Diana the Goddess Who Hunts Alone

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A few years later, I took a nonstop flight from Los Angeles to New York. I had just given a series of lectures at some California colleges and decided to reward myself with the luxury of a first-class seat on a jumbo jet so I could sprawl out comfortably for the six-and-a-half-hour flight. There were very few people in first class. After we were all seated, an airline official escorted a splendid woman to the first row. She passed in a cloud of perfume that conjured both Olympus and the jungle: a black woman in a short skirt, with long legs, perfect thighs, marvelous breasts, but a maternal belly, the belly of a goddess of the subjugated earth of Africa and America. Her tensed neck emblematized and betrayed all the cares, fears, and timidity of this lioness, which is what she was, crowned with an animal mane the colors of a sunflower — copper, red, blond, black, pubic.

Of course I knew who it was: Tina Turner. What I noticed was her pain, her modesty, which dissipated any air of stardom, any undeserved arrogance. Her veiled eyes said to themselves, I have no right to all this, but I deserve it. She didn’t apologize for her fame, but she preferred that we share, at least in the anonymity of travel, the human meaning of her songs. She snuggled up next to the window, took off her shoes, and put on her sunglasses; a gracious stewardess covered her with a vicuna blanket — soft, infinitely swaddling, maternal, protecting the singer from the sound and the fury, caressing her with the sweet drowsiness of fatigue.

I didn’t want to stare at her too much; I didn’t want to be curious or impertinent. I thought of the song Diana Soren listened to so often—“Who Takes Care of Me?”—and, looking at the sleeping lioness wrapped in her own skin, I admired, with painful tenderness, the strength of this humiliated, beaten, cheated-on woman who overcame her troubles without taking revenge on her tormentors. Without asking for the death or the imprisonment of anyone, earning, on her own, the right to be herself and to change the world with her voice, her body, and her soul, without sacrificing any of the three. Her art, her race, her spirit … Poor Diana, so strong that she had no defense against the weaknesses of the world. Marvelous Tina, so weak she learned to defend herself against all the powers of the world …