She Boards the Plane
She boards the plane with three small children. The daughter, the oldest,
tugs a suitcase as tall as her with the handle up. The middle child, the son,
is attached to his mother’s right hand. And the baby is draped over her
left arm as she holds her own bottle.
She boards this plane with light brown skin and a foreign accent. Stares and
upturned noses accompany her to her seat. She struggles and sweats as she wrangles
her children to their seats - two together, one across the aisle.
“Would you like some help?” She smiles and refuses as she questions
my authenticity. “Are you sure?”
More refusal.
With the baby still hanging from her left arm she lifts the suitcase with the
right. She looks at me, “Maybe I could use some help.” I put the
suitcase in the overhead bin and she takes her seat, baby still secure.
As a mother she is expected to do it all, and she has come to expect just as
much from herself. Accepting help is conceding her ability to be a contemporary
mother. The real tragedy here is that no one else offered her help.
Two men are offered suggestions to move so this woman and her three children
could sit together. The black man is quiet and passive; his words are lost in
the scuffle as they stutter from his mouth. He is looked over. The white man
refuses to move because he “needs room for my knees.” He sits there,
dead-panned, staking his white male privilege, claiming another territory for
patriarchy.
A female flight attendant searches this half-full airplane for an empty row,
saying, “I wouldn’t want to be separated from my daughter.”
This family is uprooted to the back of the plane. Not one comment or suggestion
is made about the three rows surrounding me with one single male occupant each.
No, this foreign mother’s place is now the back of the plane.
She giggles on her way back, not from the irony, but from the laughter of her
children.
August 16, 2005