Harriet

Harriet

by Carter Jefferson

I'm standing in the middle of Quincy Market in the rain, under a transparent plastic roof, looking at pictures made from old glass negatives. "Archival Process," the sign says. "As Used at the Smithsonian Institution." I've just eaten dinner at a Greek restaurant with my family, my daughter's boyfriend, and his parents. The father is a fireman. Nice people, very different from the people I see all the time. He tells stories about Guadalcanal; she hardly ever says anything.

The pictures, matted, cost ten dollars apiece for an 8x10. They are displayed on what looks like a peddler's cart. Somebody says, "Who was Harriet Quimby?" I stare at a picture of a woman with a kind face full of sadness and pain, rather beautiful. She is dressed in old-fashioned flying gear, holding on to the struts of a plane that looks so fragile it couldn't have flown. But it did. I am seized with her sadness and pain and an inexpressible "gone" feeling.

I answer: "I know. She was the first woman to fly the English Channel. But something else big happened at the same time--I forget what--and she got hardly any publicity. And then she got killed in an air show accident six months later."

Bob, my daughter's friend, looking at the date on the picture--1912--says, "It was the Titanic." And I remember that; he is right.

There is another picture, just a little one, in the Literary Digest. I sit in the Boston Public Library and stare at it. On the right three or four men wearing straw hats are standing on a beach looking out at the left side of the picture, which shows two men carrying her body, her legs hanging down in big boots. You can't see her face. The picture is black and white, of course, but it is really gray. The pages are white, but they look gray, too, and the whole bound volume is dirty, old, and gray, lying there on the polished oak table, and the day is gray outside the big windows. June in Boston. She was killed in Squantum, it says, just a few miles from here; somehow she was thrown out of her plane and fell a thousand feet into three feet of water. Dirty water, with garbage floating in it. I don't know that, it just seems that way. Those men in their straw hats are watching her body being carried by other men in black suits who look as though they ought to be at a lodge meeting instead of carrying a crushed body through the slack water on Squantum Beach. They say her flying suit was made of purple satin.

There is another picture of her, full face, that makes her look like a stupid girl with little curls under a no-doubt fashionable bonnet.

A man named Willard flew with her that day. He fell out of the plane just before she did. He was crushed, too, but I have not seen a picture of his dead body so I don't much care.

In the library a book on the early days of aviation tells about her flying. It has a long quote from the last article she wrote, full of brave words about how women pilots could help build the air transport business. She wrote about flights between cities as much as sixty miles apart. It sounds silly now. Mathilde Moisant said in her talk with the Columbia Oral History Project that Harriet Quimby came from San Jose, California. That's probably not true. Harriet lied to people. Her mother taught her to lie. Nobody really knows anything about her life before she was nearly twenty-five, except that she was born in Michigan and lived in Arroyo Grande for a while. She made myths. They are her myths, but they are mine now.

I think of San Jose in 1890. That must have been when she moved there, if she did. Norman Angell wrote about being a cowboy out there around the turn of the century on a ranch that is covered now with houses. Not as many people, then. She looks middle class. None of the burning eyes that you see so much in old photographs of ordinary people, eyes you could still see fifty years ago in the faces of migrant workers driving through western towns in old station wagons. Haunted. By what strange horrors we no longer have? San Jose probably was small. Just a few gaslights, maybe two blocks of wooden stores, wooden sidewalks along dirt streets, rutted, with piles of manure steaming in the warm sunshine. Her father was a failed farmer, then a storekeeper. He wore a wool suit, frameless glasses. He was quiet--depressed, we'd say now--always working, but willing to talk to people who came to ask for help, for food they couldn't afford, to feed children in some poor hovel on the street behind the stores. He went to church regularly. But she said she came from a rich family.

Her mother was pale, gray. A hired girl did the heavy work, but her mother worked, too. She sometimes waxed the heavy dark mahogany dining table. I've seen pictures of big Victorian houses centered on big lots with scraggly bushes and grass gone to seed, all closed up against the night air, the day air. My great-aunt's house was a little like that, a long time ago. Heavy draperies darkening the windows of the dining room, heavy chairs padded with cross-stitched seat cushions; heavy buffet, covered with a strip of embroidered linen, stolid under cut glass bowls and big round goblets, green on top with plain glass stems, from Bavaria. Turkey carpet, they called it; we call it an Oriental rug. Brown pictures under glass in smooth dark frames.

Harriet played outside, kept in the yard by the low picket fence.

In New York, in 1903, she finally became a reporter, then, later, drama critic, for Leslie's Weekly. She was twenty-four then, or twenty, some thought. Unbelievably young for such a prestigious job. She was actually twenty-eight, but her myth said twenty-four. Or twenty.

When she was twelve she knew she was leaving, but not why. Her father said little, but somehow she learned that she had to do more than anyone else. Jonathan Strong was the smartest boy her age in town, but she was smarter, and she knew it. Once she climbed the pear tree in her yard and fell out of it. She landed flat on her stomach and bit her lip clear through with her bottom teeth. She felt the shock, but no pain. She couldn't breathe for a minute, but then she got up and went in the house and kept washing her mouth out with salt water until it stopped bleeding. By then it hurt. Nobody ever knew about that. When her lip swelled up and turned purple, she told her parents she had tripped on a rock and fallen on her way home from school. By the time she was twelve she didn't cry much. She already knew how to lie.

She read the San Francisco newspapers her father sometimes brought home. The Bible. Her schoolbooks: her father insisted that she read history, but all the books told about were battles and heroes. Sometimes she read of heroic women. Jo March taught her to write her way to New York. She pored over maps in the her father's books and in the back of the Bible, and she embroidered a map of California on a piece of linen her mother had given her to use for a sampler. Her mother thought she was strange, but kept her mouth shut. Once Harriet saw a balloon ascension at the county fair. There were no airplanes then, of course.

If we could hear that time the silence would stupefy us. Every sound was clear, distinct. A bird calls; a dog barks; hoofbeats draw near; carriage wheels rumble and squeak; boys yell. Trains made noise when they came through town, but otherwise there was no noise: no radios, no automobile engines, no furnaces humming and just slightly rattling the pans on the kitchen stove. When she hit the ground that day she fell out of the tree, she heard the thud. She could sit in the house on a warm September afternoon when the windows were open a little and hear a ripe pear land when it fell off the tree. Sometimes she hummed or sang to herself while she was sewing or shelling peas, but she sang badly, and was ashamed when she had to sing hymns in church. She had a good enough ear to know she couldn't sing. She sang when she flew the English Channel, though; she couldn't hear herself then, for the wind.

Sometimes I can stare at her picture and think of her embroidering, humming to herself. Her death certificate said she was twenty-seven, but that was a lie. I still can't think about her plunging a thousand feet to land in three feet of water, wearing her satin flying suit. That's not part of her myth, or mine--it's the truth. I wonder what lie she told herself as she fell.