Text Leveling System

Talkin' About Bessie

RDQ:	2579	Max Word/Sent	54	Total Words	3204		Diff Words	1195
Lex	990	Ave Word/.Sent	16	Hi Freq occurs	2182	68.1%	Hi freq	424	35.5%
AR	5.9	Long Sentences	42.5	Low Freq occurs	289	9%	Low freq	252	21.1%

Bessie Coleman was born in Atlanta, Texas, at a time when segregation-with its Jim Crow laws and racist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan-was a way of life in the South, and lynchings of African-American men were commonplace. So-called separate-but-equal schools did little to prepare African-American children to compete in the world of business and academics, because many whites considered African-Americans to be mentally inferior, and descendants of African slaves were only expected to be field hands or factory workers. As a result, there was little talk of technology in the cotton fields of Bessie's world. Certainly, in 1892, when Bessie was born, few African-American people even dreamed of mastering machines that could fly.
Bessie was eleven years old when Orville and Wilbur Wright made the first successful airplane flight near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on December 17, 1903. The flight took place on a narrow strip of sand called Kill Devil Hill, a thousand miles from the Texas cabin where Bessie lived. Yet the lives of Bessie and the Wright Brothers are forever linked: all were pioneers in the field of aviation.
Airplanes were widely used in air strikes during World War 1, but after the war, civilians had no use for the machines or the pilots who had flown them. Several years would pass before planes were used to transport passengers. Until then, pilots who wished to earn a living flying resorted to performing death-defying stunts, hundreds of feet above the ground, at outdoor circuses. These stunts, or aerobatics, required special skill, steady nerves, split-second timing, and great physical strength, for with each roll, loop, or nosedive the pilot had to fight the natural force of gravity. There was no room for failure because failure often meant death. Not surprisingly, these barnstormers, as they were called, were known for their daring. One of the most daring, and dazzling, of them all was Elizabeth "Bessie" Coleman.
Somewhere on the South Side of Chicago, in a private parlor, twenty souls gather to mourn the death of Bessie Coleman and share their memories of her. Many more had come to the house earlier that evening, but they are long gone. The grandfather clock reads 12: 01 A.M., but no one seems to notice that one day has just slipped quietly into another.
Bessie eyes the gathering of family, friends, and acquaintances from her place in the photo on the mantel behind them.
Hello, Mama," she whispers. Susan Coleman snaps her head around toward the mantel. She listens for a moment, but there is only silence. Finally, she shakes her head, and turns her attention to her ex-husband, George, who has started to speak.
I remember that bone-chillin' January day in 1892 when Bessie's first cry raised the roof
off that dirt-floor cabin, back in Texas. Our tenth chile was of a fightin' spirit
and, though four Coleman babies flew to Glory soon after their arrival, I knew,
of the thirteen born, Bessie would survive. When she turned two, we moved to Palmer Road near Mustang Creek
in Waxahachie, Texas,
where Cotton was still King.
The three-room house I built was on a quarter acre bought with back breakin' labor and a careful savin'
few Colored men could manage, thanks to Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan.
A man of African and Choctaw blood, I was told that hatred was
the only reward to expect in life. Oklahoma was better suited to prosperity
for such as me. If only my wife had agreed to follow. 'Course, Bessie understood none of that.
She was jus' a chile then, spendin' happy days waterin' roses, weedin' where corn,
kale, and peanuts grew out back, and moldin' mud pies after cool spring rains. Sometimes, I wish I had stayed.
I woke my Bessie before dawn on Sundays to bathe and dress her for church,
bein' bound and determined that she, like all my other children,
should first learn the wisdom of the Lawd, and then, the wisdom of the world. Bessie got her taste of the second
at school, after she turned six. I could neitha read nor write, but fixed it so my children would. I weekly pinched pennies
to rent books from the library wagon, which come by the house twice a year. Still, near as I can remember,
Bessie's first book was the Bible. Each night, I'd tend the oil lamp,
then sit while Bessie read the Scripture.
Her eyes glowed as they moved across the page. She'd stumble over the begats,
but mostly she'd read in a steady voice, pausin' between verses to lick her lips as if the words were honey.
I cried to see the joy Bessie took in readin'. Somehow, I foreknew the grand use she would make of it one day
Bessie had no time for foolishness after Papa left.
There were four of us girls in the house, then, plus Mama Lillah and Alberta were long gone, as were John, Walter, and Isaiah, our three older brothers, which meant,
by the age of nine, Bessie was the oldest child at home. Overnight, my big sister became a second mother, who cleaned and swept and cared for us,
while Mama kept another's house crosstown. Bessie's rag doll rested in a rocker
as its owner braced herself to face
a spring or summer, fall or winter day of hauling water from the well,
and mopping floors, and making meals atop
the old wood-burning stove that warmed our cabin. Bessie's days seemed endlessly tiresome to me. But she just took each one in stride.
Ain't nobody mentioned how crafty Bessie could be.
Not mean-spirited, mind you. Just sly. I saw that side of her, out in the fields, whenever we were workin' cotton.
Bessie despised pickin' cotton, couldn't even stand the smell,
and she'd show it by laggin' way behind. Once, I even caught her hitchin' a ride on the back of another picker's sack.
