Flygirl

When the women arrive at the bar, Ida sees the "Whites Only"sign above the door. The sign makes her nervous, but she walks in with confidence. Once inside, Ida realizes the bar isn’t as glamorous as she expected: “‘Whites Only’ isn’t exactly a sign of quality, I guess. Jolene will get a kick out of that” (129). The women get Coca-Colas and Patsy leads them over to two men sitting at a table. The first asks Patsy to dance. Lily learns that the second man is married, and with her engaged, they decide there is no harm in dancing together. While her friends dance, Ida sits down to write letters home to her mother and Jolene.

Instructor Jenkins arrives at the bar. He comes up to Ida and asks her to dance. Ida is surprised that an instructor even came out to the bar. She is about to say that she is not allowed to dance with white men, but stops herself just in time, and says instead that she is not allowed to dance with instructors. Instructor Jenkins insists that he is off duty and finally Ida agrees to dance. Ida knows that it is illegal for a black woman to dance with a white man, but “there is a strange thrill in knowing it” (133). After they are done dancing, Patsy teases Ida: “No wonder you scored so well on your test. He was grading you on your curves” (134). Ida becomes angry and accuses Patsy of dancing with everyone in the bar, and says that if it weren’t for her, Patsy would have been sent home like Melanie Michaels. The whole room becomes quiet and demand that Ida tell them what she means. Ida reluctantly explains that she ran into Melanie and found out that Melanie failed the test. Patsy tells Ida that she was just teasing, and Ida says she understands, despite her true apprehensions: “[T]hey could never understand what it felt like, being a colored girl in the arms of a white man who could destroy me if he knew what I was” (135).

Ida is in a class with Instructor Jenkins. No one has mentioned their dance at the bar since it happened, including Instructor Jenkins. Today, the women will be trying out the Link trainer, a simulator designed to look like the kind of plane with a dark, covered cockpit, or to simulate flying at night. The women will have to fly with no vision, using only the control panel. Ida volunteers to go first, but once inside, she feels as if she’s drowning at the bottom of a lake all over again. Ida panics and bangs on the roof of the simulator until Instructor Jenkins lets her out, but once she’s out, she’s afraid she’s going to fail out of training. Instead, Instructor Jenkins explains that the Link trainer is hard for everyone the first time. The other women in the class each take a turn, but no one lasts more than ten minutes.

Ida and Lily continue their swimming lessons. Ida can now hold her breath for twenty seconds at the bottom of the pool. But it is starting to get cold out, and Ida and Lily reluctantly agree that they should hold off on their lessons until Spring. After swimming, Ida carefully takes off her swim cap and applies setting lotion to her hair before getting in the shower to keep it smooth. She is always careful to keep her hair braided or under a swim cap, and to not let it get wet in front of others. She is afraid that her hair will get frizzy and reveal to the other women that she is not white.

After her shower, Patsy, Lily, and Ida go into town to go holiday shopping. Once in town, they split up, and Ida realizes that this is the first time she’s been in town alone: “As long as Lily and Patsy are with me, I blend in and look like I belong. But the minute they disappear into their storefronts, I can’t help but start seeing the ‘Whites Only’ signs hanging in every window” (146). Ida goes into a hardware store to buy an awl for Grandy. At the store, she sees a black farmer attempting to return a bit of wire. The clerk refuses to accept his return and is extremely rude and disrespectful to him. Ida tells the clerk that she wants to buy a bit of wire of exactly that length, and finally, the clerk reluctantly lets the farmer return the wire so that Ida can buy it. As he leaves, the farmer whispers to Ida:“Child, you gonna get yourself killed, or worse, doing what you’re doing” (150), and Ida realizes he can tell she is black and passing as white. His words make her especially nervous, but Ida tries to ignore it as she pays and leaves to meet up with her friends, even though “it’s harder than any flight maneuver [she has] ever performed” (151).