In 1998 I was going out with a lovely girl who hailed from the lovely island of St. Lucia. Things between us were going very nicely and so she wanted me to come home with her to meet the folks. What she didn't know was at the time I'd never left the continental USA.
Didn't even have a passport. She informed me I wouldn't need one for St. Lucia. (This has since changed, probably due to terrorism)
Ok cool.
So we were off from NY to the Caribbean one wintry December day. We arrived several hours later in this black paradise where it's summer year-round, but I immediately felt uneasy. It was a bit discombobulating to see black people for the first time doing jobs I'd always associated with whites. It was a mind-blower, actually, I gotta tell ya.
But the ultimate was this: we decided to do a little island hopping. She wanted to take me to the Old Year's Night festival in Bequia, an island off the coast of St. Vincent and The Grenadines. Cool, I said.
First, we hopped to St. Vincent, on what could best be described as a flying bus. Not pleasant, but I rolled with it. To get from St. Vincent to Bequia we took a 1-hour ferry ride. Awesome. Terrifying but awesome. She'd gotten seasick, though.
Old Year's night was wonderful. The music and festivities speeded her recovery, and we partied the night away. We stayed in a hotel on top of a mountain with a view that is permanently seared into my memory.
But on the way back to St. Vincent, homegirl decides she'd prefer we flew, that seasickness had traumatized her. Bequia is a speck in the Atlantic.
"Ummm...this island has an airport?"
Of course it did. This is the modern age, isn't it? Duh. We get there and, I shit you not, their idea of a plane was one of those propeller'd numbers with tires that could fit my Honda Civic back in NY.
"Ummm, nah, I think I'm gonna hop on the ferry, love. I'll meet you in St. Vincent."
"Come on, don't be a scaredy cat!"
Fine...
Then the pilot appeared. Black, young, uniformed, young. Did I mention he was young? I'm talking twenties. Did I mention he was BLACK??? I was dumbstruck... Black people don't fly planes. Not with me in one of TWO effing passenger seats, anyway. But, she goaded me and eventually, after kicking the tires on this thing, she, I, and this pilot flew through the bumpiest, mountainous roller-coaster of a jet stream ever, in this flying Volkswagen.
All the time I'm looking at the pilot's 45. auto sitting, holstered, in clear view, on the floor beside his seat. I figured they must have skyjackers about...
Needless to say, we arrived safely and I realized, creepily, that I had been conditioned by life in the US to believe black people were incapable of or ill-suited for certain jobs, pilots, at least commercial ones, being one of them.
The irony here, and I'm almost embarrassed to say this, is that I went to August Martin High School, one of two high schools in NY at the time that actually had flight programs for students.
What I didn't know, and would have known if I weren't blitzed half the time I was there, was that not only was August Martin the first black airline pilot in the United States, he was the first black commercial captain. Though he would never fly for a major airline due to racial discrimination, he did fly for a minor one.
He learned to fly in the Civilian Pilot Training Program at the University of California and received his Instructor's Rating in 1942. He then worked as a flight instructor in the Navy V-12 program at Cornell University. In 1943, he joined the Army Air Corps and went through flight training at Tuskegee, Alabama. He then went on to fly B-25s. He was hired by Seaboard Airlines in 1955.
On July 1, 1968, he died tragically in an accident flying a Lockheed L-1049G Super Constellation on a mercy mission to Nigeria.
Big props to August Martin and all the other pilots who endured and made the skies above a lot friendlier to fly!
(I've written many great stories from the 80s and 90s in NYC and several of the best are in my critically acclaimed best selling memoir, Hi! My name is Loco and I am a racist. From my experiences with the Five percent nation of Islam to being accused of stealing at my job in major retail, to my first interracial date, with a white woman. and trying to hide this fact from the community...Check it out!)
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