And that night — we stayed in a little tourist camp about two miles away and he had a cap and goggles all ready for me too; and then I knew why they hadn’t been able to find him — Uncle Willy told me how he had bought the airplane with some of the money he had sold his house for after his sister saved it because she had been born in it too, but that Captain Bean at the airport wouldn’t teach him to run it himself because he would need a permit from a doctor (“By God,” Uncle Willy said, “damn if these Republicans and Democrats and XYZ’s ain’t going to have it soon where a man can’t even flush the toilet in his own bathroom.”) and he couldn’t go to the doctor because the doctor might want to send him back to the Keeley or tell Mrs. Merridew where he was.
So he just let Secretary learn to run it first and now Secretary had been running it for two weeks, which was almost fourteen days longer than he had practiced on the car before they started out with it. So Uncle Willy bought the car and tent and camping outfit yesterday and tomorrow we were going to start.
We would go first to a place named Renfro where nobody knew us and where there was a big pasture that Uncle Willy had found out about and we would stay there a week while Secretary taught Uncle Willy to run the airplane. Then we would head west.
When we ran out of the house money we would stop at a town and take up passengers and make enough to buy gasoline and food to get to the next town, Uncle Willy and Secretary in the airplane and me and old Job in the car; and old Job sitting in a chair against the wall, blinking at Uncle Willy with his little weak red sullen eyes, and Uncle Willy reared up on the cot with his cap and goggles still on and his collar without any tie (it wasn’t fastened to his shirt at all: just buttoned around his neck) sometimes sideways and sometimes even backward like an Episcopal minister’s, and his eyes bright behind his glasses and his voice bright and fine. “And by Christmas we will be in California!” he said. “Think of that. California!”
VI
So how could they say that I had to be tolled away? How could they? I suppose I knew then that it wouldn’t work, couldn’t work, that it was too fine to be true. I reckon I even knew how it was going to end just from the glum way Secretary acted whenever Uncle Willy talked about learning to run the airplane himself, just as I knew from the way old Job looked at Uncle Willy, not what he did of course, but what he would do if the occasion arose. Because I was the other white one.
I was white, even if old Job and Secretary were both older than me, so it would be all right; I could do it all right. It was like I knew even then that, no matter what might happen to him, he wouldn’t ever die and I thought that if I could just learn to live like he lived, no matter what might happen to me I wouldn’t ever die either.
So we left the next morning, just after daylight because there was another fool rule that Secretary would have to stay in sight of the field until they gave him a license to go away. We filled the airplane with gas and Secretary went up in it just like he was going up to practice.
Then Uncle Willy got us into the car quick because he said the airplane could make sixty miles an hour and so Secretary would be at Renfro a long while before we got there.
But when we got to Renfro Secretary wasn’t there and we put the tent up and ate dinner and he still didn’t come and Uncle Willy beginning to cuss and we ate supper and dark came but Secretary didn’t and Uncle Willy was cussing good now. He didn’t come until the next day. We heard him and ran out and watched him fly right over us, coming from the opposite direction of Memphis, going fast and us all hollering and waving.
But he went on, with Uncle Willy jumping up and down and cussing, and we were loading the tent into the car to try to catch him when he came back. We didn’t hear him at all now and we could see the propeller because it wasn’t running and it looked like Secretary wasn’t even going to light in the pasture but he was going to light in some trees on the edge of it.
But he skinned by them and kind of bumped down and we ran up and found him still sitting in the airplane with his eyes closed and his face the color of wood ashes and he said, “Captin, will you please tell me where to find Ren—” before he even opened his eyes to see who we were.
He said he had landed seven times yesterday and it wouldn’t be Renfro and they would tell him how to get to Renfro and he would go there and that wouldn’t be Renfro either and he had slept in the airplane last night and he hadn’t eaten since we left Memphis because he had spent the three dollars Uncle Willy gave him for gasoline and if he hadn’t run out of gas when he did he wouldn’t never have found us.
Uncle Willy wanted me to go to town and get some more gas so he could start learning to run it right away but Secretary wouldn’t. He just refused. He said the airplane belonged to Uncle Willy and he reckoned he belonged to Uncle Willy too, leastways until he got back home, but that he had flown all he could stand for a while. So Uncle Willy started the next morning.
I thought for a while that I would have to throw old Job down and hold him and him hollering, “Don’t you git in dat thing!” and still hollering, “I ghy tell um! I ghy tell um!” while we watched the airplane with Secretary and Uncle Willy in it kind of jump into the air and then duck down like Uncle Willy was trying to take the short cut to China and then duck up again and get to going pretty straight at last and fly around the pasture and then turn down to land, and every day old Job hollering at Uncle Willy and field hands coming up out of the fields and folks in wagons and walking stopping in the road to watch them and the airplane coming down, passing us with Uncle Willy and Secretary side by side and looking exactly alike, I don’t mean in the face but exactly alike like two tines of a garden fork look exactly like just before they chop into the ground; we could see Secretary’s eyes and his mouth run out so you could almost hear him saying, “Hooooooooo!” and Uncle Willy’s glasses shining and his hair blowing from under his cap and his celluloid collar that he washed every night before he went to bed and no tie in it and they would go by, fast, and old Job hollering, “You git outer dar! You git outer dat thing!” and we could hear Secretary too: “Turn hit loose, Unker Willy! Turn hit loose!” and the airplane would go on, ducking up one second and down the next and with one wing higher than the other one second and lower the next and then it would be traveling sideways and maybe it would hit the ground sideways the first time, with a kind of crashing sound and the dust spurting up and then bounce off again and Secretary hollering, “Unker Willy! Turn loose!” and at night in the tent Uncle Willy’s eyes would still be shining and he would be too excited to stop talking and go to sleep and I don’t believe he even remembered that he had not taken a drink since he first thought about buying the airplane.
Oh yes, I know what they said about me after it was all over, what Papa said when he and Mrs. Merridew got there that morning, about me being the white one, almost a man, and Secretary and old Job just irresponsible niggers, yet it was old Job and Secretary who tried to prevent him. Because that was it; that was what they couldn’t understand.
I remember the last night and Secretary and old Job both working on him, when old Job finally made Secretary tell Uncle Willy that he would never learn to fly, and Uncle Willy stopped talking and stood up and looked at Secretary. “Didn’t you learn to run it in two weeks?” he said. Secretary said yes.
“You, a damn, trifling, worthless, ignorant, burr-headed nigger?” and Secretary said yes. “And me that graduated from a university and ran a fifteen-thousand-dollar business for forty years, yet you tell me I can’t learn to run a damn little fifteen-hundred-dollar airplane?” Then he looked at me. “Don’t you believe I can run it?” he said. And I looked at him and I said, “Yes. I believe you can do anything.”
VII
And now I can’t tell them. I can’t say it. Papa told me once that somebody said that if you
