Now Let Me Fly: A Portrait Of Eugene Bullard by Ron Wimberly and art by Brahm Revel. First Second, 2023. 9781626728523. https://www.powells.com/book/-9781626728523?partnerid=34778&p_bt
This graphic novel is a portrait of an American hero we should all know about.
It opens with an elevator operator, Gene, and a man who works in the building, Mr. Casey, getting stuck in an elevator together. Casey thinks Gene is joking when he says he was the first negro combat aviator -- but Gene shows him the medal he won. Then he starts recounting the long story of how he ended up in France, which includes him running away from his family home in Columbus, Georgia, at age eleven, after his father had to go flee a white mob. (Afterwards, Eugene had terrifying dreams about lynchings that led him to flee to France, where he heard white people and black people live together.)
On the road Eugene spends time with a group of Irish people who've come to the US from England, and it's from them that he first hears the legend of the Ibo, a clan from Africa who refused to be enslaved. They teach him about horses, and feed his hunger for travel, too. It's not long before he stows away on a boat and makes it to the UK where he works at a carnival, takes up boxing, and starts performing on the stage as well. Gene is still quite young when he makes it to Paris just ahead of World War I, which leads him to become a soldier in the trenches and eventually a combat pilot.
Eugene Bullard led an extraordinary life, and if Wimberly and Revel set out to get me interested in it, they succeeded. I've got a list of books from the bibliography to track down, and I'm hoping to find an interview or two with Bullard, too. Worth noting: throughout the book the racism he faced as a young man is shown to be something he and others are still dealing with even in a big city in the North (in what I assume was the 1950s). But the book offers a bit of hope, too.
Revel seems able to accomplish anything as an artist, from scaring me during harrowing battles to making me experience the joy of children playing. He creates a sense of time and place with a few carefully chosen details and brings every character to life with subtle expressions and body language. This graphic novel is worth reading and then rereading for every detail.
