The Aviatrix (The Brilliant Rise and Tragic Fall of Bessie Coleman)

A rich and revelatory biography of the cinematic life of death-defying aviation pioneer Bessie Coleman, the first Black woman to hold a pilot’s license, by the author of the national bestseller Valiant Women.

For a brief and brilliant moment in the early 1920s, the first Black woman in the world to earn a pilot’s license, Bessie Coleman, was one of the most famous people in America. Her performances were tracked meticulously by Black newspapers from Chicago to Los Angeles, written up in the New York Times, and celebrated in lecture halls across the country. Bessie’s aerial acrobatics—figure eights, stalls, dives, tailspins, and loop-the-loops—were as dazzling as they were dangerous, and they drew thousands of spectators to open fields on the outskirts of cities and small towns, where Bessie appeared suddenly (and loudly) in the cockpit of her plane, as if conjured from their imaginations.

Then, almost overnight, she disappeared, killed in a plane crash in 1926. Bessie’s death was only the beginning of a long compression of her extraordinary life into a few lines of inspirational copy in children’s books, a face on a commemorative stamp, and a tale traded among pilots. While these tributes to Bessie’s life are deservedly reverent—she was, after all, the first Black woman to surmount the many obstacles to success that were thrown in her path—they fail to return to Bessie the thing that fame most reliably destroys: her humanity.

The Aviatrix resurrects Bessie. Working with a historical record that is nearly nonexistent—she left no papers, no artifacts—Lena Andrews has assembled previously unexamined genealogical records, scattered dispatches from the Black press, and a deep command of the era’s animating forces, into kaleidoscopic biography of Bessie’s pioneering life.

For the first time, The Aviatrix gives us Bessie’s whole story; and it is some story. Born at the bleeding edge of the American frontier, Bessie educated herself out of deep poverty, came of age in the grit and grime of Chicago, bootstrapped her way across Europe, and returned home a minor aviation celebrity—where, improbably and imperfectly, she engineered her own rise to national fame. The portrait that emerges gives readers a rich reward: The Aviatrix reveals not just what made Bessie a hero, but what made her human.