Create Dangerously

CHAPTER 9

I used to have a fear of flying. No, I was never the hyperventilating kind of airline passenger, or the person who wouldn’t even get in the air at all. But each time I was set to board an airplane, I would stay up the night before, putting my life in order, arranging important papers, cleaning my apartment. In case “the worst” ever did happen, I told myself, I wouldn’t want my loved ones to have to sort through my dirty laundry-literal and otherwise-to wash my soiled dishes and pick up my cluttered piles of books off the floor. Besides, my sleepless nights always gifted me with what seemed like a shorter trip, since I would fall asleep soon after buckling my seatbelt and wouldn’t wake up again until I reached my destination.

This strategy worked fine for a while, until I had to travel regularly on book-related trips. My travels then increased in frequency from my four or five yearly journeys to Haiti to stretches of two to three weeks when I would be on a different airplane once, and sometimes twice, a day.

How to make those long flights bearable? I certainly couldn’t stay up every night if I were to be in half-decent shape for my book-related event the next day. So I decided to approach my plane rides in an entirely different manner; I was not going to dread them, but welcome them, value them as pockets of life experiences that couldn’t take place anywhere else. I would fully embrace the “magic” of being suspended in midair, between hard ground and sky, simply like a bird, or like the jailbird Daedalus who, with his son Icarus, had crafted wings of wax and feathers to escape their earthly prisons.

I began my effort at improving my flight experiences by reading purposefully during my flights. My airplane reading would often be centered on themes. On some flights I would read only newspapers and magazines, catching up on one particular event. On other flights I would read a short novel, and finishing the entire book during the flight would give me a great thrill, as if I’d just flown a cross-Atlantic mission with Amelia Earhart.

When not reading books, I would read people, some of whom march onto planes with their life stories literally on their sleeves: a honeymooning couple sharing a heart-wrenching good-bye before being separated by a few short rows, an unaccompanied minor sobbing while ending a custodial visit with one parent to return to the other. This would make me think of Assotto Saint, a Haitian American poet and performance artist, who pegged as one of the defining moments in his life the hours he spent in the skies as a fourteen-year-old boy about to be reunited with a mother he hadn’t seen for almost a decade. Of that particular plane ride, he would later write, “i wanted to write a happy carefree poem / for my childhood / lost too fast… / somewhere in the air / between port-au-prince & new york city / but I’m left bereft.”

I too am left bereft when random acts of kindness manifest themselves in airplane aisles. Once on a flight from Port-au-Prince to Miami, a muscular white man with an elaborately tattooed arm willingly surrendered his aisle seat for a tighter middle seat so that a nervous Haitian father could sit next to his young daughter. Another time, an old woman who had trouble walking to her seat after the airline wheelchair had delivered her to the plane door was taken in the arms of a younger man and carried gently to her spot.

Once on an early morning flight from San Francisco to Miami, a woman sitting two rows behind me suffered a heart attack. I was dozing off with the shutters pulled down and a blanket over my head when a voice came over the loudspeaker asking if there was a physician onboard. It turned out there were a few, among them an affable man with salt-and-pepper hair, who immediately took control of the situation, operating an EKG machine and defibrillator from the plane’s advanced first-aid kit while calmly probing the woman’s distressed husband and teenage son for details of her medical history.

During the moments it took for the doctor to decide whether or not we should land so the woman could be rushed to the nearest hospital in the nearest city, her name and age and overall condition were shouted down the aisle from the doctor to the flight attendant, who was in touch with the pilot by phone.

The woman’s name was Donna. She was forty-seven years old and very thin. Not at all the kind of person one might expect to be having a heart attack. Her husband explained to the doctor that she had been under some pressure at work and had brushed off three days of chest pains as symptoms of something else. At the doctor’s recommendation, the pilot decided to land.

As we descended toward the snow-capped mountains of Salt Lake City, nearby passengers vacated their seats so Donna could lie down. A few even joined the flight attendants in the quick collection of cups and cans that was crucial to the lastminute landing. Community, like family, is sometimes a result of arbitrary grouping. Having ignored one another the entire flight, my seatmates and I looked at one another and exchanged a few knowing nods and glances for the first time. Because suddenly we were a kind of village in the air and one of our own was in danger.

When the plane landed and the paramedics boarded to pick up Donna, one of them joked, as he made his way down the aisle, that we would not be charged for the extra stop in beautiful Salt Lake. No one laughed. Instead, as Donna was carried off the plane, many of the other passengers squeezed her son’s and husband’s hands and told them that they would pray for her. While we waited to take off again, I could hear snatches of conversations on cell phones and the words, “sorry,” “thank you,” “I love you.”

My favorite flights depart late in the afternoon or early in the evening. While on those flights, I always imagine what the plane must look like to a very small child from the ground, a silvered speck racing across a flaming orange sky, nurturing the child’s own dreams of escape, like they once did Assoto Saint’s and countless others. I am now inside that giant sunset-framed bird and as I approach my destination I am lowered into a picture-postcard view of all the places that are lit in my arrival city, what combat fighters once called a “God’s-eye view” of the luminescent ground.

