Breathe by Imani Perry

Author:Imani Perry [Perry, Imani]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Beacon Press

Since you’ve been born, we have flown home to Birmingham at least once a year. So much so, that you identify yourself as “part Alabamian.” You know the airport as the Shuttlesworth Airport. You fly into a place named for a Black man who fought against the white supremacist establishment of the city. I sometimes marvel at that. So much has changed since the time your grandmother was the ages you are now.

But do you know that air travel wasn’t ever segregated? The waiting rooms were, the restrooms were, but the planes were not. I guess because it was such a luxury it wasn’t necessary to separate things out to keep racism in order. But it is still something.

I always give one of you the window seat. Out in the sky, over the wing, you can see that we have departed the earth. By the time we are up, I usually stop thinking about how much has changed. Like how we used to be able to meet people at the gate. There wasn’t all of that security. When it first happened, it was jarring. It was like some collective ritual of lost trust.

When I was a child, in the 1970s, before 9/11, people used to hijack planes rather than crash or bomb them. And often the hijackers were looking for a different future. Sometimes they wanted to be taken to Algeria or Cuba. They took over planes seeking revolutionary asylum and what they hoped could be utopias. Usually they failed. Sometimes Jesse Jackson would be called in to negotiate. A Black man, a political figure who moved from the movement to the halls of the establishment, he mediated between the power of the West and the rest.

Back then, if you looked up in the air and dreamed about where it might take you, you couldn’t see if the plane was being hijacked. Obviously, it was too high. You would learn on the radio, or the nightly news, on one of the three stations. And up in the air you couldn’t see what was happening down below, down where the Black people and the white people and everyone else was. Everything was undistinguished from above.

There is a scene in Richard Wright’s novel Native Son, in which Bigger and his friend Gus look at a plane in the sky and Bigger asks bitterly, “Why don’t they let us fly planes?”6 That was true and also not true back then. You already know this.

You are descended from a Tuskegee family on both sides. Your great-uncle used to pour drinks for Ralph Ellison and the critic and writer Albert Murray. You know the stories of that rural oasis in the middle of the Black Belt, where the famous airmen were trained to be heroes in World War II. You know that George Washington Carver’s voice was high, his genius legendary, and that he was queer, a man with a life partner with whom he spent decades deep in rural Alabama. And beloved nonetheless.

The popular stories of who Black people are, are far too simplistic.

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