Velva Jean Learns to Fly (14 page)

I know you’re mad at me because I ain’t heard from you. I know you’re just freezing me out and that you still love me even though you don’t want to, but someday you’ll understand why I needed to go and why it’s so important to me to do this. Our own daddy’s always run away from everything big or hard, but you know me. I believe in taking things head-on.

Did you hear about Beach? He had to take over his plane when the pilot and copilot was killed. Shot down four enemy planes and one Jap bomber over in a place called Guadalcanal, and he ain’t even carrying a weapon because he’s a noncombatant.

Tomorrow we begin jump training from ground level mock airplanes, but I’m ready for a real one. I don’t know when we’ll be done with all this and when they’ll ship us out, but I can’t wait to see the faces of the enemy and the fear in their eyes—whoever they are—when they see me coming.

Love,

Private Johnny Clay Hart

P.S. The FBI arrested 158 German nationals living in the United States because they was endangering state security. And 30 of them are women. Spies!

FIFTEEN

O
n September 20 Duke handed me the latest issue of
Life
magazine. There was a picture on the cover of a girl, not much older than me, wearing goggles and standing in front of an airplane. He said, “I want you to take this home and read it. You’re one of the best natural pilots I ever seen. You’re a regular Amelia Earhart.”

This was the most I’d heard Duke say all at once since the very first time I met him and he talked to me about how if I could drive a truck I could fly a plane. I stood there waiting, just in case there was more, but then he turned toward the Aeronca, and I knew that meant it was time to go up.

We flew for an hour—Duke was teaching me spins—and after we came down I ran to the truck holding the magazine close, just like it might get away from me. The old men sat outside the cracker-tin building, spitting and arguing and playing cards, and because I didn’t want them to call out to me or bother me I drove fast as I could back to the Lovelorn, the magazine burning a hole in the seat next to me the whole way.

I parked just down the street and then I sat there under the streetlamp and read. The article told about two government programs started for women pilots, the Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron, or WAFS, and the Women’s Flying Training Detachment, or WFTD. The WAFS was started by a woman named Nancy Harkness Love. There was a picture of her in the story, and she was beautiful even in her flying gear and goggles. She learned to fly when she was sixteen, and when she was at Vassar College in New York she earned extra money by renting a plane and taking her fellow students for rides. One time she flew low over campus, and someone turned her in. She was suspended for two weeks and not allowed to fly for the rest of the semester. Nancy Love had handpicked the top twenty-five women pilots in the country to ferry military planes to training camps and airfields across the United States. They’d just flown their first mission, flying Piper Cubs from Pennsylvania to New York.

The WFTD was created by Jacqueline Cochran, who was America’s most famous woman pilot and the first and only woman to fly a bomber across the Atlantic Ocean. She owned a cosmetics company, and it was her husband who suggested that she learn to fly so she could market her cosmetics around the country. She became good friends with Amelia Earhart and believed that women pilots could be trained to do more than ferrying, that maybe they could even fly in combat. The training school for the WFTD was in Houston, Texas, where the first classes of pilots were being taught to fly the army way, while living in barracks and wearing uniforms and practicing drills. I thought she looked like a more glamorous Sweet Fern.

I couldn’t read the article fast enough. My eyes started traveling up and down the page, across it, back and forth. I kept thinking, This is too unbelievable. The girls in the pictures looked like me—young and happy and normal, like they’d just come from anywhere, maybe up in the mountains or a small town or a farm in the middle of nowhere. I looked at them and thought, I could be one of them.

But these girls had already been chosen. The WAFS and the WFTD already had their female pilots. I imagined them first learning to fly at fancy air bases in Washington, D.C., or New York City or Los Angeles, California. They must have had hundreds of hours of experience. They must have been flying for years.

Then I saw the last few sentences of the story, which Duke had underlined twice with a thick black pen: “The first class of twenty-eight recruits from the WFTD will be reporting to Houston on November 17, but the WFTD is looking for more girl pilots for future classes. Interested ladies should contact Jacqueline Cochran.”

The
Life
article said the WFTD had originally required two hundred hours of solo flying time but that they’d just lowered the requirement to thirty-five hours. I had twenty-five hours, but I wondered if that might be enough. The article also said girls had to be at least five feet two inches tall, a high school graduate, and twenty-one years old. I was only nineteen and I hadn’t gone to school past the seventh grade, but I was five feet six, almost five feet seven, and I thought those extra inches should count for something.

The next morning Harold Lee left for training camp. He was headed to North Carolina and he was as wound up as a cat. He jigged and jittered in place till I wondered if he might not dance all the way there. We stood outside the café, just me and him—he’d already said good-bye to everyone else. He had his duffel bag over his shoulder and he was on his way to the train station. He handed me a poem and he said, “Will you wait for me, Velva Jean?”

