ON THE WINGS OF THE WIND: The Untold Story of History’s First Flight. By Richard Kigel. Part 22.
OH, NO, I THOUGHT. BAD MISTAKE. THE ANGLE OF THE FLIER WAS WAY TOO STEEP. WE WERE FLYING COCKEYED. THE FLIER WAS FLIPPING. ALL WE COULD DO TO SAVE OURSELVES WAS TO HANG ON TO THE WOOD FRAME AND SCREAM. THIS IS IT, I THOUGHT. OUR FLIGHT TO FREEDOM WAS GOING TO END HERE AND NOW.
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SUMMARY: THE STORY SO FAR…
Josiah, a young slave 12 years of age, lives in a cabin in the slave quarters of a Virginia tobacco plantation with Auntie Bee, Mose, the plantation handyman, two young children, Randall and Emily. He notices Mose leaving the cabin in the middle of the night and follows him to his secret workshop in the woods where Mose is building some sort of strange contraption. Mose tells him it is a machine that will fly him to freedom. Now that he knows Mose’s secret, he stays to help build the flier. After mishaps, false starts and setbacks—the flier tumbles down the mountain and is seriously damaged—they are attacked by snakes—mountain lions lurk all around them—they realize someone has been spying on them and they think their escape plan has been discovered. Finally, their time has come. Now they are in the air, riding on the wings of the wind.
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I thought I’d better take a good look around us to get a sense of our position and where we were going and immediately I was alarmed. We weren’t exactly heading in the direction we wanted to go. The mountains were supposed to remain on our left side all the way north. But now, instead of following the mountains we were moving away from them at an odd angle. We weren’t heading due north any more. We were moving more toward the east.
I guess all that ruckus with me and Randall made us veer off course.
I thought I’d better take a good look around us to get a sense of our position and where we were going and immediately I was alarmed. We weren’t exactly heading in the direction we wanted to go. The mountains were supposed to remain on our left side all the way north. But now, instead of following the mountains we were moving away from them at an odd angle. We weren’t heading due north any more. We were moving more toward the east.
I guess all that ruckus with me and Randall made us veer off course.
What did Mose say? “To change direction, lean the way you want to go.”
I told everybody to move to the left side of the flier, the side closest to the mountain. That way we could lean in that direction like Mose said and
hopefully it would shift our path and get us back in line with the mountain so we could keep going north.
One by one we moved to the left side of the flier. With all that extra weight on one side of the flier, we began to dip. We were sitting with our legs dangling over the wood frame while that whole side was dropping lower and lower.
Oh, no, I thought. Bad mistake. The angle of the flier was becoming way too steep. We were flying cockeyed. The flier was flipping. All we could do to save ourselves was to hang on to the wood frame and scream.
This is it, I thought. The flier was almost in a vertical straight line. We were hanging on to the lower edge and about to tumble off. Our flight to freedom was going to end here and now.
Posted By: Richard Kigel
Thursday, June 10th 2010 at 7:07PM
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