The Man Called Brown Condor

by Thomas E. Simmons

  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.”

  Teddy controlled the wheel with his stick so that it made a perfect turn over to where Johnny was standing. “Hey, Johnny. What you got?”

  “How do you like this kite I made?”

  “You make the best kites ‘round here.”

  Johnny took the kite and string from his mother and handed it to Teddy. “Here. You take it. And don’t you let it get hung up on no trees.”

  Teddy carefully took the kite with one hand, put the ball of string under his arm, and held the rusty bicycle wheel with the other. “Man, thank you, Johnny.” He smiled and started across the street, yelling to a friend half a block away, “Hey! Osborne Barabino! Look what Johnny give me. Look at this, man!”

  Celeste sai
d, “You didn’t have to do that, son.”

  It was dusk when Celeste and Johnny reached home. Charles Cobb was sitting on the porch.

  “Where ya’ll been? I was starting to worry, not to mention get hungry.” He laughed. “Bertha and me even got the stove hot.”

  “I’m sorry, honey. I’ll warm up some gumbo and some hot French bread.” Celeste took the bag of groceries from Johnny and walked to the kitchen.

  From a small cloth bag, Charles Cobb shook a little tobacco onto a cigarette paper, curled the paper around the tobacco with his free hand, lifted it to his lips, licked one edge of the paper, and pressed the edges together to make a cigarette tapered at both ends. Holding the cigarette in one hand, he lifted the little tobacco bag to his lips with his other, grabbed the drawstring in his teeth, pulled it tight, and stuffed the bag into the top pocket of his bib overalls. Charles took a lucifer match from his pocket, lit it off with his thumbnail, and took a satisfying drag.

  “Nothing better than your momma’s gumbo. What you got to say for yourself, Johnny?”

  “Nothing, Daddy, except I’m gonna look for work to help with my school money. I figure I can keep up with my chores ‘round here and still shine shoes at Union Station.”

  Charles eyed Johnny. “You and Momma must a been talking mighty serious like.”

  “Naw, Daddy. I just figured it’s time I did something on my own. And I’d like to go with you to the shop, too, learn more ’bout machinery and things. Maybe I could help sweep up.”

  Charles stood up and put his arm around the stepson he loved as his own. “That would be fine, son. Now let’s go in and light a fire. I think it’s gonna be right chilly tonight. Maybe after supper you can read me the paper ’bout the war and how our boys are doing over there. Might be a story ’bout those airplanes fighting in the sky. This world’s in a real mess, but some mighty interesting things happening. You keep up with things, Johnny. This old world’s changing, changing for colored folks too. Yes sir, you keep up with it boy. Now let’s go see ’bout supper.”

  Every morning Johnny walked the short distance to the three-room school he attended on Thirty-Second Avenue where grades seven through ten were taught. High school only went to the tenth grade. It was a wood frame building in need of paint. Inside it was clean, the bare wood floors smelled of linseed oil. In the center room there stood a large potbellied stove. On the coldest days, the center room was always too warm and the two rooms on either side too chilly. There were black boards, worn thin, on the walls of all three rooms. The schoolbooks were dog-eared hand-me-downs discarded by the white schools. A one-room building next door, called The Annex, served as the elementary school for grades one through six.

  After school all the next week, Johnny looked for a spot with busy foot traffic where he could shine shoes. What he found was that all the best spots at Union Station were already spoken for by a healthy number of shoeshine boys, most of who were older than John. Then he discovered that his friend Collins was shining shoes at the OK Shoeshine Parlor on Fourteenth Street downtown. John applied to the owner, Mr. Sam Alexander. The small shop was a five-seat shine parlor and newsstand, and Mr. Alexander cleaned and blocked men’s hats. John got the job and Collins showed him how a “professional” shined shoes. The shoeshine men weren’t paid by the customers. The shine men would give the customer a token in a color assigned to them. The customer turned in the token and paid for the shine at the store register. The shine men were paid a percentage in salary for each of their tokens turned in. John figured the small salary plus tips was better than nothing.

  Robinson was always interested in machinery and spent any time he wasn’t shining shoes helping a mechanic who had a shop in his neighborhood. The man taught John to drive when he was fourteen. It was a task for which he quickly developed both skill and judgment.

  In 1918 John turned fifteen. He was tall, carried himself well, and was a good student. One spring morning, he wore his Sunday suit to school.

  In the school yard a young girl named Miomi Godine ran up to Johnny. “You’re sure dressed up, Johnny Robinson, just like when you walk me to Sunday School. What you dressed up for?

  They were joined by a boy Johnny’s age wearing bib overalls, but no shirt or shoes. “Yeah, John, you gonna shine up to the teacher, or you been struck by love or something? You sure ain’t gonna play no baseball after school in that getup.”

