Flight

Flight by Walter White (1926)

Flight*, by Walter White, follows Mimi Daquin, a young Creole woman of mixed racial heritage, from her girlhood in New Orleans through a turbulent journey of self-discovery, love, loss, and racial awakening in the early twentieth-century American South. The novel opens as Mimi, her gentle, dreamy father Jean, and his ambitious second wife Mary travel by train from New Orleans to Atlanta, where Mary has arranged for Jean to take a position with a Black-owned insurance company. Jean, a man steeped in Creole tradition and the quiet romance of old Louisiana, is uprooted against his deepest instincts. Mimi, not yet fourteen, is torn between her affection for her father's way of life and the excitement of new experiences. Before leaving New Orleans, Jean takes Mimi on a long walk through the city's old streets and cemeteries, recounting their family history with pride — a lineage that weaves together free people of color, French Creoles, and participants in Louisiana's colonial and revolutionary past. He warns Mimi that life outside New Orleans will force her to confront her racial identity in ways she has not yet had to face. In New Orleans, Creole society had provided a buffer; in Georgia, the lines between white and Black are hard and unforgiving. In Atlanta, the family settles into a furnished house provided by Mary's father, the brash and money-minded Mr. Robertson. They are introduced to the tight-knit circles of Atlanta's Black middle class, a society obsessed with respectability, skin color, and social standing. Mimi observes with sharp, often critical eyes the gossiping, the social climbing, and the elaborate performances of propriety among their new neighbors. She forms a deep and passionate friendship with Hilda Adams, the daughter of a quietly dignified woman who is herself an outsider among the socially ambitious. The most shattering event of Mimi's early Atlanta years is the race riot of September 1906. She and Jean are caught downtown when white mobs, inflamed by sensational newspaper reports of alleged assaults on white women, begin attacking Black men on the streets. Mimi witnesses brutal violence at close range. The experience permanently alters her. Before the riot, she had thought of people simply as people; afterward, she becomes acutely and painfully conscious of being a Negro in a society that defines and confines her by that identity. She passes through a period of obsessive racial bitterness before gradually arriving at a more complex understanding of both her own people and the white world around her. Central to Mimi's emotional life is Carl Hunter, the restless, rebellious son of the insurance company's president. Carl refuses to conform to his father's expectations, drinks, associates with people deemed disreputable, and dreams vaguely of writing. He and Mimi form a rich intellectual companionship, exploring together the churches, dances, work songs, and spiritual life of ordinary Black Atlanta. Mimi comes to see in the music and resilience of poor Black people something vital and irreplaceable that the socially ambitious class around her is in danger of losing in its rush to imitate white respectability. Their friendship is complicated by Hilda's silent, long-held love for Carl, which Mimi discovers. Out of loyalty, Mimi breaks off the companionship with Carl, who responds by drinking more heavily and behaving erratically. Eventually, on the night of Jean's first serious heart attack, Carl comes to the house and confesses his love. Mimi confesses hers in return, and they become lovers. Jean dies shortly afterward of heart failure. His death devastates Mimi and leaves her spiritually adrift. She had loved him with a devotion deepened by her awareness of how lonely and unhappy he had been in Atlanta, far from the world he belonged to. His death also alters the domestic balance: without Jean as a buffer, Mimi's relationship with her stepmother becomes more uncertain, though Mrs. Daquin, softened by widowhood, proves less hostile than expected. Carl's behavior improves markedly after his reunion with Mimi. He becomes steadier, more willing to apply himself to his father's business, and their relationship deepens into something settled and quietly joyful. But the novel's forward momentum is driven by consequences. Mimi discovers she is pregnant. Her reaction is one of happiness and love rather than shame, a response that baffles even the sympathetic Dr. Adams, who understands the social catastrophe this represents. The pregnancy forces Mimi toward a reckoning with the world's judgment and with her own future. Throughout the novel, White layers Mimi's personal story over a richly rendered social landscape: the rigid color hierarchies within Black Atlanta, the psychological costs of racial oppression, the beauty and spiritual depth of Black folk culture, the tensions between tradition and modernity, and the question of whether a person of ambiguous racial identity can pass as white and what that crossing would cost. Mimi's journey is one of flight — from New Orleans to Atlanta, from girlhood to womanhood, from innocence to knowledge — and the novel asks repeatedly what it means to belong, to love, and to survive with integrity in a society designed to diminish you.

By Walter White · First published 1926 · Genre: Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction, Social Commentary · 24 chapters · 106,467 words

First lines

The long train rumbled and swayed, whistle blowing intermittently, screeching discordantly, past smoky factory and office buildings, through rows of one-storied, two- or three-room cottages, outside which on hard packed clay earth played here towheaded white children or there black or brown or yellow ones. It plunged suddenly into cavernous darkness under a bridge, thick acrid smoke pouring into the open windows of the wooden coaches.

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aviation · adventure · journey · escape · freedom · human spirit · perseverance · innovation · dreams · challenge · exploration · courage

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