Officer Jenkins turned his face up to the great painted mural above the checkpoint, high on the curved wall where he had never once looked, and he found the third figure from the left in the crew of young men in front of the silver plane. He read the name painted beneath it, slowly, as if each letter weighed a pound. “Captain Clarence Hollowell. First Black Captain, Southern Crescent Airways. Nineteen seventy four.” The line behind me had gone completely silent. A baby stopped crying. I am Clarence Hollowell, eighty years old, and I stood barefoot on the cold floor with my belt in a gray bin and my pants held up in one hand.
In 1974, I was twenty eight years old, and I was the first Black pilot to command a jet for Southern Crescent. I had been rejected by four airlines. I had flown a crop duster in the Delta heat for two years just to earn the hours. On my first flight as captain, a passenger asked the flight attendant whether a real pilot was coming. I flew for twenty one years. When I retired, the airline gave me silver wings with my captain number, one, engraved on the back. I sold hardware for twenty one more years, because I could not stand to be idle.
The supervisor, a man with a gray mustache named Frank Delaney, stepped across the checkpoint with his hands at his sides and his eyes shining. “Captain Hollowell,” he said, with a catch in his throat. “I was a baggage handler on your first flight to Chicago in seventy four. You came down the stairs and shook every hand on the ramp.” A businessman in a gray suit lowered his bag. The woman with the stroller turned her stroller to face me. A boy of about nine, in a Braves cap, looked at the mural, then at me, then at the mural again, and mouthed the word, Wow.
A pair of silver wings on a belt buckle gave one retired captain the length of a security line to bring a young officer back to the sky in Atlanta.
I gave my terms quietly, because the young man looked as if he might fall over. “Officer Jenkins, I am not going to file a complaint. You are twenty six, you are careful, and a careful officer is the one I want in front of my belt. I would ask three things. Stand under that mural at the start of every shift for one minute and read the names. Tell your supervisor what you learned today, so that the next old man in line is greeted by name. And walk me to my gate, because I have a baptism in Chicago, and I should like to be early for once.”
Jenkins lowered his rubber gloves, and his voice came out cracked. “Captain Hollowell, my grandfather was a Pullman porter,” he said. “He told me stories about men who flew. I never thought one would walk through my line.” His throat worked. “I asked you if you had ever flown before. I told you that wings were costume jewelry.” He turned to the supervisor. “Sir, I would like to apologize, in front of everyone, before I do anything else.” Frank Delaney nodded, and the line leaned in to listen.
But the young man was too ashamed to wait. In one frantic motion, Jenkins reached out, took the belt from the bin, and sprinted for the security office behind the checkpoint, saying he had to check the buckle against the airline records. He took five steps. A tall woman in a Delta Sky Club blazer moved across the passage. The businessman in the gray suit set his bag down and spread his arms. And the boy in the Braves cap, quick as a whippet, slid under the rope and stood in the middle of the walkway with his hands on his hips.
Jenkins stopped, holding my belt in both hands with the silver wings flashing, and the entire line watched him from behind the stanchions. The boy in the Braves cap looked up at him with solemn eyes. “Mister,” he said, “that belongs to the captain.” There was a long pause. The whole concourse seemed to hold its breath. Then the young officer turned, walked back, and knelt on the cold floor in front of me with the belt held across his open palms, like a man presenting a sword. “Captain,” he said, “please forgive me.”
The consequences were courteous and warm. Frank Delaney walked me through the checkpoint himself, and Jenkins pushed my little suitcase down Concourse B past two hundred people who clapped as I went. They held my flight for ten minutes. The airport authority put a small brass plate under the mural that afternoon with my full name and my number, and Jenkins asked to be the first to polish it. The airline invited me to speak to its new pilot class in the spring, and I was glad to say yes.
In the name of my wife Rosalyn, who passed in 2017, I started the Rosalyn Hollowell Fund. It pays for flight lessons and aviation scholarships for young people who could not otherwise afford to fly, in Fulton, Clayton and DeKalb counties. In the first year we gave fifty two first flights and funded nine private pilot licenses. One was a fifteen year old from College Park whose father cleaned airplanes at night, and who sat in the left seat of a little Cessna and put both hands on the yoke, and laughed with his whole body.
On a bright afternoon in April, I came down the jet bridge in Chicago holding the arm of my great granddaughter, who was wearing a white dress and a bonnet. Her mother laughed and cried in the same breath. Behind me, an officer in a blue uniform was waiting at the bottom of the stairs with my suitcase. It was Jenkins. He had taken the same flight, on his own day off, in the last row. “Captain,” he said, “I wanted to see the baptism.” I put my hand on his shoulder. “Then you had better sit in the front pew,” I said.
