The Man Called Brown Condor (2 page)

The startled little boy jumped behind his mother and peeked around her skirt. He was not alone in retreat. A great many adults had quickly backed away. Moisant calmly sloshed through the shallow water around the lower wing and climbed into the pilot's seat.

Satisfied all was well, John checked to see if his passenger was ready. “Miss Gary, are you all set?” he yelled. Sitting on the quivering machine, holding on for dear life, too scared to speak, she bravely nodded her head. With a crowd-startling roar, Moisant throttled up the engine. The pickup ground crew struggled to hold the plane while spectators on the beach scattered from the blast of the propeller. John signaled the men to let go.

Blowing swirls of spray in its wake, the plane waddled away from the beach. Gaining speed across water rippled by a gentle southeast breeze, the fragile craft at last lifted into the air. Looking more graceful in the sky than it had on the ground, it circled over the harbor and turned back toward the crowd waiting on the beach.

Down it came, only fifty feet above the sand. Those in the crowd gaped open-mouthed up at the fantastic machine as it flashed over them at the incredible speed of forty-five miles an hour. The wide-eyed little boy stared up in awe. He broke from his mother's grip and ran down the beach with hands stretched high toward the flying machine. There was joy in his heart, wonder in his eyes, and laughter on his lips. The black child had found his impossible dream. His name was John Charles Robinson.

***

Returning from his reverie the colonel answered Bruno's question: “I made up my mind that I was going to fly when I was seven years old.” He paused, then added, “But for a black child in Mississippi, it wasn't an easy dream to follow.”

Robinson's attention quickly focused on the present. What had broken his thoughts? He wasn't sure, but his sharply honed pilot's senses were registering mild alarm. Vibrations in the cockpit were vaguely different from what they had been moments before. He scanned the engine instruments for clues.

Bruno, concentrating on flying to impress his old instructor, had yet to notice anything unusual. They had just cleared the last high ridge and started the long decent toward the high plateau. Addis Ababa was barely visible in the distance.

The engine noise changed faintly. The tachometer needle began to wiggle slightly. Now Bruno took notice. He opened his mouth to speak, but the engine spoke first. A loud metal-to-metal pounding sent both pilots to red alert.

Robinson reached for the fuel selector and switched tanks, checked both magnetos and the fuel mixture setting, and pulled the throttle back to reduce stress on the engine. The pounding, like a trip hammer on boilerplate, could be felt through the control stick, rudder petals, and airframe. The shock-mounted instrument panel was vibrating violently.

John yelled, “I've got it,” and took control, got on the radio, called Addis Ababa, declared an emergency, and gave their position.

Bruno tried to sound calm, but there was fear in his voice. “What now, my friend?”

The colonel turned the plane in a gentle bank to the right and then left, searching the ground below, behind, and ahead for a place to land—any place free of boulders, jagged rocks, and steeply sloped terrain.

“We can try to put it down now, but we don't stand a chance in hell of doing it in one piece. With a little luck, the engine will hold together for a few more minutes and we'll make it.”

“And if we're not so lucky?” Bruno asked.

The colonel answered, “Well then, my little momma might turn out to be right after all these years.”

“Your mother?”

“Yeah,” Robinson replied. “She told me a black man had no business fooling around with airplanes.”

T
HE SEVEN-YEAR-OLD BLACK CHILD WAS ALMOST UNCONTROLLABLE
as he and his mother walked west on 13th Street, crossed the Gulf & Ship Island (G&SI) railroad tracks, and turned north toward the Big Quarter, the segregated neighborhood where many black families lived. He jumped and skipped and made engine noises with his arms outstretched like wings, mimicking the airplane he had just seen.

“Johnny! You calm down! You're gonna embarrass your momma right out here on the street.”

His mother's appeals went unheeded. The child was too excited to calm down. “Wait till I tell Daddy I seen a real airplane fly!”

Later that afternoon, Johnny sat on the front steps of his house waiting for his father to get home. The dirt road soon filled with men returning from their day's work. John could always pick his stepfather out of the crowd. Charles Cobb walked with a pronounced limp, the result of an accident at the G&SI locomotive shop where he worked. Johnny spotted him and ran to tell him, with wide-eyed excitement, about the flying machine he had seen that day.

When the two reached the house, Johnny's sister, Bertha, was playing in the front yard. Mr. Cobb picked her up and carried her into the house to join Celeste in the kitchen for supper. Charles Cobb listened to Johnny talk about the airplane and how it had carried people up in the sky.