Now and then on early morning flights I ask for a window seat, if there is one, in the very last row. I take off my shoes and surrender to the vibration of the engines beneath me, which produce a loud but soothing white noise. While staring out the window at the early predawn sky, I sometimes have waking dreams and watch mirages emerge from the dense highlevel clouds. One morning I thought I saw Tante Ilyana-who had never been on an airplane-walking slowly over the clouds toward me. Another time I thought I spotted my childhood friend Marie Maude Gédéon, who had died of renal cancer at age thirty, joyfully doing somersaults in the celestial mist wearing the wedding dress in which she’d been buried because she was unmarried when she died.

My dread of flying returned when I was in what felt to me like a near crash between Miami and New York one summer night. As we were approaching New York’s LaGuardia Airport, the plane began to nose dive as though it were being sucked down by a centrifugal force. I was looking out the window and suddenly the buildings beneath us began to blur. As the plane rattled from side to side, people screamed, some shouting for help, others calling loved ones’ names, and still others shouting directly to God. Finally, the runway appeared and the plane’s wheels seemed to tap the ground once, then twice, then three times, bouncing like a giant basketball. Then the plane shot back up in the air.

Everyone sat stunned into complete silence, as we waited for the captain to explain what had happened.

Finally he spoke.

“Folks, there’s nothing wrong with the aircraft,” he soberly declared. As we were circling the city that it seemed we had nearly crashed into, the captain assured us that we had “only” been caught in a wind shear, an aggressive type of turbulence caused by an abrupt shift in the wind’s direction.

On September 10, 2001, I was on a plane with my mother, returning from a ten-day trip to Japan. My second book, a collection of short stories titled Krik? Krak!, had just been published there, and I had been invited to give a series of talks jointly sponsored by the American and Haitian embassies of Japan. The trip had gone quite well. In addition to work, my mother and I had done a lot of sightseeing, including at the world-famous Peace Memorial Museum in Hiroshima. On the flight back to the United States, however, I had been anxious to get home. Home being my first apartment in New Rochelle, New York, what I called my artist colony of one, in a town that had taught me the true value of writerly solitude, a town where I knew no one. The flight from Tokyo was long but uneventful. My mother read and reread the twenty-third psalm. (The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want.) Every now and then she stopped and marveled at how much we were fed, even in coach. I made her walk every other hour to avoid blood clots in her leg.

We landed in Chicago and after a brief layover changed planes there. My themed reading for both flights was Wole Soyinka, anything I had not yet read by the Nigerian novelist, memoirist, poet, and playwright. Because New York City was our final destination, I lingered over a poem of his titled “New York, U.S.A,” which had been published more than a decade earlier.

Control was wrested from your pilot’s hands,

And yours, mid-Atlantic, hapless voyager.

Deafened the engine’s last descent

To all but disordered echoes of your feet.

An evening thunderstorm forced us to circle over the city for some time, making us land later in the evening than we should have. I spent a sleepless, jetlagged night at my parents’ house and the next morning around seven a.m. I drove my tiny Toyota Echo to New Rochelle. Traffic was light. A better driver now, I drove assuredly, routinely, over the Whitestone Bridge and into the tree-lined streets of New Rochelle, where people were heading out for work. Then I walked into my sparsely furnished apartment, crawled onto my mattress on the floor, and fell into a deep sleep.

When I woke up a few hours later, I turned on the television hoping to catch my midday soap opera, but my television was not working. There was only television “snow,” a sign that my signal had been lost. Later I would learn that it was because the tower that sent this signal to my home had been destroyed when the first plane hit the World Trade Center at 8:45 a.m. I did not have cable and, knowing nothing of what had happened, I went back to sleep. I woke up at 2:00 p.m. when my phone rang. My father had been trying to reach me, but phones were also down.

“The World Trade Center has been attacked,” he said. “The towers don’t exist anymore. Thousands of people have died.”

I wanted to rush home, to my parents’ house, but the White-stone Bridge was closed and no trains were running. I would have to process this horrifying news for long empty hours by myself, with no one I loved within physical reach. I was alone and my writer seeking solitude was of no use. A friend’s wife, who had escaped from the second tower, had temporarily gone mute from shock. My pregnant cousin had walked home to Brooklyn from midtown Manhattan, barefoot. My brother Karl, who worked near Grand Central Station, was still unaccounted for. Still, I didn’t think I knew anyone who’d died in the towers, or in Pennsylvania, or in Washington? Or did I?

The next day, when I was finally able to leave New Rochelle, I took the train to Manhattan, a darker, quieter city, with MISSING flyers on subway walls and makeshift memorials on street corners. My friends and family now accounted for, I still couldn’t help but feel that someday I may not be so lucky, that I may be among those wandering the streets, asking myself, the way I would nearly a decade later, during another catastrophic event in Haiti, how others could be eating and sleeping, and not be looking for a father or a mother, a son or a daughter, a husband or wife. I also felt guilty for having slept through what for so many people and their loved ones had indeed been the end of the world. That so many others would never again wake up haunted me. I felt useless and at a loss for words.

“i have not written one word,” the Palestinian American poet Suheir Hammad, paradoxically, wrote soon after September 11th, “no poetry in the ashes south of canal street.”

