My favorite book as a child was The People Could Fly. I stared with fascination at the illustrations of people with backs as straight as ironing boards, feet lifted magically off the ground, breath carrying bodies to a place only their eyes could see.
At night, I dreamed about flying— always out my bedroom window, always on an ironing board, as straight as the backs of the people who could fly. I whisked through the night sky, light as air. At some point the board vanished, and it was just me, flying, floating, never falling. I had this dream so often as a child it became a part of my reality. Until it wasn’t. I don’t remember when I stopped having the flying dream. But I remember how it felt to fly.
My children believe they can fly. They zoom through life, arms aloft. Awake or dreaming, they are perpetually in flight. So they are thrilled when they learn they are going on their first real airplane ride to Charleston. We are going to visit family and explore the new International African American Museum. For my five-year-old twins, however, the destination is less important than the fact that they will finally be in the air, where they belong.
At the airport, my son gazes out the window at two young Black men holding orange flags, standing at either side of the plane’s nose, guiding it into position.
“Look!” he exclaims to anyone in earshot. “They’re moving the plane!” He beams joyously at the men, and I wish they could see his face: a little boy thrilled to see they have the important job of “airplane mover.”
My father’s first job was at the Montego Bay Airport, the same airport he departed from in 1968 when my grandmother made a connection that afforded him an opportunity to further his education in the United States. But before then, he was a young Black man trying to survive, a young man with a deceased father and a struggling mother, a young man who liked to read but had no luxury of doing so in that airport with a boss who breathed fire as scorching as the heat of a Jamaican summer. He could not then move the pieces of his life around, guiding them into place. But he could still dream.
On the plane, the children glue themselves to the windows, monitoring every dip and turn as if they are at the helm. Faster and faster they fly, racing past clouds. When my great-aunt was their age, she sat next to her mother on a train that chugged its way from Galveston to New York City. I don’t know if she had a window, but in its absence, I’m sure she conjured images of the world she was leaving behind and the one she would soon enter.
Perhaps my great-grandmother looked at her daughter the way I look at mine: half seeing, half dreaming. At five, she rode the waves of a flood, her tiny body defying odds to survive the Hurricane of 1900. Years later, she boarded that train, passage secured by her Pullman porter relatives, pulled by the weight of dreams to come and of memories left behind. She sat next to her daughter who knew nothing of bodies floating in streets made into rivers, who held no fear of tides that swallow. But in that moment they were one, as I am one with my children, in flight but not fleeing, floating on dreams, carried by the jet stream.
En route from the Charleston airport to the hotel, we are surrounded by water. A rare winter storm nearly flooded the city, and while the rains have ceased, the pools linger, forming rivulets that flow stealthily toward rivers. One day they will succeed in submerging the Lowcountry, but for now they bid goodbye, and rejoin the Atlantic.
Spying the shore, my son exclaims he can’t wait to dive in. He is just learning to swim; he has never dived, but he likes the sound of it: like flying, it conjures invincibility. We explain that he cannot swim, much less dive here, but he persists. He will dive and conquer these waters, and resurface to tell us all about it.
There is a picture of me as a young child on a beach in Montego Bay. I’m with Grandma; it’s one of the few memories I have of her wearing a bathing suit instead of heavy undergarments layered with starched churchwear. Grandma holds my hands high above my head, my tiny wrists clasped in her grasp. The seawater washes gently over our ankles, demure from the heat of the sun and the placidity of the bay. But Grandma holds my hands in an iron grip anyway, as if the waters might, at any moment, show their hand and swallow me alive. I don’t know if she could swim, but like my son, she was ready to dive in, trusting that she would, eventually, resurface.
We ride the remnants of the storm to the hotel, and awake the next morning to a city bathed in light. As we walk along King Street, we squint at buildings that sparkle in fresh coats of paint, glistening in the sun. The children jump over lines in the sidewalk and my daughter grabs my arm for balance, the unexpected force causing me to nearly fall down. “Don’t step on the crack or you’ll break your mother’s back,” the children chant with delight, as tantalized by the prospect of stepping on a crack as they are by jumping. I spy the peeled paint on the side of a storefront, shades of pink and blue peeking out from beneath a cracked white surface.
