The supernatural is the natural not yet understood.
EVOLUTION. IT’S HOW WE ADAPT TO WHAT THE WORLD throws at us. We’ve netted physical dividends—bigger brains and opposable thumbs—from years of change. Technology, on the other hand, is how we master the world, but it often masters us in return. We’re an aspirational species, never giving up on enhancing the richness and reach of our lives. That effort drives the course of history: revolutions, wars, elections, assassinations, and innovations.
We have come to walk upright and we have discovered fire—or at least how to use it. That is who we are as a species: not just aspirational but at a unique edge between evolution and technology. We adapt, we master; we are part of nature, we overcome it; we are shaped by history, we make it. And any one of our stories can thus be told twice, looking at the forces outside us and those within. So it is with Daddy’s mother: my grandmother Mamatha. She was a woman who straddled nine decades and all of the history and social evolution that came along with them. I was a witness to three decades of her life but, through her eyes, was privileged enough to see much more than that.
In my lifelong obsession with flight, I’ve had occasion to consider both evolution and technology. Through the aeons birds have gained feathers and wings. That most have also become airborne over millions of years is truly miraculous.
Humans, of course, did not evolve to join them. For the relatively short time we’ve shared the earth with birds, we’ve looked skyward and wondered about—maybe wished for—flight. But we couldn’t solve the mysteries of lift and propulsion. Then, a little over a century ago, we made some of the fastest progressions from dreaming to doing that mankind has ever witnessed. In the span of a few decades, the dreams of taking flight became a reality.
Mamatha was born Ethel Jennings in 1896—one generation removed from slavery. She entered life on the edge between two centuries, in a nation that was expanding rapidly as a world power. Technology had already conquered much of the continent via rail and steam engine. Automobiles were replacing horses and voices were streaming in crackling tones along telephone cables. It must’ve been a heady time, with all the connectivity broadening horizons in some ways and making the world smaller in others.
For some flying things it was also the worst of times. By the 1890s the same technologies that allowed people to move faster and further and tell others where they’d been and were going led to the extinction of the passenger pigeon. Word of mouth—expedited and expanded by a growing phone system, or a few dots and dashes tapped on a telegraph message—about where the dwindling flocks had congregated made it easy for greedy shooters to slaughter the last of a species that had once darkened the skies. Other endangered birds suffered, too. Carolina parakeets, noisy native parrots that found comfort in big cypress bottoms and around cocklebur-infested farmsteads, were also disappearing. Unabated logging of swamps pushed the green-and-gold masses of sociable birds to the brink. Steam shovels drained the water away and the sawyers did the rest—cutting and bucking and running wood out on rails to build the nation. The parakeets soon had no place to go. In just a few short years humans would take the empty spaces the birds had left behind in the skies.
It’s 1903 now, and Ethel is a little girl, amazed and maybe unbelieving when word washes down through church folk and the rumor mill that some crazy white men in North Carolina are flying like birds—but in a machine made of wood and cloth! I’m sure there were those who didn’t like it, who saw the sky as a place God made for feathered things, not man. This flying thing was an affront to God—sinful arrogance—and surely would not last. Those people would have been wrong, of course. Godly or not, humankind was off the ground.
Fourteen years later, in 1918, Ethel is hanging the wash out to dry in the warm sun, wondering if her husband-to-be, Joseph Samuel Lanham—“Daddy Joe”—will come home from the war alive. She knows from newspapers—and letters from France—that men with designs on destroying one another are conquering the air with deadly effect. She reads and hopes for the best. An odd puttering sound overhead interrupts Ethel’s work and drowns out the copycat song of a mockingbird. A biplane growls and crawls below the clouds. She shades her eyes against the midday sun with tired hands and waves. The unseen pilot waggles the plane’s wings in a salute from heaven. Not long afterward, Joseph comes home from France alive, but not whole.
Less than a decade later and flight is no longer a novelty to Ethel or Joseph. Charles Lindbergh flew an airplane across an ocean she’s never seen. The world celebrated the achievement but to Ethel it seemed simply another thing done by white men with too much time on their hands. At home there were three girls to raise, a farm to help keep and, in a little more than a year, another mouth—a son’s—to feed.
“Time flies” goes the saying, and Ethel is forty-eight and wondering if an even bigger war will ever end. The Nazis claim racial superiority and work hard to rid Europe of anyone not fitting their designs. The Japanese attack Pearl Harbor. Joseph and Ethel hear about black aviators—trained down in Alabama—who are taking the fight to the Germans. Joseph knows of the famous black college in Tuskegee and even follows the farming prescriptions of a professor there named George Washington Carver, who advises plowing on the contour and planting cover crops to save the soil. The black airmen have endured hatred, but are proving themselves in airplanes that can fly faster than any bird ever imagined. They surpass the records of many of their white counterparts. Ethel and Joseph talk frequently about their hopes for better times and imagine that achievements like the soldiers’ flying and fighting and the Tuskegee professor’s farming genius will help set things right once and for all.
As the demands of war call for more wood, large swaths of bottomland forest disappear for the sake of Uncle Sam. Ivory-billed woodpeckers hold on until the last, but the “Lord God” birds finally disappear as another world war fades into promises of “never again.”
Just a few years later, however, Joseph and his wife are sending their drafted only son into conflict. President Truman calls it a “police action” but people are dying by the thousands over a line drawn in the Asian dirt and something called “communism.” The parents fret again over a war threatening to destroy something they love.
The only Lanham son skirts by the conflict, though, serving out a lucky deferment to Europe. After a stint in Germany, he returns to Edgefield to find his father ailing. There’s an uneasiness boiling up across the nation, too. A quiet seamstress sits down on a bus in Alabama and a man named Martin Luther King Jr. seems intent on making things happen for colored folk as quickly as the supersonic jets arc across the sky, leaving long trails of white and sound in their wake. A birdwatcher named Rachel Carson writes a book warning that our sins against nature—polluting land, water, and air with chemicals—will create silent springs and disaster for all living things. There’s talk in the newspapers about man-made machines circling the earth.
Joseph struggles to see the 1960s come in and doesn’t get to share in Dr. King’s dreams for equality. The veteran has done his part, though, training his people to lead, learn, and teach their way to better lives. My grandfather dies maybe hearing more saber rattling—of missiles on Cuba that fly faster than any airplane he’s ever known. This man, who once crouched in a trench and saw leather-helmeted men in open-air cockpits dogfighting over muddy battlefields in planes that moved barely faster than an automobile, might have mused sadly in his last days over a potential destruction that no one will see or hear coming.
Ethel is almost seven decades removed from the little girl’s disbelief that men were flying, and on some days the air over her gray-haired head seems more filled with the sound of airplanes than birdsong. Her husband has been dead eight years but there’s another Joseph with her now, a little namesake grandson only four years old. On a humid July night in 1969—only a little more