Free Air Force Eagles by Walter J. Boyne

to sweeten up the brass—you know, buy them dinner, take them fishing and hunting. Troy always says you sell a hundred times more airplanes on the golf course than you do on the flight line."
    "Stan will be perfect for you!"
    Elsie just smiled. Maybe he would, at that. She pushed the pecan pie away untasted—perhaps it was time to find out if there was life in the old girl yet.
    *
    Cleveland, Ohio/March 17, 1948
    God bless his father. Usually his calm presence, so benign and filled with good will, made everyone feel better. Now he was mad as hell, veins purpling out in his forehead, arms waving, and everyone was uneasy.
    "Start at the beginning, son. I'm tired of wondering what's going on. You and Saundra have been sharp with each other all morning.
    The Reverend John Stuart Marshall Sr., three inches taller and fifty pounds heavier than his son, was built more like Joe Louis than Father Divine. Curly white hair ran around the monklike tonsure of broad black scalp, and his eyes normally sparkled with humor. Now they flashed an urgent warning that he wanted straight talk. Despite his anger, Reverend Marshall instinctively pulled Saundra close with his beefy arm; she gladly folded herself into him, grateful for his love and warmth, sorry that their bickering had bothered him. She had never really known her own father. For some reason still unrevealed, her sternly religious mother had forbidden even the mention of his name. Their life had been work and church, yet until she'd met John's father she couldn't believe that ministers could laugh, that religion could be comforting.
    "Dad, the problem is work! I can't get a flying job. I've been all over the country. If I didn't have Mr. Bandfield's word on it, I'd think I'd been blacklisted by McNaughton."
    "Oh, you're 'black' listed, son, we all are. I thought you found that out at Tuskegee." His mother shook with mirth, eyes lit up and crackling white teeth smiling through skin as shiny as a polished pan. Her face was long and narrow, her nose slightly hooked, her smile wide. The family had always had fun, no matter how hard times had been. When everyone was home it sometimes seemed as if laughter would jump the little frame house on Connick Street right off its concrete block foundations. Mary was a tall woman, thin and strong as the lengths of hickory she used to apply to John Jr. 's backside. His copper color and hooked nose came from her side of the family. The senior John Marshall always joked about there being an Indian somewhere in his mother's family woodpile—but never when Mary was around.
    She busied herself around the battered oak kitchen table, the center of their life, passing out plates of fragrant stollen, heavy white frosting dotted with raisins, oven-warm and their standard Saturday morning treat. Working for a German family in Shaker Heights for almost twenty years, Mary's cooking style had changed over time to mix its purely Southern origins with German-American dishes. John's favorite meal was still neckbones, sauerkraut, and liver dumplings, a Dixie-Bavarian mixture he'd daydreamed about when eating K-rations in Italy.
    "Don't laugh, Mom; at least Tuskegee taught me to fly—I'll always be grateful for that."
    Tuskegee Army Air Field had been the experience of a lifetime—and an utter nightmare. Tuskegee was an experiment, to see if Negroes could learn to fly, and the Army handled it in a curious dual fashion. Oh the one hand, the training was just as arduous and fast-paced as at a white flying school. On the other, segregation was preserved almost as strictly as it was in the nearby town of Tuskegee, where the drinking fountains were marked white and colored and hostility lurked behind every glance. Like most of the other aviation cadets, John had endured the humiliation because he loved to fly and because he felt that a chance to be a commissioned pilot offered the best way for Negroes to advance.
    "Dad, the only people hiring pilots are the airlines, and