying helmet and replaced it with a modish gray cloche hat that fitted tight over her sleek, marcelled hair—she was always so much more stylish than Momma. Delia carried her helmet and goggles in a pink-and-gold-striped cardboard hatbox over one arm and she had her pigskin flight bag over her shoulder. She was also holding the big paisley carpetbag she packed her things in when we were traveling. She dumped everything down on the kitchen floor and swooped over me and Teo for a hug and a kiss. Then she looked up at Momma and said sadly, “McKinley won’t let us do the show for a mixed audience. Whites only.”

Momma banged the cooking fork so hard against the iron fry pan that me and Teo jumped. We must have been seven by then. Old enough to understand what was going on.

Momma’s wispy gold bangs were matted to her forehead. She stuck out her lower lip and blew at them. Then she frowned so that her gray eyes went narrow and you could see that little dent between her eyebrows. But she wasn’t mad at us, or at Delia.

“We’re staying in his house,” Momma said. “He’ll let us all sleep under the same roof, in the same bed, and help ourselves to the food in his icebox to feed our kids. But he won’t let colored folks and white folks watch our air show together?” She rammed the fork back into the eggs and stirred them messily. A big piece of egg flew out and sizzled on the black charcoal beneath the range’s brand-new gas burners. “Well, I’ll talk to him.”

“Just ’cause you’re the White Raven is not going to make him change his mind.”

Delia wasn’t being sarcastic or mean. She’d talked to the airfield owner already, and she knew he wasn’t going to budge.

Momma stabbed at our eggs like she was going to kill them.

“Now, Rhoda!” Delia gently took the fork and fry pan out of Momma’s hands. Delia was still wearing her pretty hat and her flying coat, and she squeezed Momma around the waist. Then she started to stir the eggs herself.

Momma stomped over to the kitchen window and looked out with her arms folded over her chest. If a human being could look like a covered pot about to boil over, she was doing it.

“It’s not fair, Delia,” Momma said. “It’s not fair and it’s not right. Bessie Coleman wouldn’t ever fly if she couldn’t have a mixed crowd watching. She’d have refused, and we should, too.”

“We don’t have Bessie’s draw,” Delia said, “or her backing. Maybe someday we’ll get a newspaperman to sponsor us like she did, but that has not happened yet, and her falling out of a plane and killing herself didn’t do us any favors. We just don’t pull the crowds like she could, and that means we don’t make the money. And we have more mouths to feed.”

Momma stood, simmering.

“We have got to do it, Rhoda. We have got to go ahead and play to whatever crowd we get.”

“I won’t.”

“Well then, I will do the show myself,” Delia said.

Momma turned around to glare at her. “You dirty double-crosser.”

Delia took the iron fry pan off the stove and started to pile forkfuls of egg into two saucers that Momma had put out for us.

“I never double-crossed anybody,” Delia said calmly. “I’m just feeding the kids.”

Momma let out one enormous, choking sob and swiped the back of one hand angrily across her eyes.

“It’s not right, Delia. They don’t do this in Pennsylvania or New York, and when they tried it in New Jersey, we didn’t cave in like this. We never caved in like this before.”

“’Cause we haven’t had to yet.” Delia took hold of Momma’s shoulders and made her sit down with us at the table. “Listen, honey—I want to tell you my wild idea.”

Then she knelt between me and Teo with one hand on each of our shoulders now. “I want to tell you all my wild idea.”

Delia got up and sat down across from Momma and held out her hands over the table. Momma took them. Teo and I sat watching with our scrambled eggs getting cold in front of us. We knew that wall they were up against. Crossing that invisible border between Pennsylvania and Maryland took you into another world, where you had to play by a different set of rules. Delia probably hated them more than Momma did, but she was better at playing along.

“You want to go back to France?” Momma asked. Her voice was low and husky. “I’d go back there in a heartbeat. Remember how no one cared when we sat together at the café in La Chênaie, drinking Chartreuse and rocking our babies in the same baby carriage? A colored girl and a white girl wing-walking and flying aerobatics would pull sensational crowds in France.” Momma paused. “How do you say Black Dove and White Raven in French? La Colombe Noire—Le Corbeau Blanc.”

