FAIRMONT — In skies achingly clear over north-central West Virginia 30 years ago, the late Rose Cousins, by all airborne accounts, was a woman content.
During those lofty, leisurely afternoons, when the crosswinds minded their manners and the clouds made just like a Bob Ross painting, Cousins would pay a visit to Frankman Field, the single-runway, municipal airport just outside her hometown of Fairmont.
Courtesy of her connections with the city and then-Fairmont State College, she had access to a small plane.
She’d buckle in and scoot down the runway, just so she could keep current with her flight hours.
Here’s what she didn’t do, once she got up there: She didn’t auger into a barrel roll. Not once.
Nor did she opt to fly upside down.
Heck, Cousins even curbed her urge to deliberately stall the engine — just so she could glide the plane in for a perfect landing, sans power.
As said, she didn’t do any of those things.
But she could have.
Because that’s how she was trained, back when she thought she was going to be a female Tuskegee Airman, flying fighter planes in World War II.
Two parts Jim Crow, one part reverse-discrimination, denied her that chance.
She didn’t make the cut in Tuskegee — not because she wasn’t good enough — but because she was a woman.
Later, when she applied for the Women Airforce Service Pilots organization, a critical wartime transport group that ferried equipment and airplanes in and out of combat zones, she was again grounded in that pursuit.
Pigment, was why.
She was Black, and it was a “Whites Only/Coloreds Only” climate in the country she wanted to defend.
“Aunt Rose got a double-whammy, for sure,” family member Judy Lampkin Bussey said.
“Race and gender. How about that?”
Even though Bussey affectionately referred to her as “aunt,” she’s actually a cousin to Cousins, who was 86 when she succumbed to complications of Alzheimer’s disease 18 years ago.
“Our family is so close,” Bussey said.
“Rose was older when I came along. It really was like she was my aunt. More like my second mom, when I think about it. You know, I could tell her things I wouldn’t tell my mom.”
Here’s something else Cousins didn’t do: She never outwardly showed anger or bitterness over the prevailing societal norms that were used to define people when she was a young woman coming of age in Appalachia and America.
“She got things done and didn’t make a big deal about it,” Bussey said.
Barnstorming, at Dunbar and beyond
For Bussey, Cousins’ story is Black history, American history and West Virginia history.
All stitched, like an awesome quilt, into an epic telling.
She was born March 26, 1920, in Fairmont, to Ann Alberta Rolls and Theodore Emory Rolls Sr., who preached to their daughter that she could accomplish anything, no matter what the sign over the water fountain said, if she worked hard.
Work, she did.
She graduated early from Fairmont’s all-Black Dunbar High School, the institution whose alumni included Col. George S. “Spanky” Roberts, her classmate who did become a Tuskegee Airman; and Johnnie Johnson, the boogie-woogie piano player and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame member who gave Chuck Berry his first gig.
Cousins went to college at one of the few schools open to Blacks in the Mountain State at the time.
At the former West Virginia State College, she excelled in the classroom. She was also a varsity cheerleader, while acting in and directing plays put on by the drama department.
Her school at the time was one of just six black colleges in the nation offering instruction in the inaugural Civilian Pilot Training Program, and Cousins was enthralled.
Well, enthralled all over again.
Thank her dad for that.
When she was around 6 or 7, and barnstorming pilots were big summertime draws, Mr. Rolls produced a dollar bill (the equivalent of $30 today) so young Rose could take a ride in a biplane.
“Did you like that, baby girl?”
“Yes!”
At West Virginia State, she got her pilot’s license and picked up all that aforementioned aerobatic prowess — and then the nation said “no.”
By then she was married to her college sweetheart. They came home to Fairmont in 1941, where she parlayed her business administration degree into a job teaching math at Dunbar.
Other employment followed, including a key administrative post in Fairmont city government and an upper management position at the former Fairmont Clinic, where she oversaw patient records in the facility that tended mainly to coal-mining families across the city and Marion County.
The Rev. Richard Bowyer, a white clergyman who mainly pastored at Black churches in the city, got to know Cousins by way of the clinic, where he served on the board of directors.
He remembered her as someone who, while gracious, was also focused — in the manner of, say, a pilot keenly watching the artificial horizon indicator when bad weather rolls in front of the flight plan.
“Rose wasn’t aggressive, but she was assertive,” he said, “in that she knew that you had to do the job the right way. Especially her job at the clinic.”
At 50, she was divorced and raising two daughters as a single, working mother.
However, Bussey said, that didn’t stop her from being everyone’s mom.
“And everyone’s mentor,” she said of her family member who was also active in local politics and the NAACP. “Young women of color around here don’t always get to have mentors.”
Love song
Ilene Evans, an internationally known actress who portrays Cousins in a one-woman show, said the above is what impressed her the most as she began researching the life and times of the pioneering aviator.
That, she did in preparation of her show, which she set at Christmas — the favorite time of the year for Cousins.
“All of her grandchildren and her family would always come back to her house in Fairmont for the holidays,” Evans said. “She loved it.”
Sadly, both of Cousins’ daughters are gone now, but she did a Zoom call a couple of years ago with those grandchildren for a group interview.
Everyone started singing what they called the “Family Song,” Evans said, which was, in actuality, “Tonight, You Belong to Me,” the unabashedly sentimental Billy Rose ballad from 1926.
That was a holiday tradition in the Cousins house.
No schmaltz, here: The way the Cousins descendants performed it sounded like the ghost of a mist over a valley in Almost Heaven, the actress said.
Voices, from West Virginia to North Carolina and Washington, D.C., sweetly harmonizing, in perfect pitch.
“It was stellar. Beautiful, beautiful.”
‘We’re good’
When Cousins finally slipped the surly bonds of Alzheimer’s on July 30, 2006, after being imprisoned by it for a decade, Bussey had a smiling memory — even in the face of a cruel disease that robs memories.
It again goes back to when Cousins was in her 70s.
Along with piloting that plane, she had another notion, which she advanced, with neither the blessing, nor the knowledge, of her family.
Skydiving.
“She set everything up on her own,” Bussey recalled. “We didn’t know a thing until after she did it.”
A pilot was again up in the clouds, lighter than air.
Until one actually leaps, parachute jumping is high-decibel affair, with the engine noise and rush of generated wind.
The instructor had to yell to make himself heard.
“Mrs. Cousins, are we good?”
“We’re good.”
And, with a whoop, Aunt Rose let go.
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