“That thing flew out over the water and come back right over my head. It scared the devil out of a bunch of seagulls. Scared me too when it first started. Near 'bout blew down some peoples standing behind it. I bet most nobody in Mississippi seen anything like that. I'm gonna fly in one of those things some day, Daddy.”

Charles Cobb listened to the excited little boy and wondered if one day he would have to try and explain to the child that a black man had about as much chance of flying as he himself had of being an engineer for the railroad. He tried to remember the moment he had finally accepted the fact that he would never drive a steam locomotive on the main line. Even today the dream haunted him. That's why he had become a railroad mechanic, working his way up from laborer and gandy dancer. If he couldn't drive, one he would keep them running. They still thrilled him. He must have been about Johnny's age when he saw a steam locomotive come thundering by for the first time. He had been sitting on his daddy's wagon when the huge puffing monster with its big driving wheels roared past the crossing, scaring his daddy's mule nearly out of its hide. The engineer had waved and Charles Cobb knew that somehow steam locomotives would be a part of his life. He knew everything there was to know about them, every part. To him, a locomotive with steam up was like a giant, live, breathing thing, powerful and mighty and thrilling to the bone.

When there was some unusual problem with an engine at the shop, his boss would come to him to fix it. Mr. Cobb knew how to drive a steam locomotive; he drove them out of the shop, across the roundtable, and down the siding to wait for an engineer to come along to put it in service and make up a train, but that was not the same as climbing up into a cab, opening the throttle, and highballing down the main line pulling a string of cars toward some destination miles away. Now he was worried, saddened really, that his boy might be haunted by a dream that would remain a dream.

John Robinson was born in Carrabelle, Florida, in 1903, coincidentally the same year the Wright brothers made the world's first powered airplane flight. Following the accidental death of his father, his mother, Celeste Robinson, moved to Gulfport, Mississippi, with her baby boy, John, and his four-year-old sister, Bertha, to live with her father. At the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, Celeste met Charles Cobb. It was not long before they were married. Mr. Cobb was employed in a good paying job at the G&SI engine shop and roundhouse at Gulfport, the southern terminus of the line that hauled Mississippi timber and cotton to the port. He was a gentle man that had taken to the baby boy and little girl as if they were his own. He was rewarded with the love of the little children who worshiped the man who would be the only father they would ever know. Although Charles Cobb wanted to adopt the children and give them his name, Celeste insisted that they keep their real father's name. In Johnny's case, whenever someone asked about his name Celeste would answer that Robinson was his dead father's name, then smile and say, “but Charles was for his stepfather, Mr. Charles Cobb.” No one ever knew if that was true, but the name by which the world would know him was John Charles Robinson.

***

Gulfport was founded in 1898 on the foundation of the man-made port, railroad, and timber industries. The virgin, long-leaf, yellow-pine forests of south Mississippi were being cut, shipped by rail to the port and by ship to the world. By 1910 Gulfport was the second largest timber exporting port in the world. It boasted a population of ten thousand and had an electric company, streetcars, waterworks, and many brick-paved streets downtown. Between the north/south G&SI and the east/west L&N railroads, eighteen trains arrived and departed daily. Some would think that a town with a constant flow of lumberjacks, sailors, railroad men, construction workers, and fishermen, and with more bars than churches, would be a rough place—and it was. But it was also a town of law and order with a thriving middle class. Many blacks owned their own homes at a time when that was uncommon in the South. This was largely due to the relatively good wages that the railroad paid and the black stevedores, who had formed a union at the busy port, earned.

The Cobbs built a white, two-story wood frame house at 1905 Thirty-First Avenue in the middle of the Big Quarter. It had half brick and half wooden columns across the front porch and was large enough for Celeste Cobb to rent several rooms to boarders. There were two bedrooms downstairs and five bedrooms upstairs. The Cobbs took the front bedroom downstairs and the babies at first were in the downstairs back bedroom. As Bertha grew older, she got a front bedroom upstairs.

As the years passed, there was very little doubt about John Charles Robinson's continued interest in all things mechanical—especially airplanes. By the time he was twelve, the Great War burst across Europe, and stories about airplanes and the daring pilots who flew them and fought high in the sky covered the pages of newspapers and magazines. When there was time between school and chores at home, John would whittle out model planes and build kites and fly them on the beachfront.

In an interview in 1974, Mr. Harvey Todd recalled, “Designing and building kites and fighting them was 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.

“You 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.”

“Momma, I'm workin' hard at school.”

“I 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.

“And 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.”