American Ace by Marilyn Nelson

M y father, Melvin M. Nelson, was a captain in the United States Air Force, a navigator, and one of the Tuskegee Airmen, the first African American military aviators in the U.S. Armed Forces. I have long wanted to write a book about the Tuskegee Airmen for young adults, and when I suggested it to my editor, she said yes—but write it for readers who know nothing about the Tuskegee Airmen. Write it from the point of view of someone who’s learning about them for the first time.
    Some people believe that young adult readers can only identify with young adult characters. I’m not convinced this is correct, and if it is, it might be something writers and teachers and editors should try to change. But I decided I needed a young adult protagonist—a central character other young adults would be comfortable reading about. And here came my first big challenge: Who would this character be?
    The story of the Tuskegee Airmen is an African American story and an important piece of twentieth-century African American history. Most African American young adults have heard about them during February, Black History Month. (At least, I hope they have.) Tuskegee Airmen in their red blazers attended President Obama’s inaugurations and appeared on television. So I couldn’t imagine telling the Airmen’s story as a young African American adult who was totally clueless about them.
    I wondered—could I move the story into the past? Could the protagonist be the younger brother of a Tuskegee Airman, or years later, a Tuskegee Airman’s son? I couldn’t imagine how or where to begin.
    Then I remembered the furor I’d seen on Facebook after the 2012 release of
Red Tails,
George Lucas’s movie about the Tuskegee Airmen. There was a lot of chatter about the fact that the only love story the movie told was a fantasy about one of the African American pilots and a beautiful young Italian woman. My African American Facebook friends wanted the love story to be between a pilot and the African American girl he’d left behind. I don’t think that would have been very dramatic: A movie about the exchange of love letters would be boring! And, since the Airmen were stationed in Italy, it’s possible that one or two of them might have been involved with Italian girls.
    I don’t know of any such romances, but one of my childhood friends, Brigitte, was a biracial girl born in 1946 to an African American soldier father and a German mother. The mother gave her away at birth, and she was adopted by a childless Tuskegee Airman and his wife.
    Recent genealogical and DNA research tells us that a large percentage of so-called “white” Americans unknowingly have African American ancestors. According to Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. of Harvard University, the percentage of self-identified white Americans whose DNA is at least one percent African is, in some Southern states, as high as twelve percent.
    I thought it might be interesting to imagine a Euro-American family’s discovery that they are also African American. I remembered reading a powerful novel by Sinclair Lewis when I was a young adult. Published in 1947,
Kingsblood Royal
tells of a middle-class Euro-American man in a small Midwestern town who learns that one of his forebears was a famous African American explorer. He is delighted, proud. But when he tells his white friends, they snub him and rub his nose in the nastiness of racism. At the novel’s end, he and his few new black friends are barricaded in his house as his white neighbors march toward it with guns and torches.
    I thought the Italian American grandson of a Tuskegee Airman might not know anything about the Tuskegee Airmen, but that an interest in his own family history might ignite his curiosity and make him identify with the history he discovered in his research. And now I had my protagonist.
    I remembered my father’s class ring, which I always hoped I would inherit