“Blanche,” Delia corrected. “You are a girl.”

“No. Raven is masculine,” Momma said.

“But you’re not,” Delia laughed.

She realized she was still wearing her hat and let go of Momma’s hands for a moment to take it off and lay it on the table. Teo shot me a warning look, and I carefully moved my plate closer to me so I wouldn’t risk getting grease on the hat’s soft charcoal-gray surface. But Delia wouldn’t have noticed. She had something more important on her mind. She pulled Momma’s hands back across the table and said quietly, “I don’t want us to go back to France. I want to go to Ethiopia.”

This is the moment I remember—not my earliest memory, but the best. Delia and Momma gripping each other’s hands across some stranger’s enamel kitchen table, staring hard into each other’s eyes. Their hands were clasped in front of us, Momma’s strong and pale, Delia’s slender and brown. Momma’s gold wedding ring and Delia’s rose-red painted nails. I want to go to Ethiopia.

The Europeans still use its old name, Abyssinia. But the Americans who are enchanted by it call it by its own name, in its own language: Ethiopia.

“That’s crazy,” Momma said, giving Delia’s hands a shake and a squeeze like she was trying to wake her up.

“It is not crazy.” Delia was forceful, but she still didn’t sound like she was being stubborn or mad—her voice was just warm and determined. She really meant it. “I told you it was a wild idea, but it is not a crazy one.

“I have been thinking and thinking,” Delia went on. “Maybe I wouldn’t have ever heard of Ethiopia if I hadn’t gone to France and met Gedeyon and had Teo, but I bet I would still have the notion to go to Africa. You and me both used to listen to that Marcus Garvey talking about Liberia being the new black African homeland. I don’t have reason to go to Liberia, but my son is half Ethiopian. I want him to feel at home there.”

“But that’s like running away,” Momma objected. “And Ethiopia isn’t my homeland.”

“No, your homeland is that Alice-in-Wonderland horse farm in Pennsylvania, where nobody fights wars and nobody gets lynched, and you go every Sunday to those starchy Friends meetings, where nobody ever sings or says anything, and you left when you were eighteen because it was so boring! You know that isn’t the real world!”

“What about the NAACP trying to change things lawfully for Negroes in the USA?”

Delia hesitated. And finally she said, “They are changing too darn slow. They help people in court; they don’t do a thing on the street. Being a mother is making me selfish. I don’t want my boy to have to wait. Ethiopia is a country of African people run by Africans, and it always has been. It’s not like Liberia, set up by the USA as a colony for freed slaves. Ethiopia is the only country in Africa never to be colonized!”

Delia knew what she was talking about. She went on. “They have got their own culture and their own language—Rhoda, you still look at those wonderful books of photographs Gedeyon gave me in France. You were looking at them before we left Pennsylvania. You know you want to see it. Imagine if you could take pictures like that yourself!”

“You temptress,” Momma teased.

Teo and I loved those pictures, too. Even before we could read the books, we made up stories around the pictures. Churches a thousand years old carved in rock. Crazy-looking hornbills so top-heavy it looked like their beaks ought to make their heads fall over. Black-and-white monkeys with beautiful, long tails, and men playing strange stringed instruments, and women in embroidered robes weaving patterned baskets. Crowned priests carrying fringed umbrellas and horsehair fly swatters.

“And now Ethiopia is respected enough to be a member of the League of Nations,” Delia said. “They just sent a diplomat to the American president! It’s turning into a modern nation—let’s be the first to go!”

Momma sighed again, shaking her head. “It’s a dream, Delia! Ethiopia is poor. People there don’t have money to pay to watch a pair of girls wing-walking.”

Delia was ready for this.

“We could make a business for ourselves finding game for white hunters. Or taking exotic aerial pictures for magazines. You nursed people before—I bet they need nurses. We could fly to out-of-the-way places and help out. I don’t know, but something! So our kids will grow up in a place where no one will ever say to them, ‘You can’t ride with each other, because one of you is colored. You have to eat in different rooms because of the color of your skin.’”

That was something Teo and I hated. We all hated it.