Her mama also caught her at it. `Course, Mrs. Coleman let Bessie off scot-free, seem' as how Bessie was the one who kept the family records and tallied the bales of cotton the Colemans picked each day, making sure the foreman paid them their due-and, sometimes, more.
It was an open secret: now and then, as bales was bein' weighed, Bessie'd "accidently" leave her foot lightly restin' on the scales, then press down if the foreman chanced to look the other way
Yessir! You might could say Bessie bore some watchin'.
When it came to knowledge, Bessie was a miser, hoarding facts and figures like gold coins she was saving up to spend on something special.
I'd watch her sometimes, poring over her lessons, lips pursed in concentration.
Often, when the subject turned to math, she'd glance up at me and, I'd swear,
she'd get a sort of greedy look in her eyes. But maybe it was just my imagination.
I did not imagine her persistence, though. Come rain, or shine, if work allowed, Bessie would attend the hot-in-summer, cold-in-winter, one-room Colored schoolhouse where I taught in Waxahachie.
Not even the four-mile walk it took to get there discouraged her from making her way to class.
Still, bright as she was, I worried that her fine mind would soon be sacrificed to a life spent picking cotton or working in the mills, like so many others had before. But, after each harvest, she'd return to class, determined as ever to snatch up and pocket
every tidbit of knowledge I could offer. "Teacher," she'd say, "one day, I'm going to amount to something."
Bless God! I need not have fretted in the least.
Folks who met Bessie once she left Waxahachie considered her allergic to elbow grease and manual labor. But I recall all the years she took in wash
to help out with the bills, and to fill jelly jars with precious pennies toward her education. Laundering was more than just a notion, then. Talk about some hard work! Listen:
You had to boil clothes in a tub,
scrape and scrub them on a washboard in a burning bath of soapy lye
that puckered tender skin.
Next came the strain of wringing, and rinsing, and dipping shirts in starch before
hanging them in the sun to dry. But your work still wasn't done. You couldn't call it quits till you'd pressed each piece with a red-hot iron, careful not to scorch your fingers. Your good humor could easily dissolve in a week's worth of dirty water.
Bessie held her spirits high by saying over
and over again, "I won't be doing this forever."
Bessie Coleman? She was a nice-enough girl. Polite in her way, I suppose. Goodness knows, I couldn't complain about her work.
My laundry was spotless, perfectly pressed, always delivered
in a timely manner each Saturday, even though my family occupied a mansion in west Waxahachie, 'bout five miles from the Coloreds. Bessie had to walk the distance, I believe, but she managed it.
Still, there was somethin' disturbin' about her. I think it was her eyes. She'd never look down, you know?
She'd come to the back door, like they were supposed to in those days. But when I opened it, there this Colored girl would be standin', lookin' me straight in the eye, like we were just any two people meetin' on a street in town. You know, like we were equals.
It was odd, I don't mind tellin' you.
I studied at the Colored Agricultural and Normal University, which was a fancy name for trade school,
and believe me, few people there were rich.
But Elizabeth, as she then preferred to be called,
was among the poorest of our class-though not regarding style. At eighteen, she studied single-mindedly,
for she did not plan to be a laundress all her life,
or live out her days in Texas as wife to a tenant farmer. When her money ran out after one semester,
I expected her to shove signs of despair. Instead,
she simply wrote a letter home to say she'd be returning. Soon after, word came that her church had planned
a homecoming party to ease her disappointment.
Her having quit school so early must have been a blow.
Yet, out of nowhere, Bessie got the idea to take the school band back to Waxahachie with her, to provide the entertainment. Well, you never saw so much grinning, and hand clapping, and parading as Bessie did that day at Missionary Baptist Church.
Only Bessie could turn defeat into a day of celebration and delight in being the star of the show, besides!
My sister wasn't one to take a thing at face value, especially not thought, or word, or deed to do with race. Uncle Tom's Cabin was among Bessie's favorite books,
and she made it one of ours through her lively reading, miming a preacher's style so perfectly, we'd be in stitches. But I recall, after her first recital, she hotly announced, "I'll never be a Topsy, or an Uncle Tom!"
She had no respect whatever for the slave girl, Topsy, who seemed incapable of self-improvement,
or for Tom, who had too little race pride
for Bessie's taste. She had no use for either not when it came to picking role models, anyhow. Bessie's habit of probing others' words came,
I suppose, of studying those written by
Booker T. Washington and Paul Lawrence Dunbar. Sometimes, I wondered how far
their words would take her.
By twenty-three, she'd discovered a newspaper from Chicago which boasted of a better life up North
and featured stories of powerful women of the Race: writers, business tycoons, and civil rights workers
like Ida B. Wells, Madame C. J. Walker, Mary Church Terrell full-of-hope and headstrong women. Like Bessie.
She'd often wake me at 3:00 A.M., burning to discuss
some new topic or report about our people she'd just read.
I heard the wheels turning in her head long before that North-bound train rolled through Texas and carried her away.
My little sister was born for Chicago.
In no time, Bessie seemed to fit right in with the equally proud and stylishly dressed ladies and gentlemen of the South Side
who filed through Jessie Binga's bank at lunchtime, or sauntered by the office of the Chicago Defender,
or paraded in and out of countless other Negro businesses bordering The Stroll. She loved the salons and haberdasheries, restaurants and bars, and the nightclubs like Dreamland, where Louis Armstrong blew all our blues away.
