When Ida Mae sees the newspaper article about the WASP program she decides to apply but since she doesn't have her license she decides to use her father's old license and replace the picture. They were also involved in testing new planes and in particular were responsible for getting men to pilot the B-29 plane, known as the "Widowmaker". These women pilots will ferry planes across the continental United States for shipment overseas. In August 1943, with the war in Europe and the Pacific struggling on, the US government decides to form the Women Airforce Service Pilots program (WASP) to free up men pilots for service overseas. He is sent to the South Pacific where he is a field medic in the colored infantry. Ida Mae's brother, Thomas who is a student at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee, takes a leave of absence to enlist. With the bombing of Pearl Harbor however things are about to change as America is drawn into the world conflict and new opportunities arise. She's already been failed once because she was a woman. But Ida Mae is black and a woman and even though she is light skinned, these two things mean it is most likely she will never get her pilot's license. Instead he married a black woman whom he fell in love with.This resulted in his light skinned relatives essentially disowning him.Īt eighteen years of age, all Ida Mae longs to do is fly, like her daddy taught her. But her father did not marry a white woman. In her family's past, a half-colored girl was "steered down a path that made each generation light than than light, having children by white men and marrying those children to other mixed coloreds, lighter and whiter until" her father was born. Ida Mae is fair-skinned like her father, while her brothers are dark like her mom.
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