Friendly Skies, or, Black Woman Speaks Herself into God

—we’re taxiing at an airport named after american president ronald reagan. people tell me he was an american hero. sometimes, labels are jumbled in the big dark bag we call manifest destiny. sometimes, things get lost in its velvet mouth.

—as we move across the land in a machine built for sky, we wait for the flight attendant to tell us how to be safe, how to will ourselves alive thirty thousand feet in the air if we find ourselves falling to an inevitable end. how to build a raft from breath alone to face a gulping sea.

—our attendant, Valerie, is Black. her braids hang, a holy rope, in a high ponytail. her eyes, divinely familiar. when the disembodied voice booms over the plane speakers, we see her mouth moving in time with its words. to ensure your safety, she says. secure your mask before helping others. her lips make the shape of our salvation.

—reader, this might be how you felt sitting in the movie theater’s strobelit box when you saw Black Panther, when you realized a Black person could feel as big as God, could save the world and make it home in time for dinner, run a whole country against no white background, could know all the land and its secrets and roam the afterworld, leisurely resting after a life of nothing colonized, after all the sweat of work done just for self, of work unstolen and unenslaved.

—and i know Valerie isn’t God but i also know that she is, standing here, commanding this voice we thought was faceless, using her earthly body to show us the way. here, with her hands which will pour us fizzy drinks in our little plastic cups, usher trash from our laps into an unknown abyss—i know if  this thing goes down in a fiery cocoon, she will part every sea to cradle us, she will speak to us through the fire—you are that you are.