that the cows in the pasture were a herd of bison on a western prairie. I was a Plains hunter, Lakota, stalking the woolly beasts. And then some days I was “Jim”—Jim Fowler, the young, brave wildlife adventurer on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. Jim was always being sent into danger by the show’s white-haired, whiny-voiced host, Marlin Perkins—wrestling huge anacondas or wrangling rhinos. There were mysterious creeks with hidden creatures lurking underneath the water’s surface and endless blue skies with hawks soaring in plain sight. I wanted to see it all.
I can still hear the quail calling and the foxes barking. I can still taste the sweetness of blackberries plucked fresh off the bramble and smell the rain coming on the approaching rumble of a summer-evening storm. All that and the land were mine back then. I was the richest boy in the world, a prince living right there in backwoods Edgefield. Two hundred acres. The Lanham family’s land was a boyhood barony—our kingdom. It was a place where the real wild things dwelled.
The memories run deep. The Home Place was where Cheves Creek snaked foamy and quick and where Daddy taught us to fish. Wetting a line, hoping for a bream to take a wormy hook; calling the cows in from evening pasture; picking butter beans on a sweaty summer’s eve, with a trip to the Augusta Exchange Club Fair hanging in the balance; stacking heavy bales of sweet-smelling Bermuda hay; watching a flock of wary wild turkeys grazing the spring growth; busting up the side-hill covey of quail for the hundredth time; dirt-clod wars with Jock and Bug that I never seemed to win; mowing an acre of grass for a dollar; a toddling little sister meandering into the strawberry patch to pick her own sweet treats; the belly-filling satisfaction of homegrown food and thirst-slaking coolness of spring water; the awe of a whitetail leaping the blacktop road in a single bound; the wonder of finding an ancient arrowhead in a newly plowed field; the breathtaking beauty of the bluest jay against golden hickory leaves. All of these Home Place things haunt me pleasantly. They are ghosts I conjure up from time to time to help me understand who I am and perhaps recapture who I need to be.
They say that home is where the heart is. Now with that place far removed in time and space and my present life firmly planted in suburbia and lethargy-inducing convenience, I recall those times and most of what came with them wistfully. My heart has moved on to love other people, places, and things like I never thought I could. But that first place I knew as home will always be locked within.
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
