After they sat down, Jackie toggled a finger at Marian. “This won’t do.”
Marian thought Jackie was summarily rejecting her. “I won’t?”
“You need to be an ambassador. You’re meant to represent American women. Ladies. Not grease monkeys.” Her accent was carefully refined, but underneath was a disguised twang, a sharp elbow.
Marian looked down at herself. “I thought about getting a dress.”
“Why on earth didn’t you?”
In the morning she’d hesitated outside the glass doors of Macy’s, stylish ladies sweeping past, the corners of their shopping bags bumping her imperiously. She’d glimpsed gleaming floors and counters, bottles of perfume, her own incongruous reflection. “I didn’t want to get my hopes up,” she told Jackie.
“That’s all inside out. You must dress for your aspirations.”
“I don’t aspire to be anything other than a pilot.”
Jackie’s smile was more of a wince. “Don’t be stubborn. You must know they want the contrast, the magazine pictures of the pretty girl like any other, neat as a pin, hair curled, serving coffee and cake, who happens to be the same girl flying the big plane. You can’t have the pilot without the lady.”
So the lipstick in the cockpit was an armoring, not an obeisance or a pandering affectation but something more like a beetle settling its wings down into a smooth shield.
* * *
—
An incomplete history: Jacqueline Cochran is born Bessie Lee Pittman in 1906, raised in shabby itinerancy in the humid sawmill towns of northern Florida by people who are almost certainly her biological parents, though later she’d tell everyone she was an orphan, preferring the idea of herself as separate. She is one of five children, a barefoot urchin, a crab-catcher and chicken thief. The story she tells—and it’s likely true enough—is that she wore dresses made of flour sacking and slept on a straw mattress in a shack on stilts with oiled paper for windowpanes.
A leering old man tells her she’d started out as a boy but an Indian had shot her through with an arrow when she was very small, making her navel and surprising her so thoroughly that she’d sat down on an ax, becoming a girl. A girl is a boy who has sat on an ax, he says.
She wonders why boys still have navels, then. Had they not been surprised when the Indian shot them? Or was it that there weren’t any axes around? The air smells of the high sharp burn of a blade through wood. A fine layer of sawdust sticks to her skin. She wanders where she will. When she is very small, she witnesses a man lynched in the woods, burned.
Bessie Lee, eight years old, has a night job pushing a cart through a cotton mill, bringing spools to the weavers. As Jackie Cochran will tell it one day, that’s how she earns the money to buy her first pair of shoes. She knows to eat her lunch quickly and hide in her cart for a nap, hopefully unnoticed by the men. （She learns to punch and kick, which is sometimes enough.） Soon she gets promoted to spinner and walks until dawn between the rows of bobbins, looking for snags. Lint in her lungs, ears full of the screeching machines. The steamy hot southern night presses down on the mill’s long roof, presses down on the cotton fields and the red clay earth as the child reaches into a machine and ties a broken thread back together with her small, nimble fingers, sets the bobbin spinning again.
Bright little girl. Again she is promoted. She oversees a gang of fifteen children who inspect the newly woven fabric for flaws, fifteen bent and wizened miniature people, hunched like jewelers over smooth, rippling cool cotton.
During a mill strike, ten years old, she gets a job in a beauty shop sweeping up shorn hair and mixing shampoo.
Here begins her rise.
* * *
—
Jackie clasped her hands on her desk, said to Marian, “If you’re picked, you’ll transport planes where they need to go. From factories to airfields, for example, or from airfields to repair depots or vice versa, freeing up RAF pilots for combat. No matter your experience, you’ll start with trainers. Everyone does. If you’re good enough, you’ll upgrade from there. You’ll learn a whole class of planes—twin-engines, say—and then be expected to transport types you’ve never flown before just by reading the specs. It’s an actual, concrete contribution, but it will be difficult. Do you think you’re up for it?”
Marian was so terrified of saying something that would mean she would not get to do what Jackie had described, she found she could not speak. She nodded.
“Yes?” said Jackie.