She'd come North by my invitation, though she'd always had a mind
to leave the limits of the South.
"You can't make a racehorse of a mule," our mother used to say. "If you stay a mule, you'll never win the race."
Bessie'd planned on winning if only she knew what.
Each year, she searched for the one trade or career she thought might best suit her, never knowing what that vocation was, or what might lead her to it.
I don't understand how Bessie
kept her focus fixed, but however long it took, she meant to find a lifelong work of substance, to prove herself and to make her people proud. Racehorse or not, Bessie
had a lot in common with a mule.
World War One left me with nightmares, and a fondness for drink, though neitha gave me an excuse for teasin' my sister.
Still, I goaded Bessie 'bout goin' to
the Burnham School of Beauty Culture, and bein' overeager to avoid
hiring herself out as a domestic.
But she just shrugged. Said she'd had enough of that kinda work back home.
She got a job buffin' men's nails at
a high-class barbershop on The Stroll, where I'd drop in to swap war stories and talk politics with her customers.
I'd point out that she was still a "common laborer," after a lifetime of tellin' anyone who'd listen
that she'd amount to somethin' "big" someday. She'd worked in the shop five years
when I wandered in one afternoon, blabbin' `bout airplanes and French women who had real careers as pilots.
Then I turned to Bessie and joked,
"You Negro women ain't never goin' to fly. Not like those women I saw in France." The barbershop rocked with laughter. Then I heard this snap that was so familiar: It was that steel-trap mind of Bessie's.
"That's it," she said. "You just called it for me!" She gave up her manicurin' job that very day. That's when I knew: by whatever miracle was required, Bessie would learn to fly.
For, at the core, she	though slight in appearance was tough as any metal, and always ready and willing to test her strength.
That much was clear the day she strode into my office to talk about her future and the future of our people. She was twenty-seven then, and planned to be
the first Colored woman in the world to fly. The problem was, no flight school
in our color-minded nation
would accept a woman, or a Negro.
She asked for my help, since I, too, had once been driven by a dream to lift the Race.
I'd founded my newspaper on nothing less.
"Go to Paris," I advised. "French fliers are the best, and they'll teach anyone. In French, of course." Much to her credit, Bessie didn't even blink.
I told her of a language school on Michigan Avenue, and the next I knew, Bessie had enrolled.
For one year, she studied French
and worked in a chili parlor to save toward the aviation school I found for her in France. I helped her buy passage on the SS Imperator, and said the Defender would promote her cause and record her success-once she returned with pilot's license in hand.
It was 1920, and Bessie was news, you understand. As a publisher,
I considered her a wise investment.
When Bessie boarded the steamer that icy November, she became a front-page story in the making.
Ja, ja, she knew a little French, but my English was better. We would speak together often, for Bessie was lonely.
In a graduating class of sixty-two, she was the only woman, and the only black, as well, at the Caudron School of Aviation. Ground school was where our training started, and
Bessie always raced to find a seat up front. She wanted
to be close enough, she said, to catch each new word, and there were many, like cowling, struts, joystick, rudder bar all parts of the biplanes we would later learn to fly. Our heads were filled with principles of flight,
and we were drilled on cloud formations, wind, weather,
and what effect each one might have on takeoffs and landings. I'd grow dizzy watching Bessie furiously scribble notes. Sometimes, she would smile and gaze out the window
at the wondrous, man-made birds of wood and wire silently waiting to lift her up, and up, into the endless blue over Paris, and she would sigh.
I shared her longing, but not her love for the complex equations we had to learn: calculating plane weight, plus distance,
and figuring out how much fuel we would need for each flight, and what the takeoff speed should be	depending on what
the pilot weighs, of course! Juggling such a lot of facts
and figures gave me headaches, but Bessie hummed sweetly, and puzzled out each problem without complaint.
I asked her, once, to please explain how it was possible for her to find such difficult work enjoyable.
"As a child," she said, "I was always good at math. But now, I'm glad to discover that there was, all along,
a higher purpose for my skill than counting bales of cotton." "What is a bale?" I asked.
Bessie threw her head back and laughed.
Mais oui, she was a beauty. A twenty-seven foot-angel with a forty-foot wingspan-the Nieuport 82,
an old and trusted friend I introduced to students. But I warned Bessie, as I cautioned everyone,
if she continued her course, the Nieuport could be the last old friend on whom she ever laid her eyes. One day, Bessie learned precisely what I meant. The Nieuport climbed to two thousand feet, then leveled off, purring perfectly-until the engine quit. The roar died suddenly away, and soon the plane was falling, falling, as the wind screamed past.
One hundred, two hundred, three hundred feet it fell, then snapped into a roll. Wedges of earth and sky flashed by too fast
for memory as the plane hurtled, then slammed to the ground with student and teacher on board. Bessie gasped, watching from the sidelines, knowing how easily she could be the one in flames. I was surprised the next day when she came for her lesson, how she boarded the plane without hesitation. I signaled directions above the wind and engine roar. She moved the rudder bar and joystick as I told her, practicing until her rhythm was steady and sure.
"The crash was a terrible shock to my nerves," she later said. "But I never lost them."

