The Plane Home

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An Excerpt from In The Constellation Leo by A.A. Clarke

It was such an improbable journey for an eight year old girl to make, this trip to Africa.  I felt like Dorothy leaving the farm for Oz, my thoughts spinning like the tornado that took her there.

I fidgeted in the window seat on the nine hour Pan-Am flight to Monrovia. Previously sandwiched between my mother and father, I’d successfully pleaded with my dad to have the seat closest to the clouds.  That’s how it had always had been–me in the middle.  Our neighborhood in Ames was a small one, college town with a diverse group of close knit foreigners and locals alike.   But I was their “only” here, and was protected as such.

But we were leaving Kansas now; well, Iowa to be exact, and Africa was beckoning through airplane glass.
“Come see me,” she whispered.
And I did.

She was magnificent from the air.
The ground was green forever. Miles and miles of it stretched like a bumpy green carpet separated here and there by sinewy rivers or brown clay road.
The plane began its’ descent.

“Mommy, Mommy!” I reached across my father to grab my mother’s hand. “We’re almost there!”

My hair, beaded and braided, bounced about my head in sync to my eight year old joy. I picked my favorite dress for this trip: my red orphan Annie dress, similar to the one Aileen Quinn wore at the end of the movie when she and Daddy Warbucks sing “I Don’t Need Anything, But You”.  Annie was big that year.  Two redheads from my elementary school in Ames had auditioned for the role.  They didn’t get it.  But I always believed I could have.  Why in the world couldn’t a little brown skinned girl with big brown eyes and braids in her hair play Annie?

But my parents had gotten me the dress instead of the acting lessons I had asked for.  On this day though, I was bright Annie-red; my red dress, white socks and shiny patent leather mary-janes.

“Sit down Mahmie!”

My mother gave me her best airplane cabin stage-whisper from her position between her knees.  She always kept her head down during landings.  Kept her ears from popping, she said.

I asked my father once if Mommy was just being a scaredy-cat.
“Yes Alfreda”, he answered.  And the two of us  laughed hysterically.

He looked at me now with somber eyes as the captain announced our descent over the plane’s intercom.
“Remember what I told you? About how things will be unlike America?” he said.  I nodded.

His voice was stranger.  Not at all playful, like before.  It seemed in the 9 hours it took us to leave North America, Daddy had become more African.

I could feel it in his voice, see the change in his shoulders.  Shoulders I rode on after kindergarten class when Billy Aster had poured paint on my sneakers and I refused to wear them home.  The slight pot-belly I had fallen asleep on night after night when I was too afraid to sleep in my pretty little blue room sucked in a little as he sat up straighter.  As if slouching, along with shoulder rides and calling your mum a scaredy-cat were now a no-no.

I nodded again, fighting to urge to cry.  My Daddy would never yell or be cross with me, I said to myself.  After all, I was his Princess.  But that was in our American home.  We were going to Africa now.

I wanted to close the shade on the oval as the ground rushed up to meet us.

Many things would be different in Africa.

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