I snapped, they never came running.
Soon after school started, couples started forming, and love (the adolescent kind of love that fourteen-year-olds feel) was in the air. Jennifer did not have a boyfriend, but I thought she was too pretty and popular ever to be interested in me. She was a white Jewish girl from a nice neighborhood, and I was a black kid living in the projects. Having learned the subtle, unwritten rules of society, especially as they related to interracial couples in the States, it seemed a lost cause even to try. How could she possibly ever be into me? I thought. However, socioeconomic class issues and race aside, I was just a boy who liked a girl (a lot), and I promised myself that one day before we graduated, I would find a way to tell her.
My four favorite classes during my freshman year were English, biology, gym, and band, in which I continued to play the trumpet. I thoroughly enjoyed the novels we read in English class, such as Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird”, JD Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye” and Richard Wright’s “Black Boy”. My love of reading made me look forward to that class every day, and discussions about the novels were always very lively. I was one of the weird kids who actually enjoyed writing essays and book reports, eschewing the “Cliff’s Notes” versions, which were smuggled into school and sold by some enterprising students. I discovered that I was more verbally inclined and stronger in English than in math or science, but I did my best to get through geometry, trigonometry, calculus, and chemistry. I knew that my intended profession involved quite a bit of math, but I hoped that since I would be flying the airplanes and not designing them, that I would be able to escape the more involved math that Aeronautical Engineers had to know. Whatever the case, I resolved to put in whatever extra time and effort was needed to get through math and science. However, English class was a joy, and much like anything one truly enjoys, it ended all too quickly each day, and it was off to math class.
The director of the Scholar’s Academy, Miss Kirsch, taught biology, and I quickly discovered I had an aptitude for it. She was very passionate about her subject and put lots of work into her lectures. She used visual aids and different kinds of media to keep the class fresh and interesting, and her passion was contagious. As I look back, she, like Mr. Kuck before her, encouraged me to dream big, saying that if I worked hard, nothing could keep me from becoming a pilot one-day.
My band teacher Mr. McCarthy, a tall, slim, grey-haired Irish gentleman in his early fifties, was also passionate about his class and had an intense love for classical music, which he tried his best to transfer to his students. While growing up in 1980’s New York City, Betty and I had been at the epicenter of the rise of Hip-Hop and had grown to love it with a passion. Classical music grew to become a very close second for me and still is to this day, in large part due to Mr. McCarthy and my years in the high school band.
I dove into high school fully aware that I was less than four years away from starting college and my flying lessons. From the very beginning of high school, the dreaded Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) had been looming large on the horizon because along with my high school grades, it would be used by colleges to decide whether to admit me. Knowing that doing well in my classes and on the SATs would be the key to my future dream of flying, helped me to stay focused. With my goal in mind, I settled into my daily routine of waking up early, taking the thirty-minute bus ride to school, going to my classes, taking the thirty-minute bus ride home, doing my school assignments, watching a little television, going to sleep, and starting the cycle again the next day. Mom and Dad always reminded my siblings and me that our education was something no one could ever take away from us.
Back to the past
In the summer of 1989, before the start of my junior year, Mom and Dad arranged a family vacation to Haiti. This would be my first time back in nine years and the first time that all seven of us would be there together. The trip was planned to last six weeks, and my siblings and I were excited because we would be staying in our own house. While saving up to buy a house on Staten Island, my parents had also been sending money to Haiti throughout the 1980s for the construction of a house, which my dad’s cousin Arnold, an architect, was supervising. It was a large, two-storey, four-bedroom house. It had a balcony that wrapped all the way around the second level. Construction had begun on the house when I was in the seventh grade, and as progress was being made, I brought photos of it to school to show my friends in part to ease my feelings of inadequacy at living in the projects as if to say, “See, I have a nice house too!”
As the day of our departure neared, Betty and I talked excitedly about all the fun we were going to have with our many cousins and about how cool it was going to be having a maid to cook, clean the house, and wash the dishes for us. For me, there was a heightened sense of anticipation, as this would be my first time flying since I had first arrived in New York almost a decade earlier. The flight back to Haiti was just as mesmerizing as that first flight had been, and I stared out the window pretty much the whole time and fantasized about the day I would be sitting in the cockpit.
Over the prior nine years living in New York, my Kreol had slowly been growing weaker from disuse, and although I still understood and spoke it, I had ironically developed an accent in my native language. Although my parents often spoke to me in Kreol at home, I usually replied to them in English, and we had long conversations with them speaking in Kreol and me replying in English. In the build-up to our trip to Haiti, I was worried about how my family and friends in Haiti would react to the fact that the little boy they knew who had left only nine years earlier was now speaking his native language with an accent. I wondered how the country would look after so many years away. With these questions swirling in my head and the excitement of seeing my family and friends, we touched down at the Toussaint Louverture International Airport in Port-au-Prince.
As we deplaned, the smell of the air and the intense heat felt instantly familiar. We made our way through the thronging crowd of people and children who were begging for money and headed towards our waiting truck. Mom had given Betty and me each a handful of dollar bills to give out to the children, but we handed them out too quickly, running out well before reaching our ride. I was saddened to see young kids and teenagers around my age, who should have been in school, begging for money, wearing tattered clothes with no shoes. I looked into their eyes and thought how these kids were just like me. They too had dreams and goals, but sadly, they had no opportunities. I was one of the blessed few whose family had been able to provide with a chance to make his dreams come true. Looking at these kids, I knew that no amount of handouts could ever make a real difference in their lives. They only needed a chance to get an education in order to better themselves. Haitians are generally a very proud, hard-working people. I knew that those kids wanted to go to school, and that their parents wanted to work, but the country could not provide enough educational opportunities or jobs in order for them to do that. Haiti was failing them. Looking into their faces, I knew that I HAD to succeed in becoming an airline pilot, then they could see that one of their own had made it and be inspired that they too could make it. As I looked into their eyes, I hoped to return one day to open up a travel academy and aviation school, where they could study about the travel and tourism industry and work towards careers as airline ticket agents, hotel managers, aviation mechanics and airline pilots. I still cling to that dream and pray to realize it before my time on Earth is done.
My mom’s eldest brother, Uncle Octamoliere had come to pick us up in his red Toyota pickup truck, which by the looks of it had seen lots of action. It was a dual-cab diesel-engine truck with rugged tires and a bunch of dings and scratches in the paint from its battles with Haiti’s rough roads. We piled our bags into the back and headed to our house. Mom and Dad had been to the house before during their trips back to Haiti, but Betty, our siblings, and I had only seen it in photos.
We made our way from the airport through downtown and up to our neighborhood called Delmas. As we rode along, my uncle’s heavy-duty tires got a good workout as we weaved from one side of the road to the other, avoiding ditches while dodging the heavy oncoming traffic, pedestrians, goats, stray dogs, and chickens. Uncle Moliere was very skilled in maneuvering through all the chaos and before long; we reached our house. I was tingling with anticipation as we pulled up in front of the gate. We honked the horn, our watchman slid the large red gate open, and with a roar, the engine of the heavily weighed-down truck pulled up the little ramp into our