Subjective Criteria

Illustrations: Little support

Vocabulary: Many difficult words

Language: Many descriptive words

Sentences: Some Long/Complex

Text structure: Story/Poem

Inferences: Several Implications

Complexity: Several unrelated ideas

Concepts: Abstract/Complex Social

Author's purpose: Obvious

Features

Character traits

Integral Setting - Historical

Dialect/Accents

Topic

*Transportation

Determination

Airplanes

*Careers

*Feelings, Behaviors

Low Frequency Words

academics	acquaintances	acre	advised	aerobatics
agricultural	allergic	announced	aviation	bale
bales	barnstormers	begats	bein	biplanes
blabbin	boarded	breakin	buffin	calculating
civilians	coloreds	complaint	concentration	countless
cowling	crosstown	culture	customers	defender
defying	descendants	despair	despised	determined
disappointment	discouraged	dissolve	disturbin	domestic
dreamland	ease	education	effect	enjoyable
equations	familiar	featured	figures	figuring
fliers	flown	fondness	foreknew	foreman
formations	fretted	fuel	furiously	future
gathering	glance	glory	goaded	goin
graduating	haberdasheries	harvest	hatred	hauling
headaches	headstrong	hesitation	hitchin	hoarding
homecoming	hotly	humor	hurtled	imagination
imperator	improvement	incapable	inferior	introduced
investment	invitation	january	joystick	jus
kale	kinda	knowing	knowledge	labor
laborer	ladies	landings	language	laughter
laundering	laundress	laundry	lawd	lawrence
license	lifelong	lightly	limits	listens
lively	longing	lookin	lynchings	madame
mais	manage	manicurin	mansion	mantel
manual	mastering	memories	mentally	mentioned
michigan	miming	minded	mindedly	miracle
miser	missionary	models	moldin	mourn
mustang	nation	nieuport	nightclubs	nightmares
nosedive	notion	nowhere	occupied	organizations
oui	overeager	overnight	paraded	parading
paris	parlor	passage	passengers	performing
persistence	physical	pickin	pilots	pioneers
politics	poring	practicing	preacher's	precious
precisely	preferred	principles	private	promote
prosperity	prove	publisher	puckered	purpose
pursed	racehorse	racist	readin'	recall
regarding	required	resorted	respect	restaurants
restin	result	reward	rhythm	rinsing
salons	sauntered	savin	schoolhouse	scorch
scripture	segregation	semester	separate	shared
shove	shrugged	sidelines	signaled	snatch
souls	spirited	spotless	standin	stitches
stride	strode	stroll	struts	studied
stunts	stylishly	substance	suited	surprisingly
survive	swap	swear	swept	takeoff
technology	tenant	tidbit	timely	tiresome
topsy	transport	tycoons	verses	vocation
wandered	warned	washboard	watchin'	waxahachie
weighed	whispers	whites	who'd	wingspan
wisdom	wondrous	workin	worth	wringing
writers	yessir