  “Now don’t you go messing with me, Ross. I’m dressed up ’cause I’m going to town after school to look for me a summer job, something better than shining shoes. School gonna be out soon.” Johnny turned to the girl. “Miomi Godine, you get yourself over to The Annex where you belong and don’t make nothing out of me walking you to Sunday School. The only reason I do it is ’cause my momma and your momma are friends and ask me to look after you. Now you get! I don’t want no smart mouth from you either, Ross.”

  “Aw man, I don’t mean nothing. How come you always gotta be so serious?”

  “I just got things I gotta do, and getting me a summer job is one of ’em.”

  Two weeks passed before John got what he considered a real job. He had impressed Mr. C. A. Simpson who owned a ship chandler business. When school let out for the summer, Johnny was first assigned to the warehouse where he did anything from sweeping to unloading and loading trucks. Mr. Simpson learned John could drive. He had just lost a driver to the army.

  “You think you can handle that?” Simpson pointed to his 1917 REO stake bed truck.

  “Yes sir, I can.”

  Simpson told John to get up in the truck, got up beside him, and ordered, “Let me see you drive around town and then down to the port and bring me back here.”

  John did and got the job driving the truck all that summer and every summer until he finished college. He was responsible for loading the truck with ship orders for parts, marine hardware, and groceries, delivering them dockside, and taking new orders while he was at the port. It was a job that required driving skill, accountability, and dependability. John excelled at it.

  Halfway around the world, another young black man was busy at his first job. The young man was twenty-six-year-old Ras Tafari Makonnen, second cousin to Zaudith, the daughter of the late Menelik II and empress of Ethiopia. Ras Tafari had been appointed by the ailing Zaudith to be the ruling regent of Ethiopia, still known in much of the world as Abyssinia and before 1000 BC as Aksum. Fate would one day place the two black men together, the first to serve the second, the second to place his life in the hands of the first.

  Chapter 3

  Northbound

  BY THE SUMMER OF 1920, THE GREAT WAR WAS A BAD MEMORY. Johnny had come marching home victorious. America was settling in to a joyous peace, gleefully entering the prosperous, anything goes Roaring Twenties—the age of short-skirted flappers, jazz, prohibition, bootleg whiskey, speakeasies, automobiles, and barnstorming pilots.

  At seventeen, John Charles Robinson carried himself confidently with a warmth about him that made him immediately likeable. In 1974, looking back some fifty years, different contemporaries, including Miomi Godine, Osborne Barabino, and Teddy Collins, described him in these terms:

  “Kind, good at sports. He played on our baseball team.”

  “Johnny was the best at everything he did.”

  “I wanted to be just like hm.”

  “He was dependable, always there to help others, an all-around guy.”

  “Johnny was serious sometimes, but when he laughed, there was honest joy in it shared by all around him.”

  “He never started trouble, got along with everybody. He was a leader.”

  Most Sundays, Johnny attended the African Methodist Episcopal Church, a small building at the corner of Thirty-Second Avenue and Twenty-First Street. The minister of the AME church, Pastor Lanoa, was also John’s school principal. He recognized Johnny as an exceptional student and encouraged him to follow his parents’ desire for him to attend Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.

  On a Sunday after
noon in late August of 1921, Johnny walked aimlessly down Thirty-First Avenue all the way to the beach road. The Gulf waters sparkled under a blue sky laced with fair weather clouds. The breeze filled his lungs with the clean, salty scent of the sea. Thoughts about leaving home for the first time weighed heavy. I’m gonna miss that water and the fishin’ and swimmin’ out there. Ain’t nothin’ like it up in north Alabama.

  Johnny turned east toward town, paying attention to the surroundings as if seeing them for the first time . . . or the last. Leavin’ a place you know and love is harder than I reckoned now that it’s almost time to go. He passed the electric power plant at the foot of Thirtieth Avenue. Heavy black smoke billowed from the towering chimney. Behind the plant was the car barn where the town’s streetcars were maintained. To the south he could see the harbor filled with steamships and tall-masted sailing ships, most taking on loads of lumber, some loading cotton bales. Since the Great War, steamships were beginning to outnumber the graceful, tall-masted barks, brigantines, and schooners that called at the port. Streetcars were running back and forth out to the grand pavilion at the end of the East Pier. Sunday strollers dressed in their best moved along the boardwalk parallel to the streetcar and railroad tracks. Men wore hats and ladies carried parasols for protection from the sun. John passed the ice plant where blocks of ice were being loaded into insulated boxcars that would transport vegetables and oranges, gathered from the outlying farms, all the way to Chicago. Johnny picked up a chip of ice and chewed it as he walked east across the front lawn of the Great Southern Hotel that faced the Gulf.

  At Twenty-Fifth Avenue, he turned north to the center of town. On Sunday afternoons he had always liked to go downtown to watch the increasing number of automobiles. They were beginning to replace horse-drawn buggies and wagons just as steamships were replacing those powered by sail. Miller Tire and Gasoline Store stood not far from Alexander Livery, Harness and Vehicle Company. There were even two motorcycles in town.