One of the people in the ashes south of Canal Street was Michael Richards, a U.S.-born sculptor of Jamaican ancestry who had created a bronze cast statue of himself dressed as an African American World War II combat pilot, a Tuskegee airman, with dozens of miniature airplanes shooting through his body. Richards had a studio on the ninety-second floor of Tower One of the World Trade Center and was there when the first plane struck the building at 8:45 a.m. He had spent the night working on, among other things, a piece showing a man clinging to a meteor as it plunges from the sky. Richards had been interested in aviation and flight and had used them as motifs in his work for many years.

I did not know Michael Richards, but being both terrified and intrigued by the folklore of flight, I admired his work, which sometimes seemed like visual depictions of characters in pieces of literature that I loved. His pierced Tuskegee airman reminded me of Toni Morrison’s flying insurance salesman in Song of Solomon, who wrote what must be one of the most eloquent farewell notes in the world, ending with “On Wednesday the 18th of February, 1931, I will take off from Mercy and fly away on my own wings. Please forgive me, I loved you all.”

Michael Richards’s Are You Down, a series of life-size sculptures of three fallen Tuskegee airmen, remind me of Ralph Ellison’s short story “Flying Home,” in which a young pilot crashes his plane and hurts himself, forcing him to ponder a lifelong love affair with airplanes. Winged shows two joined arms with feathers attached to them. Those arms too were Michael Richards’s, cast in bronze and eerily reminiscent of the men and women jumping from the towers on September 11th, with their arms flapping as though they were trying to fly.

Did Michael Richards know how he was going to die? Did he somehow sense that his own body would one day represent that of so many? Maybe he was clairvoyant, what some might call “double-sighted.” One can’t help but hope that like the old Africans, suddenly remembering that he had the gift of flight and seeing the airplanes heading for him, he stepped out of his earthly body and flew away. In any case, he surely must have known what we all instinctively know, that we must all die and that whenever it is we die, it is always a day, a week, a month, a year, a lifetime too soon.

“The poet turns the world to glass, and shows us all things in their right series and procession,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote. “For through that better perception he stands one step nearer to things, and sees the flowing or metamorphosis… that within every creature is a force impelling it to ascend into a higher form.”

Michael Richards was a poet of bronze and stone. He was the sculptor of private spaces and public gardens, except his gardens were purposely filled with tar and ashes. His death was no more tragic than that of the nearly three thousand other people who also left behind fingerprints on half-filled glasses and lipstick traces on collars and strands of hair on brushes and combs, but he leaves behind something that speaks not only for himself but also for them.

“He rose one day according to his habit, before the dawn, and saw the morning break, grand as the eternity out of which it came,” Emerson wrote of a sculptor from his youth, “and for many days after, he strove to express this tranquility, and lo! his chisel had fashioned out of marble the plan of a beautiful youth.”

Emerson’s sculptor had extracted youth from marble. Michael Richards had repeatedly chiseled himself as a dying man in agony, in pain. He had linked the European warrior Sebastian to the cunning southern African American trickster Tar Baby, titling his representation of his airplane-pierced body Tar Baby vs. Saint Sebastian. He had sculpted not one but two of his Tar Baby vs. Saint Sebastian statues, one that perished with him in the towers, and a second that was stored and then rediscovered in a cousin’s garage.

Michael Richards was born in New York City, but grew up in Kingston, Jamaica, and then returned to New York as a young man, making him an American who was often called an immigrant. In Richards’s obituary in The Independent, the art critic Adrian Dannat wrote, “Richards had gone against the expectations of his Jamaican family in becoming an artist, an extremely rare profession in a society dominated by bourgeois conventions of financial success.” His friend, the art curator Moukhtar Kocache, told the Village Voice that Richards’s work featured “men who were alienated and unacknowledged, using that for his own existential feelings as a black man, an artist, an immigrant.”

“The highest minds of the world have never ceased to explore the double meaning, or shall I say quadruple or the centuple or much more manifold meaning, of every sensual fact,” Emerson wrote in his essay “The Poet.” “For we are not pawns and barrows, nor even porters of the fire and torch bearers, but children of the fire, made of it.”

Michael Richards was a child of the fire. He often remade himself in it, using his body, over and over again, as his template.

In Ralph Ellison’s “Flying Home,” an old man asks Todd, the fallen young pilot, “Son, how come you want to fly way up there in the air?”

“Because,” Todd replies, “… It’s as good a way to fight and die as I know.”

This leads Todd to think about a time in his childhood when he would chase the shadows of passing airplanes, thinking he could somehow capture and own them. Even the fact that the planes were being used to dump hateful and racist flyers did not diminish his admiration.

“Above he saw the plane spiraling gracefully, agleam in the sun like a fiery sword. And seeing it soar he was caught, transfixed between a terrible horror and a horrible fascination,” wrote Ellison.

Unable to accept the swift reality of sudden death, I’d like to think that Michael Richards had a final moment when he was downright enthralled and mesmerized by his-our-horrible fascination. Or that maybe he had enough time to stop and whisper, “I will take off… and fly away on my own wings. Please forgive me, I loved you all.”