I tried to laugh, but the sight of him in his uniform, his dog tags hanging around his skinny neck, that Adam’s apple bobbing up and down, made me sad. I said, “Harold Lee, you just keep yourself safe.”

“You won’t even try to love me, will you?”

I said, “Not like you want me to.” I felt like the world’s worst person. I thought how easy my life would be if I could only love Harold Lee. For one second I tried to imagine it in my mind, but I couldn’t. I wondered if I would all the time love the wrong men.

He said, “I love you, Velva Jean.” And then he kissed me quick on the mouth and hugged me tight and spun away at a sprint up the street, just a blur of legs and arms, disappearing into the crowd of people that always seemed to be walking down the sidewalks no matter what time of day or night.

I watched him go and then I looked down at the poem he’d handed me. It was written, as usual, on a Lovelorn Café napkin. It was called “From a Soldier,” and not one word of it rhymed.

This boy is going to fight for his country
In a war with people he’s never met
He’s going to have to kill
And bleed
In a place he’s never heard of
But he wants you to remember
That you knew him once
And that he loved you
And that he was here.

I folded up the napkin and slipped it into my dress pocket, and went up the stairs to my apartment and into my room and sat down at my desk in front of my typewriter.

September 21, 1942

Dear Jacqueline Cochran,

My name is Velva Jean Hart. My flight instructor sent me an article from
Life
magazine about the WFTD, and I would like to apply. I now have twenty-five hours of solo flying time. My teacher, Duke Norris, says he’s never seen anyone take so natural to flying, and he’s been flying for twenty years. I am five feet six inches tall, and I will be twenty on my next birthday.

Last year I taught myself to drive an old yellow truck that came to me when my brother-in-law was killed in a train wreck. It was his truck and then it was my brother’s and now it’s mine. No one helped me learn to drive. I did it all on my own, and then I drove that truck from Alluvial, North Carolina, to Nashville so that I could be a singer at the Grand Ole Opry. I’ve wanted to sing ever since I was a little girl. But now there’s something I want to do more—fly.

Please consider me for the WFTD. I promise not to let you down.

Yours sincerely,

Velva Jean Hart

After that I stopped writing to Judge Hay at the Opry and started writing to Jacqueline Cochran. I wrote her at least one letter every week, even though she didn’t write me back. When I wasn’t writing to her and when I wasn’t working, I went out to Duke’s farm and earned more solo hours up in the Aeronca, just so I would be ready.

October 9, 1942

Dear Jacqueline Cochran,

I read that you came from a poor background, like me, that you were an orphan too, that you had to go to work when you were eight years old, and that you chose your name out of a telephone directory. You didn’t go to high school, and you passed your flight test without even knowing how to write. I know you grew up in Florida. I may be from North Carolina, but I think we come from the same place.

I got married when I was sixteen years old. I thought I knew what was going to happen with my husband when I fell in love with him. I thought we were going to be together forever, Mr. and Mrs. Harley Bright, but sometimes things don’t work out like you think. I thought there was a guarantee.

Same with the Grand Ole Opry. My whole life I’ve pictured myself up on that stage, wearing rhinestones and satin and playing the steel guitar. For all these years, it was never like I was dreaming it up, but like I was seeing what was going to happen in the future. Like it was predestined, and all I had to do was wait till it was time. I left my husband and went to Nashville to make that happen but I still haven’t sung at the Opry. So is it predestined? I don’t know anymore. Maybe it’s just a dream that will never come true, and I was only fooling myself.

Now I’m in Nashville and I thought this was where I needed to be. But I don’t need to be here anymore. I need to be Out There, as my mama called it—living Out There. She didn’t know back then, before she died, that I would ever fly a plane. I was just ten years old. But maybe she did know somehow and maybe she meant that Out There was in the sky, high above the clouds.

All I’m asking for is a chance.

By the way, I now have thirty-two hours of solo flying time.

Sincerely,

Velva Jean Hart

October 18, 1942

Dear V. J.,

You can tell by the address that I’ve moved again. That’s right—no more Camp Tombs. Fort Benning may still be Georgia, but it’s a high time compared to Toccoa. Here we got big brick barracks and beautiful big mess halls. The PX at Camp Toccoa only had cigarettes and chocolate bars, but the one here’s got everything you could ever want on this earth.

We’re in such top condition that our company got to skip the first stage of jump school—the only goddamn company in the airborne to do so. It’s double time here everywhere we go. We got parachute towers like we did at Toccoa, except here we got a device that draws you up and lets you go.

The best thing about Benning, though, is the jumps. I never loved doing anything so much in my life. I mean it. I wish you would jump out of a plane and see what I’m talking about. It beats gold panning and gem mining and roping steers.

Did the army make you a pilot yet?

Love,

Your brother,