My grandmother Ada was born in this city a century before my children’s birth. She learned to walk as King Street was overrun by white sailors terrorizing Black residents and ransacking their businesses on the eve of Red Summer. She would have had no memory of that, but she must have remembered walking that street as a five-year-old. By 1923, the buildings had been repainted, sidewalks scrubbed, and the people went about: hushed into thunderous silence, feet dodging blood-soaked cracks, lest they, too, fall. But surely Black children skip-jumped then, as they do now. And Black mothers squeezed their hands, half-terrified, half-hoping to see them take flight.
We pass pristine shops and my daughter presses her nose against windows, inhaling the displays. Already, she loves beautiful things and wants to grasp them in her hands, imbibing the scent of luxury. She has a new favorite color every month, and right now it is white. She is held captive by its blinding brightness, its blistering snowiness that begs to dissolve on the tip of her tongue.
There is a picture of my mother at five years old, seated among a row of students in her kindergarten class. Her teacher stands to the side of the children, white blouse tucked neatly into skirt, black hair immaculately rolled and pinned, brown skin smoothed with cocoa butter, refusing to crack. My mother wears a white baby doll dress billowing atop a generous petticoat, white Bobby socks and Black Mary Janes. Sitting pristinely among the rows of Black and white children, under the watchful eye of the only Black teacher she would have, her smile is as bright as the sunlit snow.
The snow-white beacon of Mother Emanuel AME Church emerges into view as we turn onto Calhoun Street. Through the windows of the steeple, I spy nine souls holding hands as they utter their last prayer. Denmark Vesey stands behind them, cloaked in defiant silence before the gallows, unbowed and unafraid. As I pass below, I remember the walk to Grandma’s church. We would walk from her apartment building to the bus stop, from the bus stop to the subway station, and from the subway station to her church in the Bronx. She held my hand as we boarded buses and trains, as we walked across subway platforms, and as we climbed station steps. She was still holding it as we marched down Gun Hill Road, her legs clad in white stockings that shuffled against the white linen skirt she’d bought at Macy’s and tailored to eliminate the three-inch slit she found too revealing. Grandma greeted everyone during those journeys: acquaintance or stranger, friend or foe. She was going where she was going, me in tow, and she was not afraid of anyone. Or, if she was, she refused to let that stop us.
Our feet finally reach the International African American Museum. My body is present, but my spirit has splintered into bits and pieces scattered throughout the city. The museum sits at the mouth of Charleston Harbor, elevated by pillars to honor the sanctity of the ground where our ancestors arrived: battered, bruised, but alive. The breezy patio beneath the edifice offers rest for the weary. I take a moment to collect myself, inhaling the emptiness overflowing with calm.
To reach the entrance to the museum, one must climb two flights of stone steps adjoined by a platform. My children fly up the first staircase, counting as they go. At step number fifteen, they hover on the platform, triumphant, watching and waiting.
Black hands praying
Black feet walking
storefront windows
searching ourselves
white-white dresses
little brown girls
Black men push planes
Black men pull trains
our mothers’ backs
jumping cracks
peeled paint
whitewashed walls
arms held high
submerged feet
sea waters drown
Fifteen steps. I reach the landing, turn and look behind me like the Sankofa bird. Then we run up the rest of the steps together.
The back of the museum is bound by floor-to-ceiling windows facing Charleston Harbor. I find myself here in a rare moment of quiet, gazing at the waters. I don’t know the souls lying at the bottom, the ones swallowed by the deep. But I know the survivors. I know the seas they traversed, I know the horizons they glimpsed, I know the stories they shared. I know the hands of my grandmother who held me. I know the love of my namesake grandmother, who holds me eternally.
Perhaps all we carry are suitcases stuffed with dreams, memories snuggled tight like children we refuse to let fall into cracks or drown in floods. Children who need us to walk so they can soar.
Gazing at those beautiful, foreboding waters, I feel light as air. I feel I can fly.
*Edited by Non-Fiction Editor, Ravynn K. Stringfield, Ph.D.
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