Urim and Thummim, and the disruption of a significant slave auction, might instigate something more like a riot rather than endless rounds of applause did not occur to the boy with anything like the clarity it should have. He was blind to everything but his own ambition and his desperate craving for adulation-the sanctuary of money and freedom he hoped would descend upon him as soon as he descended into the thoroughfares of the city. This was his moment, his chance to reverse the fortunes of his family and establish a place for himself in the history of transport, science, and entertainment. The world.
Then a sudden rogue gust rose up as they crossed through the hotter air of the cityscape. The thermal blast destabilized the
The spiral kite cell caught the updraft and surged up to graze Lloyd’s swinging legs and then veered off back toward the Mississippi, the Ambassadors clicking and squealing like hysterical animals in a drowning cage. The tether that Lloyd held to the kite now threatened to drag him out of control and he was forced to let go, releasing the deformed brothers to the mercy of the sky. Meanwhile, he was rising higher than he had intended, the figures below seething like ants before a rainstorm. The power of the wind billowed out his homemade wings and filled his belly with the butterflies that a normal person would have felt long before. His whole being was alive, and terrified at the volatile elements now determining his fate. The kite was but a speck in the air. He felt the world slipping away. Then he remembered that he could steer. He had to steer-for his life. And yet even now-ruptured from the
Years before Sir George Cayley’s hapless coachman was compelled to make his historic glider flight (which inspired him to defecate in his trousers and resign his post). Long before Lawrence Hargrave and Alexander Graham Bell experimented with their kites and Otto Lilienthal broke his neck. Before Samuel Pierpont Langley catapulted his Aerodromes-and before the bicycle-repairing Wright brothers from another small town in Ohio took their fifty-nine- second flight into history over the dunes of Kitty Hawk-Lloyd Meadhorn Sitturd was flying, fulfilling the dreams of the Egyptians, Assyrians, Chinese, Indians, Norse, and Greeks. Not falling. He was riding the wind in a winged vehicle that, while neither heavier than air nor machine-powered, possessed a capacity for maneuverability that would not be achieved by others for another fifty years.
But herein lay the great shortcoming of his undertaking. Wilbur Wright’s critical insight was that the secret of controlled flight lay as much in the skills of the pilot as in the capabilities of the craft. It was not enough for the machine to have the ability to maneuver; it was essential for the pilot to have the experience to utilize this potential. Without control, the solutions of lift and propulsion were meaningless. Despite the feverish pace at which he had been working, Lloyd had not had time to align his personal skill with the potential of his creation. Faced now, at approximately three hundred feet, with the combined circumstances of the failure of one half of his enterprise (the loss of the
He pulled the left steering toggle and swung left, sailing faster down and forward, whistling over the steeples and the carriage-colliding laneways to the horror and amazement of Mulrooney, Hansel Snowden Brookmire, and the people of St. Louis. Flaring slowed his driving speed and restored lift, while his body trembled in the risers. The thought of the helpless brothers breaking every bone in their bodies stabbed him with remorse and doubt. He whooshed around a smokestacked section of town, heading back toward the courthouse, but in banking the toggle tore and a puff of air stalled the edge of the parafoil.
Where the wing had been filled like a lung, it now gasped and he jostled in the rigging. The sunlight burned into his retinas. He heard a cry come up from the streets beneath him and the whinnying of crazed horses. The turbulence batted at him like a spinning leaf-his nerves were frayed like the ribbons he clung to.
He tried to readjust, flying at half brakes, one toggle up, one down. But in swerving around to make the courthouse and the confusion of Fourth Street, where he was to have made his epochal landing, he overcompensated and then had to brake full-which battered the wing chute more. One of the main leads streaming down to the risers broke-the toggle did not respond. He felt the heat waves rising up from the bricks below-the smell of horse manure and the din of human panic.
Ground rush hit him-the mess of scattering street traffic engulfing his field of vision, all the glory gone, leaving stomach-churning, muscle-bracing expectations of obliteration upon impact! He yanked the toggles, beginning to plummet, regaining control too late, and swooping down like a raptor to strike a fleeing rodent in a field of dry corn.
While this private drama had been playing out in the air, a rather more public debacle had been unraveling below. Representatives of Bladon, McCafferty & Co. had led their assembled offering clanking and shuffling like a parade of the damned from the auction house’s pen on Chestnut Street to the courthouse steps, where a pompous man in a frilled shirt and a broad-brimmed hat read out the particulars of the sale and clarified the terms of purchase in stentorian tones. The planter aristocracy was well represented, decked out in top hats and European-tailored finery. Some had come from as far away as the black-loam bottomlands of Mississippi and Alabama, or the sugar kingdoms of Louisiana. The merchandise stood glistening and grim in the brassy sun. Errant schoolboys gapped and stretched. Idlers spat tobacco juice; skinny dogs panted under drays. Hoop-skirted women with complexions like clotted cream dabbed their throats with eau de cologne as barrel-chested saloonkeepers emerged blinking in the glare, hooking their thumbs into their braces.
Down on Fourth Street, a hatchet-faced plantation foreman watched from the saddle of a bay gelding while his tight-lipped overseer stood gripping a musket on top of the courthouse stairs. Another man in a baggy black suit, with a head as bald as a fire bell under a black silk hat, leaned over a weathered pinewood podium that had been wrestled out of a wagon, while two hulking guardsmen strolled the lines of slaves-some slumped with weariness and despair, others standing erect, both male and female, radiating the strength they had earned by long work in bright light and all weather.
The two hard-bitten white minders had hairy arms as thick as the limbs of hod carriers and skin not much lighter than the individuals up for sale. Their square-toed boots were flecked with the pale green-gold of dried dung, and faded red or threadbare white bandannas poked up under their chins as if to hide some growth. Everything as usual.
Until the
The outre vessel came across the river and the sky like some narcotic vision of the future. The sausage casing- like balloon, which had provided the initial elevation, detached and expired in what from ground level Lloyd would have considered a disappointing poof relative to the incendiary excitement he had intended. (The problem was that he could not use any true ordnance for fear of incinerating the Ambassadors and himself.) But to those who were unprepared it was fireworks enough. The river-slapping force of the barge, stoked to boiler-blowing overload, hauled the beautiful abomination forward, where it was set free in a dense shower of glitter, sparks, and feathers.
It was right about then that Mule Christian glanced up from his row of chained fellow slaves and came to the conclusion that this was the sign from God that he had been waiting for. There was no other way to interpret it. This was a message from the Almighty. And he knew in his heart just what the message was.
Mule was what white plantation owners of the day would have described as a “big field nigger”-and big he was, in every way. Worth fourteen hundred dollars in St. Louis. More in Memphis or New Orleans. Six feet five inches tall and as muscled as a well-bred fighting dog. He had the mind of a child but a clear head, except when it came to his religious visions. Somewhere in the past his people had come from the Bight of Benin, that gouge in Africa that extends from Cape Verde to the Congo River. They had given him a name that sounded like Mulu, but all that was a cloudy memory. Mule he became to everyone he met in the cruel New World. An earlier owner had been known as Christianson, but it was thought that his American surname owed more to the fervent faith he had adopted. In any case, Mule Christian knew what he must do. The moment he gazed up at the terrible blue sky, he knew.
“Heee comin’!” the giant boomed in his work-gang baritone. “Heee comin’ to sabe us all! Lord beee praised- heee comin’!”
This remark, uttered as loudly as it was, at the precise moment that it was, by someone not expected to speak at all-and by someone of Mule’s impressive physical stature-had a profound effect. The tall-hatted white dandies in polished boots moved toward their carriages. Several of the auction items sought to plunge to the ground in fear and supplication, which, chained as they were, caused havoc among the rows. Others, in a state of understandable panic, tried to bolt. They had no clear thought of trying to escape. They had no clear thought at all-and, pulling in
